With the decimated housing market fueling the Great Recession, savvy realtors have realized they needed to “up their game” with their online marketing in order to keep food on the table for their families. Where did they turn? Why, blogging of course, among other things.

I had an opportunity recently to sit down with one such forward-thinking realtor-blogger, Jamie Miller. She’s actually a former employee of my former company Netconcepts, and she’s the agent for this beautiful property in Madison Wisconsin (yes, it’s my home). I asked her to share some pointers for realtors who want to get into blogging. Here are Jamie’s tips:

• Use your blog’s name to target geographic locations. I named my blog Madison Wisconsin Living.
• Also consider optimizing your blog around condo communities, like Miami Condo Lifestyle does, to target Google searchers. Individual posts can be condos for sale within their respective communities.
• Post all your property listings to your blog, and have a separate property listings category. This provides an excellent source of regular content for readers and the search engines.
• Don’t remove properties once they’ve sold. Simply update the listings with the word “Sold” — it’s a great way to communicate to prospective clients how many properties you’ve sold.
• Develop an authoritative voice in your local market for all things home sales. For instance, The Boston Real Estate Blog publishes local real estate news and stats.
• Leverage your blogging content into Social Media sites, such as your Facebook pages or Twitter profiles. It takes time to source and author content for blogging, this content should be shared across additional marketing channels in order to get the most bang for the buck and maintain message consistency.
• Don’t forget to also incorporate typical Real Estate Website features and functionality into your blog, such as Featured properties to highlight the agents own properties for sale, a Property Search that pulls from a MLS (multiple listing service), and informational pages on buying and selling homes. For example, My Westside LA has great posting categories that feature content targeted to buyers and sellers.
• If you’re a blogging newbie, it’s really easy to get started. Simply purchase a domain or use an existing domain you own (don’t just use a subdomain of wordpress.com or blogspot.com), purchase a hosting package (Ed. note: Bluehost is the one I use), and perform the famous “5 minute WordPress install” (actually it’s more like 5 seconds!)
• There are some great, cost-effective real estate-specific themes for WordPress you can choose from, including RealEstateThemes.com, Agent Press, and Villa Grande. Or, just Google for “wordpress real estate themes“.
• Install the following WordPress plugins: SEO Title Tag, Breadcrumb navigation, Google Analytics, and WPtouch iPhone Theme.
• Before you start writing, first outline your content plan for the blog. The plan can include things like new listings, local real estate news, tips on home selling, etc.

Have you ever come across a business blog and have wanted to print out a blog post but find that there is no print icon on the blog page?

I always think that we need to make it as easy as possible for people to access our content from our business blog so one of the things I did some time ago on my main blog was to add some plugins so that people could then print a blog article and also email articles to others.

However I recently came across a service that enables us to guide people to alternatives to print pages yet still makes your content accessible to readers and enables you to virally market your blog to others with a tell a friend functon – and it’s free!

The ECO-SAFE Merit Badge can be added to your website and offers the opportunity to website and blog visitors to:

• send themselves or other an email of the blog article
• send themselves or others a PDF of the blog article
• download a PDF of the blog article.

Why not add the ECO-SAFE Merit Badge to your business blog? That way you are being kind to the environment and enabling others to share your great content with potential readers and potential clients.

Oh I almost forgot to let you know, you can also register for free iTunes music of your choice when you add the ECO-SAFE Merit Badge to you blog or website.

Whether you’re just starting out in the blogosphere or you write for an established blog, you’ll need an angle to set your blog apart from the rest. Ideally, this theme will carry through all your posts, injecting the blog with a unique style and personality (e.g. snarky, witty, professorial, egotistical to the point of humorous, self-deprecating, nihilistic, voyeuristic). Your angle could also be in the way you present your content, too. For example, you might offer video blog posts that are extreme close-ups or you might include hand-drawn illustrations with your posts.

An angle helps make your blog remarkable, which is a laudable goal for any marketer. In his book “Purple Cow,” marketing guru Seth Godin stated that being “remarkable” doesn’t mean you (or your blog) needs to be the best, it means that you need to “be worth remarking about.” Seth also said that the opposite of “remarkable” is “very good.” In other words, having a “very good” blog just doesn’t cut it — not when there are hundreds of millions of other blogs out there too.

Another way of thinking about a “hook” or an “angle” is to think about your blog as “link bait.” Link bait is content that is so funny, so interesting, and so useful that it becomes irresistible to other bloggers and site owners to link to and “remark” on. Nick Wilson revealed 5 “hooks” in his landmark post on link baiting:

1. humor hook
2. news hook
3. contrarian hook
4. resource hook, and
5. attack hook

Link bait can take the form of Top 10 lists, humorous videos uploaded to YouTube, checklists, cartoons, tools, widgets and blog plugins — to name a few.

One business blog that I think really nailed this concept is Sparkle Like the Stars, a blog owned by jewelry retailer ice.com. The blog is snarky, irreverent, fun, voyeuristic, trendy and useful — all at the same time! This blog’s hook is paying off, in the form of a loyal following.

We, at Netconcepts, decided to follow in the footsteps of Sparkle Like the Stars to create a blog about shoes we affectionately named, “The Shoe Paparazzi.” The idea behind it was to fuse footwear with the “sport” of celebrity watching in order to capture and keep readers’ interest. At this point it’s still just an experiment, a pet project of Netconcepts that wasn’t commissioned by a client, but is something we hope can be used in the future to prove the case for the “celebrity watching hook” as a viable angle for online retailers.

As far as blogs go, I’m not 100% certain we’ve hit that right hook/angle yet to build that loyal following every blogger dreams of. I put it to you, my fellow bloggers, do you think our Shoe Paparazzi experiment is link-worthy? What’s your blog’s hook, and how’s that working out for you? Talk back via comments.

One of the great things about using WordPress is that it automatically creates keyword-rich, spider-friendly URLs for your posts (as long as your Permalink settings in the Options tab of the WordPress admin are configured properly). Many times, though, these URLs are TOO keyword-rich. In other words, the URL has too many words in it. That happens if you create a long title to your post, because every word in the title is worked into the URL automatically by WordPress.

But how long is “too long” for a URL? For the answer to this question, I went to the source: Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team. In my interview with Matt Cutts, I asked:

“What is excessive in the length of a keyword-rich URL? We have seen clients use keyword URLs that have 10 to 15 words strung together with hyphens; or blogs – we have seen them even longer there. A typical WordPress blog will use the title of the post as the post slug, unless you defined something different and you can just go on and on and on. Can you give any guidelines or recommendations in that regard?”

Matt answered:

“Certainly. If you can make your title four- or five-words long – and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.

The thing to be aware of is, ask yourself: “How does this look to a regular user?â€? – because if, at any time, somebody comes to your page or, maybe, a competitor does a search and finds 15 words all strung together like variants of the same word, then that does look like spam, and they often will send a spam report. Then somebody will go and check that out.

So, I would not make it a big habit of having tons and tons of words stuffed in there, because there are plenty of places on a page, where you can have relevant words and have them be helpful to users – and not have it come across as keyword stuffing.”

Based on this new information from Matt, you can see that even your blog post slugs have the potential to appear spammy and “keyword stuffed,” which doesn’t look great for your readers and may end up getting flagged as “spam.” So how can you prevent your blog from appearing spammy?

I’d strongly recommend that you curb the length of your URLs. There are a couple of different approaches to this in WordPress:

1. Hand-craft your own “Post Slug” when you are writing the post. To do so, simply type in your desired post slug into the “Post Slug” field found on the right-hand side of the “Write Post” page in the WordPress admin (you probably will have to hit the + sign to see the field). You can mirror your post’s title but drop throwaway words like “the” and “and”. You can take the first four words or so of the title as your slug. Heck, you could even write something totally different that doesn’t resemble your post title.
2. Use a WordPress plugin that will trim your post slugs down to a more manageable size, i.e. to five or six words. There are two plugins to choose from that will accomplish this: the WordPress Slug Trimmer plugin or the Automated SEO Friendly URL plugin.

For more great tips from Matt Cutts, I invite you to listen to my audio interview in MP3 format or read the full transcript. The interview is a little over 30 minutes long, and it has some invaluable advice.

Enjoy, and happy search engine optimized blogging!!!

Incentives work. Our whole economy is powered by incentives — as one of my favorite business books Freakonomics reveals.

Incentives work in the blogosphere too. Commentors will respond to incentives. Motivate your readers to comment with the following WordPress plugins (hat tip to Blogtalks.net):

• Show Top Commentators — to publicly recognize and name your top commentors on your blog
• Link Love — to motivate your commentors to post comments, because they’ll get links and PageRank from you. Most blog platforms automatically nofollow the links in comments, so that no PageRank is transferred. This WordPress plugin removes the nofollow, so that your commentors will gain an SEO benefit from their comments. Just make sure that your blog is pristinely clean of comment spam. You don’t want to inadvertently link to what Google calls “bad neighborhoods.”
• Comment Relish — to send Thank You notes to your new commentors. The plugin ensures that you don’t send regular commentors repeated thank you emails. So don’t worry, you want be inadvertently barraging your commentors with an onslaught of spam.

Can blogs be optimized for search marketing? Absolutely! Blogs are basically content management systems with additional functionality such as comments, trackbacks and RSS. In many ways, blogs are no different than web sites.

If a document can be optimized and that document gets indexed, categorized and ranked by any kind of search engine, it’s an opportunity for search marketing. As such, marketers should be aware of how document optimization within various channels can be used within the overall online marketing mix. Blogs are one of many platforms that benefit from optimization.

At a minimum, using blog software to manage certain kinds of content on a web site such as an online media room, to archive newsletters, post frequently asked questions and to provide product updates can make a site that is otherwise very search engine un-friendly, become a viable source of great rankings. This applies to both regular search engines as well as blog search engines. These are applications for a blog besides the common use as a platform to increase credibility and communicate a more personalized voice for a company.

Blogs are no silver bullet though and require working hard and smart – especially smart. However the payoff can be significant. To prove the point that blogs are effective tools for improving search engine visibility, I can offer that my own blog (Online Marketing Blog) receives the majority of it’s traffic from search engines.

Here are a few Google ranking examples of the top referring search phrases in the past month for Online Marketing Blog:

• “marketing blog“
• “online marketing“
• “rss buttonâ€?
• “social bookmarks“

Even more niche phrases bring in quality search traffic such as:

• “blog optimization“
• “press release optimizationâ€?
• “social media optimizationâ€?

which are all services our search marketing agency provides. Of course the rules can change slightly over time, but here are a set of benefits I often find myself explaining to people wondering about the search engine optimization benefits of having a blog.

1. Structured content – Blog software with category features allows the aggregation of content according to themes. This makes it easier to algorithmically categorize content. If you can make it easier for search engines to understand your content, you have a much better chance of ranking well on those topics.
2. Crawlable URLs – Most blog software offers uncomplicated URL structure, making it fairly easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.
3. Internal links – Blogs that post product or service related information can deep link anchor text to product information or purchase pages deep within the web site. This is very beneficial for ranking on long tail phrases.
4. Inbound link magnet – One of the biggest benefits, blogs link freely to each other – much more than web sites do. Blogs are also a significant source of many posts to social news and social media web sites. Text, audio and video are all easily supported for syndication by blogs. The more media available, the more likely it will attract incoming links. Additionally, there are many widgets and plugins that make it easy to share blog content, thus encouraging links and traffic.
5. RSS – Links to RSS feed urls that use the blog domain name will assist in building link popularity and when RSS content is syndicated or cited by other blogs, any embedded links will also assist in sending traffic.
6. Fresh content – Both readers and search engines reward fresh content with repeat visits. From a search engine perspective, that means your site can be crawled more frequently, allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly. Fresh content is also indicative of a more authoritative web site.
7. Active community – Comments and trackback features in blog software encourage interaction. An active blog community creates the kinds of citations or signals from other sites (annotated and contextually relevant links) that search engines tend to reward in the rankings. Loyal blog readers can boost a site’s visibility through advocacy on other blogs, in forums offline at conferences as well as on their own blogs and within the comments of your blog.
8. Non-Search traffic – I think the greatest benefit of having an active blog has little to do with improving your search engine rankings though. The best thing about blogs is that they allow you to generate substantial amounts of traffic via RSS and links that have NOTHING to do with search engines. My recommendation to marketers in 2007 is to pursue traffic alternatives to search engines as aggresively as their budgets and marketing programs will allow. The result will be incremental increases in site traffic with search engine referred traffic an added bonus, if not correspondingly enhanced.
9. Blog & RSS Directories – With a blog and corresponding RSS feed(s), your site can now benefit from visibility within blog and RSS search engines. Web sites without feeds (your competition maybe?) are not included in these kinds of directories and search engines.

Felllow BBC’er Stephan Spencer has also written extensively about optimizing blogs and using blogs as SEO tools.

So there you go. A basic list of practical reasons a blog can be beneficial as a site optimization tool and for improved web site traffic along with practical examples. What SEO benefits have you found from having and promoted a blog?

Yesterday’s New York Times article “Some Bling for Your Blog” got me thinking about widgets and plugins and how most of them are serve no real purpose to the average blog reader and simply frustrate them by slowing the page downloading. The article showed screen grabs of a few cool-looking widgets: the trivia game Blufr, the Streampad music player, and the fund-raising widget ChipIn. But do those widgets really add value — enough value to counterbalance the extra download time?

What I would have liked to have seen in the article is a list of the best of the bling. Well, since they didn’t, I will take a stab at it myself. And please jump in with your suggestions too, via the comments. Here are my personal favorites:

• Swicki “Hot Searches” Buzzcloud (from Eurekster)
• Recent Readers (from MyBlogLog)
• Flash Photo Stream (from Flickr)
• Preview Anywhere (from Snap)
• “What Am I Doing” Twitter Badge (from Twitter)
• Film Loops (from FilmLoop)
• Number of Readers FeedCount (from Feedburner)
• “I’m online” Skype buttons (from Skype)
• del.icio.us Tagometer (from del.icio.us)
• del.icio.us Linkrolls (from del.icio.us)
• del.icio.us Network Badge (from del.icio.us)
• Timelines (from MyTimelines)
• Link Count (from Technorati)
• Polls (from PollDaddy)
• Now Playing (from SIGamp)
• BuzzBoost (from Feedburner)
• Books in my Library (from LibraryThing)

and these which are not really widgets, but plugins (for WordPress):

• Ultimate Tag Warrior (tag clouds)
• Share This (add to social bookmarking services)
• Recent Comments

Plenty more widgets at Widgetoko

In speaking last week with friend and colleague Alan Rimm-Kaufman, he told me of his company’s plans to switch their company’s site to WordPress. Very timely that he would mention that to me given my recent post about WordPress for non-blogs. I asked Alan to write these points up, they were so good. He agreed, and blogged it. In summary, Alan says WordPress provides company site owners with:

• editing without needing to know HTML
• easy handling of “rolling events” like speaking engagements
• post-dating of articles so they can automatically “go live” on the scheduled date (as is required with embargoed articles until their print publication date)
• reader participation through comments
• organization of the content using tags
• seamless handling of pre-existing URLs
• easy addition of new functionality (because it is “open source”)
• free support by the very responsive developer and user communities

I’ll just piggy-back on Alan’s points a bit:

• Because WordPress is such a popular blogging platform, it’s easy to find developers to work on it. It also certainly doesn’t hurt that WordPress is written in PHP — the most popular programming language on the planet!
• WordPress is easily extensible through the use of plugins. Many hundreds of plugins exist already. It’s also pretty easy (if you’re a developer) to write your own plugins. That’s a lot more elegant that directly hacking the WordPress code base.
• Maintaining inlinks to former URLs can often be accomplished just by making the “post slugs” (filenames) consistent with the old site then adding a rewrite rule to the .htaccess file that maps to the new URL structure. If that’s not possible, you can always create a comprehensive list of 301 (permanent-style) redirects to add to your .htaccess file.

So I made my case for running WordPress on non-blogs, based primarily on the positive impact on SEO that you’ll get out of doing so. This rounds out the reasons for switching to include compelling reasons beyond just search rankings.

Actually, I’ll add one more. WordPress allows you to add cool sidebar widgets, such as the Swicki buzzcloud, with the greatest of ease. I love widgets! (A swicki, by the way, is a custom search engine, like this one, and a buzzcloud is a tagcloud type thing but of popular searches rather than tags, like the one in the right column on my daughter’s Neopets Cheats site.)

My two-part article for Marketing Profs titled Ten Tips to Help Your Blog Soar in the Search Engines, was published a couple weeks ago. If you are a premium subscriber, you may have already read it; if not, here’s a brief overview of the secrets to SEO success contained within…

1. Customize your title tags with keywords
2. Rewrite your URLs for link gain
3. Tag clouds and tag pages are your twin secret weapons
4. Link to related posts
5. Create a Top 10 Posts list, regardless of posting age, and offer links to these
6. Lose “permalink” and “click here” from your linking vocabulary and instead link with keyword-rich anchor text
7. Create sticky posts to gain keyword prominence on category or tag pages
8. Use heading tags to reinforce your keyword theme
9. Guide the search engines to your key points with bold, strong or emphasis tags within the body of the post
10. Multiple author blogs need author pages and the links to their sites need to be cleverly done to maximize SEO benefit to them

The complete article is around 3000 words and goes into much more detail, including suggested WordPress plugins and specific PHP code to insert into your blog. Sign up to MarketingProfs to read the full article, or access most of the information on my blog optimization tag page.

This week in Boston the Pubcon conference kicked off with the Boston Marathon and a keynote from Malcolm Gladwell. The conference covered a lot of ground including a session on blogs, podcasting and RSS.

On Tuesday, the “Blogging, Pod Casting and RSS Feeds” session included Dr. Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit, Daron Babin of New Gen Media, Brian Prince of BOTW as well as Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo and Matt Cutts of Google for the Q and A.

The mechanics of blogging and marketing blogs included alternative uses for RSS, blog and feed optimization, plugins, promotion and blog metrics. Babin discussed the pros and cons of podcasting with practical insight based his experience with the explosive growth of WebmasterRadio.FM.

The Q and A brought up the blurring line between what is a blog and what is a web site with the search engine reps defending their performance at indexing blogs. There was also a good question about whether to convert a whole site to a blog platform or to just add a blog to the existing site. Jeremey Zawodny’s response was to pick the right tool for the job based on your needs whether it’s forum software or blog or a content management system.

Here’s more detailed coverage of the Blogs, RSS and Podcasts session.

Recently I wrote a post on optimizing your TypePad blog titles for the search engines. Today I read a well-documented article called Search Engine Optimization for Blogs by Bill Hartzer.

In it he discusses techniques to use if WordPress or Movable Type is your platform of choice. He also has some good information on promoting your blog. (Although, how he forgot Stephan Spencer’s fantastic collection of WordPress plug-ins I’ll never know!)
If you’re using your blog as a lead-generation tool be sure to check this article out.

Since my list of WordPress plugins was so well-received, I’ve got another list to share. This time it’s my favorite Firefox extensions…

• Tab Mix Plus – saves your tabs and windows and will restore them if you quit out of your browser or it crashes, allows you to undo the closing of a tab, and lots more
• Performancing for Firefox – a blog editor for your WordPress, Movable Type, or Blogger blog that features integration with del.icio.us and Technorati, spellchecking, etc.
• All-in-One Gestures – execute commands by making certain movements with your mouse without having to use the keyboard, menus or toolbars — like going back a page, closing a tab, etc.
• User Agent Switcher – masquerade as Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp, or msnbot etc. to see if a site is doing bot detection
• Web Developer – tool for doing CSS coding, building web forms, etc.
• Google Toolbar for Firefox – Get query suggestions as you type into the search box, view PageRank scores, etc. Check out my screencast on installing, configuring and using the Google Toolbar.
• SEO-Links – hover over a link and it displays link popularity and rankings for the anchor text from Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. I’ve got a screencast on using SEO-Links too.
• Copy Plain Text – copy-and-paste from a web page into Microsoft Word so that the formatting isn’t carried over
• ChatZilla – IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client
• Sage – RSS feed reader
• ViewSourceWith – view the page’s HTML source using an external editor (WordPad, BBEdit, etc.)
• ShowIP – displays the IP address of the web server in the bottom right corner
• StumbleUpon – get recommendations of related pages to check out from friends and like–minded individuals
• Search engines for the Search Bar – add your own favorite search engines to the search box in the top right, such as: MSN Search, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Technorati, Creative Commons, etc.

Here’s a tip that isn’t quite an extension, but over time it’s a huge time-saver. And it works in IE too.

• When you want to type in a URL into the address bar, you can leave off the the www. in front and the .com at the end, because, by hitting Ctrl Enter, the browser will automatically add the www. and the .com to the address for you!

This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list of useful Firefox extensions. Check out the new FirefoxFacts ebook for a bigger list of recommended extensions and tips for Firefox. And if there’s an extension you feel should be added to the above list of favorites, please leave me a comment!

What follows below are some of my favorite WordPress plugins and why. Many of them I have in common with Cavemonkey’s excellent Top Ten WordPress Plugins list. Here’s my list, in no particular order:

• PodPress – makes it super-simple to post podcasts; includes an inline media player
• Popularity Contest – offer a leaderboard of your Most Popular posts based on views and ratings
• Google Sitemaps Generator – creates a Google Sitemaps XML file. What’s killer about this is that it uses Popularity Contest’s ratings for the priority scoring that Google uses to determine how frequently to spider your pages
• Akismet – you’d be a fool to run a blog with comments turned on and not use this plugin to stop the flood of comment spam. ’nuff said!
• Adhesive – gives you the ability to flag certain posts as “Sticky” so they float to the top of the category page regardless of whether it’s the most recent
• Ultimate Tag Warrior – creates tag pages and a tag cloud. Great for SEO as I’ve said before.
• EmailShroud – an email address obfuscator to thwart those evil email harvesters. Scans for email addresses in posts, but won’t work on email addresses hard-coded into your theme.
• Transpose Email – another email address obfuscator. Doesn’t automatically scan for email addresses, but can be used from within your theme files.
• WP-EMail – “Email this post to a friend” functionality
• WP-Print – Printer-friendly version of posts
• Subscribe2 – let your readers subscribe to your blog updates via email
• In-Series – link posts together into a series, regardless of dates posted or categories selected
• Permalink Redirect – fixes the canonicalization problem where the same page loads whether the slash is there or not. Important for SEO.
• Gravatars – puts the commenter’s “Gravatar” image next to their comment
• Subscribe to Comments – a commenter can check a box on the comment form so that they get notified of further comments to that post
• WP-Notable – places a row of buttons alongside your posts so the reader can easily add your post to their favorite social bookmarks service (del.icio.us, digg, etc.)
• A Different Monthly Archive – a pretty way to display links to archives by month
• Related Posts – link to related posts automatically based on the content of the post
• Related Posts for your 404 – your File Not Found error page can now suggest related posts to the misguided user. Cool!

What are your favorites? Did I miss any important ones?

Keeping the pace of these blog platform reviews hopping, here’s the next one about GreyMatter by Joni M. Mueller. I have to say, the review itself is great, very well-written, thorough and honest. Honest to the extent that, althought Joni obviously loves the platform, she admits it may not be for everyone.

My summary of the review: It’s a server-side, PERL-based platform, like Movable Type, which means, among other things, it requires rebuilds of the archives when you make significant changes to the templates. Joni tells how this process early on crashed her then mom-and-pop web host’s servers and she was polited asked to take her web site elsewhere. (Bad blogger! Yikes!) Also, GreyMatter is no longer being actively developed by its principal developer, although there remains an active, die-hard community of plug-in and hack makers. It is also not so easy to install for novices. For those reasons, Joni suggests it’s better for those who like playing around with the underside of the tools and maybe not ideal for most corporate blog installations.

Read her whole review for yourself below. Please offer your feedback on both the review and especially the platform in the Comments thread.

GreyMatter Review

by Joni M. Mueller

General performance. What makes this different/better than other blog publishing platforms?

GreyMatter was one of the first Perl-driven blogging tools out there. That was back when the choices were Livejournal, Blogger and GreyMatter. The difference with GreyMatter was of course its power. At that time, it offered things that the other blog tools did not. GM was written and developed by Noah Grey.

What are some of the best advantages about this platform?

It offers powerful blogging tools like a calendar, searching, comments, IP banning and karma voting, something even today seldom offered in any other blogging tool. Most people probably would never use the karma voting feature of GM, but it might come in handy for a review site (books, DVDs, software, etc.).

One of GM’s best features is its ability to be completely customized. There are a dazzling, if not daunting, array of templates with which to tweak and customize your layout.

What are some of its disadvantages?

Because it is based on Perl, not PHP, the rebuilds that plague other Perl-driven sites also plagues GM. And if your site is hosted on a small server (as mine was way back when), you may end up crashing your web host’s servers. This is not likely to endear you to them, nor GreyMatter to you.

Another disadvantage GreyMatter has is that you have to know your way around an Unix server pretty well and understand completely the difference between an URL and a server path to install GreyMatter. Either that or know someone who does. The installation of GreyMatter is not for the novice.

Also, because GreyMatter is no longer being actively developed by its creator, it will likely stall out at its current version, 1.3. However, there’s a close-knit community of GreyMatter enthusiasts who have taken up the torch and offer a robust and active support forum, where new plugins and hacks are being engineered constantly. GreyMatter is no longer in the forefront of the blogging world, if it ever was, but it’s keeping stride with its bigger competitors and has a very loyal fan base.

What’s the killer feature, if there is one?

There are two features that I think have the “wow” factor above all other blogging tools:

1. As mentioned before, its karma voting feature.
2. GM creates a log, as does MovableType, of all the activity on your site. But unlike MovableType, GreyMatter alerts you to any hacking attempts that occurred and provides the hacker’s ISP. (See Fig. 1)

Fig. 1

What features does it lack or need fixing?

Streamlining the cumbersome installation process would be a plus. There was a very big security issue about a year ago for those running GreyMatter in conjunction with PHP. But the flaw was isolated and patched and it’s just as safe as any other Perl program now.

Where does the publishing engine reside? On its own hosted servers, like Blogger or TypePad? On your own web server, like Movable Type? On your desktop, like Userland Radio? Other? (Outerspace?) What advantages/disadvantages do you see in this approach?

GreyMatter is very much like MovableType in that it must reside on its own server. As mentioned before, you must have a robust web host. When I first installed GreyMatter, my site was hosted by a local ISP, a true “mom and pop” operation. In no short order, GreyMatter apparently ran amok on a rebuild and the ISP operator had to shut the servers down for several hours while he found the offending program (GreyMatter). I was asked, albeit nicely, to find another server from which to run GreyMatter. I am happy to say there are many web hosts out there who can handle GreyMatter and the strain it can sometimes place on a server. There are many, though, who have taken the stance that it is a hoggy program and will not allow it on their servers.

What’s the geek factor on this? How comfortable can non-technical people be with it?

On a scale of 1-10, 10 being the Geekiest of Geeks, I rate GreyMatter a 7 on the difficulty level. There is difficulty in its installation, and further difficulty if you are an HTML novice in dealing with its vast array of templates. Once you’ve mastered both, however, you will find GreyMatter very powerful.

What’s the learning curve? Totally intuitive? Lots of features, thus requiring more time to familiarize yourself with all of it?

The learning curve is a bit steep, but the rewards are worth it in terms of having the ability to create your layout exactly as you want it. Spend a bit of time getting to know GreyMatter’s templates and how they work. The documentation is very informative and easy to understand. It reviews all the tags and their possible uses so you get a good understanding of what you need to set up to get your blog up and running, while you work behind the scenes on the layout.

What’s involved in setting it up? If you’re not technical, do you need help?

While the installation can be troublesome, GreyMatter does have a diagnostic utility that checks to be sure you’ve made your files and directories writable, so if you haven’t it will be easy to go back and fix them so they are. The setup instructions walk you through configuring a hypothetical site so you aren’t left completely in the dark about how to set up GreyMatter. But someone who’s never messed around with FTP and CHMOD or used Tel-Net or the Unix shell commands is going to need to go through some trial (and error) by fire!

Are there platform restrictions? (E.g., PC/Mac, APS vs. Linux servers, SQL Server, etc.)

There aren’t any restrictions that I’m aware of, but you must have a minimum of Perl and access to your cgi-bin folder to install GreyMatter.

Who produces it? Is it an open-source community, a labor-of-love by some programmer, a company with financial backing? What is the likelihood this development team is going to still be at it a year or two from now, providing new features, etc.?

GreyMatter was created and developed by Noah Grey, a photographer. He continued development and support for GreyMatter until around 2002 or early 2003, when he announced that he would no longer be developing it. Then, support for GreyMatter through its forum was taken over by FoshDawg, who maintains the forums and keeps track of the various hacks and mods that continue to be written for GreyMatter as of this writing!

Where is the software developed? How is language support in English (the web site, the manual, the support communities, etc.)? Other languages?

Other languages are supported through mods/hacks found here.

What’s the pricing of it?

GreyMatter is free (although it is not open source), and there are no licensing fees for personal or commercial use.

Is there tech support?

Yes, through the GreyMatter support forum.

Is there a good user manual?

There is an excellent online installation and user manual that ships with GreyMatter. It is very detailed and walks you through the installation and configuration of GreyMatter. It can be viewed here.

Is there a third-party developer community? If so, how active?

GreyMatter has a loyal following and many people are actively developing plugins and hacks for GreyMatter at FoshDawg.net/gm/mods/ and at the Flipped Cracker site, FlippedCracker.net/gm/.

Is there a vibrant user/support/forum community? If so, what are the URLs of such?

Yes, indeed. Since Noah Grey no longer develops GreyMatter, it has been “adopted” by FoshDawg, and its support forum is at GreyMatterForums.com.

Is there support for photos galleries?

GreyMatter natively supports uploading of images and because of its large assortment of customizable templates, it is well-suited to a photoblog, but not “straight out of the box.” Here’s a tutorial on creating a photoblog with GreyMatter.

Is there a built-in Blogroll/Link List kind of feature to manage blogrolls?

Unfortunately, no. However, most people are familiar with and use Blogrolling.com, which a user is certainly free to incorporate into his or her GreyMatter blog.

Can you post via email? Mobile phone/moblog?

Yes, you can post via e-mail only through a hack/plugin found here.

Does it email posts to subscribers who so choose?

Yes, through another hack/plugin found here.

Anything notable in the archive features?

Because of GreyMatter’s array of templates, it’s possible to completely separate your main entries’ style from that of your archives.

Does it support comments? Comment-spam filtering? If so (the latter), what’s the approach?

Comments are natively supported in GreyMatter. It also has a mod/hack that verifies that the commenter’s email address is valid. That can be found here.

Does it support trackback?

Through a plugin, trackbacks and RSS feeds are now supported. One such hack can be found here.

Any idea how well it works on a Mac, with Mozilla or other non-W2K IE platforms?

I have no way to test it on a Mac, but I know that it (the GM control panel; I have no control over your GM-powered website!) renders fine on all the Gecko browsers, in Opera 6 and 7, in Avant and IE6.

Does it pioneer any other new blog features that other platforms don’t have?

GreyMatter is no longer being actively developed, but new plugins and “hacks” are being written for it constantly. Most of these are simply features that allow GreyMatter to keep step with the rest of the blog tools out there, so it’s not breaking any new ground right now.

One plugin/mod/hack that I think is worth having is the spellcheck hack.

Does it support multiple authors? If so, does it have decent permission controls? (E.g., can you limit authors to publish only to draft?)

GreyMatter supports an unlimited number of authors and you can restrict them through the control panel. (See Fig. 2)

Fig. 2

GreyMatter doesn’t have a “draft” setting per se. But it has a unique feature where you can open or close an entry. This causes it not to be shown on your site. And if you decide you want to reopen the entry, you can do so at the click of a button. (See Fig. 3)

Fig. 3

Also, not asked, but worth mentioning is that if you want more than one GM blog on your server, you must install each separately. And there’s no “miniblog” or other way (other than through complicated PHP calls) to run both blogs on one page.

Does it support a simple modular design for page elements? (E.g., when editing templates, are things like blogroll lists, sidebar elements, headers, etc., managed as separate entities, or are they all just in the HTML of a single template?)

Yes, it does. It has separate sections for a “header” and a “footer” so that constant information (such as copyright and colophon information, often contained in a footer) can be written once and called by any page in the GreyMatter template scheme.

Is it well suited for public corporate blogging? Why or why not?

I wouldn’t recommend it over MovableType or WordPress for several reasons. One, because it’s not supported any longer; two, because any PHP-based program (e.g., WordPress, pMachine) will place less load on one’s server and is leaner; and third, and most important, the learning curve on a program like this is fairly steep. You’d need one or two people in the company who are well-versed to set up the journal for all the other users. With other journaling programs being so much more popular and more widely supported, it’s just not something I’d offer as a choice.

Is it well suited for internal corporate blogging? Why or why not?

See above

What other blog platforms have you used that you can compare this to?

I started out using Blogger, then found GreyMatter and was intrigued by its karma voting, calendar and search box. Its closest competitor is MovableType*, as they are both Perl-based programs.

I’ve also dabbled a bit in pMachine*, Geeklog, Mambo*, e107, PHPwcms, TextPattern*, and WordPress*.

*Denotes active testbed site and extensive use.

What else do we need to know about this system?

When it first arrived on the scene, it was an elegant program for those who wanted to roll up their sleeves and dive into the backend of a journaling program. With the advent of Blogger, and the growing popularity of blogs in general, people started wanting something that needed less know-how to get off the ground. MovableType seemed to strike a happy medium between geekishness and wham-bam click and go blogging. It still does, but since that time, there’ve been many more programs flocking to fill in any gaps. For the longest time, it seemed that GM and MT were in a dead heat. Perhaps had Noah Grey continued a more active role in GM, it may be in a different place today, but I could sit around and speculate all day. In sum, GreyMatter is a great program, if you are willing to hunt down the mods and hacks for it. If you like complete control over every single detail and every single piece of output of your blog program, GreyMatter still has that thrill factor.

UPDATE:
I asked the author to add in a few other questions, which she graciously did:

Does it have a spell checker?

Not natively, but you can via a plugin.

Does it have a wiki-publishing component?

No.

Can you easily set up multiple weblogs from one account or installation of the blog publishing software, or must you create multiple accounts or installations?

You must install separate instances of GreyMatter in your cgi-bin folder if you want multiple blogs running GreyMatter on the same server. Also, there is no way to call one GM blog from within another so you can’t have a sideblog or miniblog.

Does it support categories? If so, how about hierarchical categories (e.g., Movies/Horror, Movies/Comedies, Movies/Thriller, Books/Fiction, Books/Biographies, and so on)? What about suppressed categories? (That is, in the monthly archive, publish all except the “Breaking News” category)?

GreyMatter does not natively support categories, but does so only through a plugin. Caveats abound with this plugin as it apparently alters GreyMatter’s underpinnings quite a bit.

Does it let you easily create a “remaindered links” blog-within-a-blog, a la Anil Dash’s Links Blog? (Obviously, you can kludge this in most systems, but I’m wondering if some blog software has it off the shelf.)

No, and there doesn’t appear to be a plugin, mod or hack that will accomplish this either.

A couple of weeks ago, I put out a call for reviews of blog publishing platforms. I got a number of offers to review platforms, and several are now in the works. Strikingly, I got more offers to review WordPress than any other platform, by a wide margin (I did, however, note that I didn’t need reviews of the popular platforms Movable Type, TypePad and Blogger, as I will write those myself).

Anyway, I’m pleased to hereby present the first review about WordPress by by Jeremy C. Wright of Ensight.org. Since I am not familiar with this platform personally (or any of the others I solicited reviews for) and the reviewers who volunteered are obviously fans of their respective platforms, I would love to hear from the rest of you in the Comments thread on this post as to what you think of the review and, more importantly, the platform in question.

UPDATE:
On the recommendation of an off-site commenter, I think it’s probably appropriate for me to give my summary of what I took away from each of these reviews, so here’s what I’d say for WordPress: Overall, Jeremy is quite enthused about it. It’s PHP, which means it generates pages dynamically and doesn’t need to rebuild the whole archive the way Movable Type and other PERL-based platforms do. It’s open-source and free and has an active developer and forum community; based on number of offers I had to review this platform, I’d say it’s got a lot of interest and momentum behind it. While you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to set it up, it is not a piece of cake, either. Jeremy says that may inhibit its ideal use for internal corporate (“intranet”) blogging, as it would probably require someone from IT to set up every new installation, as opposed to being something folks in any department could do themselves. Overall, though, he gives it high marks.

Oh, also, I actually had Jeremy rewrite the review, because his first draft didn’t conform to my question-and-answer format, which he graciously did. Here, for the record, is his original version of the review. The revised version is below here on my blog.

WordPress Review

by Jeremy C. Wright of Ensight.org

There are, quite literally, hundreds of blogging platforms and packages out there. Choosing the right one for you can be such a daunting task that most people simply pick what is most well known, without necessarily picking based on quality of the software or even longevity of the platform.

Thankfully, WordPress is both well known and deserving of its status as the most popular PHP-based blogging platform available.

General performance: What makes this different/better than other blog publishing platforms?

WordPress is fast, has a quick installation, low learning curve and yet is incredibly powerful. It includes a robust plugin system, a full comments system and blogrolling and linkblogs as part of the software. In addition, it includes mobile features like Blogging by Email and Bookmarklets that let you blog any page you are on quickly and easily.

The WordPress community is large and vibrant and the developers are top notch. And, to top it all off, WordPress is free.

What are some of the best advantages about this platform?

Ultimately the choice of blogging software will always come down to a few fundamental questions: Are you looking for a hosted solution? Are you looking for a PHP or Perl-based product (or some other platform specifically, like ASP.NET)? What other features are looking for (comment spam protection, multiple authors, multiple blogs, photo gallery, etc)?

WordPress is designed for those who are not looking for a hosted solution, who are looking for a PHP based solution and who want certain well architected, yet foundational features: standards compliance, dynamic templates, a fully fledged comment system (including anti-spam protection), ease of plugin installation and more. If these are the types of things that are important to you, WordPress may just be the perfect fit.

Finally, the developers are going to stick around. They’ve been doing blogging software since 2001 and are a large part of the blogging community and have been able to create a fantastic product used by thousands upon thousands of bloggers.

What are some of its disadvantages?

There a few smaller features WordPress lacks. Mainly it isn’t that WordPress lacks features, but that certain feature sets are weaker than they need to be. For instance it is difficult to moderate what authors are able to publish and the comment spam protection system is weak and difficult to maintain.

What’s the killer feature, if there is one?

WordPress’s feature which puts it above many other platforms is it’s templating system. Essentially, there is one core template, contained in the index.php file. Every page takes its design from that main one. That doesn’t mean every page needs to look the same.

Each element of the template is modular. So, in order to remove the calendar, you simply remove the <?php get_calendar(); ?> code from your index.php file. Ditto with monthly archives (<?php wp_get_archives(‘type=monthly’); ?>). Keeping the design modular allows for a very flexible presentation layer.

What features does it lack or need fixing?

WordPress’s comment spam protection features definitely need to be looked at. Recently, comment spam overtook email spam as the most intrusive form of advertising for users to have to deal with. Many blogs get hundreds of comment spam attempts per day, and WordPress’s system of having the author moderate each individual comment is far too cumbersome.

In addition, WordPress lacks the ability to have static archives, which are important for larger sites with many older entries both for backups and to decrease server load.

Where does the publishing engine reside? On its own hosted servers, like Blogger or TypePad? On your own web server, like Movable Type? On your desktop, like Userland Radio? Other? (Outerspace?) What advantages/disadvantages do you see in this approach?

The publishing engine resides on your own web server, like MovableType. If you already have your own web server or are using space provided by a shared hosting provider, WordPress will be ideal for your situation. However if you aren’t, the setup and installation of a WordPress blog will require you to purchase a domain, sign up for hosting and then setup the publishing engine.

However, having the software be your own allows for a much greater level of control and flexibility as you can modify the software as you see fit.

What’s the geek factor on this? How comfortable can non-technical people be with it?

Assuming a non-technical person is able to do the initial setup in terms of database details, actually using WordPress is very easy. The documentation is clear and concise and the interface is very easy to work with as it is broken into tasks: Write, Edit, Options, etc.

This means that just about anyone can log into the Control Panel and get to writing very quickly.

What’s the learning curve? Totally intuitive? Lots of features, thus requiring more time to familiarize yourself with all of it?

WordPress’s learning curve is only as steep as you need it to be. While there are lots of features and there is a lot of depth, someone can get started as simply as logging in and writing. They don’t need to setup categories if they don’t want to. They don’t need to do anything besides write, if that is all they need to do.

However there are a lot of options for permanent links for your entries to how articles are read and how dates are displayed through to link blogs and blogrolls. All in all it is simple enough to learn, but deep enough to keep using even for the most advanced user.

What’s involved in setting it up? If you’re not technical, do you need help?

WordPress bills itself as having the simplest installation on the planet: The 5-Minute Installation. To be honest, I’ve found it generally takes me 7 minutes, but then I can be kind of slow. Either way, here is the entirety of the installation instructions:

1. Make sure your host meets the requirements. Also, have a database ready with proper username and password.
2. Unzip the package you downloaded.
3. Open up wp-config-sample.php and fill in your database details. Save and rename the file to wp-config.php.
4. Upload all the files to your webhost
5. Run the installation file. Relative to where you uploaded the files, it’ll be in wp-admin/install.php.

Yep. That’s it. 5 steps.

Beyond that, you will need to login to WordPress, change your password and get acclimatized to the environment. However, the WordPress introduction and wiki provide a lot of help in this area.

In addition, if you are stuck, the WordPress Support Forums are always buzzing. If you need a hand, that’s often the best place to look. As a suggestion, though, you may want to try the Search feature before you post your question as it’s likely that any installation issue you are running into has been encountered, and solved before.

Ultimately WordPress is designed to be simple enough for the casual blogger, but to have the flexibility even the most experienced blogger would need.

Are there platform restrictions? (E.g., PC/Mac, APS vs. Linux servers, SQL Server, etc.)

The only requirements for WordPress are that PHP v4.1 or later be installed and that MySQL v3.23.23 be installed on whatever server you are running. The actual OS can be Windows, Linux or Mac as long as the database and scripting language are present.

Who produces it? Is it an open-source community, a labor-of-love by some programmer, a company with financial backing? What is the likelihood this development team is going to still be at it a year or two from now, providing new features, etc.?

WordPress is an open-source labor-of-love by a large team of programmers and a vibrant support community of thousands of users who love to help out and welcome new bloggers to their community. The development team has been doing blogging software since 2001 and has no plans to stop. They love the medium, love the community and have great plans for the future.

Where is the software developed? How is language support in English (the web site, the manual, the support communities, etc.)? Other languages?

The software is developed largely in Canada and the US. It supports mainly English, though there is documentation and plugins available to transform WordPress’s language into some other ones like French or German.

What’s the pricing of it?

WordPress is completely free under the GPL license.

Is there tech support?

There is support through the WordPress Support Forums and through the WordPress Wiki and Documentation. The primary means of support, though, is the Support Forums.

Is there a good user manual?

Yes. The user manual is available on the website at the Documentation homepage.

Is there a third-party developer community? If so, how active?

There is an active developer community releasing a myriad of plugins (more than 100) and hacks (more than 200). Also, users are able to request help instituting new plugins and hacks (hacks are where code changes to WordPress are necessary to enable functionality).

Is there support for photos galleries?

There are currently several plugins which enable this functionality, though it is not part of the core build.

Is there a built-in Blogroll/Link List kind of feature to manage blogrolls?

Yes, there is advanced functionality for Blogrolls and Linklists.

Can you post via email? Mobile phone/moblog?

There is Blog by Email functionality built into WordPress, and there are moblog plugins available as well.

Does it email posts to subscribers who so choose?

WordPress does not notify subscribers by default when new posts are posted; however, there are [XML] feeds that users can subscribe to in their Feed Reader of choice, and there are plugins to allow users to subscribe to new posts, if the blog author so desires.

Anything notable in the archive features?

WordPress provides very advanced Archive Customization and Archive Rewrite functionality.

Archive Customization:

Your archive URL’s can be fully customized. In fact, the options are sometimes quite staggering. Any combination of categories, authors, post ID’s and date parts (year, month, day, date, minute and second). For example, an Archive Format of:

/archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

would give you a URL of

/archives/2003/05/23/my-cheese-sandwich/

Archive Rewrites:

In addition, once you have figured out how you want your archives to look, WordPress gives you all of the .htaccess configuration information you will need (if your host supports it), so that your URL’s will appear to be real files, which means search engines will index them more quickly and effectively.

Does it support comments? Comment-spam filtering? If so (the latter), what’s the approach?

One of WordPress’s weak areas is the area of comment spam. While the Comment system itself is very capable and fully fledged (a full members system, users can subscribe to a comment feed or get notification of new comments through a plugin), the comment spam protection is very basic.

WordPress’s anti-spam system is based primarily on a Moderation Queue. This moderation queue is designed so that any comment which doesn’t match the criteria you specify doesn’t get shown until you approve it. You can choose to either approve every comment, or allow comments through as long as they contain a name and email address and don’t match a word in your Blacklist. In addition, if a comment contains more than a specified number of links it can be placed automatically in the queue (as spam often contains more than 5 links).

The issues with this system are twofold. First, there is no large, central list of words spammers are using like there is with MT-Blacklist. Second, because every comment goes into a queue, you do need to “manually” delete all of the comments in the queue.

That said, there are a couple of hacks and plugins to make life easier including WP-Blacklist (an attempt at duplicating the MT-Blacklist functionality for WordPress) and some easier comment spam moderation techniques. However there isn’t yet a single technique, like MovableType’s MT-Blacklist which is both overwhelmingly effective and incredibly popular, though several people are making inroads.

Does it support trackback?

The WordPress developers are committed to standards in all their forms, from the W3C‘s markup requirements to Trackback and Pingback.

Any idea how well it works on a Mac, with Mozilla or other non-W2K IE platforms?

Because WordPress is web-based, the choice of platform is up to the blog author.

Does it pioneer any other new blog features that other platforms don’t have?

Beyond all else, WordPress pushes “simplicity”. By now most blogging platforms are copying one another’s features, but the simplicity of personal publishing on WordPress is still very hard to beat. Certain platforms like Blogger and TypePad are definitely up there, and WordPress stands tall right along with them in terms of ease of writing, publishing and maintaining a blog of any size.

Does it support multiple authors? If so, does it have decent permission controls? (E.g., can you limit authors to publish only to draft?)

WordPress is built around the concept of multiple authors. While it does only allow one blog (technically) it is geared towards unlimited authors in unlimited categories, which is always a nice thing.

Does it support a simple modular design for page elements? (E.g., when editing templates, are things like blogroll lists, sidebar elements, headers, etc., managed as separate entities, or are they all just in the HTML of a single template?)

WordPress’s design is entirely modular, and can easily be extended because it is PHP-based. Currently only the WordPress elements (calendar, link lists, etc) are modularized; creating other modular elements, however, is quick and easy.

Is it well suited for public corporate blogging? Why or why not?

While WordPress’s suitability for corporate blogging will vary depending on a given company’s requirements, there are a few features which I believe it is lacking, based on my experience with corporate blogging:

1. Individual categories or subsets of content cannot be locked away from certain readers (without hacking the system, which is quite possible since you could ensure that only users of a specific Privilege level saw certain content)
2. Users cannot be forced to save every entry in Draft format for later approval by an editor or manager
3. There are no built-in metrics to gauge how effective the blogging platform is being for the company

However, that isn’t to say WordPress isn’t appropriate. Because it is such an open platform and is so easy to use, it is entirely possible companies may try it and find out that it fits perfectly, with some minor modifications (which are easy, given WordPress’s open architecture).

Is it well suited for internal corporate blogging? Why or why not?

WordPress’s ability to meet a corporation’s internal needs will vary. However, because it is difficult to setup new blogs on an ongoing basis (unlike other systems you cannot simply point and click to create new blogs), it may not be the most appropriate solution for internal blogging.

What other blog platforms have you used that you can compare this to?

The first piece of blogging software I started using was b2, nearly two years ago. I spent three months with that blog and that blogging software before I burnt out. The reasons aren’t important, but basically boiled down to not properly defining the scope of my blog. The software was fairly difficult to work with, but was very easy to customize.

I knew that for my next blogging foray I wanted something more powerful. So, when I started Ensight, along with a group of friends, we decided to go with MovableType. It was easy to setup, had a large community and had a powerful templating component (at least, coming from b2 it did).

In addition, I’ve used a dozen more platforms (Drupal, Blogger, etc.) when guest blogging or helping others troubleshoot issues with their blogs. While I don’t necessarily consider myself an expert on every blogging platform, I am just about as much of a blogger as you can get, for good or for bad.

What else do we need to know about this system?

Some of WordPress’s other key features include:

Standards Oriented: The WordPress developers are committed to standards in all their forms, from the W3C’s (http://w3.org/) markup requirements to Trackback and Pingback. In addition, the WordPress developers have chosen to develop common API’s and an easy to use plugin architecture to allow others to work closely with the software without having to jump through any needless hoops.

Dynamic templates: I touched on this earlier. Essentially, having a dynamic templating system means that when you hit “save” on your blog post, it is live. When you make a change to the core templates driving your blog, it is live. No waiting around. No fussing. And definitely not mussing. Mussing is such a pain, and the WordPress developers have definitely made the templating system muss free.

Easy Importing: One of the biggest reasons for WordPress’s growth, besides WordPress itself, is that the development team have created importers for every major blogging platform out there, including Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, b2 and many others. If you are using a different platform, chances are someone from the community has either written an importer or they may even help write one for you.

In addition, the Plugin architecture is fantastic.

WordPress’s plugin system is incredibly simple: upload the plugin, login to your WordPress Control Panel, Navigate to the Plugins section and click Activate for the plugin you have just uploaded. Done. And if it doesn’t work as you’d hope, deactivate it.

If the plugin is for design changes, you may need to add a line of modular text (like the Calendar module I showed you in the Templates section), but for all other plugins, code changes are kept to an absolute minimum (which generally means you don’t have to do anything but Upload and Activate).
How many Plugins are there, and how do you find them? Your first stop should always be the Plugin page at the WordPress Wiki. It contains a list of more than a hundred plugins ranging from Per-Post Styles to the popular Auto Shutoff Comments Plugin. There are also plugins for photo galleries and a whole suite of other nifty blog tools.

If these aren’t enough, there are also “pure code” plugins, known in the WordPress community as Hacks. These will range from the mundane to the…odd (World Kit comes to mind).

What’s the Verdict?

Obviously I’m biased. I chose WordPress and I feel like I would never look back. While I’ve had issues, the amazing developers and fantastic support community have always been there to help me when I’ve needed it. For me, that has been extremely important. I never expect software to be perfect, but when the community helps me get it as close to perfect as I need it to be, that to me is a good sign.
Again, WordPress is open, flexible, dynamic and completely customizable. The template, posting, plugin and link management systems are world class. With some slight polishing of user permissions and comment spam blocking, WordPress could easily become the choice of just about every blogger out there. If these are the kinds of things you are looking for, WordPress is definitely for you.

UPDATE:
I asked the author to update this review with a few additional questions, which he graciously did:

Does it have a spell checker?

WordPress does not have a spellchecker as part of the software, however there are 2 spellcheck plugins that I am aware of, though I haven’t used either one.

Does it have a wiki-publishing component?

WordPress does not have a Wiki component.

Can you easily set up multiple weblogs from one account or instalation of the blog publishing software, or must you create multiple accounts or installations?

No, WordPress is currently a single-blog platform. There are several ways to get multiple blogs together on one blog site, however they require independent installations of WordPress.

Does it support categories? If so, how about hiearchical categories (e.g., Movies / Horror, Movies / Comedies, Movies / Thriller, Books / Fiction, Books / Biographies, and so on)? What about surpressed categories? (That is, in the monthly archive, publish all except the “Breaking News” category)?

WordPress supports categories, category descriptions and nested categories. I have tested it to 5 levels of depth, though I’m sure it goes much deeper than that. WordPress does not support the suppressing of categories, though there are several hacks and plugins that do accomplish this functionality.

Does it let you easily create a “remaindered links” blog-within-a-blog, a la Anil Dash’s Links Blog? (Obviously, you can kludge this in most systems, but I’m wondering if some blog software has it off the shelf.)

WordPress does not currently support a format like Link Blogs, however it does allow for the easy addition of links to the Link Management system. This feature is “kludgeable” by installing a separate version of WordPress or through several hacks and plugins.