You’re in your new WordPress.com blog and ready to just start blogging away… WELL DON’T! If you want your content to mean anything you’ll post only one introductory welcome 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 it 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.
Writing & Reading
Next two pages are personal preference. Starting with Writing, there are 4 options: Size of the post box (when writing how big the default post box will be), Formatting (Emoticons and Auto xHTML validator), Default Post Category, and Default Link Category. This is self explanatory and doesn’t need a long overview, however if you have questions simply add a comment with your question below.
Reading
Reading, contains 6 options: Front page displays (I’ll cover this in detail on a later post about theme designing [to be name]. In the mean time leave it on “Your latest posts” and don’t switch it to static page, search engines like when the main landing page always has new content), Blog pages show at most (amount of posts on the main page), Syndication feeds show the most recent (this is for your RSS list, you safe number is between 6-12. I use 6 in order not to overwhelm my users), For each article in a feed, show (Switch to Summery, in order not to overwhelm your users, if they want to read more they will), For each article in an enhanced feed, show (This is a WP.com only feature that allows you to add the category, tags comment count and social social buttons to the posts in the rss feed), and Encoding for pages and feeds (defaults to “UTF-8“, if you don’t know what it is leave it, if your using a qwerty keyboard leave it.)
Discussion Settings
Now we’re ready for end-user command central a.k.a. Discussion Settings. Discussion Settings sets most of the rules that dictate how your readers will interact with the content of the site. First group of the page: Default article settings has 3 check boxes (Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article, Allow link notifications from other blogs, Allow people to post comments on new articles). The interesting things about the first and second options are that they actually control how the users on other sites interact with your site. In simpler terms it’s setting the defaults on the use of Trackback and Pingback, unfortunately these are to controversial about to sum up in a few short sentences so in the mean time refer to the links attached to the words and on a later date I’ll go more in-depth.
Other comment settings
Next grouping is: Other comment settings, which is well the for comments and just as the name is simple as is the options so I’m only going to point out the unusual or confusing option. Fourth from the top, Enable threaded (nested) comments [ # ] levels deep, enables a commenter to directly comment on the comment and for how long the tree can branch out. If turned off the commenter would have to add a new comment to the post and the new comment may seem out of place if there are generic comments separating the new text from the source they want to reference (Shorten version: commenter comment comment comments to reference).
E-mail me whenever & Before a comment appears
The two grouping that follow, E-mail me whenever and Before a comment appears are centered around a notification via email of your users interaction and there is suggested configuration.
Comment Moderation & Comment Blacklist
Okay, this bold, yes bold, meaning I need you to pay attention to the following. Spam can slow down, dis-credit, and make you good user leave without doing what you want them to. WordPress has a built in measure against spam and it is called Comment Moderation. Comments are the main way a user will be interacting on your site and therefore the largest breach point for malicious content like spam. To assist WordPress you can add in keywords to auto queue any comment containing any word or is part of any word that is listed. To help with this I’ve attached a Comment Moderation (250) text file (.txt) with a list of common spam phrases. The field to follow is the Comment Blacklist which is just like the Comment Moderation but will auto send to spam (using carefully as you will not be notified of spam).
Comment Reply Via Email, Subscribe To Comments, and Subscribe To Blog
For the sake of keeping on topic I’m going to skip over Comment Reply Via Email, Subscribe To Comments, and Subscribe To Blog, these are simple toggles that controll the RSS feed and comment usability. My only suggestion is if you want your reads to stay up-to-date on your content, allow them to use the RSS.
Avatars
Avatars are easy, if your theme supports them and you want well established commenters/users to show off their personal ID’s then allow them. So let assume your theme supports them and your willing to go alone with it, you click allow avatars then you proceed to the next two options: Maximum Rating & Default Avatar. Maximum Rating is the maturity rating of the avatar of the users may have and what you want to allow them to add to your site. If they user does meet the maturity rating then they assigned a default avatar. Default Avatar’s are either the same for everyone without an avatar or a randomly generated for them using one of the three generation options.
Media
Media sets the defaults for the image sizes the 3 presets of thumbnail (an auto crop method), Medium (constrains and re-sizes), and Large (constrains and re-sizes). These are used when creating/editing a post or page and adding image media to the entry.
Auto-Embeds
We add in the 2.9 update where if you add a URL to media (image, youtube, vimeo, etc) it’s only line and it is not hyperlinked, it will automatically follow that link and render the proper code to post without you having to add any object/img/embed tags. You can also constrain the media to a fixed width or height if is excesses you settings.
Privacy
Privacy also known as Blog Visibility sets the robots.txt file of you blog. Robots.txt files dictate how search engines and other crawling services interact with your blog. By setting your blog to: I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers, you saying to bots they have full access to index and allow potential reads to find my website in a search engine. If you don’t want anyone to find your site via a search engine but would only like direct traffic (reads would have to manually type in the URL) the set it to: I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors. Finnally if you want complete controll over who see the content and set you can see your blog on a person by person basis then select: I would like my blog to be private, visible only to users I choose (this option is only available to internal blogs although some plug-ins exist to allow external blogs to have the same restrictions).