Wordpress Setup
The blogging software I’m using is called Wordpress (v.2.6.2). It’s very popular, and easy to use, but still powerful enough to have a wealth of different configuration options available.
I figured I would write down some very basic steps I took to configure this blog.
Permalinks
This allows you to create permanent and intuitive links to your blog posts, and not something that looks like: “http://yourblogurl/?name=feed”.
Wordpress has a easy way to convert your blog to use permalinks.
- Login to the wp-admin page.
- Click on the “Settings” tab on the right side (next to the Plugins tab)
- Click on the “Permalinks” tab.
- Select one of the suggestions in “Common settings”, or using that create your own.
Adding Widgets
- Login to the wp-admin page
- Click on the “Design” tab
- Click on the “Widgets” sub-tab
- Add whatever widgets you want.
- One tip: add the RSS widget. Most blog readers will use a blog aggregator (like Google Reader) to keep track of multiple blogs, so you want to make it easy for them to add your blog to their aggregator.
- Second tip: Click edit on the RSS configuration panel, and click “display item content”, this will allow your readers to read your content without having to actually go to the web page where you are hosting the blog. This is a small courtesy to your reader.
Change User Name
If you haven’t configured your user name yet, you probably want to do so since that is the name that shows up on all your posts.
- Login to wp-admin
- Click on “user” tab on the right side.
- Click on the “Authors & Users” sub-tab.
- You will have at least one user (the administrator). Click on the link for this user, and modify the fields you want to modify like “nickname” etc.
Themes
- Download a theme.
- The theme file will come in a zipped directory. Unzip the theme in the “wp-content/themes” directory.
- Login to wp-admin
- Click on the “Design” tab
- Click on the “Themes” sub-tab
- Click on the theme to get a preview.
- Click on the “activate” link on the upper right of the preview.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment