Aboutnewtech.com has always been a DOFOLLOW blog.  That means that people are welcome to leave relevant comments and participate in discussions and link back to the authors blog or website.  It seems to me that this is the right thing to do on a social level because a good blog, like a good coffee shop should encourage open dialog and genuine community.

The argument against is about three different concerns.  First, the question of losing linking power when you link outbound. That could be true, but I’ve seen a whole lot of pages that link to a whole lot of Page Rank zero (new) websites and they still have great PageRank.  I’ve also seen that my outbound links to other sites are a NET BENEFIT if that site is more authoritative and that link benefits our readers.    The second and third reasons not to have a DOFOLLOW blog are centered around spam and unintentionally linking to bad neighborhood sites.  This concern is largely eliminated by Akismet, the WordPress spam filter.  It’s amazing, saves time, prevents spam and generally does exactly what they say it will.

I think it’s best summed up by the Google webmaster guidelines which basically say “Build a site that delivers value to the reader“.  If an outbound link adds value, then link it.

So participate openly, genuinely and link.  This is one community that is open to all.

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I have no previous experience with Wordpress.  This is my first project.  What I can say is that the install was 100% painless in fact, smart and easy.

I have a lot of experience with Mambo,  Joomla, Drupal and the NUKES.  I have developed many commercial sites on those platforms, but for this project I really wanted to blog instead of just create sites so it was time to try out blogging platforms.I went to CMS MATRIX and checked out features on my top candidates.  I further selected 5 platforms, installed them and practised building some things to see how it really worked in the real world.

I also went to Open Source CMS, where the motto is ‘Try Before You Install’ and did some serious test driving.  I advise everyone to go and play with all the toys they have.  Ever curuios about Drupal, Text Pattern, Joomla, Mambo or others?  Sure you’ve heard of them, but no time to install and see what they’re all about right?  Check out that site and save a ton of time.

Wordpress was the clear winner.  It’s a trifecta of power, elegance and simplicity both from the writer’s and the system administrator’s perspective.

I’ve found integrating components such as adsense to be relatively easy.

The templating system is also very easy compared to joomla or other systems I have built upon.

Wordpress 2.7 has the ability to add ‘Pages’ and some would argue that it makes it a full fledged CMS, but it’s strong suit is clearly as a blogging application.

A typical CMS like Joomla is excellent to create custom websites with, but lacks most of the features you need to succeed with blogging.

All in all Wordpress 2.7 looks very polished and frankly I have had zero bugs since installation although I am confident that they are there to be found.

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