Up until a few hours ago, this site was just a few bytes saying: “Powered by vi.” I’ve decided to jump into WordPress.

Here’s where I’m going to dump my thoughts about:

• software
• karate
• kids
• sailing
• cooking

I’ve recently become interested in how SEO works, so I’m also going to try to SEO the heck out of this site, at least from a WordPress tooling perspective. I don’t expect this site to rank particularly highly on any particular keyword since it’s going to be a general mishmash. But I’ve already learned how to hook up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. The WordPress plugin I’m using is the “All in One SEO Pack”, which in addition to guiding me through the Google process, also helped me end up with:

• A sitemap.xml
• Verifying the site with Bing and Pinterest as well as Google.
• Including a reference to my Google+ account (we’ll see if that shows up properly in the search results later).

The other WordPress Plugins I’ve installed so far are:

• Defensio Anti-spam. We’ll see how much garbage ends up in the comments. I’ll leave them turned on for now.
• Google Analyticator, which may be unnecessary in conjunction with the “All in One SEO Pack”, but provides a view of Google Analytics embedded in the WordPress dashboard.
• WP Super Cache to speed up the site. I noticed that when I changed the theme, I had to invalidate (delete) the cache.

As for WordPress itself, until recently I had a pretty low opinion of it. I’ve ended up mis-using it as a wiki at work, and it really doesn’t fit the bill. I’ve found it sluggish, and a pain to create hierarchical content. However, the availability of plugins is amazing and the editing experience seems good so far, for a single article-style blog entry.

Let the experiment begin.