Blogging 101

I bet that choosing a “look” for your blog was one of the first things you did the first time you logged in. This entry might even be superfluous considering that changing the “look” of your Wordpress blog is one of the easiest things to do.

Nevertheless, for those who haven’t discovered it yet, you can change your blog’s theme by clicking on the “Presentation” tab in the main menu of your Wordpress dashboard. On the themes page, you will find a list of all available themes, including screenshots. Pretty nifty, huh? The screenshots give you an idea of how your blog will look with each theme.

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Imagine you have a hundred folders of documents and you need to file them away neatly in cabinets. Are you going to just dump them in no particular order? What happens when you need to find one particular folder later on? How will you search for it in that heap?

The solution, of course, is to organize the folders so that you will know exactly where you can retrieve them in the future. In Wordpress, your entries are organized automatically by date of posting. The one most commonly used is the monthly archive. But there is an even better way of organizing your entries. You can assign them to one or more categories.

But before you can assign your entries to categories, you have to create the categories first.

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So you want to upload personal photos on your blog. It’s not that hard.

First, you will need to resize or crop your photos using a photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop so that they fit on the main panel of your web page. “Main panel” means the column on which you are reading this blog entry right now. See, if you don’t resize your photos, they may overlap with the side panel or, worse, they may push the side panel and create a horizontal scrollbar. We want all our content to be contained within the width of our readers’ screens so let’s make the photos fit, okay?

What’s that? How to resize photos in Adobe Photoshop? Ooohh, but this is a Wordpress blogging tutorial. If it’s too much to presume that you know how to work with Adobe Photoshop, perhaps, I should mention that I have a blog called Photoshop 101. The problem is that I haven’t posted anything there yet because I am still busy — very busy — with the HEdCen site. But do check it out once in a while. I never — well, almost never — let a domain go to waste, really, so it’s 99.99% certain something will get posted in Photoshop 101 sooner or later.

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My kids are YM addicts. So are most of their friends and schoolmates. One of the main attractions of YM for them is the variety of emoticons that go with the service. I don’t want them to miss those cute little baldies when they start blogging in Wordpress. So, below is a guide on what to type to make the smilies appear within the posts and comments. The images are screen grabs from the Wordpress Codex.

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What is a hyperlink? In non-geeky terms, it may be a text or a graphic which, when clicked, will bring you to another web page or another portion of the same web page. It is created with HTML tags.

In Wordpress, because we can post entries using the “Visual” mode, we don’t have to type in the tags manually or what we call hardcoding. All it takes is knowing how to highlight, left-click and right-click.

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This tutorial is a modification of a Posting Entries 101 page that I published in Pinoy Moms Network so the graphics will show a different dashboard. Don’t worry. Except for the name of the blog, the procedure is just the same.

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Spammers attack blogs through the comment box. Another effective way of controlling blog spam, therefore, is to moderate commenting. In the early days of my blogging, I never opted for moderated commenting. Discussions were more lively when allowed to flow at their own pace. But as blogging became more and more popular, I was left with no choice. There weren’t too many spam filters available back then. And the earlier spam filters were rather “primitive” compared to the kind we have today. A lot of comment-spam was still able to get through. The only option was to turn moderation on.

So, why are we talking about moderating comments when we have Akismet installed in the system? Well, nothing — not even programs — is perfect. There are a lot of anti-spam plugins available and Akismet, for me, is the best but, still, it does not work all the time. As an added precaution, commenting can be moderated. Even if a couple of comment-spam escaped Akismet, they still wouldn’t be publicly viewable if commenting is moderated. You can mark them as spam then delete them right on your administration panel.

How do we turn comment moderation on?

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Wikipedia defines spam as “the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, which are universally undesired.” The term used to be associated with e-mail so that the old definition of spam used to be unsolicited bulk e-mail.

But blogs have become the targets of spammers too. In fact, we even get SMS spam these days. Earlier today, I received a text message from an unfamiliar number saying I won a vacation somewhere and I should call the supplied landlines. Duh, as though I joined a raffle to explain the “winning.”

But SMS spam is another story. Let’s try to deal with blog spam. Believe me, as your content grows, the spammers will find you. You don’t want them posting links to their Viagra online stores and porn sites, do you?

So, what do we do? I have installed a plugin called Akismet. How do you use it?

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When your HEdCen.Com blog account (don’t confuse it with your e-mail account), you chose your username (which also forms part of your blog URL) but you were provided with a password that was randomly generated by the system.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to presume that you will remember the weird alpha-numeric password that the system gave you. We don’t want you locking yourself out of your blog’s administration panel because you can’t remember such an impersonal password. So, one of the first things that you should do after you first access your blog is to update your user profile and to change your password to something that you will remember.

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The administration panel is where you take control of your blog. You access it by logging on. The log in page is found at http://hedcen.com/yourusername/login.php.

You type in your username and password then you hit the “login” button.

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