As a new blogger you’ve probably gotten Wordpress all loaded up to your server by now and even though you might not be too familiar with the Wordpress Admin dashboard you can’t wait to get your blog on and write your first post. While you could by all means get straight to blogging your heart out, one thing you should be aware of is that there are a few Wordpress settings that you will need to configure inside the Wordpress dashboard prior to publishing your first post. Let’s go through them together and once we’re through you can get down to the serious business of blogging about it all. So when you’re ready, log into your Wordpress Admin and let’s have a look around.

As of the writing of this post the current version of Wordpress is version 2.7 Coltrane and it is quite different from other versions of the software and requires some getting used to even for seasoned users, so here’s the nitty gritty:

Once you’ve logged into your account you will be in the default dashboard which is like your blog’s command center. You will be able to see lots of valuable information here like your blogs status in regards to number of posts, comments waiting to be moderated, who links to your blog, your recent drafts, latest news from the Wordpress development blog, and many other pieces of useful and interesting information about your blog.

While the dashboard is a helpful information center, the real heart and soul of managing your blog is found in the list of links in the left sidebar of your dashboard and they are labelled Posts, Media, Links, Pages, Comments, Appearance, Plugins, Users, Tools and Settings.
The first thing you should do to set up your blog is to change the password that was generated for you when you first installed Wordpress and that can be done by clicking on the Users link. You should see your profile and an option to edit the settings there. You will be able to change your email address, the color scheme of your dashboard, your user nickname and of course your password so make sure it’s something you can remember and note it down somewhere just in case. If you are setting up a multi-user blog this is also the area where you would add users and set their access levels.

The very next place you should go to is the Settings link and more specifically the General tab. You will need to add your blog title and tagline if you didn’t already do so when you installed Wordpress. Setting your time zone is also crucial to do as your blog posts and comments will always be off otherwise. It will also wreak havoc on your scheduled posts if your time zone is set incorrectly.

The next important area in the Settings link is the Reading tab. This is the area where you will choose if you want your blog to have a static front page such as a Home or Welcome page or if you’d rather have your blog posts running down your page instead. You will be able to set any page you’ve created as the front page of your blog so make sure to set it up before selecting this option. You also have the choice of how many posts to display on your blog’s front page and whether they display the full post or a small expert if you decide not to go with the static front page.

Next in the Settings link you should access the Media tab. This lets you adjust the default sizes for your thumbnails, medium and full-size post images.

The next option in the Settings link is the Privacy tab. You probably already said yes to have your blog visible to search engines when you set it up, but just in case you didn’t just double-check that your settings are set to being visible to everyone including search engines and such.

The last but probably most important setting you should set appropriately in your Wordpress blog is what sort of permalink structure you plan on using for your posts. This step may be last on the list here but it is crucial that you set this correctly so your post urls are defined the way you want them right away before you start posting…once you’ve set up your permalink structure you never have to do it again so take the time to decide your permalink structure now. If you’re having trouble deciding which permalink structure is for you I’ve written a post about choosing the structure that’s right for you as well as instructions to make changes to your permalinks here.

Now you’re all set, go on and write your first post…send me a link to it I’d love to read it.

Until next time new bloggers…have fun on the Internet and get those blogs up and running!

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In the Wordpress Admin there is a Settings tab and within that tab is the Permalinks tab. Setting up this area of your blog administration is crucial to having your blog post urls (or links) be the way you want them. The default setting for your posts is p=”whatever the post id number is” but it’s not such a nice url to have. Here’s an example: You’ve written a post on your dog care blog about how to choose the best breeds. With Wordpress’s default permalink strucutre your post would look like this:

“http://dogcare.com/p=123/” – What the heck does that even mean to anyone? Not much and if anything were to ever happen to your blog and you didn’t have a backup of your post database, would you be able to remember all of your post id numbers? Probably not, and then all those people finding your posts in the search engines would click and receive an error message because the link they followed would be invalid.

Next option is day and name and again this option is not so great either…why? Because time moves on and again if anything ever happened to your blog and you had no backup of your post database, you would have to re-post to your blog and the date from the re-post wouldn’t match the previous date. You would end up having to implement a redirection plugin to have your old post structure match up to your new post structure. Here’s an example of the original post link using this structure:

“http://dogcare.com/january/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/” and if you had to repost it months later your new post would look like “http://dogcare.com/december/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/” and you can see how the new link structure could never match up to the old link structure without a redirection plugin from the old link to the new one.

The same issues would arise with the month and name option so make sure to keep track of which posts were posted in which month.

Same thing goes for the numeric option but again you will have to keep track of which posts go with which number.

The best option by far is the custom permalink option and one of the best custom permalink structures to use is to have your post url structured by category and post name. The value you would need to enter for this field looks like:

%category%/%postname%

This will have your posts looking like this example: “http://dogcare.com/breeds/how-to-choose-the-best-breeds/”and if anything ever happens to your post database it would be easy to remember your categories and post names and they wouldn’t be dependent on variables that change like the date or post id numbers.

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Now that you’ve gotten your blog up and running you’re probably already writing posts but some unusual anomalies have crept into your work. You’ve perhaps wondered why your text is not wrapping around your images? Or perhaps you find that you have oodles of whitespace to the right of your posts because your post text is not justified? Maybe you’re wondering why no-one is coming to your posts? Perhaps it’s due to the irrelevant title? Here’s a short list of ways you can style your Wordpress posts to address the most basic issues every blogger runs across when just starting out.

• Blog Posts Need Relevant Titles – Make sure your title is relevant to the post you’ve written or no-one will ever find it. So let’s say you wrote a fantastic article about “home stereo systems” then you should try to pull a relevant title from what you’ve written. For example, you’ve written a comparison guide for “home stereo systems” that includes features and prices, then a great title for your post could be “Features and Price Guide For Home Stereo System Buffs”. You might be saying to yourself, “Well isn’t it obvious that my post is about features and prices for home stereo systems?” and “What kind of moron would incorrectly title their blog post anyways?” Well, some posts you write will have a very clear and concise direction while others will be more like unfocused rants or just thoughts you’ve had about a certain subject and the title may not be so easy to come up with then. If the latter is the case, then trying to find the focus of an unfocused post can be somewhat challenging and it happens to us all. Take a moment and consider the subject matter of your post before coming up an irrelevant title and check out Copyblogger for some great tips on writing your best post titles.

• Post Images Need Relevant Titles – The way to title an image is there in the display window that comes up after you’ve uploaded the image. The default photo title will be the what the camera gave it or the name of the file you downloaded from the Internet. You will need to change it to something relevant to the photo if you want folks to find it. As an example, if you took a photo of a beautiful sunrise your camera has probably titled your photo something like “img1101.jpg”. You need to change the title in the image title field to read something like “beautiful sunrise”. After all, which do you think folks will search for on the Internet? Photos named “img1101″ or photos of “beautfiul sunrises”…it’s up to you…

• Wrap Text Around Wordpress Images – To make sure your text wraps nicely around your post photos…always set the photo alignment to left, right or center. You can do this from the display window that pops open after you’ve uploaded your image. If you find that even after setting the alignment your text is still now wrapping around the image, that’s because Wordpress changed the default image classes not too long ago and probably the template you’re using still uses the old image classes in the stylesheet. Add these codes to the style.css of the theme you are using:

img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em}
img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0}
img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}

• Always Use The HTML Editor Tab When Inserting Any Sort of HTML Codes Into Your Posts. – Why? Because the visual editor tab inside Wordpress will not convert your html codes to what you wanted it to do. Instead, your html codes will appear in your post exactly the way you inserted them using the visual editor. Switch to the html editor tab, insert your code, then switch back to the visual editor. Your post html should look like what you had intended and not the raw codes.

• Set The Alignment Of Your Post Text – You can align your post text left, right, or justified. Justified gives you the same amount of whitespace in between each left and right margin. You can do this two ways…the first way is to wrap your post writing in this source code < p style=”text-align: justify;” > or align it left or right, from inside the Wordpress post editor each and every time you write a post. Or you can fix this globally by adding:

text-align: left;
text-align: right;
text-align: justify;

to your style.css file at to automatically align text such as on page paragraphs and post paragraphs.

• Clear The Float Of Images You Add To Your Posts – If it ever happens (and it will) that you have an image that is longer than the text you want to put next to it, when you want to start a new paragraph the image will hang down over your next block of text. Your next paragraph or image will by default try to line up underneath the last block of text even if it throws off your entire post layout. Here’s how to fix this:

Enter this source code <div style=”clear:both;”></div> after your last paragraph (with the image) in the Wordpress editor and before the next text paragraph or image. This code will force your next paragraph to start below the last image length instead of the length of the short text you wrote beside it.

This is not an exhaustive list of how to style a Wordpress post, but it is an outline of the basic quirks that you will be sure to run into pretty much as soon as you write your first post…so keep this list handy as a reference and happy blogging.

When I upgraded my Wordpress version to 2.7, the ability to schedule posts in Wordpress 2.7 no longer worked. I could still schedule a post but the scheduled time would come and go with no future post being published. All that I could see in the Wordpress dashboard was “Missed Schedule” no matter what I tried to fix this problem.

The Missed Scheduled Wordpress Posts Problem

After searching for a solution to Wordpress missed schedule problems it was clear that no-one seemed to know exactly why it was happening and how to fix it. The problem of future posts not working in Wordpress happened to some folks who upgraded from version 2.6.5 and not to others, and it happened to some folks who changed web hosts and again not to others. The Wordpress missed schedule error has also been known to happen to folks on one or two of their blogs and not on their other blogs. So clearly this issue needs to be resolved in future versions of Wordpress but for now there are a few suggestions that have been offered on the Internet.

Some fixes that were suggested for the scheduled Wordpress posts not working problem:

You can see details of what some other fixes others have suggested as well as my fix in the Wordpress support forum in regards to this issue here

Here’s My Wordpress Missed Scheduled Posts Fix:

I’m a simple kind of chick and as such I downloaded Wordpress version 2.6.5 and had a look at the wp-cron.php file in the root directory as well as the cron.php file that resides inside the “wp-includes” folder. The code inside both files is quite different from the the Wordpress 2.7 file versions. In Wordpress 2.7 wp-cron.php there are references to “local-time” and the doing_cron option is set to zero. This is not present in the 2.6.5 versions of these files. So I decided that it might be possible that if your web server time is off by even a few seconds from the Wordpress official time the scheduled post may not go through. This is because the doin_cron argument is set to zero making it absolutely necessary that your web server and your Wordpress time match up pretty much exactly. Now I could have changed something in the code of these files but since I didn’t want to mess with variables I am unfamiliar with, so here’s what I did:

While this fix may not be for everyone and “Frankensteining” (yes I just made that word up) your Wordpress installation is not the best solution, it is a temporary fix until the next version of Wordpress is released and the issue is hopefully resolved.

I have included for download the two Wordpress files needed to fix the missed scheduled post issue in this post. Click on the download button, unzip the files and follow the directions in this post or the readme file that is included with the two files. Please note that these two files were obtained directly from the official Wordpress repository and are guaranteed virus-free.

Setting your blog using Fantastico scripts is pretty quick and easy but what if you don’t have Fantastico scripts or cPanel hosting? Well then you will need to learn how to install Wordpress manually using FTP or File Transfer Protocol. In a previous post I outlined how FireFTP is by far the best and easiest FTP to use to get the job done and the best part is that it works right inside your Firefox or Flock browser. So before you get started installing Wordpress make sure you’ve downloaded, installed, and set up FireFTP and you can find complete instructions and a download link to FireFTP here.

To install Wordpress manually you will need the following:

- Firefox or Flock
- FireFTP all set up and ready to go
- The latest version of Wordpress (2.7 at time of writing)
- A text editor like Notepad or Notepad++

Step One – Unzip Wordpress once you’ve downloaded it to your computer
Step Two – Open the unzipped Wordpress folder and locate a file named wp-config.sample
Step Three – Open the file wp-config.sample in Notepad or Notepad++
Step Four – Look for these lines inside the wp-config.sample file:

Step Five – You will need to change the values listed here but first you need to create a database for your Wordpress installation inside your hosting account in order to obtain these values. So go ahead and log into your hosting account and let’s set up your database using MyPhp if you have cPanel hosting otherwise look for “Databases” in your hosting account.

- The first field you should see in MyPhp is your database name and here is where you can enter any name you want but you should make it relevant to your site name so you can remember it later on. Now click “Create Database”.

- Once your database has been created you will see a field marked “Database User” and you will need to enter a username of your choosing as well as a secure password (please note your username and password somewhere as we will need them for your Wordpress installation later). Now once you’ve filled out your database username and password click “Create User”.

- Now you will have to scroll down to the section that shows how many databases you currently have and it should be the one we just created, there should be a field next to it that allows you to choose a user to add to your database. Choose the username we just made together and click on “Add User To Database”.

- You should now see a screen asking what sort of privileges you would like the user to have and you should select “All Privileges” and save your changes.

Congratulations! Your Wordpress database is now set up!

Step 6 – Now we just need to go back to the wp-config.sample file we opened earlier and enter your database name, username, and password in the approriate fields. Where you see:

‘putyourdbnamehere‘ replace everything between the single quotation marks with the database name we just made
‘usernamehere‘ replace everything between the single quotation marks with the username we just made
‘yourpasswordhere‘ replace everything between the single quotation marks with the password we just made

Step 7 – Once you’ve made the changes to wp-config.sample you will need to save the file but use “Save As” and change the file extension from .sample to .php

Step 8 – Now you’re almost done, it’s time to load everything up to your web server using an FTP program. So go ahead and open the FTP program of your choice and log into your web server

Step 9 – You need to make sure that you are in the public_html directory before uploading any files and if you use Thinkhost it will be the docs directory

Step 10 – Locate your Wordpress folder and open it inside your FTP program…then upload all the folders and files inside the Wordpress folder into your web space (this should take a few minutes as there are quite a few Wordpress files to load)

* Once you are finished uploading your Wordpress files to your web space you will need to run the install script so Wordpress can set itself up inside your web space. Here’s what it should look like:

http://yournewdomain.com/wp-admin/install.php (of course you need to replace yournewdomain with your actual domain name) and if everything went well the install script will run. All you need to do is follow the onscreen prompts regarding your blog’s name, and email address.

You will be given a username (admin) and a password PLEASE WRITE IT DOWN as this will be your Wordpress Admin login until you change it.

If you have any trouble you can check out the Wordpress Installation guide here.

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Hopefully now that you’ve made the decision to start your own self hosted blog you’ve registered a domain name, bought your blog’s hosting, and changed your name servers so that your domain name points to your hosting account. If all of the above went smoothly then your site should be visible when you type it in the address bar even if it is just a hosting company placeholder page. Now it’s time to get your blogging software into your web space so that you can get to the serious business of blogging everything and anything that is on your mind.

In this post I will show you how to use Fantastico scripts to install your blogging platform and in a separate post I will also show you how to manually install your blogging platform without using scripts as it’s worth knowing how to do it that way too.

The benefits of using Fantastico scripts to install your blog are that it’s fast and simple enough to have your blog online and ready for you in less than five minutes. So if you’re ready, let’s get started!

Step 1 – Consult the Welcome Email Your Hosting Company Sent You

When you signed up for your blog hosting account you would have received a welcome email that contained details about your cPanel and how to access it. It will have a URL in it that looks something like:

This area of your hosting account is username and password protected so make sure you’ve located that information in your welcome email and enter it when you access your cPanel.

Step 2 – Accessing the Fantastico scripts

Once you’ve gotten to the cPanel interface you will see a lot of information and it can be a bit confusing and overwhelming. The information on the left side of the screen is a running log of your account activity like how much web space and bandwidth you’ve used. The right side of the screen is what we’re interested in and it is separated into rows and by category with names like Preferences, Mail, Files, Logs, Security, Domains, Databases, Software, and Advanced. While each section has its use which we will cover at a later time, for the purposes of this post we want to set up your blogging platform so scroll down to the section marked “Software” and you will see a blue happy face and that is your Fantastico scripts section so go ahead and click on it.

Step 3 – Choose Your Blogging Platform in Fantastico Scripts

Congratulations! You’re ready to pick your blogging platform from one of the many scripts available to you by your blog host.  There will be many options to choose from such as content management platforms and ecommerce, but this tutorial covers setting up Wordpress only. Once you’ve installed Wordpress you will have learned how to use the scripts in this section and you can experiment with the other choices available if you like. Locate Wordpress from the list of scripts in the section marked “Blogs” and click on it.

Step 4 – Setting Up Wordpress In Fantastico Scripts

Once you’ve clicked on Wordpress you will see a short description, the support forum and a link marked New Installation so click on it. The next screen is the first of three steps in your Wordpress installation.

You will now be able to view your Wordpress blog by typing in your domain name in the address bar and to log into your Wordpress administration dashboard you must add wp-admin to your domain name like this:

That’s it…you’re done! Now you can start blogging it up! Good luck!

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