How To Recognize a Blogging Service

It is surprising how most people don’t know the definition of the word “blog.” The word is often used a stereotype for sites that offer daily logs. But in essence, blog is a platform that most sites are built on these days. You can run diary blogs, news sites, and even corporate sites with blogging platforms such as WordPress. A lot of people take blogs less seriously so perhaps that’s why many companies go out of their way to hide their tracks.

But the good thing about services such as WordPress is that you can easily figure out who’s running them. These platforms come with a signature code that is recognizable from a mile. So I often get surprised when people claim a site to be running Blogger when it is indeed built on WordPress platform.

There are three super easy techniques that can expose the technology you are using whether you like it or not. Here we go:

• The Admin page technique: if you are running a content management system, you have an admin page. For WordPress, you can access that by adding “/wp-admin” to the end of the root URL. The same thing can be said about member pages. For instance, if you are running a membership site with amember, people can easily find out what platform you are using by adding “/amember” to the end of the root URL. While there are ways to get around this, in most cases people don’t know enough about the technology to hide their tracks.
• View Source technique: if you are a bit more technical, you can go through the source code of a site and figure out what platform it is using. Most plug-ins leave comment codes on your pages, so it’s easy to figure who’s running what.
• Built with Service: Builtwith is such an amazing site as it goes through the signature codes on sites and can tell you a lot about who’s running what. You can even figure out what analytic packages people are using. It will tell you if people are using Dojo, Scriptaculous, and other technologies. It’s a very handy sneaky competitive intelligence tool.

Whether you are just curious about the technologies used on a site or you’d like to figure out exactly what platforms your competitors are using, you can use the above methods to get a lot of information about other sites. You can often find useful plug-ins and software packages that you can use on your site by analyzing other competing sites. The new age of the Internet is all about transparency, and in most cases, you can’t hide anything from anyone. That’s what makes competing in this day and age great.