The last few days, I’ve been playing with my latest software toy, Rapid Niche Websites. I’ve set up this blog with the standard RNW template.

Exploring all that Rapid Niche Websites can do to design a blog got me thinking about types of blogs, and the themes and plugins that go with them.

First of all, blogs are different, and may need different themes and plugins, depending on how they relate to the passing of time:

• Traditional blogs are journals or news sites. They show posts in reverse chronological order, so that the latest news or post is always at the top. Most blog themes and plugins are designed for the traditional blog, and you’ll find plenty of links to them on the Wordpress.orgsite.
• Blooks are books published in a blog. The reverse chronological order of the traditional blog doesn’t make a lot of sense here, as it only makes the book more difficult to read. A blook needs a table of contents, with posts or chapters in chronological order, to make it easy to start reading at the beginning. There aren’t many themes available for blooks - the only one I could find is Blook
• Niche Websites are information sites. Their articles are relatively timeless, and it doesn’t make much sense to categorize them in relation to time at all. So niche sites are not usually built with blog software. But there are a couple of software systems available, that can turn WordPress into a niche sitebuilder: Semilogic Pro and Rapid Niche Websites. After reading up on the two systems, especially from people who have used both systems, I decided to go with Rapid Niche Websites, mainly because it includes a template builder as well, which makes it really fast and easy to build customized WordPress themes for niche websites.

Blogs also differ, and may need different plugins, depending on how posts are made:

• Traditionally, blogs have a single author,
• But some blogs are multi-author, with a number of direct contributors
• Traditionally, blogs are hand posted by directly typing in their posts
• But some blogs are autoposted, where software is used to post automatically. What’s more, if material from RSS feeds are posted, the material posted might not even have been read by the blog owner.

So how does your blog fit into these categories?