blogmaking.net

Posting blog entries is easy peasy. In the basic WordPress system there are “posts” and “pages”. Both can be found in your dashboard (eg http://domain.com/blog/wpadmin/) if you click on “Write”.

Posts are your blog posts, so if you want to write a new post click on Write/Write Post and your install should come with the rich text editor installed as standard (you can switch it on or off by going to Options/Writing Options and untick “Users should use the visual rich editor by default”) so you can easily add links and formatting. If you click on “Save” it will save your post as a draft if it hasn’t been published and give you a black write post page. I recommend clicking on “Save and Continue Editing” as it will save it as a draft but allow you to keep editing it with the benefit of an update post preview so you can check what your post will look like. Once you’re happy with it, click on “Publish” and you’ll see it on your site! You can later “unpublish” the site by changing the status back to “draft” in the “Post Status” box on the right hand column (if it’s minimised, click on the “+” next to it to open it).

On this page, you can edit who is the author, the timestamp, whether to allow pingbacks (notification as a comment when yours or another site links to you) or comments (”Discussion” box), allocated and add categories as well as upload images. Some of it is pretty self explanatory but others will be the subject of later posts.

Just a word of warning, I ALWAYS select all my text and copy before clicking on Save or Publish. You never know when your browser might decide to freeze or your connection dies. I try also to remember to select all and copy several times during writing a post if it is long. I’ve lost work too many times and it’s really annoying!

“Pages” are intended to be static and you can’t categorise them so they are for things like About Me, Contact Me, etc. Still you might be able to find some creative uses for them like using them to make a guide to your site.