Do you feel some pain in your lower back? A light numbness in your rear and lower thigh? Are you feeling a little down?

These symptoms are all normal, and they’re not good. They may well be caused by doing precisely what you’re doing – sitting. All of these can be symptoms of not having a proper chair to sit in when doing desk work. Research in the diverse fields of epidemiology, molecular biology, biomechanics, and physiology is converging toward a startling conclusion: Sitting is a public-health risk. And exercising doesn’t offset it.

"People need to understand that the qualitative mechanisms of sitting are completely different from walking or exercising," says University of Missouri microbiologist Marc Hamilton. "Sitting too much is not the same as exercising too little. They do completely different things to the body."

Feeling first signs of the above mentioned symptoms I was looking for a new office chair and came across Herman Miller’s Aeron.

The Aeron Chair is a popular office chair introduced by Herman Miller back in 1994. The chair is popular for its ergonomic design, which ensures comfort and an excellent fit for the user. It is definitely one of the best chairs around for computer users and for general office use and use in meeting or conference rooms.

"The human form has no straight lines, it is biomorphic. We designed the chair to be above all biomorphic, or curvilinear, as a metaphor of human form in the visual as well as the tactile sense. There is not one straight line to be found on an Aeron Chair."  says designer Bill Stumpf.

Its novel design has gained it a spot in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.

Have you ever wondered why people purchase a high-end chair like the Aeron even if it costs nearly a thousand dollars? The answer lies in the health benefits. If you get the right size and adjust it properly, most people can sit in them all day long without feeling uncomfortable.

Other popular high-end chairs to look at are Herman Miller’s Mirra, the SwingChair, the Ergohuman Mesh Chair and the Liberty Chair from Humanscale.

Many office workers swear by them. But are those high-end chairs worth the money? What do you think?

• Born To Run
• Wear Sunscreen
• UI Platforms: Which One Would You Pick?
• Top 10 Tools for Learning
• Time Management

Information overload has been around since the introduction of the printing press; so why do we still consider it to be a new problem?

Clay Shirky, New York University new-media professor, writer, and consultant argues that the problem isn’t information overload, it’s filter failure:

“What we’re dealing with now is not the problem of information overload, because we’re always dealing (and always have been dealing) with information overload…Thinking about information overload isn’t accurately describing the problem; thinking about filter failure is.”

Watch the video below to hear Clay Shirky’s well-argued points:

The  Gutenberg economic logic of publishing required that publishers act as filters. The Internet reduces the economic risks of publishing by allowing more and more information to be published at almost no cost.

This means it’s increasingly important for us to create better filters. Having access to information is great, but we need to filter and focus based on what we want to accomplish and what we need.

What kind of filters do you have in place to keep yourself from getting overwhelmed by too much information? Let me know in the comments.

• Top 10 Tools for Learning
• How to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization?
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?
• Wear Sunscreen
• Top 6 Tools to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization

In a previous article I showed you why it is beneficial to support Knowledge Sharing in your organization. If you haven’t read this article yet go and check it out first: How to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization?

In this follow up post I will show you the top 6 tools you can use to as part of your Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure. The main focus is on how those tools can be used to to support parts or the entire outlined concept.

1. WordPress and WordPressMU

WordPress is world’s leading blogging platform. It is free and easy to use. The open source project is driven by a dedicated community. Due to its plug-in architecture and strong user community there are tons of plugins available for WordPress.

A self-hosted version that can be installed on any server is available. WordPressMU is a special version of WordPress that allows multiple blogs on one installation. WordPressMU could be uses out of the box to establish a corporate blogging system.

Pros:

• Best blogging solution available
• Very easy to use

Cons:

• Lack of social networking features beyond blogging (The new BuddyPress project tries to deliver something on this front)

2. Drupal

Drupal is best open source content management system available. Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal supports a variety of websites ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven websites. Like WordPress it also has a very strong user community and many plugins.

Pros:

• Great CMS Platform
• Social Networking Features are available.

Cons:

• Complex system, harder to use than WordPress
• Social Networking features are not integrated out of the box.

3. SharePoint

SharePoint is an integrated suite of products to create a Microsoft intranet and collaboration portal.

Pros:

• Technology might be already in use in your organization
• Integration into the corporate IT Infrastructure
• Many tools available (File Repo, Links, Wiki)

Cons:

• Document Management Centric
• Hard to customize to specific needs

4. Yammer, SocialCast

Yammer is a private Micro-blogging service for in-company use. In addition to Micro-blogging there are discussion boards and users can form/join groups. SocialCast is a Yammer competitor.

Pros:

• Easy to use Micro-blogging solution
• Good support for Member profiles

Cons:

• Yammer can not be self hosted

5. Status.net

Status.net is a self-hosted open source Micro-blogging server.

Pros:

• Similar to Yammer and Twitter but open source and self-hosted
• Good for the Micro-blogging and Member Profile part

Cons:

• Focus just Micro-blogging. Needs to be integrated into an overall platform

6. The Elgg Social Media Platform

To realize the outlined concept the integration of different tools like Profiles, Microblogs, Blogs, Wikis into a common News Feeds is key.

The Elgg Social Media Platform is the fastest and easiest way to realize the outlined concept. Elgg is a free, open source social media platform. It is more than just social networking but can support a huge variety of social media tools like bookmarking, blogging, wikis, files, RSS feeds, micro-blogging and more – all in one platform.

Elgg allows individuals to create, organize and manage their own personal resources and contacts, as well as work with others – co-creating and sharing content and resources – in groups.

Why Elgg?

There are a huge number of different social media tools available. Although some people can cope with working with a large number of tools; others are overwhelmed by this – and is even putting them off getting engaged with social media. 

Using the Elgg social media platform within an organization means:

• You don’t have to rely on cobbling together a mish-mash of stand-alone social media tools
• You don’t have to worry about the security and privacy of data held outside of the organization
• You can provide a seamless environment where members can use a range of social media tools

If you need help setting up your own Elgg environment you can contact the the Elgg consultancy services.

• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?
• Top 10 Tools for Learning
• Story Power! Tools to Create Engaging Content
• Project Natal
• Microsoft Surface Parody

The number and volume of information resources on the Internet and our corporate intranets is enormous and growing exponentially. People spent a lot of time trying to find information to accomplish their tasks. Improving this process increase the competitive advantage and accelerate the adoption of new and worthy ideas.

Know-how is Know-where. The quality of decisions depends on existing knowledge. The one that use, create and share knowledge efficiently will succeed. It is not possible to keep all relevant knowledge in mind. A big challenge is having the available knowledge where it is required.

To identify relevant content it is necessary to look through many resources for those of specific interest; it will also be necessary to continuously monitor available resources (e.g. blogs, twitter, etc.) to detect new useful sources or to decide that others are no longer of interest.

This means it’s increasingly important for us to create better filters. Having access to information is great, but we need to filter and focus based on what we want to accomplish and what we need.

You can achieve this goal by connecting your team to a knowledge network. Members of each community of interest are expert in their topic and have fun sharing their knowledge and expertise with others. The infrastructure powering the knowledge network will provide straight forward tools to support social interactions, shared creation, information research, collaboration and communication. The integration into daily business is important.

The heart and soul of a Knowledge Network are the people contributing to topics of their interest and improving the quality of these topics.

The infrastructure of a Knowledge Network consists of a number of topic spaces, member profiles and shared tools. A community of interest grows around each topic.

Each Topic Space has a dedicated moderator and you may use any number of Shared Tools like a Dashboard, a News Feed, a Blog, a Microblog, a Wiki, Links, Files and aggregated Feeds. The integration of these tools with an overall news feed is important.

Each Team Member gets its own personal space and can choose to add from all available shared tools like a Blog, a Microblog, Files, Links, etc. The profile can be personalized by your team members. At least it contains a portrait image and a short role description.

Project Spaces are just special topics. The shared tools are the same. They provide a starting point for each project and contain pointers to all the relevant information. Furthermore they can be considered as shared space for ad-hoc collaboration around project specific activities. Traditionally you would do this via email. The problem is that it is locked up in our “inbox silos” and thus not accessible to any other interested team members not part of the distribution list…

To keep up to date with the activities on a certain topic you can visit the web interface of your knowledge network, turn on Email notifications or subscribe to the news feed in your aggregator of choice.

In a follow up post I will show you tools you can use to support Knowledge Sharing in your organization.

• Top 10 Tools for Learning
• It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?
• Wear Sunscreen
• Top 6 Tools to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization

In an previous post I showed you how to create more engaging content which is fun to read and easy to memorize: If you haven’t read this article yet go and check it out first: Story Power! Brain-Friendly Content through Visuals and Storytelling.

In this follow up post I will show you some tools you can use to create visuals that allow your readers to "get" something as quickly and clearly as possible.

Stock Photography

It is much more effective to use pictures and words than just words alone.

Thanks to web sites like iStockPhoto, you can get just about any image you can imagine for a couple dollars. If you use the image just on your web site you can get away with the lowest resolution/least expensive version of the photo. Here are some examples where I used stock photography to make content more appealing: Eagle or Seashell?, Fly like a Penguin!, Juggling Five Balls Of Life, Find What You Love.

Comic Strip Tools

Just take a look at the Google Chrome Comic book with artwork by Scott McCloud to understand the power of comics to transport information.

ToonDoo, KerPoof and Bitstrips are all examples of free tools you can use to create your own comic strips.

As per ToonDoo’s terms of use, you are free to use any cartoon created by you as long as you include title, author name and ToonDoo watermark. When those  mandatory elements are included, you are free to embed ToonDoo‘s or screenshots.

I used the excellent ToonDoo Maker to create the comic strip for the Designing the ULTIMATE Twitter Client article.

Chart, Sketch & Wire Frame Tools

I love wire frame tools. They allow you to sketch an idea as quickly as possible without worrying about the visual design.

For user interface related mockups try Balsamiq Mockups. You can see it in action in the following articles: About bSix12, Put First Things First, Designing the ULTIMATE Twitter Client

You can also try Lovely Charts. It is a free online diagramming application, that allows you to create professional looking diagrams of all kinds.

Drawing & Photoshop

You can create your own visual by using an image editing software like Photoshop and a drawing tablet like the Wacom tablet. For more detailed information read Kathy Sierra’s excellent article about how to add graphics to your blog, book, or presentation.

For the following article I used Photoshop to create a visual that helped me bring the point across: UI Platforms: Which One Would You Pick?

Videos & Screencasts

YouTube is the most popular video sharing website where you can upload and share videos. If you want to use a video, you can embed it into your own web page or blog. On this blog I use embedded YouTube videos a lot. There are some excellent videos hosted on YouTube to learn from.

Here are some examples of featured YouTube videos on this site: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, The Inspiring Story of Rick and Dick Hoyt, Time Management, Find What You Love.

We learn a lot by watching other people doing things. This is why screencast’s  are a powerful learning tool. It is like looking someone over the shoulder and learning from that persons experience. My favorite tool to produce screencast’s is Camtasia Studio.

• Story Power! Brain-Friendly Content through Visuals and Storytelling
• How To Setup a Self-Hosted WordPress Blog
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?
• Wear Sunscreen
• Validation

Jane Hart a Social Learning Consultant and the Founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies maintains a list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning.

This valuable resource is compiled from the feedback of hundreds of learning professionals all around the world contributing their personal top 10 tools.

Here is my contribution for this year’s list:

1. The Web

According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, the main objective of the World Wide Web was to be a space for sharing information. “It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute”, he wrote in his first blog post. It was, in other words, supposed to be a groupware application.

He designed and implemented the first web browser to not only display the content of web pages but also to edit and save a new version of that page. Early Web pages were fully collaborative. Mosaic, the browser that popularized the Web in 1993, allowed pages to be viewed and not changed. The original collaborative nature of web page browsing was lost.

Despite the fact that the Web took off primarily as a publishing medium people invented other ways like blogs, forums and wikis to make it the creative space Tim Berners-Lee envisioned right from the beginning.

For me the Web is without a doubt the number one tool for learning. It is the foundation that allows us to share our passion and knowledge with the rest of the world and to collaboration around shared content with others.

My favorite web browser to access the Web is Google Chrome: It is fast, user-friendly and convenient.

2. Google Search

Google search was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997. It achieved better results for many searches with an innovation called PageRank. It ranks web pages based on the number and PageRank of other web pages that link there. The page rank of a web site is an indicator of the popularity of this site but it does not say anything about the quality of the content. However the premise is that people will link to sites with good content and and thus make it more popular. You can think about PageRank as a voting system for web sites.

For me Google Search is still the best way to find information on the Web.

3. Twitter

Twitter is a free online service that enables you to broadcast short messages of 140 characters or fewer (aka status updates or tweets) to your friends or followers. People interested in your status updates then subscribe to follow your messages and you can subscribe to follow others.

With status updates you can answer the question “What are you doing?” However many users go beyond this simple question and use status updates to share links to interesting content, photos, videos or music on the web. You can learn more by reading What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?

My preferred way to access Twitter is SharedMinds Desktop. With SharedMinds Desktop you can browse though all your tweets quickly and show links, user profiles and twitter search results right there in the same application. This will make you more productive and enhance your Twitter experience. You can download a free version here.

4. Blogs

In addition to Twitter, reading blogs is still one of my favorite ways of learning about new stuff. Blogs are special web sites that provide an RSS feed of published articles or posts in reverse-chronological order. RSS is a document format which allows you to keep up to date with the content on sites all across the web.

When you subscribe to an RSS feed, the feed reader will check the website you subscribe to for new content. If there are any new articles, they will be displayed directly in your feed reader. The feed reader of my choice is Google Reader.

If you like to start your own blog you can check out WordPress.com, Blogger.com or TypePad.com where you can start blogging right away. For bSix12 I decided to setup a self-hosted WordPress blog. For writing blog posts I am using Windows Live Writer.

If you haven’t already subscribed to bSix12 you can do this here.

5. Podcasts / Audiobooks

Podcast and audiobooks are great tools for learning . There are many situation in which you can listen to audio while doing other things like driving to and from work, cycling, jogging and so on. In this way you can make use of otherwise unused time. Or you can save time by listening to the audio versions of books. Sometimes I find myself to tired even to read and an audiobook is a good alternative.

A very good site to find podcasts is www.spokenword.org. A great resource for free audiobooks is librivox.org. A good selection of audiobooks can also be found on Amazon.com.

6. Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, collaborative encyclopedia and a fantastic information resource. It is a starting point for most of the things I research.

7. Books

I am not spending as much time reading books as I where used to but books are still very important. For me the best place to discover new and interesting books is Amazon.com.

8. Videos & Screencasts

YouTube is the most popular video sharing website where you can upload and share videos. If you want to use a video, you can embed it into your own web page or blog. On my blog I use embedded YouTube videos a lot. There are some excellent videos hosted on YouTube to learn from.

We learn a lot by watching other people doing things. This is why screencast’s  are a powerful learning tool. It is like looking someone over the shoulder and learning from that persons experience. My favorite tool to produce screencast’s is Camtasia Studio.

9. Social Bookmarking

My favorite social bookmarking service is del.icio.us. It is a service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The search functionality is very powerful and for certain keywords I get a better search result than with Google Search.

10. Note Taking & To-do List

My favorite note taking application is Evernote. This is how the developers themself describe it: “Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at anytime, from anywhere.” It provides advanced features like OCR. This allows you to search for text inside images. Notes are synchronized between your devices and applications.

My favorite to-do list tool is Remember The Milk.

What are your favorite tools for learning?

• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?
• Top 6 Tools to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization
• It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure
• How to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization?
• Wear Sunscreen

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a free online service that enables you to broadcast short messages of 140 characters or fewer (aka status updates or tweets) to your friends or followers. People interested in your status updates then subscribe to follow your messages and you can subscribe to follow others. Whenever you start to follow somebody on Twitter you will instantly receive their status updates and you can read all of their messages in one place.

You can use a web browser, instant messaging, your mobile phone or you can choose from a gazillion of third party applications to access Twitter.

Watch the following CommonCraft video, which explains Twitter in Plain English:

How to get started?

The best way to find out what you think about Twitter is to experience it yourself. Go to Twitter.com and sign up for a free account. I recommend using your real name as your user name. In this way your friends will be able to find you easily.

Each user has his own profile page, in the form of Twitter.com/username (Example: my Twitter profile page is Twitter.com/RainerFalle). To customize your profile page write something about yourself, upload a picture and customize the look of your profile page. Your picture will appear next to each status update you send.

Your profile page will show information about you, who you are following and who is following you. It will also display your recent tweets (known as your timeline).

Now that you have a Twitter account, tell your friends about it!

Finding and Following people

Your Twitter experience will be defined by the people you choose to follow. Who you follow is completely up to you. During the sing-up process, Twitter will suggest some people to follow. If you are new to Twitter you can start following some of them to get used to the system.

If you already know people on Twitter you are interested in, start following them. You can use Twitters people search to find people by name. It is a little bit like coming to school for the first time. Nobody will tell you hey here is your list of new friends. Over time you will figure this out on your own.

A good way to find new interesting people is to take a look who your friends are following. Take a look at the pictures in the sidebar on your friends’ pages. Those are the users they are are following. If you click on one of those pictures, you’ll go to that user’s page.

Every time you came across a persons Twitter profile take a look at their recent tweets. If you like what you see click the “Follow” button. Following someone simply means receiving their Twitter updates. When you follow someone, every time they post a new message, it will appear in your Twitter home page. How many people you follow is up to you. Some people follow a small number, others can cope with hundreds if not thousands. Remember you can always stop following people if you are not interested in their updates any more.

When people follow you you shouldn’t feel obliged to follow them back. Just follow who is interesting to you. If you don’t want someone to follow you, e.g. a spammer, than you can easily block that person.

Sending Twitter Messages (Tweets)

There are three types of Twitter messages: status updates, @replies and direct messages.

With status updates you can answer the question “What are you doing?” However many users go beyond this simple question and use status updates to share links to interesting content, photos, videos or music on the web.

An @reply is a public Twitter message directed at a specific person. An @reply is a tweet with @username at the beginning. Your message is understood as being intended for that particular person, although others will be able to see it. However, @replies won’t show up on your followers timeline unless they are the intended recipient.

To send direct messages (DM) enter d username message (e.g. d RainerFalle How are you?) These are private messages that only the named contact will see. Direct messages appear in a special Twitter inbox. You can only send direct messages to people who follow you.

To send Twitter messages you can use the Twitter web site, instant messaging, your mobile phone or a third party applications like SharedMinds Desktop. In all these cases, your "followers" will see your tweets on their own timelines immediately.

Sharing Web Links

Since you have only 140 characters for a Tweet every character counts and nearly everyone on Twitter uses a URL shortening service like http://bit.ly. For example the URL  http://bSix12.com/put-first-things-first/ can be shortened to http://bit.ly/1AX7Pw. Most Twitter clients like SharedMinds Desktop support URL shortening.

Sharing Images

Twitter doesn’t have built-in support to attach images to its 140 character messages. However there is a large number of third-party services to fill that need. Image sharing services like TwitPic and YFrog let you attach a photo and include a shortened link to that photo. Twitter clients like SharedMinds Desktop have integrated support for various image sharing services.

Retweeting

When you see a tweet you really like, you can "retweet" it. Retweeting is when you take the twitter message someone else has posted, and resend that same message to your followers. In this way the message is magnified, and may go viral.

The syntax of your Retweet should start with "RT" or "Retweet" followed by the username of the person who tweeted it and then finish with the content of the actual tweet (e.g. RT @KathySierra: Lovely post on design, simplicity, user experience: http://twurl.nl/61z016)

Originally Retweets where not part of the Twitter’s core features. It was started off as a pure convention between Twitter users. Due to it’s popularity Twitter added native support for Retweets.

Twitter clients like SharedMinds Desktop have a "Retweet" button that allow you to retweet as an orignial “old-school” Retweet or as a new style Twitter Retweet.

Twitter Search

To find out what people are talking about right now you can use Twitter Search. Take a look at the trending topics – the most common phrases appearing in messages right now. They are visible in the right-hand column of your profile page. Click on a trend to see the real-time search results for this trend.

Twitter Search is a very powerful tool to find out what is happening right now. There are many ways you can search and filter Twitter messages: by trending topic, search for #hashtags, keywords, phrases, people, language etc.

Watch the following CommonCraft video, which explains Twitter Search in Plain English:

#Hashtags

On Twitter a topic with a hash symbol (”#”) at the beginning is called a #hashtag. For example if you see a tweet like “Having fun at #mix09” then #mix09 is a #hashtag. You can use #hashtags to categorize or tag content so that related tweets can be grouped together. If everyone agrees to append a certain #hashtag to tweets about a certain topic, it becomes easier to find that topic in twitter search. The #hashtag is a favorite tool at conferences and events that allows you to talk about the event in real time and to connect to other people more easily.

Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists are a new way to organize the people on Twitter. It’s a way for you to group together other users on Twitter so that you can get an overview of what they’re up to. Lists can be public or private. Public lists will be visible in your public profile and other users can follow your public lists.

Watch the following video to learn more about Twitter Lists:

Twitter Clients.

Although many people use the Twitter web page to write and receive their tweets, there are other more convenient ways to do this. For instance, you could use a Twitter desktop client like SharedMinds Desktop, TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop. Those clients make it easy to organize, view, reply and retweet Twitter messages and to share links and photos. They all come with integrated Twitter search and support a lot of advanced features like multiple Twitter accounts.

Further Reading

• The Twitter Book – A Sneak Preview
• Twitter Glossary
• The Twitter Guide Book
• Twitter Reading List
• Twitter 101 – A special guide
• 10 Stunning (And Useful) Stats About Twitter
• The 11 Types of Followers on Twitter

• Top 6 Tools to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization
• Top 10 Tools for Learning
• Story Power! Tools to Create Engaging Content
• SharedMinds Desktop – The Ultimate Twitter Client for Windows
• SharedMinds Desktop – Quickstart

In this article I like to summarize the steps and decisions I made during the setup of bSix12.com – my self-hosted WordPress blog. If you are going to install a self-hosted WordPress blog for the first time this information will save you a lot of time. If you are looking for a fast and easy way to start a blog this article is not for you. In this case check out WordPress.com, Blogger.com or TypePad.com where you can start blogging right away.

Why Self-Hosted?

If you need full control over all aspects of your blog including the database, themes and plugins you need a self-hosted blog.

Get Your Domain Name

First of all you will need a domain name for your blog. Use a tool like http://instantdomainsearch.com/ to check if your desired name is available.

Once you decided for a name, register it with a domain registrar of your choice. I am using GoDaddy. I recommend GoDaddy for the registration of domain names only not for hosting plans (see below). Search for “GoDaddy Coupons” to find coupon codes you can use to get discounts during registration.

Choose Your Hosting Provider

The important criteria’s to look for when choosing a hosting provider are reputation, performance, reliability, quality of customer support and cost. Be aware that many of the review’s you will find during your research are subjective and misleading… Next you need to decide whether to use a dedicated server or to run on a shared hosting account.

I spent quite some time to research this topic and finally settled with ANHosting. So far I am very happy with this choice. ANHosting has a reputation for providing very good performance to database centric applications like WordPress and Drupal. It is also one of the cheapest shared hosting accounts you can get. Their customer service is very responsive. ANHosting and midPhase are in fact one and the same company. You can look at ANHosting as a special hosting package provided by midPhase. The benefit is that you can start on a cheap ANHosting account – however if you outgrow your shared hosting account you can upgrade to a midPhase dedicated server easily.

The ANHosting package also includes a free domain name. I decided not use this option because I like to manage my domain names independently of the hosting provider.

Install WordPress

Most hosting packages include a tool called Fantastico to automate the installation of WordPress. This works pretty well. ANHosting includes Fantastico. However I decided to install WordPress on my own because I wanted to learn more about WordPress . The manual installation is pretty straight forward as well. You will find all information necessary to download and install the software on WordPress.org.

If you install WordPress for the first time it is a good idea to do a test installation on your own PC first. I’m using a tool called XAMPP-Lite for testing purposes. With this tool you can setup a test environment within minutes. Depending on your operating system there are different version available (Just search for XAMPP for Windows, XAMPP for Linux or XAMPP for Mac). If this sounds too complicated just stick with Fantastico :-)

To WWW or Not to WWW…

After installing WordPress you should decide which canonical URL format you like to use. Some people prefer www (e.g. http://www.yourdomain.com) , others prefer a the blank domain (e.g. http://yourdomain.com).  It doesn’t matter which option you choose. Decide for one and stick to it. You can control this settings under General Settings (look for WordPress address and Blog address).

I decided to go with the blank domain (which is the default option anyway) because it’s shorter. You can still use the www prefix in your browser – however you will get redirected to the blank domain.

Choose Your Permalink Structure

Carefully think about your permalink structure. You will find the permalink options under Settings/Permalinks. By default WordPress uses the post id which is not user friendlyl. I prefer meaningful URL’s which say something about the content. From my point of view the following three options are good choices:

1. Month and post name: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/
   (e.g. http://yourdomain.com/2009/03/sample-post/)
    
2. Category and post name: /%category%/%postname%/
   (e.g. http://yourdomain.com/some-category/sample-post/) 
    
3. Only post name: /%postname%/
   (e.g. http://yourdomain.com/sample-post/)

Month and post name is a good choice if you once published do not update your posts a lot. You can tell when a post has been published just by looking at it’s URL. However if you do update an older post with new information the URL might suggest outdated content…

Category and post name is a good choice if you are pretty sure that your category names will never change. For a long time this was my favorite option because it represents an intuitive hierarchical navigation structure. With a special plugin which allows you to have a blank category base it would be possible to browser the namespace in an intuitive way. For example when you look at http://yourdomain.com/some-category/sample-post/ and delete the post name you would see a list of all posts in this category. The best book I know which discusses the importance of good URL design is RESTful Web Services by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby.

In my case I decided to go with a flat post name only structure. I don’t like to have the date in my URL because I will update older articles quite frequently. I decided against the category in the URL because I might want to change the category names in future. The option with the post name alone gives me the greatest degree of flexibility. Additionally I have full control over the post name (e.g. I could assign short and easy to memorize URL’s to important posts). Be aware that by choosing this option you share the same namespace with WordPress pages. If a page with the same name exists only the page is shown not the post!

Configure your Upload Directory

By default WordPress stores all your uploaded files under wp-content/uploads. The URL’s for your media files will have the following structure: http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/uploads/{year}/{month}/yourimage.jpg

I recommend using a separate sub-domain for your media files. For example: http://media.yourdomain.com or http://images.yourdomain.com . You can still store your media files on the same server however if you later decide to offload your images to another service provider it will be as straight forward as adding a new CNAME.

Perform the following two steps:

1. Configure WordPress: Go to Settings/Miscellaneous Settings and  change the following settings:
   (optional) Store uploads in this folder: media
   Full URL path to files: http://media.yourdomain.com or http://images.yourdomain.com
    
2. Create a new Sub-Domain: Create a new Sub-Domain with the name “media” or “images” in your CPANEL and point it to your media directory on the server. If you haven’t changed the media directory it will be wp-content/uploads otherwise it will be media or images.

From now on every time you upload a file it will be accessible via your media sub-domain.

Choose a WordPress Theme

There are tons of excellent free WordPress Themes available. Just go to WordPress.org, click on Extend in the menu bar and then click on Themes to get a good overview. If you are looking for a professional WordPress theme search for “Premium WordPress Themes”. The theme I’m using is a premium WordPress theme called arthemia premium. It is not for free but it is worth every penny.

Create a Backup Plan

A WordPress installation consists of two parts: The database and the WordPress files. In order to backup WordPress you need to backup the database as well as the WordPress files. Go to WordPress.org and search for “backup” to find detailed information on how to do that.

For short: I am using the WP-DB-Backup Plugin for the database backup and the SyncBack tool for the WordPress file backup.

Offload Your Feed via Feedburner

Sign up for a free Feedburner account. Freedburner provides many additional services like traffic analysis and email subscriptions to your feed. Additionally the feed will be delivered via Feedburner which reduces the load on your own server.

Some WordPress themes like arthemia premium provide Feedburner support out of the box. Otherwise you need to use a plugin called FeedSmith to redirect your feeds to Feedburner.

Install Plugins

I recommend the following additional plugins: Akismet, WP Super Cache, Simple Tags, Google XML Sitemaps and All in One SEO Pack.

Install Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is an excellent free blog authoring tool. It works with many different blogging system not only WordPress. To use it with WordPress you need to enable XML-RPC under your Writing Settings.

Optionally you can disable the build in WordPress WYSIWYG editor to make sure it does not do funny things with your make up.  To to this go to your profile and activate the option Disable the visual editor when writing.

• Story Power! Tools to Create Engaging Content
• What Everybody Ought to Know About Twitter?
• Top 6 Tools to Support Knowledge Sharing in Your Organization
• Top 10 Tools for Learning
• Story Power! Brain-Friendly Content through Visuals and Storytelling