Blog Basics

This is a draft of a section of a larger work that has been sitting on my hard drive for far to long. It is sloppy, not complete and there are no doubt several errors contained within but it may just contain the right bit of information for someone out there. It was written with Word press 2.7 in mind, the version number at the time of writing  is 2.8.2 so there will be some minor differences.

HOSTING

Without a shadow of a doubt the best hosting company is Hostgator . They offer a variety of different programs but all come with a fully automated way of setting up a WordPress blog. I have used them for years now without any problems at all. This article, and the rest of this blog is on Hostgator’s servers.

HOW TO USE YOUR BLOG

This is not designed to be a fully comprehensive user’s manual for your blog. It will, however, give you all the information that you need to manage and add content to your blog.

Advertisement
WordPress For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

Excellent source of information for all things WordPress

MAKING A POST
This is how you add content to your blog.

From the front page, right hand column either log in or click on admin. This opens the Dashboard page. Think of this page as the gateway to everything!

QUICKPRESS

On the top right hand side of the page there is a box labeled QuickPress. As you have probably guessed this is a good place for making short posts that don’t require a lot of formatting.

Title and Content are pretty much self explanatory.

Underneath the title you can see upload/insert with some icons. These are for inserting (in order) image, movie , sound or what they call media which includes flash files.

The content can come from either your own computer or the internet, just follow the instructions that appear on your computer.

A quick word about tags. These help people find your posts so accuracy is important, try to be fairly specific e.g. if you post a photograph of a scenic view don’t tag it scenic view but the actual place depicted in the photograph. If it is a political article about the 2001 general election don’t use politics as a tag but rather 2001 elections. There is a place for more general categorization and we will deal with that later.

Save Draft does as it says, If I were making a post that was complex enough to require drafts I would use the posting process in the next section.

Lastly and perhaps most importantly is the publish button – once you hit this the post is up for the world to see. If you are inclined to post drunken rants about your employer you can delete posts after the fact. The window for doing this is getting shorter though as posts are now getting indexed very soon after posting. In other words you can remove a post from your blog at any time but you can’t remove it from the search engines or from anywhere anyone may have copied it to.

Once published click on the link to your sites front page which is on the top left of the Dashboard page.

You should now see your masterpiece in all its glory.

If it is not quite the masterpiece that you wanted click on the edit button underneath the post.

One thing that is a little confusing initially is that when you hit the edit link you are taken to a different editing screen, don’t worry this is meant to happen. To edit, make required changes to either Title or the main text then hit the blue Button with Update Post written on it. This button is on the far right of the screen.

If you want to remove the post completely click on the red Delete link immediately to the left of the Update Post button.

If you need more control of exactly how your post will look, multiple people are going to be working on it or you will be using lots of other media then the following approach is probably better:

ADD NEW POST

To get to this page from the Dashboard page (the page with QuickPress that we have just looked at click on the New Post link at the top right of the page. You should now see this:

Much of what we looked at under QuickPress also applies here, Title and text box are the same but you do have more options here.

On the main text entry box there are two tabs on the top right, Visual and HTML. It is actually easier to work in the HTML one. You can always flip between the two, no work will be lost. The problem with the Visual workspace is that the formatting is a little flaky and it can be difficult to correct. Don’t worry you don’t need to know any code to use the HTML setting.

Now for a quick run through of the most useful buttons.

Upload/Insert – Works exactly the same as it did on the QuickPress page
link.

Link – this sets up a link to another page or website. Highlight the text that you want to be the link and click on the link button. In the box that appears type the URL (address) of the page required.

Tip: Open a spare tab in your browser, go to the page that you want to link then copy the text in the address bar of your browser and paste this into the enter URL box. This method does two things, it saves a lot of typing and it also makes a mistake almost impossible, this is especially useful with pages with addresses comprising long strings of text and numbers e.g.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=EeX&q=heidi+chronicles+wiki&btnG=Search&cts=124300853529

Imagine trying to type that without making a mistake!

Blockquote – If you are quoting someone else’s work it is really bad form not to make this as obvious as possible. Blockquote with a link back to the original work using the above method is the normal form.

To use, highlight the quoted text then hit the blockquote button and that is it – your quote will be indented in the published piece, though you won’t see it if you are working in the HTML workspace but that is fine.

If you will be making long posts the more button is extremely useful. To stop your front page becoming to unweildly just hit this when the cursor is placed after your first or second paragraph. Only the content before this point will show on the front page, the reader will be able to click on a link that says “Read the rest of this entry” to be taken to the full post.

It is worth mentioning here that you have another tool not available in the QuickPress method and that is the ability to preview, very useful to check links and make sure that the blockquotes are correct. To preview just hit the preview button, far right hand side directly above the Publish button.

This just about covers the essential controls for making a post. To recap:

Publish: Makes your post live
Preview: Shows you the post as it will appear to readers without making it live.
Upload / Insert: for adding other content to your post
Blockquote: for quoting other authors
More: for making your front page manageable

If you understand what these few controls do you know enough to have a really good blog.

Advertisement
Blogging For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech))

Must have reference guide for general blogging tips advice and trouble shooting

ORGANIZING YOUR BLOG

If you only intend to make a few entries this part isn’t to important but if you intend to post more than once a week then it is a good idea to think about this. Getting this right allows for the visitor not to be overwhelmed by the amount of information available. It also helps with the search engines, a little more on that later.

CATEGORIES and TAGS

Categories should be used for the main themes of your blog. For example if you have a photography blog the categories could be something like:

Lighting
Cameras
Software
Famous Photographers
Nikon
Canon
DSLR
Point and Shoot
Other

Very broad areas, the more specific definitions would come in the tags. Categories can be set up either before you post anything or on an ongoing basis. From bitter experience I would recommend setting them up first. This provides structure and stops what should be a great organizing tool from becoming part of the jumble. This is also the reason for including a category called Other or Misc. It prevents the temptation to generate categories on the fly for what may only be one post.

The Categories can be added from the Add New Post page, far right hand side under Publish and Tags. More than one category can be used per post. Using the above list, a post may be related to an article about lighting by a famous photographer who uses Nikon products exclusively, three potential categories.

Below is a screen shot of the category list from my own blog.

Adding a category does a couple of clever things, it automatically generates a link on your blog to a list of all post that you have included in this category:

When a user clicks on one of these links they will see a page that looks like the front page but will only contain posts that have the pertinent category assigned. It also does good things with regard to search engines, again more about this in a later section.

Tags are decided upon on a post by post bases and can be thought of as a more informal categorization. When tagging thing in terms of being specific. To carry on the photography example, a post may be a review of a specific model of Nikon Camera, say the d40x DSLR. Well according to our system so far, the categories would be Nikon and DSLR. The tags would be d40x and probably the reviewers name and/ or publication. On the Add New Post page Tags can be added on the far right between Publish and Categories sections:

SETTINGS

So, now you have your blog set up and you know how to post stuff and how to edit or delete said post. Next we will look at configuration settings, these can be done at any time and any changes will apply across your blog. The important thing is that any changes to the configuration can generally be undone very easily.

To get to the settings pages:
Login On the Dashboard page, at the bottom of the left hand column you will see a dark gray box called Settings. If it isn’t expanded click on the arrow to the right. This is roughly what you should see:

This is a very cursory overview of the most important settings, you do not have to understand everything in the settings section.

General: This is pretty much self explanatory, Go here if you want to change your email address, date or time format as it shows on your post or your blog name – yes you can do that.

Writing: Leave these settings on default for now, nothing here will harm you and there is not much benefit to fiddling around with this. There is one possible exception, you may want to change the default category that posts are assigned if you forget to or don’t want to select one. All posts must have at least one category.

Reading: I would tick the following -
Front page displays your latest posts
Blog pages show at most 6 posts
Syndication shows the 20 most recent posts
For Each article in a feed show summary
Encoding for page and feeds UTF – 8
Just trust me for now! The subjects of static pages and syndication will be dealt with later.

Discussion:

Check the following

all default article settings

Comment author must fill out name and email

Email me whenever anyone posts a comment and A comment is held for moderation.

I would leave both boxes under before a comment appears unchecked.

Comment moderation; Hold if contains 2 links.

As you get a feel for your blog and readership you may want to adjust some of these settings. As it is currently, you will receive notice whenever anyone posts a comment with a link straight to the post. This means that you can then have a look at the comment and delete it if you don’t like it. Holding comments for moderation does put people off commenting so I would avoid it if possible, especially when first starting a blog.

Media: Default settings seem to work fine.

Privacy: definitely make sure that full visibility to search engines is allowed unless you only want your friends to see your blog.

Permalinks: Check day and name unless you are planning to move your blog to a different server then check default.

Miscellaneous: Leave default settings in place.

NOTE Rereading this, the one glaring omission is the subject of Pages. Setting up a page is very similar to setting up a new post: click on ‘Pages’ on the left hand menu of the Dashboard then on ‘Add New’ on the dropdown menu. Write and publish the same as you would for a post.

A link to your page will appear under the Pages heading on your sidebar. You can have as many pages as you want.

Free eBook Minimalist Cooking Recipes