Covering Event in Real-time with Liveblog for WordPress

Liveblogging is a popular way to cover an event in real-time – it is similar to a Twitter feed, only it happens on your own site. If you like to follow major key events like the Apple WWDC, you may find some tech blogs and news sites liveblogging to cover the event in real-time.

Some of the advantages of using liveblog is that the journalists can publish updates easily, while the readers can get the updates quickly. In addition, Liveblogging also allows for multiple writers, or journalists to contribute at the same time. If you want to also cover events on your site using Liveblog, we will show you how in this post.

The Liveblog Plugin

In WordPress, you can enable liveblog with the Liveblog plugin from Automattic – the guys behind WordPress. This plugin was exclusively released for WordPress VIP: it is a premium service in WordPress.com. Now, you can install and use it on your self-hosted sites.

Once activated, you can create a new post, and enable liveblog for it, like so.

Publish and view the post, and you will find a posting tool where you can publish updates right from the front-end of the post. We can also preview the post before publishing it.

To post an image, you can drag-and-drop the image from your folder onto the input field. It will automatically upload the image and put the image URL within the posting tool.

You can also embed a tweet or a Youtube video by simply putting in the link, like so.

If you want to make the post bold, italic, or add a link, you can wrap it in HTML Markup.

When the event ends, you can click the Archive button to put the Liveblog in Archive. This way the readers will still be able to read the contents, even after the posting tool has been disabled.

That’s it. You can give this plugin a try if you want to try liveblogging on your site. I hope you find this tip useful.