WordPress Classes: Lesson 6 – Your First Post.

I was just reminded about Friends when Joey takes guitar lessons from Rachel. This is episode 11 in Series 5 The One With Lots of Resolutions.

When Phoebe finds out that Joey knows the real names of the chords, she flips out saying:

Phoebe: G-sharp? Have you been studying the real names of the chords? (Joey doesn’t answer.) Have you? (He looks away in shame.) Oh my God!

Joey: What?! I didn’t touch a guitar!

Phoebe: No, but you’re questioning my method!

Joey: No, I’m not questioning it, I’m saying it’s stupid!

Well, I’m sure my readers MUST have been practising on their own! Right? I promise I am not making any names up! I’m using the real names! Onwards and upwards. It’s time to do the first post! Yeah!

Actually, the hard part about the first post is deciding WHAT to write. I’m going to assume you already have something to post! So here goes!

bar

Login to WordPress as usual. Then navigate on the top bar to ‘Write’ – it’s highlighted in white in the picture above. Click. After a few seconds, you’ll see the ‘write’ page open.

writepost

It looks pretty much like this. Let’s dive in.

To write your first post, you write the the name of your post in the ‘Title’ Area, and enter the content in the second box down (the big one!). You’ll see some very obvious tools to help you do your basic editing.

Basic Tools
The ‘B’ is BOLD, the ‘I’ is Italic, and the strikethrough, looks like abc. You can also see two kinds of bullets. Then you’ll see three kinds of indents (left, center, right). Next you’ll see the two undo/redo buttons. If you make a mistake, then hit ‘undo’. If you undo something you need, hit ‘redo’. Try it as you type.

Additional Tools (You can skip this section, if you need to)
The next is the image upload tool (We’ll leave that one today). Then there’s the ‘more’ button, ‘spell check’ and ‘help’. The ‘more button’ is simply to insert a click more button on the front page. It allows you to highlight a section, then readers will see ‘more’ on the front page. If they want to read more, they need to click it.

Saving and Publishing
We’re almost done for Part one of ‘posting’. But you’ll see three buttons below the box, called ‘Save and Continue’, ‘Save’ and ‘Publish’.

  1. ‘Save and Continue’ is for when you are in the middle of a post and, for whatever reason, you decide to save it (for safety?) so you can continue writing in a few minutes. Hit it and the screen will refresh in a few seconds, with the data displayed for you.
  2. ‘Save’ is for when you are done writing for now, but you are not ready to post. (For now, though, let’s not use that option!).
  3. ‘Publish’ is when you need to publish it so others can see what you wrote!

Once you hit ‘Save and Continue’, you should see a Preview button appear on the top right. If you click that, you’ll be able to see what the post will look like when it’s published.

preview

See it’s painless! You just wrote your first post. Well done! Of course, I’ve not dealt with some important issues in this posting, such as categories, images, or some of the other options on the right and bottom of the screens. I’ll leave that for later lessons. But, for now, your homework is to post two post and send me screenshots so I can show off my ‘students work’!

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If you are enjoying this series or find them useful, please do comment in the posts. Let me know what you need for future lessons. I’m planning on a series of 30 lessons, I just hope that readers find them useful!

Plugins: Remove those Dashboard Feeds in WordPress!

Well, I’ve used WordPress since version 1.1 (I think!), and I have found it easier and more sophisticated as it gets older. In addition, the number of plugins and themes has just exploded! It’s quite exciting… But one thing has always puzzled me… why do I have to have the DashBoard Feeds at all. I successfully managed to get rid of them in version 2.0, but every time I reinstall, there they are! Laughing back at me, mocking me!

Perhaps you, too, run a website using WordPress that really isn’t so appropriate for some of the feeds’ news content! Perhaps it’s a personal site, perhaps commercial grade, perhaps… Anyway, I didn’t know what to do…

That was until I found a plugin by Michael Shadle that does the job nicely…

A No-hack Dashboard Removal Plugin

I don’t know why this wasn’t discovered (or a better action put in by the WP folks to begin with that could be disabled) but I was able to find a way to disable the feeds from loading on the WordPress admin dashboard without any need for customized index.php files (which would need to be updated/re-uploaded every time WP is updated.)

If you find the WordPress Dashboard Feeds handy, then fine. But if you don’t, you should check this plugin out! It cleans them out just fine! I did find the code before, but this time it’s just easier to do with a plugin! Nice and clean… I did try another plugin, but couldn’t get any results with that… This one just worked once when activated.

See….

dashboard-cleaned

Thanks, Michael. I’ll use it!

Buzz: Clean up your CSS – it’s just a cut-and-paste job really!

I came across this interesting website that encourages visitors to clean up their CSS. The website tells the story of how it came about, nothing exceptional there.

Anway, in their words, “CleanCSS is a powerful CSS optimizer and formatter. Basically, it takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise.”

css clean

Anyway, you open your blog, find your Style Sheet for the theme you are using, copy the text and paste it into the block on the left on their website. You’ll find your CSS code in the Theme Editor under ‘Presentation’.

As a precaution, save the original file in a text file, so you can paste it back should things go wrong (and they do! So be warned!).

Anyway, I took the original code for the MistyLook Theme, and pasted it in, chose the options on the right, and voila…. This is what I got!

code output

OK. Now, I’m going to try the new CSS in just a moment! I’ll post a screen shot. I don’t know if the result will speed up the website any, as it only saved a little over 2K. Last time I checked an average page on this blog was clocking in at a little over 750KB. Mmm.. I chose some options that made it a little less readable for humans than normal… Still, we’ll see. OK. It looks fine. I’ll monitor it over the next few days. But like I said, make sure you have a backup just in case things go wrong!

Warning: Any changes that you can’t undo are your own responsibility! If you’re not sure of modifying your blog, then you shouldn’t. If you decide to go ahead, back up everything at least ONCE, and preferably several times, so you can have something that works!