- A Photo Blog Can Solve Many Problems
- Working with Posts in WordPress
- Adding an Image to Your Post
- Adding Categories & Tags, and Changing Your Publishing Status
- Adding a Gallery of Images to Your Post
- Adding an Animoto Slide Show
- Some Housekeeping Notes on Categories, Tags & Images
- Working with Pages Inside of WordPress
Working with Posts in WordPress
Posts are the most common form of entries on a website page. They can be organized by date, or categorized based on keywords that you choose. You can add things to your posts like single images, galleries of images, and even multimedia content. Whether you use posts or pages on your site, you should read this, because knowing how to do one automatically teaches you how to do the other.
- Step One: Log into your WordPress admin page to get to your WordPress Dashboard (like we talked about in Chapter 3, you can access your admin page by clicking the Log In link at the bottom right of your website or by just adding /wp-login to the end of your URL). Click on the Posts button on the left, and you’ll see a running list of all the posts on the site, who created them, if they appear in a category, if they have tags associated with them (categories and tags are a great way to highlight specific content on the site, making it easier for people to search for things. We’ll talk more about these later), and when they were created. I want to start creating content now, so I’m going to click on Add New from the Posts pop-up menu.
- Step Two: The Add New Post page lets you enter a title for your post, and gives you a field underneath the title for you to enter in your content. You’ll notice that there are formatting buttons across the top and two tabs at the top right of the content field—Visual and HTML. Using the Visual tab is similar to using a word processing or email program, and very straightforward. If you want something in bold, for example, highlight the text and click on the B button.
- Step Three: At any point in time, you can click on the HTML tab at the top right and see what the underlying HTML code looks like. People who are familiar with HTML will be comfortable here. You can also use the formatting buttons that appear across the top of the content field here to format your text.
- Step Four: Clicking on the Preview button in the Publish section at the top right will open a browser tab or window and show you what your content will look like. You can check to see how the content of the page is looking and go back and forth between the Dashboard and your preview to make and see additional changes.
When you do that, you really can’t see how paragraphs, bullets, alignment, and breaks happen on a page, making it harder for you to work down the road.
There are tons of websites out there that create Greek text. More often than not, it’s just random filler text that you can copy-and-paste into your posts and have them look like they have some order to them. These webpages range from straightforward Greek text sites like www.lorem2.com and www.designerstoolbox.com, all the way to the obscure. Want to see something really wild? Go to Communications From Elsewhere (www.elsewhere.org/pomo/) and you can generate an entire post-modernist paper that...well, I won’t ruin the surprise. Go check it out!