Why blogging is STILL a mystery

Blogging is supposed to be accessible to everyone. It isn’t.

Most of the business people I know wouldn’t have the experience or the time to do what I’ve done to set up blogs and make them work. That’s the first problem.

A second problem is that when I need to know the basics of blogging (from a non-developer stand-point) I can’t find a simple, coherent resource.

The following is a typical example (and bear in mind that I’m relatively experienced).

Research tells me that the default permalinks that Wordpress gives to new posts and pages in our blog are not very search-engine friendly. Ok, I get that. They have names like:

http://www.mukaumedia.co.uk/?p=237

which of course, doesn’t contain any useful textual or descriptive information for the search engine to hook into. It’s not to difficult to see that something like:

http://www.mukaumedia.co.uk/who-speaks-for-your-industry

would be a far better option. Non-technical people still with me in principle? Good.

Ok. So I find a guide (one of many) to show me how to change my permalink structure (can you hear the sound of the non-computer literate business people starting to fall by the wayside?)

Here’s what you do. Ready?

how to change permalink structures

That’s it. Geddit? Thought not.

So I go try it out and Wordpress tells me it can’t write to my .htaccess file, so here’s the code I need to put into my .htaccess file. The problem is that, apparently, your .htaccess files is (by virtue of the ‘.’) invisible - which means that I can’t see mine to change it. Ah bollocks.

Of course, Wordpress doesn’t tell you this. It actually doesn’t tell you anything that would increase your understanding of what’s going on here nor for that matter does anyone else - and that’s the issue. Still with me? I thought not.

The following two posts (from a thread in the Wordpress developer forum on this issue last year) sums it up perfectly:

Codex exchange on permalinks

June 10, 2008 | Filed Under GRRRR!!!, blogging technique, how to 

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