Chapter 4
In This Chapter
Writing your first post and making it look nice
Organizing and categorizing your blog
Inviting friends and establishing their permissions
Moderating discussions — even when you aren’t logged in
Combating comment spam
Deciding what appears on your front page
Protecting your blog’s privacy
Sharing and publicizing with social media
Initiating trusting relationships with OpenID
Chapter 3 covers the signup process and a few important settings and options that you configure when you first log in to your new WordPress blog. Now it’s time to make a blogger out of you. In this chapter, I show you the tools you need to write your first post. When you understand the process, the blogging world is right at your fingertips.
This chapter also shows you the basics of categorizing your posts and links, uploading images to your blog posts, setting discussion and reading options for your blog, using static pages, and managing your users and authors. I don’t have the space in this chapter to cover every option available, but I hit the high points of what you need to know.
On the Dashboard, click the Add New link on the Posts menu to display the Add New Post page where you write, organize, and publish your first post. Start by thinking up a name for your post and entering it in the text box displayed under the Add New Post heading, shown in Figure 4-1.
The area in which you write your post is in Visual Editing mode, as indicated by the Visual tab above the text. Visual Editing mode is how WordPress provides WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) options for formatting. Rather than embedding HTML code within your post, you can simply type your post, highlight the text you’d like to format, and click the buttons, shown in Figure 4-1, that appear above the box in which you type your post.
If you’ve ever used a word processing program such as Microsoft Word, you’ll recognize many of these buttons:
<strong> </strong>
tag to emphasize the text in bold (example: bold text).<em> </em>
tag to emphasize the text in italics (example: italic text).<strike> </strike>
tag to put a line through your text (example: strikethrough text
).<ul><li> </li></ul>
tag to create an unordered, or bulleted, list.<ol><li> </li></ol>
tag to create an ordered, or numbered, list.<blockquote> </blockquote>
tag to indent the selected paragraph or section of text.<p align="left"> </p>
tag to align the selected paragraph or section of text against the left margin.<p align="center"> </p>
tag to position the selected paragraph or section of text in the center of the page.<p align="right"> </p>
tag to align the selected paragraph or section of text against the right margin.<a href=" "> </a>
tag to the selected text to create a hyperlink.<!--more-->
tag to split the display on your blog page. It publishes the text written above this tag with a Read More link, which takes the user to a page with the full post. This feature is good for really long posts.You can skip to the “Publishing your post” section later in this chapter for information on publishing your post to your blog, or continue with the following sections to discover how to include images in, and refine the options for, your post.
Pictures, images, video, and audio files can greatly enhance the content of a post by adding visual and/or auditory effects to go along with the words that you’ve written. Look right above the formatting buttons on the Add New Post page (refer to Figure 4-1), and you see three buttons above the WYSIWYG editor. This toolbar has a few small buttons:
Adding an image or photo to your post is easy. Start by clicking the Add Media button, which is the first button on the left above the WYSIWYG editor. The Insert Media window opens, letting you choose images from your hard drive or from the web. See Figure 4-2.
To add an image from the web after you click the Add Media button, follow these steps:
The image appears in the Insert from URL window, along with several other options for this image, explained in the next steps (see Figure 4-3).
Type the full URL, including the http
and www
portions of the address. You can find the URL of any image on the web by right-clicking it and selecting Properties.
Give the image a title so you can easily identify the image later when using the Media Library. A title also assists in search engine optimization because WordPress inserts a <title>
tag in the HTML markup that looks like this: title="your image title here"
, which helps search engines identify the type of content on your page.
The Alt (alternate) Text, also referred to as the ALT tag, is shown only if a browser is unable to show the image itself. It provides a text description of the image; additionally, search engines read ALT tags easily, which helps them categorize your site in their search engine directory.
To add an image from your hard drive after you click the Add Media button, follow these steps:
A dialog box opens, letting you choose an image from your hard drive.
The image uploads to your web server from your computer. WordPress displays a progress bar on the upload and displays an Attachment Details box when the upload is finished.
Media File: Readers can click through to the direct image itself.
Attachment Page: Readers can click through to the post that the image appears in. You can type your own URL in the Link URL text box.
Custom URL: Type in your own URL.
None: Choose this if you do not want the image to be clickable.
Figure 4-5 shows the following image editor options:
The HTML code needed to display the image within your published post is inserted automatically. The Insert Media window closes and returns you to the Add New Post page. Alternatively, you can click the Save All Changes button to save the options you’ve set for the image(s) and then return at a later date to insert the image(s) in your post, without having to reset those options again.
Along with inserting just one image into your post, you can use the media uploader to insert a full gallery of images. Go through the steps I outline in this section to upload images, but don’t click the Insert into Post button. Instead, click the Create Gallery link at the top left of the Insert Media window (refer to Figure 4-2).
You can configure the options (as explained in Step 5 of the preceding steps) for each image by clicking the Show link to the right of the image. When you’re done, click the Insert Gallery into Post button. A short piece of code is inserted that looks like this: [gallery]
. That piece of code tells WordPress to display your gallery of images inside the post you are about to publish.
The Upload/Insert toolbar (refer to Figure 4-1) contains two other buttons:
After you write the post, you can choose a few extra options before you publish it for the entire world to see. These settings are applied only to the post you’re working on; they don’t apply automatically to any of your future or past posts. You can see these options in Figure 4-6.
Here are all the options:
You have given your new post a title and written the content of your new blog post. Maybe you even added an image or other type of media file to your blog post and configured the tags, categories, and other options. Now the question is: To publish or not to publish (yet)?
WordPress.com gives you three options for saving or publishing your post when you’re done writing it. Figure 4-7 shows the Publish section located on the right side of the Add New Post page.
The Publish menu offers three options:
Cancel
link; however, that link says Edit
before you click it.)
Click OK when you’re done to save your settings.
Edit
before you click it.
Click OK when you’re done to save your settings.
Cancel
link; however, that link says Edit
before you click it.) A new menu appears where you can set the date (or time stamp) of the post and publish it right away. The date settings here allow you to set a date in the future for the post to publish, or you can back-date a post to publish on a date in the past.
When you’re done, click OK to save your settings.
When you have chosen a publishing status, click the Publish button. WordPress saves your publishing-status option. Successfully published blog posts show up on the front page of your blog.
Categorizing your posts in WordPress provides an organizational structure for your blog. Each blog post assigned to a category is grouped with other posts in the same category. When your blog is a few months old, this structure creates a nice topical directory of posts for you and your readers.
Category lists generally appear in two places on your blog, letting your readers find all your posts by subject very easily. Almost all WordPress themes list categories within the blog post itself. Most themes also provide a list of your categories in the sidebar of your blog so that your readers can click a topic of interest.
Each category in a WordPress.com blog has its own RSS feed, making it easy for your readers to subscribe to a feed and keep updated on what you have to say in your blog about a certain topic.
A brand-new WordPress blog has only one category: Uncategorized, but you can add as many categories as you want and can manage those categories on the Categories page on your Dashboard, as shown in Figure 4-8.
You can create new categories (and categories within those categories) by following these steps:
The Categories page opens (refer to Figure 4-8).
The Parent drop-down menu allows you to create subcategories. If you have a main category called Books, for example, Books appears in the Parent drop-down menu. To create a subcategory of the Books category, follow Steps 1 and 2 and then choose Books from the Parent drop-down menu.
It’s a good idea to do this step now so that later on you’ll know what you were thinking of when you created this category. A short summary will do. (Also, some WordPress themes are coded to display the category description in the sidebar of your blog.)
Once you create categories and subcategories, you never have to re-create them — they are always there for you to assign your blog posts to. To assign existing posts to a category, follow these steps:
The Posts page appears in your browser window, displaying a list of posts you’ve made.
The Edit Post page opens, displaying your post content and saved options.
You can also use the Categories section before you publish a new post to assign it to the categories you’d like.
WordPress refreshes the Edit Post page, displaying the post you just edited; it reflects the changes you just made.
A blogroll is a list of links that you display on your blog. In this section, I show you how to add and manage the links in your blogroll. To view your default blogroll, click the Links menu on the Dashboard navigation menu. The Links page opens, and you see the default links already included in your WordPress blog (see Figure 4-9).
WordPress lets you have an unlimited number of link categories on your blog. Link categories, which function similarly to the post categories discussed in the previous section, allow you to separate your blogrolls (or list of links) into topical categories.
By default, WordPress sets up a link category for you called — by no coincidence — Blogroll. To add a new Link Category, click the Link Categories link on the Links menu to open the Link Categories page on your Dashboard.
You add a new link category the same way you add new post categories (see the “Creating categories and subcategories” section, earlier in this chapter).
To add a new link to your blogroll, click the Links subtab and then click the Add New link. The Add New Link page opens, as shown in Figure 4-10.
Follow these steps to add your new link:
http://
part.The target tells your browser how you want this link to load in your visitor’s browser window after the visitor clicks it. You have three choices:
The third option — None — is my preference and recommendation. I like to let my visitors decide whether they want a bunch of new browser windows to open every time they click a link on my site.
XFN, or XHTML Friends Network, allows you to indicate the relationship you have with the people you are linking to by defining how you know, or are associated with, them. Table 4-1 lists the different relationships you can assign to your links.
Table 4-1 Link Relationships (XFN) Defined
Link Relationship |
Description |
Identity |
Select this check box if the link is to a website you own. |
Friendship |
Select the option (Contact, Acquaintance, Friend, or None) that most closely identifies the relationship. |
Physical |
Select this check box if you’ve met the person you’re linking to face to face. Sharing pictures over the Internet doesn’t count — this selection identifies a person you’ve physically met. |
Professional |
Select one of these check boxes if the person you’re linking to is a co-worker or colleague. |
Geographical |
Select Co-Resident if the person you’re linking to lives with you. Or select Neighbor or None, depending on which option describes your relationship with the person. |
Family |
If the blogger you’re linking to is a family member, select the option that tells how the person is related to you. |
Romantic |
Select the option that describes the type of romantic relationship you have with the person you’re linking to. Do you have a crush on him? Is she your creative muse? Is he someone you consider to be a sweetheart? Select the option that most closely identifies the romantic relationship, if any. |
Your new link is saved and a blank Add New Link page opens, ready for you to add another new link to your blogroll(s). Additionally, in the Save section at the top right, you can choose to keep this link private; this option, if selected, keeps the link from being displayed publicly on your blog. The link would be kept protected and for your eyes only.
You can find more information on XFN at http://gmpg.org/xfn.
Revisit the Manage Links page anytime you want to add a new link, edit an old link, or delete an existing link. You can create an unlimited amount of blogroll categories to sort your blogrolls by topics. I know one blogger who has 50 categories for his links, so the options are limitless.
What’s a blog without blog users? Of course, your WordPress.com blog always has at least one user: you. To see your list of users, click the Users link in the navigation menu. The Users page opens and the Users menu expands to show three different links:
The Users page tells you about all the users on your blog. It lists each user’s username, name, e-mail address, role on your blog, and number of posts made to your blog.
To manage user roles, you need to understand the type of access each role provides:
WordPress lets you have an unlimited number of users and authors on one blog, which is a nice feature if running a multiauthor blog is something you’d like to do.
To change a user’s role, follow these steps:
Locate the name of the user that you’d like to edit.
The Users page refreshes with the new role assignment applied.
To view all the posts made by an author, click the number that appears below the Posts column for that user.
Now that you’ve experienced the fun, ease, and excitement of having your very own WordPress.com blog, why not tell your friends so that they can tell their friends, and their friends can tell their friends, and so on?
Click the Invite New link in the Users submenu to load the Invite New Users to Your Blog page, as shown in Figure 4-11. This page gives you the tools you need to add new users to your blog. By user, WordPress means simply a person who is a member of your blog as a contributor, an author, an editor, or an administrator. You can have an unlimited amount of users on one WordPress blog.
Enter up to 10 e-mail addresses for people you’d like to invite to your blog, assign a user role, add an optional message to them, and click the Send Invitation button. If the person you invite already has a WordPress.com account, your blog is added to his Dashboard after he accepts your invitation. If you enter someone who doesn’t have a WordPress.com account yet, WordPress sends that person an invitation to become a member, along with instructions on how to sign up. (The WordPress people have thought of everything, haven’t they?)
At the bottom of the Invite New Users to Your Blog page, in the Past Invitations section, you can review users you’ve previously invited to your blog and their current status (whether or not they’ve accepted your invite and the date they accepted it).
Follow these instructions to invite as many people as you want to join WordPress.com:
The Invite New Users to Your Blog page opens.
This message appears in the e-mail that the user receives.
When you complete these steps, WordPress sends you confirmation that the invitation was sent.
Comments provide a great way for readers to interact with you, and vice versa. Readers of your blog can post comments by using the comment form that appears on the same page as each of the published posts on your blog. You need to be able to control the comments that appear, however, and I tell you how to do that in this section.
Click the Discussion link on the Settings submenu. On the Discussion Settings page, you can set the options (such as notification settings) for your posts, determine how comments and comment spam are handled, and specify whether you want to use avatars on your blog. The Discussion Settings page has 10 settings that you can configure for your blog, each of which I discuss in the following sections.
The Default Article Settings section is where you tell WordPress.com how to handle post notifications. Three options are available to you:
The Other Comment Settings tell WordPress how to handle comments:
You must be logged in in order to leave a comment
.This is a very effective anti-spam technique that many bloggers use to limit the comment and trackback spam on their blogs.
There are five options in the Email Me Whenever section:
The e-mail feature settings tell WordPress that you want to receive an e-mail anytime anyone leaves a comment on your blog, when a comment awaits your moderation, or when someone Likes or subscribes to your blog. The e-mail feature can be very helpful, particularly if you don’t visit your blog daily. Everyone likes to get comments on their blog posts, and it’s good to be notified when it happens so that you can revisit that post, respond to your readers, and keep the conversation active.
All five options in this section are enabled by default; you can easily disable any, or all, of them by deselecting the check box to the left of each option.
The two options in the Before a Comment Appears section tell WordPress how you want WordPress to handle comments before they appear in your blog:
In the Comment Moderation section, you can set options to specify what types of comments are held in the moderation queue to await your approval. Frequently, comment spammers try to spam your blog with a ton of links in the hope of promoting their own sites through your comment form. You can set the number of links allowed in a comment before it’s tossed into the moderation queue to await approval. The default is 2. Give that a try, and if you’re getting lots of spam comments with multiple links, you may want to revisit this page and increase that number.
You can set keywords, URLs, e-mail addresses, or IP addresses to be flagged for moderation in the text box below the link setting. Check out the previous sidebar, “A case for moderation over blacklisting,” for an example of how moderation helps you distinguish the real spam.
In contrast to the Comment Moderation list, the Comment Blacklist is a list of words, URLs, e-mail addresses, and IP addresses that you want to flat-out ban from ever making it to your blog. Items placed here don’t even make it into your Comment Moderation queue; they’re filtered as spam by the system and completely disregarded. (The words I placed in my Blacklist are not family-friendly and have no place in a nice book like this.)
Select the Show a ‘Follow Comments’ Option in the Comment Form check box if you want to allow the readers of your blog to subscribe to individual comment threads on your blog. When you enable this option, a check box appears in your comments section allowing your readers to opt to receive e-mails every time a new comment is posted to a specific post on your blog. This option also puts a comment subscription management page on your blog that allows readers to view and manage their comment subscriptions. This is a really great tool to keep readers coming back to your blog over and over again, and a good way to keep lively discussions going!
Select the Show a ‘Follow Blog’ Option in the Comment Form check box if you want to give your readers an easy way to subscribe to your blog via e-mail. With this option enabled, readers who select this option receive an update in their e-mail box every time you publish a new post to your blog. This is a fantastic way to keep your readers informed and coming back to your blog time and time again for more of your great published content.
Use markdown for comments. Markdown is a way for you to use text to create HTML formatting. You can read about markdown here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/markdown-quick-reference/.
Avatars are photos or images that represent your commenters (and you) on your blog. You can choose to display avatars on your blog by selecting the Show Avatars option. You can also set the maximum rating for the avatars; it’s much like the movie rating system we’re all used to. You can select a G, PG, R, or X rating for the avatars that display on your blog; if your site is family-friendly, you probably don’t want to display R- or X-rated avatars. You can also select an image to use as the default avatar for those users who do not yet have avatars assigned to their e-mail.
The text field here displays Leave a Reply
by default, and it’s the prompt your readers see on your blog that encourages them to leave a comment. You can leave this as is, or you can type your own prompt in this box to change the wording that displays in your comment area.
Open the Comments page by clicking the Comments link on the Dashboard navigation menu. The Comments page shows all the comments on your blog from the very first day you started. Here you can view the comments, edit them, mark them as spam, or flat-out delete them.
If you set your Comments options so that comments aren’t published until you approve them, you can approve comments in this section as well. To do this, of course, you have to have comments on your blog, and if your blog is new, you may not have any yet. Figure 4-12 shows what a comment looks like in this area.
To manage a comment, find one that you want to edit, delete, unapprove (that is, remove it from your blog page), or mark as spam. If you need to, you can find a specific comment by using the search feature. Just type a keyword in the search box located in the top-right corner of the page and then click the Search Comments button.
When you find the comment you want to manage, hover your mouse pointer over the comment. Six different links appear beneath the comment text as follows:
You can create pages on your blog that are treated differently from posts. These pages, called static pages, appear as separate pages on your blog rather than as posts within your blog. You use nearly the same process of writing a static page as you do to write a post. You can easily create an unlimited number of static pages, which can serve as nice complements to your overall site content.
You can use this feature to write, for example, an About page, on which you give all the wild and wooly details about yourself. If you use the Page Sidebar widget, the pages you create are listed in your sidebar; you can also add pages to the main navigation menu. (See Chapter 5 for more about widgets and menus.)
You can create static pages by logging on to your WordPress Dashboard and following these steps:
The Add New Page screen appears, and you can compose your static page.
You can use the Visual Text Editor and insert media files into your page by using the same techniques discussed in the “Ready? Set? Blog!” section, earlier in this chapter.
These options are the same as the Publish Status options available when you’re writing a new blog page. I cover the available options in the “Ready? Set? Blog!” section, earlier in this chapter.
Your static pages aren’t included in your Recent Posts list, in categories, or in your monthly archive. Figure 4-13 shows an example of a static page on the Pages section of the Dashboard.
On the Reading Settings page (click the Reading link in the Settings menu), you can set how many blog posts show up on the front page of your blog and/or change your front page to display a static page rather than your most recent blog posts. (See the preceding section, “Creating a Static Page.”) You can also determine how many blog posts your readers can see in your RSS feed. Figure 4-14 shows the available options.
The Reading Settings page gives you control of the settings that let you make these decisions for your blog:
After you change any settings in the Reading Settings page, click the Save Changes button in the bottom-left corner to save your preferences.
This section describes three very simple options, and the option you choose lets you determine how you want to deal with publicity on your blog. To access the privacy options for your blog, click the Reading link on the Settings menu. You can choose one of these three options in the Reading Settings page (refer to Figure 4-14) in the Site Visibility section (about midway down the page):
When you finish making your decision, be sure to click the Save Changes button to have the changes take effect.
WordPress gives you the ability to easily integrate your WordPress blog with various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Click the Sharing link in the Settings submenu on your Dashboard to load the Sharing Settings page.
In the Sharing section, connect your blog to popular social networks to automatically share your new posts with your friends within that network. WordPress allows you to share your blog on the following networks:
Click the icon for the social network you want to connect to and follow the steps provided to authorize your WordPress blog with that network.
Users of social media like to share the interesting content they find around the web with their friends on other social media sites, and the Sharing feature on WordPress.com gives you the tools that make it easy for your readers to share links to your content in different ways:
None of the sharing services are enabled by default. To enable any other service, click its button in the Available Services section and drag and drop it into the Enabled Services section. After you’ve done that, small, convenient buttons display within each blog post on your site; your visitors can click these buttons to share your content with their friends on their own social networks.
If you’re a Facebook user, as I am, you’ll find that the WordPress Like feature is very similar to the Facebook Like feature that you use within your Facebook account to indicate that you Like a friend’s Facebook status.
On the bottom of the Sharing Settings page you can set your preference for WordPress.com Likes — select whether you want them turned on for all posts (by default), or turned on per post (so that you determine the placement of the WordPress.com Like on a per-post basis). This feature does exactly what it says: It displays a Like button on your blog posts, allowing readers to click it and Like your posts within the WordPress.com network.
OpenID is a third-party, Internet-community identification system that allows an Internet user to create an online identity that she can use anywhere on the web where OpenID is supported. OpenID is commonly used with larger sites that receive a lot of traffic and public comments. With WordPress.com, you already have an OpenID identity.
On the WordPress Dashboard, click the OpenID link on the Settings menu to see the OpenID Trusted Sites page, which tells you what your OpenID is. (It’s usually your main WordPress.com domain: for example, http://lsrn94.wordpress.com.) You can also add the URLs of what you consider to be trusted sites. After you enter the URL of a trusted site and click the Add Site button, you aren’t asked whether you trust the site when you attempt to log in to it. In a nutshell, this setting means that you can use your WordPress.com OpenID to log in to any website that supports OpenID.
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