Pisces Moon Studio

Previous entries:

• #1: Why WordPress?
• #2: Domain Names, Hosting Plans, and installing WP
• #3: 10 Free Basic PlugIns You Should Add

Now that you have your recommended plugins installed, let’s go through the basic settings for your blog. Some will be self-explanatory, while others a little more obscure.

All of the settings are located in the lefthand column of your blog dashboard. Look at the bottom link, cleverly called Settings, and click the arrow next to it to open the submenu.

Click on General.

General Settings

Your blog title, tagline, and email address should have been set up when Fantastico installed WordPress for you. If it isn’t right, you can correct it now. The WordPress address and blog address were also automatically set up. Do not change these — this tells WP where to find your blog, and if you change them, you and your visitors will see only a database error where your blog should be.

Next comes Membership. The “Anyone can register” box is unchecked by default. Since your Subscribe2 plugin requires that people be able to register, you should check this box.

“New User Default Role” is Subscriber. Leave this as is.

Timezone: Choose a city in your time zone. It’s a long list divided up by continent, so you may have to do a little looking. Or, if you don’t see one and you know your local offset from Universal (Greenwich Mean) Time, you can enter that instead. It’s better to choose a city if possible; WordPress will automatically account for Daylight Savings Time when a city is listed, but it will not if you use a UT offset.

Date format, Time format, Weeks starts on: Self-explanatory. The default values are usually fine.

Scroll to the bottom and click on Save Changes.

Now click on Writing.

Writing Settings

On this screen, I generally change only two things: Check both boxes next to Formatting, and be sure that both boxes are checked next to Remote Publishing (Atom and XML-RPC protocols). If you plan to post by email, you can fill out that section next; I generally don’t bother with it.

Click Save Changes and then go to Discussion. You can take a look at Reading but should not need to change the default values.

Discussion Settings

These options give you a great deal of control over how comments are posted and by whom, so if you start hearing about those indispensable pharmaceuticals again, you can filter them out without having to moderate every single comment.

Here are the initial settings I recommend:

If you start having trouble with spam, you can require that a commenter be registered and logged in before leaving a comment. Or you can require that they have a previously-approved comment. In the latter case, you will have to manually approve the first time a new person leaves a comment, but after the first time their comments will be automatically approved. I suggest that you leave it open at first; people often are irritated when they write out a lengthy response to a post and submit it, only to be greeted with a message that their comment is being held for moderation.

Below the section pictured above are two more sections: one having to do with blacklisted words and one with avatars. You can leave both in the default state now.

Save Changes.

Media Settings

Like Reading, look at these options but you shouldn’t need to make changes at this time.

Privacy Settings

This one is important because one option or the other will be checked, but various webhosts check different ones. The one you want is the first choice: “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone.”

Note that if you don’t want everyone to see it until you have completely awesomized your blog and written a post or two, then feel free to check the second button. Just remember to flip the switch when you want the world to find you.

Permalink Settings

Very important!

By default, WordPress links to your blog posts like this:

http://yourdomainname.com/blog/?p=123

which tells your reader absolutely nothing about what the post is about. I recommend either Month and Name, which gives you a post URL that looks like

http://pisces-moon.com/blog/2010/01/cultivating-your-eye-and-your-voice/

… note the year and month in the URL …

or Custom Structure using /%postname%/, which would give you

http://pisces-moon.com/blog/cultivating-your-eye-and-your-voice/.

Either will tell your reader what to expect and it will help you with the magic Google rankings.

Save Changes.

IMPORTANT NOTE: On some installations of WordPress, if you choose a permalink structure other than default, you may see a message at the bottom of the page that looks like this:

In that case, you will need to create a file called .htaccess in your blog directory and CHMOD it to 777 in order to change the permalink structure. Teaching you how to do that is beyond the scope of this lesson. At some point I will write the instructions, but until then you’re welcome to call or email me for more help.

Miscellaneous Settings

Take a look but you won’t need to change any of the default values.

CommentLuv

The only choice you need to make here is which badge you want to display on your page:

Save Changes.

Subscribe To Comments

No changes needed.

TinyMCE Advanced

Ah. Now we have a plethora of possibilities!

TinyMCE Advanced is the enhanced visual editor for WordPress. This is the panel you see when you first open this page:

The top bar is the default that comes installed with TinyMCE. Mouse over each of the symbols to find out what the button does. You can remove buttons from the top bars if you don’t think you will ever use them, and you can add buttons from the bottom. Move them around and make it useful to your style of writing. Save your changes.

Now there is one last change to make on this page, and it may be the most important of all.

Check the box next to “Stop removing the < p > and < br / > tags when saving and show them in the HTML editor.” If you write your text in a word processor or other program and then cut-and-paste it to WordPress, this control makes sure that your paragraphs remain intact instead of running everything together into a big blob of words.

Tweet This

Lots more options here!

You can choose the service you want to use for URL shortening. The default option is Th8.us; I prefer bit.ly, but it really doesn’t matter. They all work in the same way.

You can choose a badge to use for your Tweet This links, plus (click on Extended Services) badges for a number of other services including Facebook, StumbleUpon, and Digg.

Save your changes.

Subscribe2

Look but no need to touch.

WordBook

You will need to follow the directions in order to set up your blog to post to Facebook. You click on the link on the settings page to log in to your Facebook account and obtain a code phrase. Return to your blog, enter the code, and click Submit. At that point, posts to your blog will automatically be cross-posted to your Facebook account.

At least until they change their application code again.

WP-DB-Backup

To find this one, you need to look for Backup under the Tools menu in the lefthand column.

As with the .htaccess file, with some installations of WordPress you may see the following scary message:

This time, though, you don’t need to panic. Scroll down a little farther:

Choose “email backup to” and enter your email address, then choose the frequency you want to receive the database. Click Schedule Backup, and you are done.

Next week: Choosing and installing a theme to awesomize your new blog.