Starting a WordPress Blog – 5

This is part 5 of my guide to starting a WordPress blog.  In Starting a WordPress Blog – 1, I discussed some blogging basics and definitions and in Starting a WordPress Blog – 2, I showed how to register on WordPress for a blog and choose a theme.   Starting a WordPress Blog – 3 showed you how to set up your blog so that it was ready for your first post. In Starting a WordPress Blog – 4, we posted your first post.  So, if you’ve followed along and done your homework … which consisted of playing with WordPress until you were ready to post … you have a yourself a blog with your first post published.  Congratulations.   Now you’re waiting breathlessly for your first comment.  Let me offer you a deal … come back and leave a comment telling me about your first post and I’ll come by and leave you a comment.  Meanwhile let me offer some thoughts on the blogging experience.

Starting a WordPress Blog – 4

This is part 4 of my guide to starting a WordPress blog.  In Starting a WordPress Blog – 1, I discussed some blogging basics and definitions and in Starting a WordPress Blog – 2, I showed how to register on WordPress for a blog and choose a theme.   Starting a WordPress Blog – 3 showed you how to set up your blog so that it was ready for your first post.  Today, we’ll make a few last settings before posting your first post.  To get started, go to your Dashboard, which you can do by: going to wordpress.com, signing in, the selecting Dashboard under your blogname; or entering your blog address, blogname.wordpress.com, in the address bar of your browser, then choosing Login in the sidebar under Meta.  Before we actually get to posting, let’s look at a couple of settings that determine how accessible your blog is to the public. In the left sidebar menu, under Settings, select Reading and scroll down to Site Visibility.  Here you can decide whether to make your blog completely public and open to search engines, semi-private in that it is not open to search engines, or entirely private for readers you choose.  If you want readers, choose the first.  Now, select Discussion under Settings.  Here you can control who can comment on your posts.

Starting a WordPress Blog – 3

This is part 3 of my guide to starting a WordPress blog.  In Starting a WordPress Blog – 1, I discussed some blogging basics and definitions and in Starting a WordPress Blog – 2, I showed how to register on WordPress for a blog and choose a theme.  Now, it’s time to use that theme to make your blog look just as you’d imagined it … ready for your first post.  As we get closer to lift-off, there will be more choices to make … and many choices are particular to the theme you’ve chosen … so I won’t cover all of them, just the main ones that most influence the look of your blog.  As I’ve said before, at the end of the day, the only way to get the blog you want is to experiment … which is adult-talk for play.   To begin, go to your Dashboard, which you can do by going to wordpress.com, logging in then choosing Dashboard under your Blog Name.  Just like last time, we’re going to look under the Appearance tab in the left sidebar and select the Customization tab.  Your blog appears as it looks (naked) with a pop-out menu along the right side.  Under the Front tab, you get to choose your home page format, what people see when they enter your blog address, either a static page that never changes (but links to your posts) or the standard

Starting a WordPress Blog – 2

This is the second post on how to start a WordPress blog on wordpress.com. In Starting a WordPress Blog – 1, I discussed some blogging basics and definitions.  Here, we take your working Blog Name and Tagline (if you want one) and start the process of building a blog.  To get your blog started, go to wordpress.com and click on the Get Started button.  While you’re there you can watch a short video on WordPress and browse some other WordPress blogs.  Once you’ve selected Get Started, you will be asked for an email (where the activation email will be sent – be sure to push the confirm link in the email), a password and a blogaddress for your blog, which will be blogaddress.wordpress.com.  It’s nice to pick a blog address related to the name you’ll eventually use for your blog but since there are already hundreds of thousands of WordPress blogs, you may not be able to get the address you want.  There are two optional blog plans, Premium and Business but stick with Free to start.   Click the Create Blog button at the bottom of the page and you are on your way.  You will receive a verification email at the address you entered above.  On the next screen, you enter your blog’s name and a tagline (which is optional).   Mine is Older Eyes and my tagline is Reflections from an Older Perspective.  You can always change these later.  If you want email reminders to post, you can select how often here.

Starting a WordPress Blog – 1

A friend of mine recently retired and both she and her husband are considering starting blogs.   I told her a while back I’d write a post on my experience in starting a blog. It will turn out to be several posts of which this is the first.  I’ve only blogged on WordPress, hence the title.   To be a little more specific, I’ve mostly blogged on wordpress.com, which is the easiest way to go if you don’t mind a few restrictions, such as use of advertising or complete freedom in modifying themes.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  There are other blogging platforms that may be wonderful but WordPress has been my home for 4 years and I like it.  As the leader to the wordpress.com website says, Start a WordPress blog or create a free website in seconds. Choose from over 200 free, customizable themes. Free support from awesome humans.  It probably says a lot that I’ve never had to deal with their awesome humans because their online support and support forum usually answers any question I have.  And you read correctly, it is absolutely free until you want to add certain features to your blog (which you probably will if you stay with it) and even then, costs are very reasonable.  The truth is that what you can have is seconds is a domain for your blog (its web address), along with a name and a theme, which you can think of as the shell in which your posts will appear online.  Having a living, breathing blog will take somewhat longer.

Older Eyes and Facebook

I first joined Facebook when Muri’s friends knew things about our daughter’s family before we did.  They’re reading about them on Facebook, she told me.  Do you think you could get me on it?    I joined to figure out how it worked then signed Muri up.  It was interesting to see our daughter on her Facebook page … it often seemed like a completely different person than the one talking to us on the phone.  An easier, happier person.  Then, the friend requests started to show up.  I’d heard about people reconnecting with old friends …  I even searched my high school and college.  Mostly, I got local 12-Step friends and acquaintances.   Family consisted of my brother and his wife plus a few nieces.  The grown children of a few old friends turned up as well as some friends of my daughter.   Why in the world they wanted to Friend me I didn’t know.  But I never thought of it as a competition.   One young woman I coached on my daughter’s soccer team sent me a message telling me what a wonderful coach I was … along with a friend request, which I accepted.  She turned out to be a prolific poster who flooded my page with stories and pictures I had no interest in seeing.   Her posts are now hidden.  I started refusing friends.  Is that a Facebook faux pas?   For one, I drew the line at children of nieces and nephews … and at grandsons.  I love the little urchins but I don’t want censor what I post … or piss off aunts, uncles and daughters.

2011 in Review

One of the nice things WordPress.com does for their bloggers is prepare an Annual Report that summarizes statistics like number of views, most popular posts, and the ways in which readers reached the blog.   It’s one of the things that makes WordPress a great place to blog.  The Annual Report on Bud’s Blog starts out like this (take a look at the report, it’s very cool):

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 25,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.  Click here to see the complete report.

Clicks

Way down on the right hand side of my WordPress Stats page is a statistic called Clicks.   Just in case you’re not a blogger … or new to blogging … the Stats page tells me how many people visited my blog, what posts they viewed, and, sometimes, how they got here.  Maybe it was a link on another blog or on Facebook that they followed or maybe they found me using a search engine like Google.   My Stats page told me that yesterday’s post was my 600th post, by the way.   The Clicks box tells me what links on my blog were clicked during the past day.   Most of you are bloggers yourselves, so I suspect you know a link when you see it.   Just in case, here’s a link to WordPress’ Links Support Page … click on this with the pointing hand  and you get to read about how links work on WordPress.  Yippee, right?

Writing and Blogging

Sunday morning, I logged onto Older Eyes – Bud’s Blog, ready to finish a post I started Saturday, determined to keep up with the WordPress Postaday Challenge for at least one more day.  But when my Dashboard popped up, there were no comments shown.  Yikes.   I clicked on Older Eyes up in the left had corner, and my home page appeared, sans posts.   I looked under the Categories and Older Posts pull-downs in the sidebar … nada.  Nothing.  Shit.  Trying not to panic, I checked my other blogs … all OK … so I jumped to the WordPress Support page, ready to send off a panic-stricken message.   But first, I logged out and logged back in again … computers are funny people, and sometimes this helps.  Bingo, content back.   Heartbeat settling back into the normal range.

Older Eyes 2010

Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow!

Back on New Year’s Day, I saw the 2010 Year in Review data provided by WordPress on Into the Mystic.   Where’s mine, I thought.  Must be in my email.   It wasn’t, so I sulked a little bit.   During the week as I’ve bounced from WordPress blog to blog, and discovered that other bloggers had received it as well, my sulking became more serious.  I searched on wordpress.com and the WordPress Forums under Blog Review and Crunchy numbers but found nothing.   Is there some sort of age discrimination going on here? I wondered.   Then, this morning, I looked in my spam folder.   For some reason, my spam filter had decided to deprive me of my 2010 Year in Blogging email.   Here’s what it said: