You’re in your new WordPress.com blog and ready to just start blogging away… WELL DON’T! If you want content to mean anything you’ll post only one introductory post then start to configure the blog so people a can consume the content with ease. First head down the sidebar of the admin panel to Settings. What loads will be the Settings > General page. This page, for the most part, will be pre-filled in by WP.com’s blog application process and all you’ll have to do is confirm it is all correct. One area of interest however is the Blog Picture / Icon (click for preview), which allows you to upload a “Blavatar” (that’s what WordPress calls it) and the blavatar will represent your blog in all of the WordPress.com searches and displays.

Before downloading the external files go to your server host’s backend and check if there is a way to automatic install a WordPress. I use IXWebHosting and they offer a service call EasyApps that can install over 30 CMS/Galleries/ShoppingCarts including WordPress. If something like that exists, use it, it’ll save you some time. In the event that you have GoDaddy I did a little research and found this for you from them: Installing WordPress on Your Hosting Account. If it’s worked check your version (it’ll be some where on your dashboard) if it’s less then 2.7 you need to download a plug-in called “WordPress Automatic Upgrade”. I’ll get you the link and how to set up plug-ins later in Full guide to WordPress External Blogs – Configuration (Coming Soon), by the way for you automated people, your done with the content of this post so feel free to jump ahead to WordPress External Blogs – Configuration (Coming Soon).

Knowing your Skill Level

There are two types of WordPress’ internal and external. By knowing what you are capable of will help you in the next set of steps. If you own a domain + hosting or are willing purchase one and what to use the WordPress there then you’ll need an external WordPress and can jump to Setup Part 2 (Coming Soon).

Ever wonder what’s the difference between ” ” vs. ‘ ‘ ? Surprisingly there is one and it’s actually deceptively simple. The basic definition of single quotes in verbatim or WYSIWYG. In contrast, double quotes have a built in logic and can recognize variables.

I have used Date() to feed variables from some complex time tracking scheduling scripts but for the most part it’s use just display time & date, as well as generate the time of an event to log for reference. To get a basic understanding of it, I wrote a simple script using two native functions of Date() N & l (lowercase L). N – Gives you the number of the week, starting from Monday (1), then Tuesday (2), . . . ending with Sunday (7). l – Return the day of the week in a more visual pleasing way; no order just returns the current value which will be the full name of the day of the week. Below, to show how it works I assembled three variables and an if statement to display a count down to the weekend or Say enjoy the weekend.

If your moving content around quickly on your WordPress or if your designing a template with no content to fill it, then your going to run in blank query results, Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here. – WordPress default phrase. Now if you don’t have any posts at all then having a default phase is need but if there are posts in your blog and you only want to display a specific category independent from the main loop and the category is doesn’t have any posts then the there is no need to show the box at all. Now I do realized that if the you add a loop to your template then you know it’s there and you’ll make sure there is content to fill it. That being said there is only really two (maybe more) times in which you may want not to show a section if a post category doesn’t exist and/or hasn’t any posts. First is WordPress MU in which a new blog won’t have the category set up and will certainly not have any posts in it. Second when your creating themes for WordPress.org’s Theme Directory or resale and you want to add special features and display methods.

Recently I working on a little pet project of mind in which the content will not be created by me however will be generated by my logged in users. The problem with letting other people into the website and have control over it is that as a coder I need to add in fail safes, and make ever step idiot proof. In this case I need to make sure that the user doesn’t create an epic saga of text and post it on the main page. Like most of my projects, it uses the WordPress engine to allow the users to enter in their data. WordPress has a two built in methods to decrease the output of text to a more manageable size.