Free software is a wonderful thing, and I've written about it not only on this blog—with my posts about WriteMonkey, Celtx, and yWriter—but on Asheyna's blog as well, with my guest post about OpenSource. I still marvel at the dedication of the individuals and groups who develop and maintain these tools; they do it because they love it, and they're often able to continue working on their projects because of donations from users.
Today, I'm going to talk about the mother of all free packages for writers: WordPress.
In the miniscule-to-nonexistent likelihood that you are a reader of this blog and somehow don't know what WordPress is, let me tell you. WordPress is a large and elaborate set of PHP scripts that allows a person to very quickly and easily set up a blog website.
If you have your domain name and web hosting service set up, all you need to do is download WordPress to your computer, unpack it, and then upload the uncompressed files to the root directory of your website. After a quick run of an installation script, you can go straight to logging in, tweaking your settings, and writing a blog post. Read the rest of this entry »
