posting – MamaBlogga

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Set up WordPress on BlueHost

Last time we covered how to make posts and pages. This time we’ll look at a few more features of the Add New Post or Edit Post page.

Posts are the basic unit of a blog. They are not to be confused with Pages, however. Pages are usually where you place special “timeless” information such as your About page, your Contact page, etc. Your posts are generally for chronological or “regular” blog entries.

To write a post, go to Post>Add New, or click on the New Post button on the top bar. The top text box below “Add New Post” sets the post title, which appears at the top of the post. If you don’t set a post title, it will be published without a title. Once you input a title and WordPress autosaves (or you click the Save Draft button), a field appears below the title box with the URL the post will have, including the “slug”: the URL name for this post (highlighted in yellow).

If you don’t give the post a title before you save the draft (or WordPress autosaves one), WordPress assigns the post a number. Every post in your WordPress blog has a number, of course. Saving a draft of the post with a title will replace the slug.

If you’d like to change the slug yourself—to make it easier to remember, shorter, or more friendly to search engines—click on the Edit button. The slug portion of the URL turns into a text field. Be sure to save your changes.

Below the title box is the post box. In the box, you type the content for the post. At the top of the box are the buttons to upload media: image, video, audio, or other media (we’ll talk more about adding pictures and media next time).

Most of the buttons above the post window are fairly intuitive. From left to right, they are:

Bold
Italicize
Strike through (a popular convention in blogging)
Bulleted list
Numbered list
Blockquote (indents text; also may add some styling depending on your theme)
Align left
Align center
Align right
Create link (only an option if you have selected text)
Unlink (only an option if you have selected linked text)
Split post with More tag (creating a Read more. . . link on your blog homepage and feed)
Spellcheck (with pull down for languages)
Toggle fullscreen mode (makes the post box take up the whole browser window)
Show or hide advanced toolbar (“Kitchen Sink” they call it):

Clicking on the last button adds a second toolbar below the first.

The advanced toolbar buttons, from left to right, are:

Preset formatting styles (drop down menu)
Underline
Align full (justified)
Select text color
Paste as plain text
Paste from Microsoft Word
Remove formatting
Insert/edit embedded media
Insert a custom or special character (letters with accents, etc.)
Unindent (only an option if the paragraph you’re editing is indented)
Indent
Undo
Redo
Help

Other capabilities on the New Post page:

Drag and drop the individual boxes to customize the page so you can find all the things you use commonly. Just click on the title bar of a box and hold to drag.
Toggle each box open or closed for clutter/cleanliness. Just click the down triangle on the title bar of the box (shown at right, it appears when you hover over the box).
Assign a post a category—be sure to check the box beside the category name in the Categories box at the right, below the Publish (this may also be below the Tags box). (If this box is â€˜closed,’ click the triangle at the end of the box to â€˜open’ it.)

Add a new category—click +Add New Category. (See also Creating Categories.)
Add tags to a post (topics addressed in a post which are not as central or important to your blog as topics covered in categories)–use the Tags box. This is on the right side below the Publish box. After typing the tags, click Add. To remove tags, click the x next to the tag.
Disable comments and/or pings (links back from other blogs that link to your post)—use the options in the Discussion box in the main column.
Select a different author for a post—use the Author box. (If this box is â€˜closed,’ click the + sign by the title of the box to â€˜open’ it.)
Set an optional excerpt—type a short summary or cut-and-paste a section of your post into the (Optional) Excerpt box. This is included in the code of your page and may be used by search engines to display info about the page on the search engine results page.
Send a trackback (a comment-like notification to another blog post that your post includes a link to it)—put the URL of the linked post in the Send Trackbacks box. However, WordPress can also be set to automatically send trackbacks to any link included in your post by checking the first option under Settings>Discussion which reads “Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article (slows down posting.).”

Beginning with Blogger: Posts and Pages

This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Beginning with Blogger

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While this post is intended for beginners, there may be something for all of us here. Did you know that Blogger now has “Pages”? This is a very cool, very important step for Blogger as a “full-featured” blogging platform. You don’t have to cobble together a menu bar or touch HTML or flood your feed as you create “About Me” and “Contact” pages. (Check out the fourth picture and description for more details.)

All right, so we’ve created a blog with Blogger and even made our first post. Now we’re ready to learn a little more about posting. When you log in to Blogger and go to your blog, click on the Posting tab. You’ll see you have four sub-options.

The first, rather obviously, creates a New Post. We already went over how to create a post, so today we’ll look at the Post Options below the post text box. Click on the triangle to open the Post Options:

Here, you can switch off comments on a case-by-case basis. (In a few weeks, we’ll find how to turn off all comments automatically.) Unless you want to code your posts in HTML, keep the Enter HTML Line Breaks set to Press “Enter for Line Breaks. And if you’re not entering any HTML (for example, the code for others to copy and paste to use a badge), don’t worry about the Compose Settings.

The Post Date and Time has two options: Automatic, meaning it sets the date and time of the post to whenever you hit Publish, or Scheduled, meaning you get to pick the date and time displayed on the post. You can pick a time in the past to post-date a post, or you can pick a date or time to schedule a post to go live in the future. (When you click the button by Scheduled, a box pops up for you to enter the date and time you want.)

Finally, note here the Labels. You can use these to assign your posts to categories, and organize them for you and your visitors. You can have many, many Labels on a post, using them as specific “tags” so you can keep track of all the topics you mention, or you can stick to 5-10 or so Labels total, and use them as broad categories to organize your blog into general topics.

The next option under the Posting Tab is the Edit Posts option. This lists all your posts and drafts—and this is where to go to finish working on a draft post.

You can select some or all of your posts to add labels (with the drop down menu at left). You can also filter the posts you see by when they are or will be published: drafts aren’t scheduled to be published, Scheduled posts have been assigned a date and time and “published,” but aren’t visible on the blog yet, and Imported posts came from another blog (we’ll look at how to do that another week).

Warning: If you are saving draft versions of posts in Blogger, you may be publishing those posts to your RSS feed. When you publish the post later, it may not show up in feed readers again. So if you have a time-sensitive post (or just want to make sure your readers see your post when it’s ready, and only then), try using a test blog to draft, then cut and paste to your main blog. (I can’t find any documentation on this issue from Blogger, but I’ve seen this happen with half a dozen different Blogger blogs.)

On the line with the post, you can see the Title and the date or time (if recent enough) it was either published or last edited. To the left of the title is a little triangle—you can click on the triangle to see the text of the post without leaving this page. If a post has been published, you have the option to View just left of that. And left of that, you click Edit to finish or fix a post.

At the top, you can search in your posts or create a new post. At the bottom, you can publish or delete any of the posts you’ve selected with the check boxes on their lines.

The next option under the Posting Tab is the Edit Pages option. Pages are not like posts. Posts are little bits of time. They have dates and times attached to them. They’re your weekly/daily/whateverly updates. Pages are for the information that’s almost always going to stay the same on your blog: who you are, how to contact you, etc. My pages are displayed in a line underneath my header. (Home, Blog Mentoring, About, Contact, etc.)

You can have the same layout easily with Blogger. (This used to be a lot of work!) Click on Edit Pages to view the page menu. Here, you have the option to create a new page. Below that, any existing pages are displayed. Click on New Page to create a new page.

The Create a New Page page looks just like the create a new post page. Enter your title and text here, and click Publish Page to make it live.

If this is your first Page, Blogger will ask you where you’d like the list of your pages to be displayed on your blog. I highly recommend the Blog tabs option.

When you visit your blog, you can see the Pages listed below the header:

The last option under the Posting tab is Comment Moderation. All this has is a link to the Settings page for Comment Moderation:

And we’ll talk about that with other settings!

There you go—now you can save drafts, create new posts and create pages for your Blogger blog.

Anything need to be clearer?