If you have a blog or are thinking about starting one, then you have probably heard of wordpress. What’s so special about it and what makes it the most popular self-hosted blogging platform out there? The official wordpress site states:

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

What makes it so priceless is the range of usability it offers. For the beginner, it offers many features without having to know code.

1. You can host your site on the wordpress server, like this site is, or you can install wordpress on your computer and make websites with it. Many hosting companies such as BlueHost and HostGator are wordpress ready.
2. You can pick from thousands of free themes to give your blog a cool, stylish look.
3. You can use wordpress for social networking, as Flickr, delicious, and digg all have plugins for wordpress. If you aren’t familiar with these applications, read this article here.
4. It has a really cool feature called XFN (XHTML Friends Network), a social networking tool that allows search engines to understand your relationship with other bloggers.

• It allows you to establish links in your link manager (blogroll) as “friend”, “co-worker” or “crush” among others. It even allows you to designate whether you’ve physically met the person.

For the advanced users, you can optimize your blog by using the following hacks.

1. Add tags to your blog.  You can forego categories and date-based archives and turn your WordPress-powered blog into a tag-based blogging system. “Like del.icio.us, but a blog.” Go to Jarrod Trainque’s weblog to learn just how to do this. (What is a tag? Read this New York Times article about tags and folksonomy.)
2. Automatically post your daily del.icio.us links to your blog. Instead of posting in your blog every cool link you find, you can automatically post links as an entry once every evening. This hack was originally posted Steve Rubelh Ten Blogging Hacks, but detailed wordpress instructions can be found at Kevin Lim’s social technology blog entitled theory.isthereason.

I believe the best blogging software out there is the open source blogging platform of wordpress. It is more versatile than blogger. It is opensource (that means free for programmers to write plugins and themes), and there are thousands of templates and pluginsto make your blog unique.

My next post will discuss the best tutorials on the web on starting your own wordpress plug in.