Sana Ahmed, of xynomedia, gave a workshop on blogging via the Wordpress platform at the BlogPaws 2010 West pet blogging and social media conference in Denver on September 9-11, 2010.

1. BlogPaws Presentation: Sana Ahmed’s co-presentation with Nikki Jeske on Wordpress
Vocabulary for starters
-The front-end of a website is what a web user sees when visiting your website.
-The back-end of a website is what the web administrator sees when updating your
website.
Walking through Wordpress
Wordpress is a Content Management Software (CMS). You will use Wordpress to manage
the content of your website (a.ka. web-log or blog).
After Wordpress has been successfully installed on your web servers, you should see the
following:
1. Wordpress Login: www.YOURWEBSITE.com/wp-admin
- Remember, typing in /wp-admin after your website domain name.
- It will take you to the login of the back-end of your site.

2.
Edit Posts allows you to review drafts and published posts. Under the post title, the
following links pop up: edit, quick edit, view or trash.

3. 13. Under Add New post, you’ll see a page with many fields:
In this field, you type in all the text you’d like to appear in your blog post. This is where you upload
any files and media you want to appear in the post.
Title of the post goes here:

4. The text of your blog post goes here:
-For your basic blogging purposes, you’ll always work in the “visual” blog box. You’ll only
need to touch the “html” blog box for adding html codes like “widgets” and so on.
Make life easy and work under the “visual” blog post.
This WISYWIG editor (what you see is what you get) should remind you of Microsoft ® Word:
‐This WISYWIG editor is your pens, pencils, crayons and paint brushes to design and write your blog
posts.
This is where you upload your media from:
adds an image
adds video
adds an audio file
adds other media files

5. Excerpts are quick summaries of your blog that you manually put in:
-You may or may not want to insert quick summaries depending on your blog’s theme
layout. Sometimes Wordpress automatically chooses the first few lines of your post as your
blog summary.
Trackbacks: The English major in me loves trackbacks. I want to let people or websites
know that I’ve linked to them. It’s web etiquette of thanking that web source.
Custom Fields:
-You may or may not want to insert quick summaries depending on your blog’s theme
layout. Sometimes Wordpress automatically chooses the first few lines of your post as your
blog summary.
Trackbacks: The English major in me loves trackbacks. I want to let people or websites know that
I’ve linked to them. It’s web etiquette of thanking that web source.
Custom Fields: this is the technical part of Wordpress. Depending on your theme, you will use
custom fields for various things such as showing a thumbnail picture on the front page.

6. You’ll have to read the instructions of your theme to know which custom field names to use and
what value to put in.
Discussions:
You’ll check the Allow Comments and Allow trackbacks and pingbacks if you want
anyone on the web to comment on your blog, and notify you that they linked to your content.
Publish:
The Publish feature (on the right hand side of your blog post box) has several features you want to
take advantage of.
-Save Draft: the save draft allows you to save what you’ve typed and publish it at a later
time.

7. -Preview: this handy preview button allows you to view how your post would appear if you
did publish it at that moment.
-Status: allows you to save the file as a “draft” or as “pending review.” Pending review (in
the status pull down menu) will remind you to review it at another time.
-Visibility: Visibility allows you publish the post as
‐ public; “stick this post to the front page” allows you to permanently stick the post to the front
page.
-Password Protected: requires a password for web users to view the post. (Nota Bene:
don’t post anything highly confidential here in hopes that it will be truly password protected).
-Private: this will publish the post but only administrators logged into the site will be able to
see the private post.
-Publish immediately or pick a date and time: Welcome to blogging automation on
Wordpress! If you choose to publish your post at a later time, you can insert the day and
time you’d like the post to appear.
‐This feature is great for anyone who has lots of blog posts but wants to spread them out over a
certain period of time (i.e. professors, students, bloggers with a lot to say). You can publish blogs in
moderation if you wish to do so!
Post tags: -Here is where you tag your post. You can “tag” your post with whatever your
blog post is about. It’s ideal to use a few general tags along with a few specific ones.
If you have a search toolbar on your website, web users can find a blog post with the help of your
tags.

8. Categories: You can select the category in which you want your blog post to appear.
- You can create a category and have a parent category above it.
Categories will keep the content on your site organized.
If you have drop down navigation menus on your website, you’ll see your blog post filed in its
appropriate category.
Post tags:
Post tags show you all of your tags that you’ve used in your blog posts.

9. Scroll down and you can add new post tags here:
Depending on your theme, you may see the tag slug and description of your post tags.

10.
Add Categories:
You can add categories here.
-A category slug name will appear in your web post URL, if you set it up in your Settings.
-After you name the category, the category slug determines how your category name will
appear in the web post URL.
-If you want to have a category parent, you can do so here.
-You can add a quick description of your category; your theme may or many not show it.
-Be sure to press the Add Category button to save your category details.
You have now just finished exploring the Post module in your wordpress panel