Post with WordPress

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To begin your first post, click the Write tab in the main WordPress admin interface. That takes you to the Write interface, with the Write Post secondary tab highlighted. Enter a title for your post in the Title entry box, and then begin typing in the main text area. WordPress has shortcut buttons for formatting in the interface, as we’ve seen in the other blogging solutions in this article. Highlight a word and click the bold, italic, or strikethrough buttons to format the selection with those highlights. WordPress automatically saves your entry every minute as you’re editing, but if you like to save even more often than that, you can click the Save and Continue Editing button at any time to save your work without publishing the entry.

You can also highlight a number of paragraphs and turn them into a bullet list or a numbered list using the appropriate command buttons. Or, for quoting, select a paragraph or two and click the Indent button to create the quoted text. (You can also use that button to indent a list, if desired.) Once a paragraph is indented, you can click the Outdent button to remove the indenting. And, again with paragraphs, you can choose to left-align, center, or right-align the text. To create a hyperlink, highlight the text that will become a link and click the Insert/Edit Link button. A pop-up window appears, where you can enter the URL for the link, choose a Target (whether it should open in the same window or a new one), and give the link a title. (The title doesn’t change the link text, but it does appear when you mouse over the link in many browsers.)

Click Insert and you’ll see the highlighted text change into blue, underlined text, indicating that it’s a link. If you need to remove a link that you’ve created, highlight the linked text and click the Unlink button. In some browsers that don’t support the WordPress Visual Editor (or, if you’ve got the WordPress Visual Editor turned off in your account preferences), you’ll see a slightly different, and more simplified, version of the Link window. Enter the URL and then click OK. The highlighted text will now be surrounded by the HTML anchor (<a href="http://www.somelink.com/"> and </a>) tags. To remove the link, simply delete those tags (and everything contained in them) from around the text.

Upload an Image Uploading an image to add to your entry is a multi-step process:

1. First you need to upload the image, which you can do in the Upload part of the page. Click the Browse button and then use the window that appears to locate the file that you want to upload from your PC’s hard disk.

2. Enter a Title for the image and a description, if desired.

3. Click the Upload button.

4. The result will be a view of the image in the Browse mode. You can now choose whether the full image, a thumbnail of the image, or the title of the image will be shown in your blog entry, and you can decide if the image in your entry will link to the file, a page that shows the image, or if there will be no link.

5. Click the Send to Editor button to send the image to the main text area.

6. Highlight the image in the text area and click the Insert/Edit Image button. That gives you additional options, including Alignment. If you would like your blog text to wrap around the image, choose Left or Right alignment.

7. Click Update in the window when you’re done making changes. If you don’t need to upload the image, but rather you’re going to link to an image that’s already on the Internet, that’s a bit easier. Simply place your cursor in the entry where you’d like the image to appear and click the Insert Image button. The Insert/Edit Image window appears. In that window, enter the URL to the image that you’d like to include in your post, then make any other choices, including Alignment for the image. Click Insert and the image will be added to your blog.

The Insert/Edit Image window offers some other interesting options such as the Vertical Space and Horizontal Space options, which you can use to give your image a few pixels of white space, particularly if you’re using the align left or align right options to wrap text around the image.

Create a More Link WordPress has an interesting approach to the whole “more” link idea in blogging. Some blogs show the entire entry on the front page of the blog; some show a snippet of the entry, and then a More or Continue link so that you can click to read the entire post. With WordPress, you have the option of doing either. If your post is short enough, you can simply type it in the text area and then save or publish the post as normal. If you’re writing a longer post, though, you might want to create a More part. To do that, place the cursor where the More part will start and then click Split Post with More Tag button. That draw a line in the post to show where the more part will begin once the post is published.

Edit HTML Code In the Visual Editor interface you’ll see two tabs: Visual and Code. The Visual tab is used when you want a WYSIWYG rendering of your post. Click the Code tab, and you’ll see the raw HTML that’s used to format your post. If you know a little something about HTML, you can change the codes (or add some more) as desired. When you’re done, click the Visual tab again to see your handiwork. If your browser doesn’t support the Visual Editor or if you have the option to view the Visual Editor turned off in your user profile (accessible from the top-right corner of the admin interface), then you’ll only see the HTML mode.

Check Spelling The last little command shortcut before the Help button is the Check Spelling button, which you can click at any time while you’re editing your post. When you do, the Check Spelling interface takes over and guides you through the process. Check Spelling isn’t available in the HTML editing mode or when you have the Visual Editor turned off.

Add Categories WordPress has a great interface for categories; off on the right side of the post is the Categories interface. You can select from the existing categories to assign them to this post or, if the right category doesn’t exist yet, type it in and click the Add button. Now, the category exists and you can assign this entry to it. Disable Comments and Trackbacks By default, both Comments and Trackbacks are enabled for WordPress posts. If you’d prefer not to enable one or the other for this particular post, then click the plus sign in the Discussion bar and you’ll see checkboxes for Comments and Trackbacks. Uncheck whichever you would like to disable.

Publish Before publishing, you can also opt to change the timestamp on your post so that it goes live on your blog at some later date. In the Post Timestamp part of the window, turn on the Edit Timestamp function, and then change the date to a later time and/or date. The entry will be published when you click the Publish button, but it will not appear on your blog until the timestamp time and date have arrived. You’ll see some other options on the Post screen, including the Option Excerpt entry field, which you can use to give a short description of this entry that will be used for RSS feeds and for search results. Otherwise, you’re ready to post your first entry. To do so, simply click the Publish button that appears under the editing text area. That will make the post go live on your site. If you’d prefer to save the post for editing later, click the Save button and it will be saved as a draft, meaning it doesn’t yet appear on your site.

You can also set the time or date to an early hour or day that has already passed, if, for example, you want to order this entry before another you’ve already published. Now you’re ready to preview your blog. Click the View Site link next to your blog’s title in the admin interface, or right-click View Site (CONTROL-click on a Mac) and choose to open the link in a new window so that you don’t replace your admin interface with the blog. How does it look? Pretty plain.

Once you’ve got some posts entered, you may want to start editing and managing them. To do that, you begin in the Admin interface by clicking the Manage button in the admin interface. Next, make sure that Posts is selected in the secondary list of tabs. Now, you should see a list of your most recent posts to the blog, as shown. You can also edit individual posts when you’re viewing your blog in a web browser and you’re logged into WordPress. Look for the Edit link; when you click it, it will launch that entry in the admin interface for you to make changes.

To delete a post, simply click Delete next to that post. To Edit a post, click the Edit link that appears in that post’s column. That brings back up the post writing interface, with a few differences. The interface now shows a full preview at the bottom of the screen (actually, it’s sort of a snapshot of the page as it was before you began editing it again) and you’ll see an existing timestamp for the entry in the Timestamp. Make your changes and click Save to have them go live immediately. If you’d like to remove the post from your blog but keep it in the system for editing, open the Post Status item and switch it to Draft. Then click Save and the post will no longer appear on your blog pages.

On the Options tab in WordPress, you can tackle all sorts of configuration issues that affect your blog. Here’s a quick look at each of the tabs:

General Options Here you can enter a Title and Tagline for your blog, which will be used in the header for your blog pages. On this tab you can also make choices about whether or not your blog offers open registration (as opposed to only allowing the users that you register from within the admin controls to access certain features) and if users must be registered and logged in to comment. Along with those, the Date and Time options are here for formatting the date and time formats that are used in your blog entries.

Writing Options On this tab you’ll find options that govern the size of the posting text area, the default post category, and the default category for items entered using the bookmarklet. You can also set up a POP account on your hosting server that accepts an e-mail that can be posted directly to your blog for posting-by-email. And you can enter the URLs for services that you want to “ping” whenever you publish a new blog entry.

Reading Options You can set a page other than your latest blog posts as your front page, using the static page capability of WordPress. You can also select the number of posts to show on the front page and the number of posts to send in your RSS feed.

Discussion Options Here you’ll set the defaults for a number of behaviors such as updating trackbacks, whether you allow comments on posts, and whether you receive comment notifications by e-mail. You can also decide if (and set up how) you want to implement comment moderation, where a comment must be approved by you (or another blog administrator) before it will appear on the blog. WordPress offers a very interesting system for catching certain words and/or IP addresses and placing the comments that match those items into moderation so that you can check the comment before allowing it to post. You can also cause certain types of comments or comments from certain posters to be “blacklisted,” meaning they’re deleted immediately as spam.

Privacy Options Here you can choose whether your site is available to search engines or if it blocks spiders and crawlers.

Permalink Options Here you can decide how permalinks will be formatted (whether the URLs look like queries, or if they look like the year, month, date, and name of the post). In order to use some of these “pretty” URL formats you’ll need to do some setup work. They require a host that runs Apache as the server, and you’ll need to create a new file, called a .htaccess file, and place it on your server. For instructions on how to do all that, see http://codex .wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks.

Miscellaneous Here you can choose the folder for uploaded files to be stored in and you can make a few other choices that are important in special circumstances.