THIS POST HAS BEEN SUPERCEDED BY A VASTLY NEW AND IMPROVED VERSION FOUND HERE
Please do link over. For now, that’s the better version. I think.
At some point, very soon now, I’m going to delete one of the two. I think.
BLOGGING BASICS: The Essentials
Where’s the Snow?
After “never post a post as long as this one”, this is the second most important WordPress blogging factoid to learn, Grasshopper: At Christmas-etc. time, everyone around you will have snow falling on their blog and you won’t know how they did it.
“Go to SETTINGS–> General–That’s how.”
(You won’t see the button there NOW, but it will be there in season. Trust me.)
Name Your Blog Unlike Anything Else You Can Google
Most of you are saying “Duh”, but for the rest of you:
You want people to find your blog, and only your blog, when they search for it, don’t you? Dummy here didn’t think about this when I named MY blog. “The Last Half”. The last half of what? Of everything that exists, apparently. Google it, and you’ll see. You’ll see everything—except my blog.
😦
At least folks can find it by Outlier Babe–whew!
Tags vs. Categories
Tags are google search terms. They don’t have to be single words. If someone googles “wee green turtles”, and one of my posts has the tag “small olive turtles”, I have a tiny chance of a hit. If the post also talks about itty-bitty emerald turtles, and teensy chartreuse turtles, I have an even better chance.
Do not use more than…oh, ten tags (I stop at twelve, max). Fewer may be even better. Google’s googlyfier [web crawler] will say “Aren’t YOU the greedy piggy?”, and refuse to give you ANY search hit candy.
Categories exist ONLY to group posts by topic.
You simply choose Category menu styles: Vertical or horizontal. The top menu on my blog–that’s The Last Half, in case you’ve already forgotten the name
😥
–is a horizontal category menu.
Vertical category menus look like the menus in my sidebar, except they list your categories. And they’re not so wordy!
When a reader picks a category menu choice from either menu style, all the posts in that category are displayed.
Widgets
The word widget means “any thingamajig that does something”. In computing, a widget means a small bit of software that does a small bit of something well. Software widgets are like Legos: You attach the pieces you want–windows, wheels, gearshifts, or Lego sharks (one can never have enough Lego sharks–especially on spacecraft) to make the Lego masterpiece you’re building.
Your WordPress blog starts as a blank screen with whatever background color and header style you chose. That’s pretty much it. You can start posting posts and they’ll show up, but if you want a menu? That’s a menu widget. If you want a text box to tell people your stuff is copyrighted? That’s a text widget.
WARNING!! DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!
Not all WordPress themes (the “look” you choose for your blog) offer the same number of places to put widgets. You may suddenly find you can’t use windows, or gearshifts, or (horrors!) even one Lego Space Shark!!
You’ve run out of space.
😀
For this reason, I personally would NEVER choose a theme that didn’t have at least one sidebar, since sidebars (columns) are usually where we WP folk put widgets (you can also put them in some footers).
You do what YOU want, though–NOOBIE.
A Theme Without a Sidebar Is Like a Day Without This Gay Bird’s Happiness
What Do All The Widget Types Mean?
I’m not telling you. And no, I’m not kidding. I’m just going over a handful, and you can poke around and explore others on your own, or read the WordPress folks’ explanations.
Follow Button/Follow Blog
Pick one or both of these, but don’t forget at least one–don’t you WANT to be followed?
Custom Menu-Ignore “Custom”. Think “Menu”. This lets you add a menu you’ve created. And then another one, and another, by dragging over this widget again. My homepage is a big crowded mess full of these, isn’t it? Do you see them in my sidebar?
Menus are a snap in WordPress and can be a mix of your own posts together with links to anything else on the web–cooool.
(You can also build menus yourself with html commands, but you don’t want to think about those right now, Noobie, do you?)
Image–The Image widget lets you add one picture you like to a sidebar or footer. And then another and another, as many times as you like. See my wee turtles? That’s how they got there.
You have to know the URL for the image. If it’s on the web, no problem. But if you read my WARNING section, you know I don’t like to use images straight from the web, in case they get deleted.
“But, Babe: If I download the image to my own drive–how do I get a URL for it? My tablet/notepad/laptop/PC doesn’t have a URL!”
Excellent question, Grasshopper. You then upload it again, to WordPress, to your “Media Library”–the place things go to and come from when you “Upload Image” while writing posts. Then, you can get its WordPress URL from there. This WordPress Support piece will tell you how in detail.
Text-Lets you add one word or a block of text, with or without a title. Just like with “Image”, you can click and drag over and over to add text blurbs all over your sidebar(s) and/or footer(s). Handy for permanent stuff, like the Testimonials I display proudly in my sidebar at the top. Handy for temporary notes, too:
“Happy Holidays, Y’All! I’m away hunting Rudolph–Wish me luck! Enjoy the pretty snow falling while I’m gone :)”
Search–Sticks a Search box on the page so your readers can look up posts using a word or two. You should add this somewhere near the top of your First (or Second) Sidebar.
Recent Posts, Top Posts–These show a list of what they say they will. Always good to display more post titles for your readers to click on!
🙂
Tags–Lets readers find posts by clicking on one of the displayed Tags. The display is a big creepy mess to me, but some people apparently like it. The more times your posts have used a tag, the bigger it looks in the creepy mess.
Deleting Vs. Inactivating Widgets
If you have a holiday greeting in a Text widget, you might want to re-use it next year. Instead of deleting it, you can drag it to the Inactive section of the Appearance>Widgets page. Next year, drag it back to turn it on again. Neat, huh?
I’m sure you’ll come up with other uses. I haven’t, but you will. My Inactive area is like garage tool benches: “I just know I’m going to use that weird 5/8″ spade bit again…”
How To Use Smilies
This smilie’s the link–just click on it (and then bookmark the link):
🙂 Don’t go nuts with ’em, now. Caution: When you put a smilie anywhere except the start of a new line, some readers will see it as keyboard characters instead of a face.
Beware the “Visual” Vs. “Text” Editor
“Visual”? “Text”? Can you not see them both? Are they not both written with text? Whatever, WordPress Overlords…
Even if you know you’re never-ever going to use any of that scary html mumbo-jumbo, you are.
If you use the Non-Html (Visual) editor sometimes and the Html (Text) editor other times, you are going be be one sad blogger, because WordPress has an undocumented feature
where when you switch over from one to the other, your post content is corrupted–a bit or a bunch.
Don’t be sad, be glad! For you were saved by this warning.
😀
You CAN start off all posts in Visual (Non-Html) mode. If you don’t need to add any html commands, that works. But once you leave the “Visual” track, you should never go back.
Consider Downloading Your Images
You’ve been blogging a while. Everything’s goin’ great. You go back to re-read your earlier posts, and
Whaat?! What happened to your images?
Someone deleted ’em off the web, that’s what happened. That’s why, instead of Uploading Image directly from web versions, I save images to my own drive first. Then, I upload from my copies.
Make Images Look Large, Be Small
You know: Like the opposite of the joke about how to catch an elephant with a glass, a pair of binoculars, and tweezers.
You don’t know that joke? You’re kidding! Why that joke’s so old, the first time I heard it, I fell off my dinosaur laughing! What? You never heard that, either? Jeez! Did you skip childhood altogether?
Here we go:
Those 1951 Boy Scouts Were Confused: This Boy’s Life Talks About An Alligator!
WordPress takes forever to load huge images (for those with slower connections). Time and readers wait for no blog. Make sure your images aren’t taking over the world.
This matters more if you use a bunch of images in each post. If only one or two, not a big deal.
I use plain old Paint to quickly check image size. Unless I think image detail is vital (like a beautiful photograph), I resize down to no more than a sixth of the Paint display. You can also sort your Pictures directory in descending order by size to find any piggies. (Note that animated GIFs, which are large, can’t be shrunken, or their animations will fail.)
The bulk of my images are 75KB or less, except some photos.
Force Blank Lines or Spaces
In the Text editor, you can force a blank line between paragraphs or a blank space between words or characters if you use this html command:
Sometimes, blank lines between paragraphs will disappear when your post is displayed on some phones. Your nice, short paragraphs will look like a Faulkner sentence (endless egotistical blathering that would never have been published, much less praised, had the author been female).
No one younger than 30 will bother reading your brilliant writing, except people who actually read Faulkner for fun.
If that happens, put this command on the lines you want left blank.
How To Do An “Instream” Link in a Comment
Say you want to tell your friend Alfonse “You should check out this blog!” and make the word “blog” be a link to the blog. Here’s how you’d do it:
<Check out this>
<a href=”www.cool.wordpress.com">blog</a>!
Notice how I waited until the end to tack on that exclamation mark, instead of putting it right after “blog”. Avoid special characters [punctuation] inside html commands unless they’re part of the command requirements.
How to Cut Down on YouTube Distractions
If a Youtube ends by showing other video choices, readers can wander away from your post and blog.
You can stop this. You can also start the video somewhere instead of at the beginning, and/or end it before the end.
Instead of using the “vanilla” WordPress Visual or Text Editor method of adding a YouTube, follow the directions given in the WordPress Support post below, but you should read all FIVE of these BEFORE you link over there:
(You’re going to wind up at step 5 with a bracket [ and the word youtube before the shortlink, and some tiny words and a bracket ] after it. The tiny words are optional, but can tell how far in–how many seconds in–you want the video to start, and whether you want other videos to play after.)
Here is one of my Youtube links, to give you an rough idea, but I’ve changed some things. Don’t YOU do that! Follow the instructions in the WwordPress link.
[younoob https://www.younoob.com/watch?v=MADEitUP?rel=0]
(rel=0 means “no videos afterward!”)
How to Add Sound To Your Free WP Blog
1. Embed a SoundCloud song or playlist
2. Include a link to a Google Docs MP3 or MP4 Audio File that’s marked as “Shared”. Your reader will see an ugly blank screen with a sound bar, but at least they can play the audio you want them to hear. There’s an example in this post.
3. Link to a Vine or YouTube you’ve made of your finger with a smiley face, dancing to your audio.
How to Change the the Order of Your Posts
(And: How to Make A Blog Like a Book!)
This post tells you. Oh!: If you ever post a new post but don’t see it on your blog–where did it go?–search for it in All Posts. WordPress sometimes hiccups and jams a past date into a brand-new post (drove me NUTS debugging this).
WordPress is Out to Help You
You have a WordPress question, so you google. If the solution mentions “plug-ins”, it’s for wordpress.ORG folks, not wordpress.COM. Some solutions apply only to those folk who are PAYing for their blogs and have customized tweaks. You can be way down a rabbit hole, thinking you’ve found a solution to your current problem, before you once again slap your forehead between your long, furry ears: “DOH! THIS DOESN’T APPLY TO ME!!”
😳
Instead, use the WordPress.com support and forums sites. (But me, I still google, too.)
WordPress Is Out To Get You
WordPress will suddenly drop a blog from the “Blogs I Follow”. You won’t notice for weeks–months! If the blogger knows you, s/he will be getting hurt or angry that you’ve dropped them. Clearly, WordPress is evil.
👿
Snap a picture of your “Blogs I Follow” list every so often, so you can replace any missing sheep when the WordPress wolf gobbles them up. As you restore sheep, peer closely at the WordPress window and hiss threateningly “Ha! Not THIS time, WordPress!”.
ENHANCING READERSHIP
Big Duh: Make Your Title and Opening Lines HOT!!
If you’re rolling your eyes at how obvious this is, you don’t need this hint. I did. For two years, my post titles and first lines put the hundred-eyed Argos to sleep.
Set a Featured Image On Every Post
When a new visitor does a Search, or clicks on a tag, or makes a choice in a category menu, s/he sees several of your posts listed. If you don’t have Featured Images set, all they’re going to see are a bunch of words. Don’t you think great images will help attract them to stop and read a post or two?
Also, WordPress has an oops if you don’t set Featured Images: When you “Quick Edit” a post, the image that used to be shown to readers can–surprise!–randomly change to another image.
(If you don’t yet know what Quick Edit is, in short, it’s when you’re looking at All Posts, and you can change just a few little things quickly, like tags and categories–even on more than one post at once.)
Use a Large Font
Older people like bigger letters. Younger people like fewer words. Bigger letters make it look like fewer words.
If the theme you picked has a small fontsize, use the first line below as your first line, and the last line below as your last line (I used braces {} in some places, but you must use greater-than and less-than signs)
<div><span style=”font-size:large;”>
the rest of your post goes here
{/div}{/span}
(You can also set that font-size to medium or small.)
Use Really Short Paragraphs
Shorter paragraphs seem like fewer words. Break your longer paragraphs up, even if it feels wrong.
Use Shorter Sentences and Words
See above.
Use Bold Picture Captions
Depending upon your theme, or the reader’s type of device, captions can appear faint and irksome. When you’re Adding Media, as you type in your caption, you can type these html commands in front and behind it to make it bold:
<strong>Here’s My Caption</strong>
PLAYING NICE
Credit Your Pics
Be a mensch, or womanensch 😉 [a good person] and give credit:
(1) A clickable link to the page where you found the image (WordPress gives you a way to do this). Disadvantage? The link can “break” if that page goes away. I only link where I think my readers will find it helpful or amusing.
OR
(2) Include that page’s address or photo/maker credit on the image (with an image editor) or in its caption. Disadvantage? You might not want it there!
OR
(3) In the html gobbledygook WordPress creates for the image, insert
Title=“credit, or address where I found it”.
I stick this in front of the
Alt=gobbledygook part.
Disadvantage? Tedious. Advantage? Anything you put in “Title” shows when a reader passes their cursor over an image. Think of the subliminal [subconscious influence] possibilities!:
People WOMEN Who Follow You Expect You To Follow Them
If you are a woman, most women who Follow you expect you to Follow them. It is my opinion/observation that, if you are a man, or your follower is a man, there is not the same degree of expectation. But I could be wrong.
Many new followers are happy when you follow them back even if you never read their posts. I find this… It doesn’t matter what I find it. It just is.
Since many bloggers post often–sometimes daily–this mutual-following etiquette can make your WordPress Reader worthless overnight.
It floods with posts you could not possibly read. What some folks do is click “Like”, “Like”, “Like” automatically to all of these. Or just to the posts of their online friends, still without bothering to read most of these.
Do however you think best regarding Follows and Likes. Usually, mutual Liking and Following brings only mutually-rewarding happiness, and many close online friendships. Just be aware that ueneath calm surface waters may lurk…junior high school.
Don’t Self-Link On a First Visit
Don’t link to your own blog or one of your own posts the first time you go to someone else’s blog. Or the second time. That is just low-class, frankly. One of the cheesiest ways this is usually done is through flattery:
“Great post! I’ve reposted you on (my blog’s link).”
Try instead:
“Great post! I’ve reposted you.”
🙂
What you should be doing when you visit someone’s blog for the first time or two is seeing if there is anything positive and genuine you can say. If not, move on.
If You Run Out of Things To Blog About
I always have too MUCH to say–just not enough time/energy/wit to articulate it–but for the rest of you, there’s this.
What do YOU wish YOU’D known? What did I get wrong? What have I been doing that’s dumb? (Three years in, and I’m still learning.)
ADDENDUM
How WordPress says to print source code (like html) without it getting executed:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/code/posting-source-code/
But that method stopped working, as I found out months after all the gobble-de-gook html commands in my Noobie-Doobie-Do’s made me look like an idiot.
How I posted the html source code you see here without the commands actually getting executed:
Don’t put the greater- and less-than signs. Put the ampersand sign in front of the letters lt or gt, instead. They’ll print onscreen as the signs. MOST of the time. SOMEtimes, they won’t. That’s where I used braces, instead.
The Last Half 