Where To Get Help

New to the series? Then checkout parts 1, 2, 3, and 4

Regardless of how brilliant we all are, there are going to be times when we’ll need technical help starting our blog. Hopefully, my other post in this series will reduce the amount of help you need, but I’m not so naive to think that I’ve provided all the answers. That’s crazy. My series has only scratched the surface of the blogosphere. Thus the goal of this post is to tell you where to go to get additional help. This part of the series isn’t much of a tutorial or advice. So, I plan on keeping it short and sweet.

General Help
Godbit Forum: My personal favorite. Godbit is an excellent website run by some of the best designers in the industry. The forum is extremely active and probably has an expert on any web related question you might have. Godbit is the place to go if you need a good, quick answer to a question you are having trouble finding the answer to in online documentation. As a bonus, they’re good at reviewing sites if your looking for suggestions.

Google Groups: This is just a general forum that you can find a group on just about anything. The quality of answers and responses varies greatly, but it is a good general resource.

W3Schools: This site is full of tutorials on just about every web language available. It is an excellent resource to learn the basics about any kind of web programming. I use it as a quick reference when I can’t remember what the exact command I need is. They also provide some code validors.

Wikipedia: the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. This is a good place to get an overview of any subject, not just blogging. One of the more useful features to me is “further reading” section because it provides a list of sites where you can learn more.

listible: Listible is a new way to get relevant resources quickly. By using Web 2.0 features such as AJAX, folksonomy (tagging), social elements such as voting/commenting and the listible’s listonomy (listing), resources can be sorted in a way that will be digestible.

Programming
Learn to Program: is a great little online book that explains the basics of programming. The book uses Ruby as the language, but the concepts apply to all programming. One thing you will notice when you start to program is that the basic ideas and features remain the same of most languages remain the same, while it is the syntax that changes.

CMS Help
The best place to go for help on a particular CMS is the CMS’s homepage. I don’t see the need to try and list all the different CMS sites here because the list would get long and cumbersome. For a quick reference to the popular CMSs go to my
One CMS to rule them all? post.

Share any great resources you know of in the comments below.

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