I’m an avid photographer. As such, I am regularly asked by photography neophytes for guidance on what they should buy or for more experienced photographers, to defend the benefits of the two major DSLR camera platforms on the market (Nikon and Canon) and whether there is a benefit to switching [I'm a Canon shooter in the interest of full disclosure]. There are reams of benefits to support each argument, vitriolic debate on both sides of the fence, and enough esoteric technical specs to pour over when reading reviews or trying to make sense of the pros or cons to make a person crazy. However, my main piece of advice is to “buy what your friends and family use.”
The reason for this advice is simple: at some point along the way you’re going to need some help or have to borrow a piece of equipment and if you’re the oddball nobody can assist. On the other hand, if you’re using what other people have, you’ve got a lot more resources to draw on.
The same applies with other tools. When people ask me about blogs and blogging, specifically, “Which blog platform do you recommend?” I always give the same advice: WordPress. Part of that is because I use WordPress myself (the AffinityClick blog is also driven by WordPress ) and find that for the price (free!!) it’s a powerful tool that has a rich, useful feature set. But more importantly, WordPress has a lot of users—over 20 million hosted through WordPress.com and probably as many instances in self-hosted sites—which creates rich, vibrant community of bloggers and developers who use, support, and enhance it.
WordPress is based on PHP scripting which, despite protestations from some developers, is relatively quick to learn and easy to cobble (perhaps hack) together. It also features an extensible Plugin architecture that streamlines the process of adding modules that add functionality. The result is that WordPress is easy to customize; consequently a large community has sprung up developing themes, plugins, and scripts to enable bloggers to tailor the appearance, features, and administration of their blog.
From the beginning AffinityClick has set out to be an better advertising solution that is designed for bloggers to make it simpler for bloggers to be part of an advertising network that works. We recognize that WordPress is a critical platform and we’ve always supported it. Now we’re taking it one step further by joining the WordPress developer community and adding our own WordPress plugin to the mix.
The new plugin makes is even easier to add AffinityClick widgets to your blog and also makes it possible for WordPress.com-hosted blogs to support our widgets (previously, javascript limitations in WordPress.com-hosted blogs prevent AffinityClick widgets from being displayed). Installation is a snap through the standard WordPress administration control panel: just download the plugin, enter your AffinityClick account information, and activate in-text ads or drag a widget into the WordPress widget sidebar…or both.
We’re happy to be part of the WordPress developer community and to help make it easier for WordPress bloggers to monetize their content. Download our plugin and see how easy it is. And as always, we’re here to help.
