A few weeks ago I was (as usual) stumbling around the web, and behold, what did I find? The WordPress blogging platform! It looked too good to be true, and at first I simply wanted to test it if it worked. Soon I was awestruck by the abilities and quality of this software and an idea quickly formed in my dozy mind. What about I do something with this domain I’d owned for so many years, mindovermadness.org? ..and I did! I got started with a WordPress-based blog, not because I think I or anything concerning me is that interesting for other people, but because I’m the kind of person that needs projects, things to fiddle with and focus on. The process is more important than the result, sort of. Also, I’ve always liked writing, and since I haven’t been studying for many years, that part of my brain was in danger of shutting completely down. Writing this blog in English also gave me the possibility of reawakening and (hopefully) improving my English, a language I hold very dearly and love, albeit I have no higher education in it. Reading English is all very well, but to really improve one’s knowledge of a language, one need to write it too.

WordPress is an extremely popular blogging platform, both as stand-alone put-it-on-your-domain software, and as a service that offers hosting and the basic capabilities from wordpress.com. Since I’ve owned this domain for many years, and it was perfect for such use, I quickly got started and I’ve never looked back. There’s a multitude of info on the web about WordPress, and hundreds of thousands of blogs running on this software, so I will not go in-dept on its abilities and pros/cons. Enough said is that it’s a piece of software using mysql database technology and powerful PHP-scripts to form a foundation for building a blog. On top of that you can slap themes, thus changing the look and feel of your blog, as well as literally a truckload of plugins. The plugins add new abilities, customize both the public look of the blog and improve the admin interface. Although WordPress works just fine from a default installation, the ability to add functionality and customize it is what makes it really interesting. You can build virtually any kind of site with WordPress and because of the exceptional amount of plugins, you can always find something that suits your needs and fine-tune the usability of your site.

Bottom line, WordPpress is free, it works, and it’s amazingly powerful, even if you’re not a 1337 coder. Even a one-braincell barbarian such as me, can put up something fairly decent in a matter of hours, Mostly everything you need to know is easily figured out through some googling and reading at the wordrpess.org site. Thumbs up!