Blogging’using’Wordpress › 2014 › 02 › blogwithwordpr… · 4" Blogging"withwordpress"!!...

Blogging using Wordpress 5th February 2014

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By Mohd Ali Mohd Isa

2 Blogging with wordpress

BLOGGING WITH WORDPRESS MOHD ALI MOHD ISA, 2014

INTRODUCTION Wordpress is a free blogging platform that can be accessed from anywhere over the Internet. In order to start blogging using wordpress, we need to have an account first. To create an account, fire up your favorite Internet browser and type the following URL: http://www.wordpress.com Notice that the domain ends with .com and not .org, although both are similar but they are not the same. Wordpress.com offers free-‐hosted online blogging platform for users, Wordpress.org on the other hand offers the ability of wordpress for users that would like to host the blog themselves. So in laymen term, if you would like to have an account with wordpress, head to wordpress.com. If you would like to download wordpress and run it on your own server, then you need to go to wordpress.org. Well enough confusion, this is how wordpress.com looks like.

For those with an account, they can start blogging by signing in using their usename and password. For us that would like to create an account, click on the “Get Started” button.

CREATE AN ACCOUNT After clicking on the “Get Started” button, you will see the “Get started with Wordpress.com” page.

Just fill in the information required (actually all is required). Make sure you used e-‐mail address that would be very easy for you to access later on, since you need to access the e-‐mail account later on to verify that you actually own it. For password, I would suggest that you used a different password than you are accustomed to. Try not to use the same password that you used for your e-‐mail account and NEVER used the same password that you used for online banking. Do not worry too much about the information entered though since you can change them later on. (Well all except for your e-‐mail address). Also do not worry too much about the domain, for now we will use the free wordpress.com domain.



PACKAGES AVAILABLE At the bottom of the “Get Started” panel, we will see the panel that contains all the packages available on Wordpress.com.

For the beginner package, we will get a free blogging account with maximum disk space of 3GB. 3GB probably does not seem much but if we are smart about what we store in our wordpress account, it is actually plenty. Furthermore, the other features like custom address, custom design, and premium themes are aim towards more experiences bloggers. For us beginner, the beginner package suit us nicely. The only setback that the beginner package has is that our post will have an advertisement below it. It is just a small advertisement so do not worry too much about it. If you are really paranoid (or if you are a lawyer) about creating an account over the Internet then you probably should click on the “Terms of Service” link, otherwise just click on the “Create Blog” button.

STEP 1 We will then get the following panel.

This is step 1 out of 5 before we can actually access our blog. So go ahead and fill in the information required. Blog title is the title of the blog, they are normally have some relation with your domain name. (But not necessarily true). You should put in something short but catchy here. Tagline is optional, it justs extends the title. The “Posting Goal” options basically decide how often do you like to post to your blog. So say you would like to set one post a week as a goal, then wordpress will send you an email with a reminder that you have not post this week. Kind of like an alarm if you please. Again, all these can be change later on so do not go all crazy about finding the snappiest title or the most crunchies tagline, just fill in anything that you have on your mind at the moment and change it afterwards when you found the proper title and tagline. Once everything looks ready, go ahead and click on the “Next Step” button, on to step 2.



STEP 2

In step 2, we are required to “Choose a theme” So what is a theme? Well, a blog theme basically defines how the blog looks like. It normally dictates:

• The layout of the blog • The colour of the background • The colour of the text • Type of font being used • The style of the header, title, subtitle, italics, bold and so on.

You probably get the idea but here are some examples, if you are going to have a lot pictures in your blog, you should probably use theme set up for picture gallery. If you are going to have blog that looks like a magazine, with lots of stories and pictures at the front, you should then choose a theme that has magazine style. Anyway just pick one for now because as usual, theme can also be change later on. For this training, the Writr theme is chosen. So go ahead and click on the “Next Step” button for step 3.

STEP 3

In Step 3, we are presented with the ability to customize our earlier chosen themes. To customize the theme just click on the “Customize it” button and we will get a screen with some nifty options to change the colour, the image and other options for the team. My advice is, since we are not entirely sure yet whether we will stick with our chosen theme, this step is probably best left for later when we are sure on what theme we would like to use for our blog. For now, click on the “Next Step” button for Step 4.



STEP 4

If you have a facebook account or a twitter account, then you can actually link to both accounts by filling in the information in step 4. So basically when you link your twitter/facebook account to your wordpress account, when you have write a new post, it will automatically create the appropriate tweet and status on your twitter/facebook account. Which is time saving if you are planning on sharing your posts on those social networks. For now though, my advice is to NOT link with your twitter/facebook account just yet. Since we are going to do a lot of testing and dummy post today on our wordpress account, there is no need to share these posts just yet. Further more, we can always link it later … So click on “Next Step” to complete step 4.

STEP 5

Finally we are at the end of the account creation step. In step 5, it invites us to post our new post by using one of the 5 formats provided which is:

• Text • Photo • Video • Quote, and • Link

We will learn about these different formats later on, and as much as we are excited to post on our new blog, there are some other things that we need to learn first. So again, click on the “Next Step” button to end the account creation process.



E-‐MAIL VERIFICATION

I know all of us can’t wait to access our blog but there is one important step that needs to be completed first, which is verifying our e-‐mail, otherwise we are not allowed to create any post. So with all the strength that we have left, open up our email account and check whether we have received the verification email address from wordpress. The content of the email should look like the above picture with a button that says “Confirm Email Address”. Click on the that button, or if for some apparent reasons you are not able to click on that button, copy the address given instead and paste it in your web browser address bar. You should receive a confirmation page saying thank you for verifying your email. You can safely close the confirmation page and return back to the “My Blogs page”.

MY BLOGS PAGE

Once everything is completed you should get to a page called My Blogs, and you should also see the name of the blog you just created listed within the page. Basically this is your landing page, after this when you logged out and logged in again, you will be directed to this page. (Not really) The “My Blogs” page will list all the blogs that you have created with wordpress.com. So since currently you have one account or one blog, you will only see one listed on the page. If you want to see your blog in action, click on the title of your blog. Once you are ready, click on the link “Dashboard” which is our next topic.



DASHBOARD

Now then every blog will have their own dashboard. As can be seen above, on the left is the navigational menu that allows us to access all the available modules. At the center is what we called as dashboard. The dashboard basically contains the summary or report or statistic about our blog. It tells us how many posts we have, how many pages we have, how many comments we have, how many comments are pending, what is our most accessed posts or pages, how do people gets to our blog, what keyword do they used on search engine and so much more. At the moment, since it is pretty much empty, we probably can not see the usefulness of dashboard but once our blog is up and running and starts getting visitors. The dashboard will be very useful. To get started, we want to create our first posts, so hover the mouse on the posts link and click on the “Add New” options on the sub navigational menu.

CREATE A POST

Click “Add New” will bring us to the “Add New Post” page. Here there are a lot of options that we can set when we would like to create a new post. But first complete the basic required field first, which is the title of the post and its content. Think of it like writing an email the title subject is the title and the content is the content of the email. Once we have completed both the required field, then we can see what options are available before we publish our posts. Here are some of the options available.

PUBLISH The options are related to the publish information of the post.

• Status indicates whether the post is still draft or have been published. • Visibility decides who can view and read the post.

o Public means everyone who can access the blog o Private means everyone who have an account of the blog o Password-‐protected means anyone that has the password

• Publish immediately allows us to control the date when the post are published. This is useful when we would like to set a post to appear to posted on a define date.

• Publicise allows us to share the post across social networks such as twitter and facebook.



FORMAT The options format is quite new and was introduce in Wordpress 3.1, basically it allows us to have a different format for our post. So that our post will have different layout suited with the content. Here are the formats available:

• aside -‐ Typically styled without a title. Similar to a Facebook note update. • gallery -‐ A gallery of images. Post will likely contain a gallery shortcode

and will have image attachments. • link -‐ A link to another site. Themes may wish to use the first <a href=””>

tag in the post content as the external link for that post. An alternative approach could be if the post consists only of a URL, then that will be the URL and the title (post_title) will be the name attached to the anchor for it.

• image -‐ A single image. The first <img /> tag in the post could be considered the image. Alternatively, if the post consists only of a URL, that will be the image URL and the title of the post (post_title) will be the title attribute for the image.

• quote -‐ A quotation. Probably will contain a blockquote holding the quote content. Alternatively, the quote may be just the content, with the source/author being the title.

• status -‐ A short status update, similar to a Twitter status update. • video -‐ A single video. The first <video /> tag or object/embed in the post

content could be considered the video. Alternatively, if the post consists only of a URL, that will be the video URL. May also contain the video as an attachment to the post, if video support is enabled on the blog (like via a plugin).

• audio -‐ An audio file. Could be used for Podcasting. • chat -‐ A chat transcript

-‐To Be Continues-‐

Blogging’using’Wordpress › 2014 › 02 › blogwithwordpr… · 4" Blogging"withwordpress"!!...

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Transcript of Blogging’using’Wordpress › 2014 › 02 › blogwithwordpr… · 4" Blogging"withwordpress"!!...