Tim Woolfson – timwoolfson.com

I figure that I’ll be blogging about many things, but certainly I want to blog about culture: music, books etc..
Apart from my posts about the making of this blog, my first “real” post happened to be about the band Blind Melon.
I wanted to add an affiliate link to a site where my readers could buy the music, book, video etc. that I was blogging about.
I was amazed by how easy the Amazon Associates scheme is to join and how decent the tools they provide are.
I decided to take the embeded YouTube links off my Blind Melon post and use an Amazon widget instead.

Originally I decided to embed a couple of videos from YouTube for my post on Blind Melon. Here’s how you’d do this:

Follow the instructions in my earlier post to set up a new category (if appropriate) and a new post. Enter the surrounding text for your post if you want then on YouTube under the video to the right click the <Embed> button, choose appropriate settings, if you haven’t changed the template you’ll want the 480 pixels wide option.

<object width=”480″ height=”385″><param name=”movie” value=

Copy the code to the clipboard. Then in Word Press go to the HTML view of your post using the button at the right of the main post entry box and paste in the code from YouTube – hit publish and your done.

I thought it might be an interesting exercise to document the steps I took in making this blog.

Registering a domain, Buying a hosting package

I had already registered the domain I wanted, timwoolfson.com some years ago and already had a one site hosting package for it, the same as ProfitableWebProjects a company I’m a director of offers to customers. I had already registered my domain, but if you haven’t registered yours, go to our domain registration page for advice and tools to use to register your domain. If you want to, you can buy one of our one site hosting packages, just buy it online and reply to the order confirmation email letting us know the domain you want to use it with. We’ll contact you by email or by phone if you give us your phone number to talk you through the easy steps you need to take to associate your domain with your hosting package so everything works. We’ll also let you know the username, password and the web address to access the control panel for your hosting.

Don’t worry, if you’ve already bought your hosting elsewhere, you can still use these instructions – most hosting companies will provide instructions on how to install the most popular content management systems!)

Installing WordPress

With our hosting, you simply log in to the web based control panel, and install WordPress like this:

1. Click Fantastico de Luxe
2. Choose WordPress from the left hand menu
3. Choose New Installation
4. Leave install on domain set as it is (unless you know better)
5. Leave install in directory blank (unless you know better)
6. Enter the username and password you’d like to use for administration.
   Use a password that you can remember. Don’t be too obvious. Use a long password. Use a combination of letters and numbers.
7. Set the admin nickname – this will be the name displayed when you author content and interact with your site in general.
8. Set the admin email address
9. Give the site a name – you can leave this as the domain name or change it – put the search phrase you would most like your site to be found in search engines for.
10. Give the site a description. This should be less than 168 characters and would be the description you would ideally like to appear in search engines about your website when someone searches for the phrase you placed in the site name#
11. Don’t worry too much about these last 2, you can change them later.
12. Click install word press.
13. Check the info you entered and OK screen 2
14. At screen 3 click on the link to your wordpress admin area then add this to your bookmarks…
    In case you forget it will be http://www.example.com/wp-admin/

Inside WordPress

You’re presented with the main wordpress dashboard – there are many options here – I decided to get straight into it and write the first post – this one.

Setting up a category

So I went to posts (top left), I already new that I would want to categorize my content, I wasn’t sure exactly all the categories I would want at this stage but my idea was to post the story of the creation of this blog so I knew I would need a category for this. I decided to be a little bit influenced by Hollywood and so label this category: “The making of”.

So I clicked on categories which was the fourth item in the left hand menu,

I gave my category a name, following the on screen instructions in Category Slug:

“The “slug” is the URL-friendly version of the name. It is usually all lowercase and contains only letters, numbers, and hyphens.”

I decided to go with “the_making_of” as my category slug. Using underscores instead of spaces is a good idea because spaces are bad characters to use in filenames but seperating words with spaces is useful in many human languages to allow easy reading and also helps out search engines – “the_making_of” is much more meaningful to both humans and search engines than “themakingof” for example and than “TheMakingOf”

I understood that Category Parent would be useful in the future if I wanted to have a heirarchy of categories – I thought later that perhaps in “The making of” category I might add child categories of “Design”, “Features” etc.

So, since “The making of” would be a top-level category I left the category parent blank.

I understood that the description was likely to be used for the meta-description of the page. This is a tag that appears in the html output and describes the content of the page to the search engines. Remembering the guidelines mentioned earlier (less than 168 characters, the text I’d like to appear beneath the title in search engine results) and also knowing that it’s important therefore that the description compels users to click, I thought about the types of phrases (search phrases) that people might be searching for where they’d find this content useful. Things like “How to install word press”, “Step by step instructions for word press installation”, “How to make a word press blog” came into my mind. So I wrote. “Tim Woolfson, a director of Profitable Web Projects provides a step by step history of the making of his blog using WordPress. You could follow these instructions to make your own WordPress blog…”

I googled for a “character counter” and found a page where I could copy and paste this description and immediately findout how many characters there were. The answer was 197. So I needed to trim 29 characters from my description.
Without getting too bogged down here I improved my description to:
“How to make a WordPress blog: a step by step history of the making of this blog using WordPress. Follow these instructions to make your own WordPress blog.”

Later I decided to change the category name to “The Making of this Blog” to make it clearer for readers what this category is about.

Then clicked add category.

Adding the first post

Next, under posts, back in the left hand menu at the top, I chose Add New and entered this post. The top box is for the title of the post, I decided to jump first into the main body of the post which is the second box. You’ll see there are two options at the top right, one is “Visual” and the other “HTML”. Visual means that you use what is known as a WYSIWIG (What you see is what you get) interface meaning just like with Microsoft Word, you enter text and use the tools in the toolbar above to format the text. HTML is the HyperText Markup Language or computer code used for web content. I decided to use the Visual/WYSIWIG editor because I figured people reading and using this post would probably find it easier at this stage.

Adding links

I wanted to add some links to the text so I hovered over the tools in the toolbar reading the description that popped up when I hover over each one until I found “Insert/edit link (Alt+Shift+A)” so then I highlighted “one site hosting package” in the first paragraph and clicked the tool.

In a separate tab in my browser I navigated to the page I wanted to link to and then copied and pasted the address from the address bar of the browser into the link URL box. You can use the target box to choose if you want when users click on the link for them to stay in the same window or tab of their browser – i.e. to leave the current page and go to the page you’re linking to, or to open the link in a new window (or tab). Generally, if you’re linking to another page of your site(s) you’ll leave this set at “not set” which will have the same affect as setting it to “open link in the same window”, it’s better to leave it on not set though. If you want to link to someone else’s site but you prefer that the user also keeps your page open you can use “open link in a new window”. Do remember though that users are only using your site because they want to, if you’re providing a useful list of links to other sites, it might be helpful for the user to keep your page open and so be able to easily visit all the links without getting lost. On the other hand, lots of users know that they can hold down control (or apple) while clicking on a link to get it to open in a new tab or window anyway and those that don’t will likely be confused or irritated by windows or tabs opening unexpectedly. Use the “open link in a new window” setting sparingly, users can always use the back button in their browser if they want to get back to your page. Definitely don’t use it when linking to pages within your site.

For title I entered a bit more informative information for the user about where the link would take them: “One site hosting package from Profitable Web Projects”

I didn’t set a class at this stage. I pressed insert and the link was made for me. I went through the rest of the post adding links where I wanted them.

Adding Headings

I wanted to add some headings to make it easy for both people and search engines to understand my content. I clicked on the icon at the far right of the toolbar labelled “Show/Hide Kitchen Sink (Alt+Shift+Z)” and found the drop down box at the right of the second line of tools. Knowing that the title of the post which I would put in the top box later would be my Heading1, I used Heading2 for my headings as these would be secondary to the title for the post and Heading3 for sub-headings. Just like with the links, selecting the text and applying the Heading2 setting.

Lists

I wanted my instructions for installing WordPress to be a numbered list so I used the Ordered List tool which has 1,2,3 for it’s icon to set this up. I highlighted all the text and applied this tool but I then had to use the return key between each line to get the numbering to work. This was difficult with the small size of the box so I used the “toggle full screen” tool to make it easier.

Other mark-up and little tricks

• I used italics for the aside about passwords.

• I had already typed up most of my text in notepad – this is a very simple text editing program that comes with Microsoft Windows – Start, Programs, Accessories, Notepad. So I copied and pasted it in here. I needed to go through my post making sure I’d used consistent formatting throughout.
  • I used shift+enter to start new lines without any line break and enter to get a line break.
  • Sometimes, my paragraphs of text would take on the format of the headings (when I deleted the space between the heading and the paragraph to put a single press of the enter key between the heading and the paragraph. I simply highlighted the paragraph that had got formatted as a heading and reapplied the paragraph style using the drop down on the second line of the toolbar.
• Once I’d finished the post I used the toggle full screen mode to tool to get back to the Add Post screen.
• I spell checked the post, correcting the words that were underlined in red and if I didn’t find a suggestion but needed to correct the word, reclicking on the spell check tool to get the red underlining back.
• I added the post title.
• Ticked the category I’d set up.
• I did do some stuff with the permalinks but I’ll talk about that in another post.
• I made this list using the unordered list tool
• I pressed publish over on the right hand side. Then in another tab navigated to my domain – timwoolfson.com and there was my post. I reviewed it carefully, returning to the tab where the edit post screen was now available and made several adjustments – each time, clicking update on the right hand side and then returning to the tab where I could view it as the public would view it, using the refresh button in the browser to load the latest version.

Tidying up the default content

• I got rid of  the “hello world” post by going to posts, checking the tick box next to the hello world post and hitting the option to trash.
• I clicked on pages, clicked on about, where it says Status on the right I clicked edit and changed the Status to Draft. This unpublished the default about page – I’ll put some content on there in due course and republish it.