It’s one crucial step to understanding and learning from its creators’ process.
Photo: Unsplash.
It’s a Saturday night, and outside my window, a Karaoke party is going on. As I’m browsing the internet, I’m increasingly frustrated with the partygoers’ oblivious use of a microphone. The whole neighborhood could hear their embarrassing singing.
I wanted to know who they were so bad. But I couldn’t. We believe they are the neighbors on one of the higher floors of our building. In the meantime, I was doing research, and it occurred to me how many people don’t know this neat trick to discover more about the blogs we read every day.
As this party was going on, I read an article that a person named Anthony wrote about how to wear sneakers fashionably. I might not show it, but I’m somewhat of a sneakerhead. I don’t even know how I stumbled into it, but I loved the website design and needed to learn more about the website itself. It’s in my Software Engineer / Creator internal programming.
Did that ever happen to you? The bloggers among us would know how it feels to come to another blogger’s home and have a plethora of curious questions about their platform.
The first goal (and only, in this case) was to know what blogging software was Anthony using. You could learn so much about a person’s blog from their software. For example, if you own a Ghost blog, you immediately win some points because you have a lot to do on your own. You have to set up the emails, the subs, and even the theme. But once you do, things get a lot more awesome for you.
If you own a WordPress blog, you will need to work hard to convince me you’re not just like everybody else. WordPress owners can do a lot to customize it, but most of the time, it isn’t effortless or costs a lot of money.
So, how do you do it? How can you discover what kind of blogging software a blog you’re visiting is using?
There’s an easy way to do it:
Add “/wp-login.php” to the end of the domain name and see if a login page appears. If so, it’s a WordPress blog. Example: https://domain-name.com/wp-login.php
Most of what you find online would be WordPress blogs. Sometimes you could discover Ghost blogs (and verify that by replacing /wp-login.php with /ghost and stumbling into a Ghost login page)
If those don’t work, then the blog owner uses something like Gatsby or some other DYI blog software. There are many options out there to create a new blog. Gatsby is one of the popular ones as it loads very fast, but you need to know web development to make it work for you. Webflow is another option to create a stunning website without writing a single line of code. But your creative freedom surpasses your ability to have many integrations.
Not all blogs out there involve WordPress, and quite frankly, even on WordPress, you can change the URL of the login page if you decided the put in the effort. But you'd be surprised how many people simply don't do that.
I hope this article helped sate your curiosity. Knowing this trick is another tool in your online research toolkit. Feel free to use it and share your own blogging tips in the comments. I'd love to read them and answer any questions you may have! May you never be bothered so much by a blog post as much as I was bothered by a karaoke party tonight.
Enjoy!
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