Under the Hood: What It Takes to Run This Blog, feeser.me

Novices to the blogging world may be interested in what’s behind my blog on Peritoneal Dialysis, feeser.me. So for those with a slightly more technical bent, this blog documents build status as of the posting date.

To start the blog, I needed a Domain Name and a web hosting company to host the blogging software I intended to use (and am using) to make daily blog entries. I did a Google using WordPress (free open-source blogging software I used while at Purdue) and “hosting” and came up with numerous providers. I sifted through the offerings and decided on Dreamhost.com as optimum. For the grand sum of less than $100, they registered my selected domain name feeser.me. They provided web hosting and offered a simple one-click solution to installing WordPress’s latest version, 6.1.1. According to Wikipedia, WordPress is used by 42.8% of the top 10 million websites as of October 2021.

With the essential blogging computer-based support system set up, I had to figure out how to use it. I used three sources. First, I signed up for a $15.00 Udemy course on WordPress. I browsed through the course content and picked up what I needed to get up and running. Second, I went to Amazon and purchased a book on WordPress, which I have yet to use (frown face!) The book’s title is “WordPress for Beginners 2022” by Dr. Andy Williams. I have it as a reference should I need it. Third, I used and use Google extensively for specific guidance for WordPress’s many bells and whistles. Two of these are Themes and Plugins.

Hundreds of Themes are available, which provide the appearance of the blog/website being constructed by WordPress. I wanted a simple-looking interface and selected Twenty Twenty-One to meet my needs. This is what you see when you visit the site. Spartan in appearance, to the point, clean and uncluttered.

Plugins are a different story. Simply put a WordPress plugin is a piece of code that you can “plug in” to your WordPress website to improve – or add – a specific feature on your site. Keep in mind that the WordPress Plugin Directory has over 55,000 plugins available, which have received over one billion downloads. It is not a trivial task to decide how you can best tweak your WordPress-based blog to perform to your liking. To date, here are the Plugins I have installed and are running unseen in the background:

• Visitor Statistics Pro ($29.00). This is my go-to Plugin to see what traffic is coming from where. Because of this, I am going to include in this blog all that this Plugin provides from their website:
  • Visitor Traffic Pro version is an innovative and easy-to-use plugin for WordPress to display your site traffic statistics in detail with excellent charts.
    • Full reporting
    • Online users, visits, visitors, and page statistics
    • Today visitors & visits chart & Today search engines
    • Recent Visitors (GeoIP location by Country, city, and region)    
    • Comprehensive overview page (Dashboard), including browser versions, country stats, hits, exclusions, referrers, searches, search words, and visitors
    • Visits, see how many hits your site gets each day and each week & month, Visits time graph to view the daily visitors per hour
    • Visitors, see who’s visiting your site
    • Recent visitors by IP & region
    • Visits, see how many hits your site gets each day
    • Visitors, see who’s visiting your site
    • Page tracking, see which pages are viewed most often
    • Search Engines, see search queries and redirects from popular search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, Yandex, and Baidu
    • GeoIP location by Country
    • Interactive map of visitors’ location
    • Widget to display website statistics
    • Overview page for all kinds of data, including; browser versions, country stats, hits, exclusions, referrers, searches, search words, and visitors
    • Exclude IP’s Export primary data, Pagination, and date range search
    • Exclude user role from statistics (NEW)
    • Plugin Accessibility (NEW)
    • Free Mobile App included (NEW)
    • Support shortcodes. Click here to get the list of shortcodes (NEW)
    • Multisite (network) support (NEW)
    • Full GDPR
• All-in-One SEO ($49.60/year for Basic). SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, takes up most of my post-post editing time. It involves tweaking the title, applying tags, meta concerns, etc., to optimize a given blog post’s probability of receiving a higher ranking by search engines. While I opted for the paid version, to date I am experiencing massive problems getting login credentials from the company.
• Grammarly Premium ($151.78/year). Grammarly Premium is a paid extension/app that offers over 400 types of checks and features, checks for grammatical errors provides vocabulary enhancement suggestions, detects plagiarism, and provides citation suggestions. It helps keep my prose in order.
• GoogleSiteSit Kit. While I have this Plugin installed, I am not using it to any extent, yet. See this link for additional info on the Kit.
• Smush (running free version). Smush is a cloud-based service that optimizes images posted on WordPress to make them smaller in size and load faster. The free version I am running is limited to 25 MB in size. Most of the pictures I upload are larger than this so I haven’t received much value from this plugin.
• TablePress (free). Supports the creation of an embedding in WordPress blog’s various types of tables. I haven’t used it yet, but when you view a table in the future you will know that this Plugin was used to create it.

As of 1/21/2023, the blog has been up for a couple of weeks now, with 14 or so posts. We have had visitors from 8 different countries viewing blog posts as follows:

• United States (70)
• Egypt (2)
• Ghana (1)
• El Salvador (1)
• Italy (1)
• Algeria (1)
• Ireland (1)
• Canada (1)

The order of referring sites is below: