WordPress has all the qualities of a professional blogging platform a person could need. It is very easy to use and is probably the defacto publishing platform used by professional and amateur bloggers alike. Apart from your content there are few other things you can do to make in the “Pro” league. One of them is to blog prolifically, one way to do so is by using shortcuts while blogging.
We use shortcuts in everyday life, here are some that you can use while blogging with WordPres
Windows and Linux use Ctrl + letter. Macintosh uses Command + letter.
Letter Action
c - Copy
v - Paste
x - Cut
a - Select all
z - Undo
y - Redo
b - Bold
i - Italic
u - Underline
1 - Header 1
2 - Header 2
3 - Header 3
4 - Header 4
5 - Header 5
6 - Header 6
9 - Address
The following shortcuts use these keys: Alt + Shift + letter.
Letter Action
n - Check Spelling
l - Align Left
j - Justify Text
c - Align Center
d - Strikethrough
r - Align Right
u - • List {bullet list}
o - 1. List {numbered list}
a - Insert link
s - Remove link
q - Quote
m - Insert Image
g - Full Screen
t - Insert More Tag
p - Insert Page Break tag
h - Help
e - Switch to HTML mode
Hope these shortcuts help you blog and format your post faster. The more you try them out the more you will ask yourself how you did it before?
The popularity of WordPress has grown beyond anybodies, especially Matt Mullenweg’s, imagination. But to make the most of this blogging platform/CMS it can take a little getting used to, especially if you are new to it. Here’s a list of the best practices to get yourself up and running with WordPress as quick as possible.
Set It, And Forget It
The first thing you want to do after you install WordPress is to head on over to the “Settings” tab. There you will see 7 sub tabs that control almost everything on your blog, except for the design and the widgets.
- General - Here you can set your blog title and any tag line if you want to include it. If you are going to be the only author on the blog then de-select the “Anyone can register” box, otherwise you may set up the role that you want to assign to any new registrants. I suggest to set them to Subscriber status. The rest of the settings are time related but worth customizing because it will help you in case you want to write first and publish later.
- Writing - The first option you see is the default size of the posting area you want to have. I like to set it at 25, feel free to try out different sizes to see what is comfortable for you. If you like smilies go ahead and select that option under formatting. You may or may not want to select the next option to correctly nest XHTML - this more or less depends on your theme. If you are using a custom theme then you will probably not need this. If you are using a free theme and notice some out of place elements on your blog then select this option to see if it rectifies it. Next, set your default posting categories and link categories, make sure you set up your categories before doing this step to see all your options. The next two options are advanced options but worth taking the time to learn if you want to post via email. Most web based email provider will provide you with an outgoing server so enter that information and try it out. If you run into some bumps use the WordPress forums for help.
- Reading - For me personally, this is one of the most important settings. Showing a high number of posts on your home page can affect load times, so set it with that in mind. I usually set it at 5 posts, and set the number of posts in my RSS feed anywhere from 10 - 15. Your choices may differ. I also recommend showing Full RSS feeds - there have already been many discussions about this on the web and full feeds generally are more popular with readers. You can leave the character encoding as it is. Tip: The number of posts you set up to show on your home page also propagates to your category page, search results page and archives page.
- Discussion - Under this tab you will see that you have a host of options around the comments that take place on your blog. Under “Default article settings” I would leave the first option deselected and select the next two. Below that, you can choose to get emailed every time someone posts a comment, which I don’t suggest. Leave the next one selected, just in case you don’t happen to check the moderation queue ever too often. On the “Before a comment appears” area you can select all or none. It’s really up to you. I usually just select the middle one and move on. The next two options can be left as is as they have always worked well for me. Just make sure you install Akismet before you do so. If your theme does not support Gravatars you should turn this option off, if you would like to support Gravatars then simply place this code <?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 32 ); ?> into your comments.php file, somewhere in your comment area. It’s best to seek professional help for this, or visit the forums if you get stuck.
- Privacy - This is pretty self explanatory and depends on whether you want to be indexed by the search engines or not. Most everybody does so I would suggest, Yes.
- Permalinks - This is where you set up how you want your URL’s to look. I usually go with the custom option and have it show “/%postname%/”. This is best because having the date as part of your permalink just makes it look longer and ugly, plus it’s not that great for search engines. Showing the numeric option is also not suggested. The next options area are probably overlooked by majority of the bloggers but I think you should take some time to go over it. Basically instead of showing your category archices as “www.myblog.com/category/mywritings/” you can have it say “www.myblog.com/topic/mywritings/”. Simply enter “topic”, or anything else, in the field provided and you’re set. The same goes for the tags field.
- Miscellaneous - Here you can set where you want your images to be uploaded. WordPress already assigns a default folder, you can change it if you like. New to WordPress 2.5 is the ability to set the default size for thumbnails and medium size images in your blog. If your theme supports a wider post area than you can set a bigger height and width for your images.
Have fun configuring your WordPress settings. Remember help is only a click away on their forums.
With WordPress 2.5 the team behind one of the best blog/CMS platforms out there implemented the option to add a “Gallery”. You can now add basic gallery functionality to your theme without needing any extra plugins.
But, if you are writing your blogs posts for someone else, other than on your own blog, make sure that you have the proper privileges to do so. Otherwise you may not be able to “add” a gallery, as I have been unable to show you a working example here.
However, you can see an example here of how this would otherwise normally look once inserted into your blog post.
The procedure is simple. When you go to write a new post, or page, you will see “Add Media” right below the “Title” field. Next to it you will find four icons, one for adding an image, one for adding video, one for adding audio and the last one for adding media.
Uploading Images
You can choose either the “Add Image” or “Add Media” button and proceed to upload your images. The best improvement I feel has been done here. You no longer need to upload one image after another, instead you can do a batch upload. So select all the files you want to place in your gallery, once the window opens to select the images from your system, and click OK.
Your image files should now start uploading, and you can watch the progress as it happens. Another nice improvement by the WordPress team. The upload interface will have three tabs - “Choose File”, “Gallery” and “Media Library”. You should see the “Gallery” showing the number of files you have uploaded. So if you uploaded 6 images, it would say “Gallery (6)”.
Go ahead and click on that tab, and you will see all of your images.
Inserting Gallery Into Post
You can now edit each property of each image like the Title, Caption and Description. Once you are done with it you can then just click on the “Insert gallery into post” option and that should do it.
You will now see something like this in your post area “[ gallery ]”. Go ahead and preview your post now and it should you your gallery in all its glory.
Clicking on each of the images you will see that all of your images now have their own post pages, and people can leave comments too if they like. Make sure that you give proper titles to your images, it may or may not help in getting extra search engine traffic. But since this feature is so new we will not know till it is widely adopted.
Gallery Options
By default the gallery will divide itself into 3 columns. You can however change them by adding a class option like so - “[ gallery columns=”4″ ]”. Now it will be divided into 4 columns.
For more options visit this page to see what else you can do to customize your gallery. Have fun inserting galleries into your posts.
* No scripts to install.
* No ftp to access.
* No files to download or upload.
* No MySql to set up.
* Install 1 or 1,000 blogs all at the same time.
All of this is now made possible by a single Wordpress plugin called the WP Auto-Installer!
In fact it’s the only plugin that installs Wordpress blogs.
Watch as it installs 50 blogs across 2 separate servers, in under 5 minutes: http://wpautoinstaller.com
What about upgrading existing blogs?
Well that’s been covered as well.
How would you like to be notified via email when a new version of wordpress is available, then have ALL of your blogs upgraded automatically… all at the same time?
No problemo! Check out the auto-upgrade plugin video here as well.
[tags]wordpress plugin, wordpress, plugins[/tags]
Here’s a quick demo of my upcoming Wordpress Auto-Installer plugin.
This plugin actually allows you to create an unlimited number of Wordpress blogs on any number of remote servers with just a few steps!
In this demo, I’m only creating a single blog on another server. It takes about 10 seconds: http://wpautoinstaller.com
In the next video, I will show you how it can save you time by creating multiple blogs across multiple servers!
Please sign up for my FeedBurner Email Updates (in the sidebar) to receive an alert notification when this plugin is released!
[tags]plugins, wordpress, wordpress plugin[/tags]
