blogmaking.net

There’s two ways that you can add images to your post.

1. The easiest is to link to an image URL hosted on someone else’s site or your PhotoBucket/Flickr account. I’m going to link to a picture off my Flickr account of my puppy when she was a puppy.

If you have the rich text editor switched on, the insert image button looks like a frame picture of a tree and if you hover over it, it will say “Insert/edit image (Alt-m)”. If you click on it you will get the following options:

Image URL = Copy the image location of the image you want (usually right click on an image and select “copy image location” does the trick). Mine is http://static.flickr.com/51/156063556_b02886ed97.jpg?v=0
Image description = It is accessible to more people if you write a short description of the image
Alignment = you can leave this blank and it will go with the default or choose the alignment that you want.

If you have the rich text editor switched off, click on the “img” button and it will only ask you for the image URL, so fill that in with the image’s location link.

If the image location link works, you should see your image show up in your post editor window:

Note that this picture is not on your server, so if the original image is removed or changed, your site will either have a broken link or link to something completely different.

2. The second way is a little more involved, but still pretty simple once set up. Below your post editor window (where you type in your content) you should have an Upload tab. Click on “browse” next to “file” until you find your image file, select it, fill out the title and a description and then hit “upload”. This will upload your pic to your uploads folder in wp-content on your server.*

Once uploaded, it should automatically switch to the Browse tab, but if not click on it and you should see a thumbnail of your image. If you click on the thumbnail you’ll get a some options

• Using Thumbnail / Using Original (clicking on one will toggle to the other, if using thumbnail is displayed, you’ll get the thumbnail in your post if you click on “send to editor”)
• Not Linked / Linked to Image (clicking on one will toggle to the other, if you choose “linked” it will automatically set up a link to the original… useful if the original is bigger than the space available)
• Send to editor (clicking on this will copy the image into your editor window which means it will now be seen in your post when you publish it)
• Delete (this will delete your image)
• Close Options (closes these options and lets you see your thumbnail, open options again by clicking on the thumbnail in the Browse tab)

So I’m going to use the thumbnail (it will display “Using Thumbnail”) linked to the Original (”Linked to Image”) and so I”ll click on “Send to Editor” and here it is, my World of Warcraft elf, Carmine, in a Darkshore forest (clicking on it takes you to the original):

* Some servers have trouble with uploads and will give you an error message. This usually has to do with folder permissions. I’ve found that I’ve always had to play around with the backend with my my Micfo Fantastico WordPress installations in order to get this feature to work. I haven’t had any trouble with my manually installed Dreamhost blogs. It’s not such a big deal, in your file manager, go to your uploads folder in wp-content and if you have a “change permissions” option change them to “775″ at the very least, but I usually find I need a “777″ to work. For more info, here’s the WordPress Codex on Changing Permissions. Usually, that solves the problem and you can then upload to your heart’s content.

As mentioned before, a page is not a post is meant as something’s that static. I’m going to create a page to act as a guide to making a WordPress blog with links to relevant posts on this site. This should be a page not a post because I intend it to stay in one place even though it will be updated. You should find it in the right column if you click on “Guide to Making a WordPress Blog”.

Go to Write/Write Page (you can also go to Manage/Manage Pages and click on “Create New Page”). Fill in the title and contents just like a post.

You can make subpages by allocating a parent pages (much like categories). On the right column, you’ll find the “Page Parent”, if it’s minimised click on the “+” to open it up. Use the dropdown box to choose which page you want to make this a subpage of (you’ll have to have already created this page).

Like posts, you can allow comments or pings or make it password protected. You can also allocate an author, but there’s no option for dates or categories because pages don’t have them.

You can create special templates which can be allocated to particular templates. In the default blue Kubrick layout, you get a premade “archives” and “links” template. If you make a new page, call it “Archives” in the title and apply the “Archives” template, click on “Create new page” you’ll find that in your main site, under Pages, you have a new “Archives” link which gives you a page which has your archives listed by month and by category. Doing the same with “links” will give you a page that lists your links by link category. These templates can also be made to look completely different to your normal theme. Note that the availability of templates (and what they do) is dependent on themes (and your modifications to them).
Some ideas for pages are:

• A Guide to some aspect of your site
• Sitemap
• Legals/Disclaimers
• Essential Resources
• Favourite Tips/Advice etc from your posts
• Contacts
• Team Details (if more than one person is writing the blog)
• Credits/Thank yous
• Sponsors (if you have any)
• Similar sites (if you have a blog/web ring, you could list them all on one page)
• How to subscribe (through RSS or email)
• Downloads
• Instructions
• List of your products/services
• Where/How to buy/find/hire your product/service
• Anything else that is like an old style html webpage

WordPress sets up some defaults that you may or may not want to get rid off. The last post on links described how to remove the default links, here are some more…

Scrap the Hello World page
You’ll notice that WordPress sets up a default post for you which you can edit or delete.

Hello world!
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

The “Hello world” is a bit of a computer joke (it has become the standard for programming textbooks to start off with an exercise to print some “hello world” text or a variation on it). Go into Manage/Posts and either click on Edit and change it to some sort of Welcome To My Blog post (here’s mine) or just delete it by clicking on Delete.

I’ve kept mine because I’ve got a link to it in this post and sometimes I get sentimental about strange things…

Customise/Change your blog’s Tagline (or Title)
The Tagline I’m referring to is the little description under your main blog title heading. It’s pretty much a subtitle for your blog. So in my case, if you look under the big blogmaking.net title/heading at the top of the page, you’ll notice under it there should be “How to make a blog and other helpful (and related) stuff!” - that’s my tagline. Note that in some themes, this doesn’t show up.

Some one click installs ask you what you want the tagline to be when you’re setting it up, if that’s the case then just ignore this step. Otherwise, WordPress may have set up a default like “Just another WordPress weblog” which is what I had on mine before customising.

To change it, go into Options/General and edit your entries for “Tagline”. Note that if you don’t want a tagline, you can delete the entry so that it’s left blank. Remember to save your changes by clicking on “Update Options”!

While you’re there you may also want to change your blog’s title, you can do so by editing the entry for “Weblog title”.

Change your About page
The About page is a page NOT a post, this is because it’s designed to be kept in the same place (static) and has the same relevance today as next year, unlike a post which is more like a diary entry and changes its position as soon as you write another post. While they look similar, WordPress views and treats pages differently to posts.

Go to Manage/Pages and you should have a page called “About”, click on Edit (if you’re logged in and still using the default layout, you can also get there by clicking on the About link on your front page under Pages and then click on the “Edit this entry” link). You can edit the title and the content in the same way as a post (but you’ll notice that it has different options than posts, I’d leave them alone at this stage). I renamed mine to “About blogmaking.net”.

Add/Change Categories:
Go to the Dashboard and click on Links/Link Categories and you can add and delete categories as you choose.

Add Link:
Go to the Dashboard and click on Links/Add Link. You only need to fill out the main details:

URl = http://www.domainyourelinkingto.com/whateverpage.html
Link name = what you want it displayed as
Short description = this is optional, but will show up when your reader hovers over the link
Category = choose from the dropdown box of categories you have created, you can always edit this later

Managing/Deleting Links:
Go to the Dashboard and click on Links/Manage Links. Click on Edit to edit individual links or delete to delete them. You can also change ownership or categories of multiple links. Use “toggle checkboxes” to click or unclick all the checkboxes at the same time.

This is probably a good time to delete the default links (various people involved with WordPress) and add some of your favourites and/or links to friends.

There are two main ways of doing this.

1. If you’re really structured and know where your blog is going then you can start off creating categories set up BEFORE you started posting. You can always add more or edit them later. So if you have a list (and a bit of planning is always a good thing) then go to the Dashboard and click on Manage/Categories. You should find that “Uncategorized” is already set up for you. You can’t get rid of this just yet but you can rename it, just click on “Edit” and retype it as whatever you wish… I renamed it “Uncategorised” because I’m Australian and that’s how I spell it.

Back in Manage/Categories there should be an “Add New Categories” box. Fill in the name, keep the “category parent” as “none” for your top level categories, descriptions are optional but helpful for your readers so they’re recommended. You can edit all these later by clicking on Edit in the Category listing (Manage/Categories). In the listing you can also delete any category except the default one, note this doesn’t delete the posts associated with it, just the category labelling.

For the time being I’m creating the following categories:

• WordPress
• News
• Diversions
• Blogging Systems
• Vox
• Writing Tips
• Monetising
• Marketing
• Blogs To Check Out
• Blog Toolbox
• Hosting
• Domain Names
• Opinion
• Site Making

Also because “WordPress” is so broad, I’m also creating some subcategories. If I click on Manage/Categories and under “Add New Category” I fill out the details but set the “parent category” to “WordPress” (which I’ve set up earlier) then it will set up a subcategory for it.

These are the subcategories, I’m setting up:

• WP Basic
• WP Intermediate
• WP Advanced
• WP Themes
• WP Plugins

Note that none of these categories will show up on your main page until they have posts allocated to them. When you write a post, open out the Categories box on Write/Write Post (click the “+” if it’s minimised) and just tick which categories (it can be more than one) you want associated with the post. You can also change categories allocated previously or add new categories through this same process.

2. You can also create categories on the fly in the Categories box on the Write/Write Post page. You can add top level categories (but not subcategories) by typing into the box given and press add, they automatically get added. Use commas to separate categories if you want to add more than one at a time. You also can’t add a description so this method is not recommended unless you are really in a super hurry and absolutely MUST add a new category.

NB I don’t see any need to change the default category from “Uncategorized” (or “Uncategorised”) but if you need to, go to Options/Writing Options and you’ll find a dropdown box called “Default post category” and choose which category you want to have as the default.

NB ALSO Remember that there are also tags for categorising which we’ll be setting up later so sometimes it is best to stick with less categories and use tags for further differentiating.

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.

Word Press 2.05 was released earlier this month. It’s rare though that you would be doing an update so early in the whole blogmaking process so I’ll wait until a little later (themes and plugins have been installed) to try an update so it’s a more typical situation.

I’ve had to take a bit of a break from blogging because of real world deadlines. In the meantime, check out the comics at xkcd, I swear they hold the meaning of life… Anyway, here’s a couple of my favs on the internet and blogging or blagging as he’d call it.

Haven’t done any more work on this blog, but not to fret, I have a big activity session planned in a couple weeks after I sort out some MAJOR deadlines (work, life and study related… it’s just that time of year). In the meantime, I’ve been checking out Vox which looks to do the myspace thing but for adults, even really old ones who have no tech skills (but can use a browser). What’s good is they have realised at the start that they need to be able to plugin with other developers so they’re trying to make things work, unlike myspace who are now cracking down on those hoping to plug into myspace (like when they made it hard to use youtube videos). Anyway, I’ve just made an account with Vox… will update here if I make any further progress on it.

A small health warning… blogging may take over your life. If you don’t believe me, check out this video by PhilTube.

Phil loves blogging. If only he had more time. And we are not talking euphemism here, people, blogging is a serious pursuit. It is shaping everything from little licorice candies to fertile American minds to kid-crazy surfboard design to scrappy nascent video content providers. As you will see, you should be blogging too. It is awesome.
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