Ok … now you know what a blog is and you’ve been thinking of starting your own. You also heard of the term ‘wordpress’ but you don’t know exactly what is it all about. In just few words, wordpress is the most used blogging platform on the planet. It is a free open source platform that lets you create and publish your blog. You just install it on your website and you’re good to go.
There is really no difference between a blog and a regular website. It’s just that the blog means a specific type of website: a web log or a personal diary. That’s it.
WordPress will basically build your website. You can choose from various skins to make it personal. You can have widgets, banners and so on. You can organize your posts in categories, timeframes and the most recent ones appear by default on your home page. If you wish, you can change that setting to display a static page. WordPress also has a complete, well designed administration area where you can manage everything on your website: you can add new categories, create posts, add pictures, embed videos, music, add links and many, many more things, all in one single online administration area.
Installing it is really easy if you are familiar with uploading files through FTP to your website. If you don’t know what that is, then read this guide and you’ll find out. If it’s still too complicated, there are hosted versions also, which are free and don’t need to have a website. I recommend having your own name on the internet though …
I wrote a guide on how to install wordpress which you may download and read.
You can download it using the form in the upper right corner.
Writing a post is a very important feature for wordpress … actually I consider it the most important feature. I’ll make it really short now and explain in just few words ‘how you can make a post on your blog using wordpress’.
It’s very easy. Basically there are 3 main ways that you can use to post on your blog. I’ll start with the most used, which is the one in the administration area. I assume this post will be read only by people new with wordpress, if you already made a post you know how to do it, so what I’m doing now it’s kinda` useless. Ok, so, here we go: let’s say you installed your blog or someone else did it for you and you want to make a post. You must have the admin info (user and password) to do that, so if you don’t have them you must ask for them. Having those ready, you need to go to ‘yourblogurl.com/wp-login.php’. After you’re logged in, you will see your dashboard. That’s not important for now. You just need to click on the button named “Write” (you can find it in the upper left corner if you’re using newer versions). Once you click on that button, you’re automatically taken to the post writing area (using the same write button, you can go and write a static page or a link, but ‘post’ is the default option).
Now, you’re in the writing area. Enter the title, then start writing your post. Make sure your title is search engine optimized (eg. contains a keyword you want to target, etc). When you’re done, scoll down and you will see the “tags” area. There you must enter your tags(or keywords). That’s not a must, but it’s important for SEO purposes. If you scroll down even more, you’ll see the categories area where you can include your post in one or more categories. That’s about it. When you’re done, just hit “save” to save it or “publish” if you want other people to be able to see it. Please note that if you don’t publish it, it will still be saved, but it won’t be available for others.
That’s it, you wrote your first post using wordpress.
Earlier in this post I was saying about 3 ways to write a post on wordpress. The one above was the first one. The other two aren’t so much used, but they’re very useful. Another way to post to your wordpress blog is using the XML-RPC protocol. XML-RPC enables a background communication channel for to manage your blog. Don’t worry, it’s quite secure so you can use that too without being afraid of something.
It works like this. First, you have to enable it. You can do that by accessing the writing settings page (“Settings” > “Writing”). If you go to that page, you’ll see this:
To have XMLRPC enabled, just check that checkbox and hit “Save changes”.
If you have this setting enabled, you can use external posting services to post remote, schedule posts, post multiple articles at once, buy content from PLR websites, etc (a lot of tasks, really). I’ll come back with more info related to XML-RPC in a later post.
The third way is ‘email publishing’. To be honest, I didn’t use that, but I assume it logs in to your email account, it grabs your email messages and posts them on your blog (based on some user/password of course as you could get a lot of spam emails going online as posts) – I strongly recommend being carefully with this one :)
Hope it helps and hope you enjoyed this post. If you did, please share it with your friends.
And guess what? I went to that page where you enter your email or username and receive a link on your email.
Pretty easy, right?
…
NO!
Unfortunately, when you install wordpress, it generates a key for you that will be used to recover your password. Therefore, in the email, you get a link like:
domain.com/blog/wp-recover.php?key=somestringhere.
Here comes the problem: wp includes the “&” when generating these keys (and for some reason it seems to include it everytime I install a blog, lol), but the “&” char is used to separate the request variables sent by GET. That’s why, when you click on that link, you get a “wrong key” error, because if the key is 1234567&9, wordpress will get only 1234567, which is wrong (duuh).
Solution? I have one that I use. I just open phpmyadmin on my server, go to wordpress database in the wp_users table and change that key to something else (of course, “1234″ won’t do as you might get up one day with all your posts deleted ). After I’m finished with that, I do the process again and I’m able to set a new password.
In this short post, I will teach you how to have a static page displayed on your home page instead of the regular: latest 10 posts (or at least 10 is the default number).
By default, wordpress displays your latest posts (latest first). However, this can be changed to show a static page for your home page. To change this setting, go to your settings menu and pick reading from there.
Please note that you must have a static page in order to display it. By default, WordPress creates a static page and puts it on your blog, but some delete it because of the “hello world” content (so did I). If you don’t have any static page on your blog, you won’t even be able to see that setting.
Here we go: on the reading settings page, you’ll notice you can choose between “latest posts” (the number of posts can be changed as well) and a static page. To make your home page static, pick static and choose one of your pages.
That’s it :)
Note: make sure you have a navigation panel or your sidebar includes a link to latest posts or archive or something. Otherwise, your visitors won’t be able to check your posts and will see only your static content.
I’ve seen this question many times on forums, so I thought it would be a good idea to make a post on how to have your post title appear on your links.
First, what does this mean? If you look in the address bar, you’ll notice that the URL is this one:
“http://www.wordpress-how-to.com/2008/10/14/how-to-make-your-title-appear-in-your-links”. This is an old SEO trick, now implemented in many web applications and yes, wordpress has support for it, just that it isn’t enabled by default.
The files/directories specified by the link don’t exist on your server, this is basically a redirection made by the htaccess file on your server. Therefore, when you hit “/2008/10/14/how-to-make-your-title-appear-in-your-links”, it will query the database for the post with that title and it will take you to index.php?p=somepostid. That’s all it happens in the background.
Let’s get to the point now. It’s very easy to enable this feature on wordpress. To do that, just login to your admin area, hit “Settings” (it’s in the upper right corner for the newer versions), then, from the contextual menu, pick “Permalinks” (or simply, put this at the end of your blog URL to access the page directly: “yourdomain.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php”).
From there, you pick one of the options, which one you consider to be the best (I’m using the second: day and name) and then click on save.
Please note that your root folder (or blog folder if it’s not located in root) should be writable. If it’s not, wordpress won’t be able to write the htaccess file.
This is it. If you enounter any problems, just let me know via email or reply to this post and I’ll be happy to help you.
