Well, had a look around have you?
Seems intimidating but in all honesty, its not all that bad. Keep in mind to think things through first, and even maybe jot them down on some paper.
General
I think it is pretty straight forward. You adjust the blog time, to correspond to your own time, and I like the first day shown to be Sunday. Now if you don’t have a posting calendar displayed, it really doesn’t make much difference, but if you do, then Sunday will be more familiar for your customers.
IF your blog isn’t going to want comments, or subscribers to it, DE SELECT the option of ” Anyone can register ” which will turn off the ‘register’ feature on the sidebar.
If your blog is about simply affiliate marketing, to me, it doesn’t make sense to have surfer’s dropping by and registering. Anyone can still subscribe to the blog feed, whether a member or not. They just can’t comment, unless you let them in other settings.
Myself, depending on the blog, I would go with de selecting that option. Who wants to moderate a ton of spam comments?
Writing
This is where you can adjust the actual ‘write box’ where you can spell out your pearls of wisdom, and display all those hot sexy pictures, that will get the surfers drooling, and signing up to your sponsors. YOU HOPE!
Adjusting the number of lines, will decrease or increase the amount of writing space you have available at one time. Make it too large, and well, you’ll be scrolling up and down to add styles or insert links or pictures.
I use between 15 and 20, depending on the blog I am doing. Some that are brief ( hard to believe I write brief blogs, but I do. ) I don’t need a lot of writing space. Others, I do, but I like to keep the entire white space visible, including the editor toolbars. It comes in handy to underline a link, to bold a word, or insert images and links.
Notice that you also get to set the default blog category, and link category. When you first install Wordpress, the only category for posts, is titled ‘uncatagorized’ which isn’t very appealing. You’ll have to change that, but it should be a generic category title. Something simple, like General works, or News, because you want to keep your posts categorized properly.
Using a general category allows for any accidental deletions of other categories, to default to this one, so you can always find them. Most blogs, don’t use their categories well, because of simple laziness. My reason for selecting a generic main category, is that rarely do I post in there. So if I do screw up and delete another category, it will be easy to find, to shift and re categorize, without wading through a lot of other stuff.
Blogroll is different.
First off, I’d like to strangle whoever named it that, as while it is descriptive, it is also, well, just lame. However, I’d not recommend renaming it, and again have it as your default link category.
One main reason is that many themes, DO NOT RECOGNIZE MULTIPLE LINK CATEGORIES. In fact, they lump them all under ‘one’. Now this particular theme allows the display of multiple link categories. However if I were to use a different theme that didn’t, and didn’t have ‘blogroll’ set, there is a good chance the other links would just disappear. Can’t have that. And no, not always does that happen, but better safe than sorry.
By disappear, I am referring to them simply not showing up. They should be intact, in your blog link listings, just not visible. It would make having to adjust them a pain, if ‘blogroll’ wasn’t the default. By simply ‘deleting the alternative link categories’ you would default each link to ‘blogroll’ which the new theme would be displaying.
One of the best ideas they had, was to make link categories separate from the posting categories. It has its own tab, and this makes your job a lot simpler, and easier.
Simply select the different categories, use the drop down box to choose ‘delete’ and then apply. That will set all other links to the default. Course, if you choose your theme wisely, you won’t have this issue.
to be continued…
Mar 14th by Malcontent