Writing

1. The post box is where you will enter your content. It looks like the image below. This defaults to 10 lines but I usually change mine to 20 as it gives you a bit more room to see the layout. There is a facility within the visual editor to go to full screen if you want to.

2. Formatting. Emoticons are typed abbreviations that look vaguely like a human face on its side. The emotion or sentiment of the writer of the written word is easily misunderstood, especially in hasty communications. Emoticons enable you to insert a little indicator of your real sentiment to accompany what you have written.

3. Wordpress to correct invalidly nested XHTML. The main purpose of Wordpress is to enable you to publish content without having to learn html code. It does this by controlling the format of your content using the theme and css files – that you never need to even look at if you don't want to. The advantage of this is that it enables the search engine spiders to crawl and index your site very efficiently – and they love that. (there's an emoticon example for you).

However, if you do start wanting to import html/xhtml code into your Wordpress blog then you can lose that advantage if you start to inadvertently publish some rubbish. So if you are a beginner and/or do not want to get involved with any html code then I recommend that you check this on.

If you are publishing poor quality code then Wordpress will attempt to correct it – but what appears on your blog will almost inevitably no longer look like the html page that you thought you uploaded – but it is a great warning sign to you that you need to go back and correct your html.

4. You can put each entry you make into a Category and can create multiple categories. This makes it easy for visitors to find all your posts on a particular subject . The default category will be 'blog' but if you would like it to be something else then you can change it here. All posts will then appear in this category. Note that you must create the Category first by making a post and adding your preferred category before you can come back here to make it the default.

5. Link Categories. Wordpress has the facility built in to create a list of links from your site to other sites. The default category is called Blogroll. You might want to use this as a means of directing your visitors to other relevant sites. Like entries, you can create Categories of Links so that you can split your Blogroll into relevant subject areas to make it easier for visitors to find a relevant link. Here you can change which of the Categories you have created is the default.

The default post box size is 10 lines.

Tick these if you want to publish to your blog from a desktop blogging client or other software.

If you are just beginning then this may well be a mystery to you so you can happily leave this until later and you have a better idea of how you are going to work with your blog.

Again, if you are just beginning then you can happily leave this. You will need to know a little about setting up email accounts to make this work so you can come back to this later.

However, bear in mind that both the previous entry on publishing remotely as well as publishing via e-mail are very strong plus points for Wordpress blogs and allow you to keep your relationship going with your blog and your readers even when you are moving around. These days, of course, with email on your mobile you can even blog from your mobile phone or PDA.

Among the MOST IMPORTANT settings.
Your default installation will probably come with the single entry of Pingomatic as shown. There are many services, often called ping servers, that do the same thing as Pingomatic. Wordpress has the facility that every time you make a new post then your blog will automatically 'ping' the services you have listed in Update Services. A ping is nothing more than a signal to say; 'Hey, I've got new content! Come and read it!'.

Pingomatic will send that ping on to other services including the search engines. This is one of the reasons that WP blogs are so effective with the search engine rankings. Every time you write and publish new content – the search engines get to know about it very quickly.

There are various arguments about which ping services to include in your Update Services. Read the word according to Wordpress here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services. The other recommendation made by several pro bloggers is to use Feedburner and turn your feed into a Feedburner feed. We will deal with that question later.

There is also a consensus of opinion that you should not invite visitors including the search engines to your blog until you have something for them to read. To do this simply delete any Update Services listed. Make sure you paste them into a text file and keep them safe somewhere until you need them again. When you have 5 or 6 relevant posts of 500 words or more then paste them back in. That way your blog will ping the servers next time you post and when the search engine spiders come visiting you will have a decent quantity of material to enable them to easily decide what your website is about.

Don't forget to SAVE CHANGES

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