Business Blogging

There are as many color tools as there are colors!  Putting together the right colors for your website is likely the best the most difficult part of your website design.

Since color select is personal, we are suggesting you use the Color Scheme Designer to pick the colors for your new website!

Select a color along the color wheel, adjust the and move the sliders until you are happy with your color selection.  Once you have your selection, choose the Export Option and save and HTML / CSS file:

After you choose Export -> HTML +CSS you screen will look similar to this:

The area circled in red above in a web address you will send us with your color selection.  You can click on the photo above to see and example of what we receive.

If you have any questions, please call us at (503) 709-1454. While color selection is personal, sometimes having a second set of eyes helps solidify your selection.  The Color Scheme Design site also has an example of a website using your color selection, note the design is only for reference purposes–it does not represent your custom designed website.

(Link to Source Document)

In addition to understanding how your specific blogging software works, such as WordPress, there are some terms and concepts you need to know.

Archives

A blog is also a good way to keep track of articles on a site. A lot of blogs feature an archive based on dates (like a monthly or yearly archive). The front page of a blog may feature a calendar of dates linked to daily archives. Archives can also be based on categories featuring all the articles related to a specific category.

It does not stop there; you can also archive your posts by author or alphabetically. The possibilities are endless. This ability to organize and present articles in a composed fashion is much of what makes blogging a popular personal publishing tool.

Feeds

A Feed is a function of special software that allows “Feedreaders” to access a site automatically looking for new content and then post updates about that new content to another site. This provides a way for users to keep up with the latest and hottest information posted on different blogging sites. Some Feeds include RSS (alternately defined as “Rich Site Summary” or “Really Simple Syndication”), Atom or RDF files. Dave Shea, author of the web design weblog Mezzoblue has written a comprehensive summary of feeds.

Blogrolls

A blogroll is a list, sometimes categorized, of links to webpages the author of a blog finds worthwhile or interesting. The links in a blogroll are usually to other blogs with similar interests. The blogroll is often in a “sidebar” on the page or featured as a dedicated separate web page. BlogRolling and blo.gs are two websites that provide some interesting functions or help related to blogrolls. These sites provide methods for users to maintain these rolls effortlessly and integrate them into weblogs. WordPress has a built-in Link Manager so users do not have to depend on a third party for creating and managing their blogroll.

Syndication

A feed is a machine readable (usually XML) content publication that is updated regularly. Many weblogs publish a feed (usually RSS, but also possibly Atom and RDF and so on, as described above). There are tools out there that call themselves “feedreaders”. What they do is they keep checking specified blogs to see if they have been updated, and when the blogs are updated, they display the new post, and a link to it, with an excerpt (or the whole contents) of the post. Each feed contains items that are published over time. When checking a feed, the feedreader is actually looking for new items. New items are automatically discovered and downloaded for you to read. Just so you don’t have to visit all the blogs you are interested in. All you have to do with these feedreaders is to add the link to the RSS feed of all the blogs you are interested in. The feedreader will then inform you when any of the blogs have new posts in them. Most blogs have these “Syndication” feeds available for the readers to use.

Managing Comments

One of the most exciting features of blogging tools are the comments. This highly interactive feature allows users to comment upon article posts and link to your posts and comment on and recommend them. These are known as trackbacks and pingbacks . We’ll also discuss how to moderate and manage comments and how to deal with the annoying trend in “comment spam”, when unwanted comments are posted to your blog.

• Trackbacks
• Pingbacks
• Verifying Pingbacks and Trackbacks
• Comment Moderation
• Comment Spam

Trackbacks

Trackbacks were originally developed by SixApart, creators of the MovableType blog package. SixApart has a good introduction to trackbacks:

In a nutshell, TrackBack was designed to provide a method of notification between websites: it is a method of person A saying to person B, “This is something you may be interested in.” To do that, person A sends a TrackBack ping to person B.

A better explanation is this:

• Person A writes something on their blog.
• Person B wants to comment on Person A’s blog, but wants her own readers to see what she had to say, and be able to comment on her own blog
• Person B posts on her own blog and sends a trackback to Person A’s blog
• Person A’s blog receives the trackback, and displays it as a comment to the original post. This comment contains a link to Person B’s post

The idea here is that more people are introduced to the conversation (both Person A’s and Person B’s readers can follow links to the other’s post), and that there is a level of authenticity to the trackback comments because they originated from another weblog. Unfortunately, there is no actual verification performed on the incoming trackback, and indeed they can even be faked.

Most trackbacks send to Person A only a small portion (called an “excerpt”) of what Person B had to say. This is meant to act as a “teaser”, letting Person A (and his readers) see some of what Person B had to say, and encouraging them all to click over to Person B’s site to read the rest (and possibly comment).

Person B’s trackback to Person A’s blog generally gets posted along with all the comments. This means that Person A can edit the contents of the trackback on his own server, which means that the whole idea of “authenticity” isn’t really solved. (Note: Person A can only edit the contents of the trackback on his own site. He cannot edit the post on Person B’s site that sent the trackback.)

SixApart has published an official trackback specification.

Pingbacks

Pingbacks were designed to solve some of the problems that people saw with trackbacks. The official pingback documentation makes pingbacks sound an awful lot like trackbacks:

For example, Yvonne writes an interesting article on her Web log. Kathleen reads Yvonne’s article and comments about it, linking back to Yvonne’s original post. Using pingback, Kathleen’s software can automatically notify Yvonne that her post has been linked to, and Yvonne’s software can then include this information on her site.

There are three significant differences between pingbacks and trackbacks, though.

1. Pingbacks and trackbacks use drastically different communication technologies (XML-RPC and HTTP POST, respectively).
2. Pingbacks support auto-discovery where the software automatically finds out the links in a post, and automatically tries to pingback those URLs, while trackbacks must be done manually by entering the trackback URL that the trackback should be sent to.
3. Pingbacks do not send any content.

The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments:

• Person A posts something on his blog.
• Person B posts on her own blog, linking to Person A’s post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback enabled blogs.
• Person A’s blog receives the pingback, then automatically goes to Person B’s post to confirm that the pingback did, in fact, originate there.

The pingback is generally displayed on Person A’s blog as simply a link to Person B’s post. In this way, all editorial control over posts rests exclusively with the individual authors (unlike the trackback excerpt, which can be edited by the trackback recipient). The automatic verification process introduces a level of authenticity, making it harder to fake a pingback.

Some feel that trackbacks are superior because readers of Person A’s blog can at least see some of what Person B has to say, and then decide if they want to read more (and therefore click over to Person B’s blog). Others feel that pingbacks are superior because they create a verifiable connection between posts.

Verifying Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Comments on blogs are often criticized as lacking authority, since anyone can post anything using any name they like: there’s no verification process to ensure that the person is who they claim to be. Trackbacks and Pingbacks both aim to provide some verification to blog commenting.

Comment Moderation

Comment Moderation is a feature which allows the website owner and author to monitor and control the comments on the different article posts, and can help in tackling comment spam. It lets you moderate comments, & you can delete unwanted comments, approve cool comments and make other decisions about the comments.

Comment Spam

Comment Spam refers to useless comments (or trackbacks, or pingbacks) to posts on a blog. These are often irrelevant to the context value of the post. They can contain one or more links to other websites or domains. Spammers use Comment Spam as a medium to get higher page rank for their domains in Google, so that they can sell those domains at a higher price sometime in future or to obtain a high ranking in search results for an existing website.

Spammers are relentless; because there can be substantial money involved, they work hard at their “job.” They even build automated tools (robots) to rapidly submit their spam to the same or multiple weblogs. Many webloggers, especially beginners, sometimes feel overwhelmed by Comment Spam.

There are solutions, though, to avoiding Comment Spam. WordPress includes many tools for combating Comment Spam. With a little up front effort, Comment Spam can be manageable, and certainly no reason to give up weblogging.

Pretty Permalinks

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. Because others may link to your individual postings, the URL to that article shouldn’t change. Permalinks are intended to be permanent (valid for a long time).

“Pretty” Permalinks is the idea that URLs are frequently visible to the people who click them, and should therefore be crafted in such a way that they make sense, and not be filled with incomprehensible parameters. The best Permalinks are “hackable,” meaning a user might modify the link text in their browser to navigate to another section or listing of the weblog. For example, this is how the default Permalink to a story might look in a default WordPress installation:

/index.php?p=423

How is a user to know what “p” represents? Where did the number 423 come from?

In contrast, here is a well-structured, “Pretty” Permalink which could link to the same article, once the installation is configured to modify permalinks:

/archives/2003/05/23/my-cheese-sandwich/

One can easily guess that the Permalink includes the date of the posting, and the title, just by looking at the URL. One might also guess that hacking the URL to be /archives/2003/05/ would get a list of all the postings from May of 2003. Pretty (cool). For more information on possible Permalink patterns in WordPress, see Using Permalinks.

Blog by email

Some blogging tools offer the ability to email your posts directly to your blog, all without direct interaction through the blogging tool interface. WordPress offers this cool feature. Using email, you can now send in your post content to a pre-determined email address & voila! Your post is published!

Post Slugs

If you’re using Pretty Permalinks, the Post Slug is the title of your article post within the link. The blogging tool software may simplify or truncate your title into a more appropriate form for using as a link. A title such as “I’ll Make A Wish” might be truncated to “ill-make-a-wish”. In WordPress, you can change the Post Slug to something else, like “make-a-wish”, which sounds better than a wish made when sick.

Excerpt

Excerpts are condensed summaries of your blog posts, with blogging tools being able to handle these in various ways. In WordPress, Excerpts can be specifically written to summarize the post, or generated automatically by using the first few paragraphs of a post or using the post up to a specific point, assigned by you.

Plugins

Plugins are cool bits of programming scripts that add additional functionality to your blog. These are often features which either enhance already available features or add them to your site.

WordPress offers simple and easy ways of adding Plugins to your blog. From the Administraton Panel, there is a Plugin Page. Once you have uploaded a Plugin to your WordPress plugin directory, activate it from the Plugins Management SubPanel, and sit back and watch your Plugin work. Not all Plugins are so easily installed, but WordPress Plugin authors and developers make the process as easy as possible.

Basics-A Few Blogging Tips

Starting a new blog is difficult and this can put many people off, there are then other people who have blogs with no comments or visits. You want to stand out from this crowd of millions of bloggers, you want to be one of the few hundred thousand blogs that are actually visited. So here are some simple tips to help you on your way to blogging mastery:

1. Post regularly, but don’t post if you have nothing worth posting about.
2. Stick with only a few specific genres to talk about.
3. Don’t put ‘subscribe’ and ‘vote me’ links all over the front page until you have people that like your blog enough to ignore them (they’re usually just in the way).
4. Use a clean and simple theme if at all possible.
5. Enjoy, blog for fun, comment on other peoples’ blogs (as they normally visit back).

Categories are a way of grouping together related posts. A post can belong to multiple categories, and categories can be organized into a hierarchy.

Note that WordPress also provides tags – you may wish to use these in addition to categories. Each post must belong to at least one category.

Categories are added to posts using the categories module, or from the edit posts screen.

You can add new categories and manage existing ones from the Categories dashboard page. Click on the Posts > Categories menu.

You will be presented with a list of your existing categories and a method of adding new categories.

Adding a category

You can add a new category by filling out the fields:

Category name – As expected, the name of your category

Category parent – If you want to create hierarchical categories then select the parent category, otherwise leave at none

Description – Describe what the category is for. This description will appear as a tooltip if you use the category widget

Click Add category to add the new details to the list.

Managing existing categories

The list of categories will show you the name, description, and number of posts belonging to each category. If you move your mouse over a category a set of options will appear allowing you to edit, quickedit, or delete that category:

If you click on quickedit the category will change into an edit box and you can rename the category quickly:

If you click on edit you will taken to a separate page where you can edit the name, parent, and description. This functions exactly the same as in adding a category.

Clicking on delete will delete that category.

Deleting a category

When a category is deleted, all posts only in that category will be assigned to the default category. If a post was also in other categories it will remain untouched.

Note that you cannot delete the default category.

Bulk actions

If you have a lot of categories that you want to delete. you can use the bulk actions feature. Select each category you want to delete using the checkbox to the left of the category name.

If you want to select all categories click the checkbox at the top:

From the bulk actions menu select delete and then click on apply. The categories will be deleted.

Converting categories to tags

If you change your mind about using categories and instead want to convert them to tags you can do so using the category to tag convertor. At the bottom of the manage categories screen is a link to the category to tag convertor.

Clicking this will take you to a screen where you can select which categories to convert to tags. Make your selection, click on convert categories to tags, and your categories will be removed and tags assigned to the posts that used to be in those categories.

Once upon a time, WordPress.com used to only allow categories to be used.

These allowed for a broad grouping of post topics, but when you wanted to describe a post in more specific terms, more categories were required. That lead to very long category lists inside the blog and very long lists in Categories Widgets. It was also confusing in that what we said were categories other services said were tags.

So we now have tags, as well.

Tags are similar, but instead of a list of words to choose from, you write them in a list (separated by commas) in the Tags Module of your post editing screen. They are free form words and generally describe your post in more detail.

For example, a post titled “Last Night At Burger King” might be filed under the “Dinner” category, but could have tags such as, “burger, chicken fries, chocolate shake, dr. pepper”. Get the gist?

We understand that it may be a bit confusing upon first glance (especially to new bloggers), so here are some common questions and answers that may help you out:

Is Tag the same as tag ? Yes. Capitals letters do not change a tag. Blogging is the same as blogging.

Is there a limit to the number of tags I can have? Yes, the sky. In other words, no.

Tag and Category Archive URLs: If you publish a post attached to a category ‘food’, the URL will look like this:

http://blog.wordpress.com/category/food/

The same post using the tag ‘food’ will look like this:

http://blog.wordpress.com/tag/food/

If you publish a post attached to a category ‘food’ and with the tag ‘rice’, the URLs will look like this:

http://faq.wordpress.com/category/food/

http://faq.wordpress.com/tag/rice/

Is there any advantage to using tags or categories, or both? No. There is no advantage within WordPress.com and external search engines using one or the other.

Do I have to use tags? The use of tags is entirely optional (although each post must be attached to at least one category).

Are categories and tags hierarchical? Categories can be treated that way by making categories children of another. Tags, however, exist in their own right and have no set relationship to anything else.

Adding and deleting categories Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this VideoPress video. Adding & managing categories after the fact Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this VideoPress video. swfobject.embedSWF("http://s0.videopress.com/player.swf?v=1.01", "vvq-1337-wpvideo-1", "605", "452", "10", vvqexpressinstall, { "wmode": "opaque", "allowfullscreen": "true", "allowscriptaccess": "always", "guid": "0M42sPky", "seamlesstabbing": "true", "overstretch": "true" }, vvqparams, vvqattributes); swfobject.embedSWF("http://s0.videopress.com/player.swf?v=1.01", "vvq-1337-wpvideo-2", "605", "452", "10", vvqexpressinstall, { "wmode": "opaque", "allowfullscreen": "true", "allowscriptaccess": "always", "guid": "duPLFt5X", "seamlesstabbing": "true", "overstretch": "true" }, vvqparams, vvqattributes);

While WordPress.com doesn’t allow you to use potentially dangerous code on your blog, there is a way to post source code for viewing. We have created a shortcode you can wrap around source code that preserves its formatting and even provides syntax highlighting for certain languages, like so:

[sourcecode language="css"] #button { font-weight: bold; border: 2px solid #fff; }[/sourcecode]

To accomplish the above, just wrap your code in these tags:

[sourcecode language="css"] your code here [/sourcecode]

The language parameter controls how the code is syntax highlighted. The following languages are supported:

• actionscript3
• bash
• coldfusion
• cpp
• csharp
• css
• delphi
• erlang
• diff
• groovy
• javascript
• java
• javafx
• objc
• perl
• php
• text
• powershell
• python
• ruby
• scala
• sql
• vb
• xml

If the language parameter is not set, it will default to “text” (no syntax highlighting).

Code in between the source code tags will automatically be encoded for display, you don’t need to worry about HTML entities or anything.

Configuration Parameters

The shortcodes also accept a variety of configuration parameters that you may use to customize the output. All are completely optional.

• autolinks (true/false) — Makes all URLs in your posted code clickable. Defaults to true.
• collapse (true/false) — If true, the code box will be collapsed when the page loads, requiring the visitor to click to expand it. Good for large code posts. Defaults to false.
• firstline (number) — Use this to change what number the line numbering starts at. It defaults to 1.
• gutter (true/false) — If false, the line numbering on the left side will be hidden. Defaults to true.
• highlight (comma-seperated list of numbers) — You can list the line numbers you want to be highlighted. For example “4,7,19″.
• htmlscript (true/false) — If true, any HTML/XML in your code will be highlighted. This is useful when you are mixing code into HTML, such as PHP inside of HTML. Defaults to false and will only work with certain code languages.
• light (true/false) — If true, the gutter (line numbering) and toolbar (see below) will be hidden. This is helpful when posting only one or two lines of code. Defaults to false.
• padlinenumbers (true/false/integer) — Allows you to control the line number padding. true will result in automatic padding, false will result in no padding, and entering a number will force a specific amount of padding.
• toolbar (true/false) — If false, the toolbar containing the helpful buttons that appears when you hover over the code will not be shown. Defaults to true.
• wraplines (true/false) — If true, line line wrapping will be disabled. This will cause a horizontal scrollbar to appear for long lines of code.

Here’s some examples of the above parameters in action:

[sourcecode language="text" firstline="8" highlight="10,11" padlinenumbers="false"] This line is not highlighted. This line is highlighted. This line is highlighted. This line is not highlighted. [/sourcecode]

[sourcecode language="html" padlinenumbers="4"] <strong>This</strong> is a short snippit of <code>code</code> with padlinenumbers set to 4. [/sourcecode]

And here’s a larger code block to see it all in action. It is set to the PHP language with “htmlscript” enabled and line number 12 highlighted.

[sourcecode language="php" htmlscript="true" highlight="12"] <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <title>WordPress.com Code Example</title> </head> <body> <h1>WordPress.com Code Example</h1>

<p><?php echo ‘Hello World!’; ?></p>

<p>This line is highlighted.</p>

<p>This line is very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very long.</p>

<div class="foobar"> This is an example of smart tabs. </div>

<p><a href="http://wordpress.com/">WordPress.com</a></p> </body> </html>[/sourcecode]

Credits

Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter project was used in the implemention of this feature. If you are a WordPress.org user and would like to use this feature on your self-hosted blog, it is available as a plugin.

WordPress.com is a type of shared environment, where all users are running off of the same software. This is great because it allows us at Automattic to update millions of blogs at the same time with a single click. It means we can fix bugs or offer new features very quickly, which is a win for you as users. Having all users running on the same software can also be dangerous. If we aren’t careful, one user has the potential to take down the entire site. So this is why we need to limit some of the things you post on your blog.

If you wrote some code or pasted it in from another web site and then it disappeared after publishing the post, the code is likely being stripped out. If you feel it’s being stripped out improperly or if you would like to suggest additional types of code we should allow, please contact support.

HTML Tags

WordPress.com allows the following HTML code in your posts, pages, and widgets:

address, a, abbr, acronym, area, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, cite, class, code, col, del, dd, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, img, ins, kbd, li, map, ol, p, pre, q, s, span, strike, strong, sub, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, tr, tt, ul, var

Check out W3 Schools for more information about what each of these HTML codes are used for.

If you are familiar with HTML, you’ll notice that codes such as embed, frame, iframe, form, input, object, textarea and others are missing from the above list. Those codes are not allowed on WordPress.com for security reasons.

Javascript

Users are not allowed to post JavaScript on WordPress.com blogs. Javascript can be used for malicious purposes. Your code and intentions may be perfectly harmless, but it does not mean all javascript will be okay. The security of all the blogs is a top priority and until we can guarantee scripting languages will not be harmful they will not be permitted.

If you need proof of what Javascript can do, it has taken both MySpace.com and LiveJournal offline in the past.

You may want a bit of Javascript and it may well be harmless but as soon as the system allows it someone will try and exploit it.

JavaScript from trusted partners, such as YouTube and Google Video, is converted into a WordPress shortcode when a post is saved.

Flash and Other Embeds

Flash and all other embeds are not allowed in WordPress.com posts, pages, or text widgets. For security reasons we remove the tags needed for these to work. Your intentions may be innocent but someone somewhere would try to damage the site, affecting all of our users.

There are several safe ways to post Videos, Audio, and other items to your WordPress.com blog.

Posting Source Code

See our Posting Source Code article for details on how to easily post source code on your blog.

There are several different ways to split content in your blog posts and pages

• The More Tag
• NextPage
• Page Jumps
• Excerpts

The More Tag

You can split the posts of your blog so that only the first part of the post is displayed on the home and archive (monthly, category, etc…) views. When you do this, a link will be placed directly after your excerpt, pointing the reader to the full content of the article.

You can find the insert More tag button in the first row of the visual editor toolbar or by pressing Alt+Shift+T:

Using the More tag

1) Go to Posts -> Add New in your dashboard to create a new blog entry (this does not work with Pages).

2) Begin writing your post. When you decide that you want to cut it off, you can insert the More tag to effectively split the post (mark where the excerpt officially ends). You will see, in the visual editor, the More tag as such:

3) Finish writing your post.

4) Publish the post and view the front page of your blog. You should see your post effectively split using the More tag. Click on the link, and you will be taken to the post in its full form. The front page of your blog should display the post similar to:

But wait, there’s more!

You can further customize the message that displays in the link to the full post content.

You will need to do this in the HTML view of your editor. Once you are change to the HTML editor, look for this code:

<!–more–>

Custom “Read More” Message

To customize the message, simply add a space after <!–more, and turn it into something like this…

<!–more But wait, there’s more–>

The front page of your blog should now display your post as such:

Note: You will need to customize the message for each post; you cannot declare a global message that will take effect on each and every post of your blog that uses the More tag.

Formatting Issues

If the More tag is inserted after writing a post, formatting errors can occur. The issue occurs when you insert the More tag using the visual editor, but it is actually placed within another HTML tag. As an example:

<strong>Oh man, this post is messed up.<!–more–></strong>

The above will cause the rest of the posts on your front page (or in an archive) to be formatted as bold, sometimes including your sidebar contents. Not cool. It can also make the sidebar fall to the bottom of the page. To fix the issue, just place the More tag on the outside of any pesky, closing HTML tags, like so:

<strong>Oh man, this post is messed up.</strong><!–more–>

Make sure to go into the HTML view of the problematic post and move your More tag to outside of any HTML tags (this includes div, strong, em, etc…).

Note: Copying and pasting content from rich text editors such as Microsoft Word often causes problems because a lot of extra HTML is used that can interfere with the More tag. Consider using a plain text editor, such as Notepad, instead or use the Paste from Word button.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this VideoPress video. return to top

NextPage (Pagination)

Did you know you could split a post/page up into different web pages so that is has pagination? All you have to do is type:

<!–nextpage–>

into the HTML editor where you would like your page splits to appear.

You can use it throughout a long post to make two, three, four, or more pages out of the single post. When you view your post on your site, the multi-page links appear as links at the bottom. The links below are an example of the feature in action.

Page Jumps

Page jumping is where you click a link and instantly get moved somewhere further up or down a long page. Try it:

CLICK HERE TO JUMP

Why use Page Jumps?

You might have a list of items at the top of the post and using these jump links means you can allow someone to jump straight to a place rather than scrolling down and looking. You could also use it to make a post jump all over the place is you wanted. return to top

Create a Page Jump

The link starts it (the ‘Click me’) is written like this:

<a href=”#unique-identifier”>Click me</a>

Note the #

The link where that goes to is written like this:

<a name=”unique-identifier”>See?</a>

The #unique-identifier matches the name=”unique-identifier”.

So you could have <a href=”#another-identifier”>Jump 2</a> to <a name=”another-identifier”>Place 2</a>

At the beginning of the post or page, add this before all of the other HTML:

<a name=”top”></a>

and anywhere you want a link to zoom them to the top of the page, you put this:

<a href=”#top”>top</a>

Okay, now jump back to the top. return to top

Excerpts

Excerpts are summaries of a blog posts that are shown in feeds and possibly on the home and archives pages, depending on the blog’s theme. When you use an excerpt, an automatic link will be placed directly after it pointing the reader to the full content of the post. When creating a new post or editing an existing post, you can use the Excerpt module to create one.

Note that only some themes utilize the excerpt feature. If your theme does not support excerpts, you can still split post contents into summaries using the MORE tag. return to top

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Problems

Microsoft Word is a fine word processor for producing documents to be shared or printed, with a wealth of print-based options for indexing, and producing table of contents. As a web publishing tool it is a little less than ideal and produces very messy HTML. The same applies when using OpenOffice, or other word processors.

When text is pasted it initially looks fine:

But looking at the HTML code you can see that it is full of additional tagging information.

The more you edit this post the worse the situation gets. Should a problem occur you will then be faced with a lot of work trying to figure out what has happened and how to fix it. The same code above can be written a lot more cleanly using the WordPress visual editor:

Using Word Cleanly

If you decide that you still want to use Word then you should use the Word cleanup feature to remove all extraneous tags from your text. From the visual editor click on the show kitchen sink button:

Then click on the paste Word button:

A window will appear where you can insert your Word content.

When satisfied you can then click insert and it will clean the content and insert it into your post. Note that all your formatting will be removed so any styles will need to be added in afterwards.

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There are very key differences between posts and pages in your WordPress blog.

Posts

Posts are listed in reverse chronological order on the blog home page or on the posts page if you have set one in Settings > Reading. If you have created any sticky posts, those will appear before the other posts. Posts can be found in the Archives, Categories, Recent Posts, and other widgets. Posts are also displayed in the RSS feed of the blog. You can control how many posts are displayed at a time in the Reading Settings. The URL for a post includes the date the post was published like this: http://blogname.com/2008/11/30/post-title/

For search engine optimization purposes, we take out the date feature of your blog post.  Not using the date in the url gives your blog posting a strong url name that is keyword sensitive and search engine friendly.  The default url name will be the title of your blog posting: so you should put some thought in to the blog post titles you use–are they keywords people are searching for?

Pages

Pages are static and are not listed by date. Pages do not use tags or categories. An ‘About’ page is the classic example. Pages are displayed in the sidebar using the Pages widget, and some themes display pages in tabs at the top of the blog. If you have 50 pages and you use the Pages widget, then all pages will be listed all the time. The URL for a page looks like this: http://blogname.com/page-title/

How many can I have?

There is no limit on the number of posts or pages you can have.

How do I post to a Page?

It’s not possible to “post” to a page; pages are static entities that only can be edited. Consider using posts and categories instead if you are using pages for several different subjects.

Posts (or articles) are the search engine magnets that (more often than not) will bring new visitors to your website.  The posts on your website are organized by choosing the appropriate category, series and/or tag.  The two videos below teach you how to navigate the blog article editing screen.

There are several different ways to create a new post, but here is the method we suggest you use:

Posts > Add New (located in the left dashboard menu)

Writing and publishing a post

The thing you’ll probably be doing most with WordPress – writing and publishing posts – is covered in this short flyby tutorial

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this VideoPress video. Saving and returning to draft posts & pages

If you’d like to save your work and come back to it another time, without putting it out for the world to see, WordPress gives you various draft options. This video talks you through the process.

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