Cajen Tutorials

Starting a Blog : Finishing touches

Posted by User Image Cajen | Filed under blogging, tutorial series

Start.

If you haven’t, please read part 1 and part 2 of this tutorial series. Now that you have a working blog, you can now start publishing content. But before you do, WordPress offers a lot of customization options to give your blog its identity. I will be briefly touch on a couple of them now.
First is your blog’s theme. If you noticed, the default theme, is very clean and simple.

Default theme

However, it’s too simple and ‘deafulty’ for my taste. There are tons of themes that you can choose from. You can visit this link to get more themes, or you can Google for them. The theme that I have chosen is made by Chris Pearson – Cutline theme v1.3. If you have chosen your theme, you can easily apply that theme by uploading the theme’s directory to folder ‘wp-content/themes directory/’. After uploading, login to your wordpress dashboard. If you followed my instructions from the previous posts, it should be: http://yoursitename.site88.com/wp-admin. There are four main tabs in your dashboard – Write, Manage, Design, and Comments. Click Design.

Themes

Wordpress makes everything pretty much simple and straightforward. Current theme IS your current theme, and just below it you can see the available themes that you uploaded. Clicking on any of the available themes will automatically apply that theme to your blog. It’s really that simple. Applying the Cutline them, mine now looks like this.

Cutline theme

Next thing that you might want to tinker with is WIDGETS! Widgets are snippets of code that can be inserted on your pages. Their use ranges from keeping track of your recent posts to displaying calendars to search boxes, ad infinitum. You can again google widgets to get more information or to download some of them. Wordpress already has some built-in widgets that can be readily used. You can access this by clicking Design -> Widgets. It’s just beside Themes. This blog currently has a search bar, archives, recent posts, categories, tags, links, technorati, and a counter. All of those can be found under widgets except the last two. For custom widgets, all you need to do is to get the code and paste it using the generic Text widget. For the counter, I use google analytics, but there are other options like sitemeter. By the way, if you want to edit the default Link title (blogroll), you can easily do so by clicking Manage then Link Categories. Click on blogroll, then edit the name. You can also add existing ones here. And to add or edit links, you can go to Manage then Links.

At this point, I’ll let you explore and do your own tinkering. I look forward to reading your first post on your new blog. And if you have any tips or tricks that you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to post a comment. In the future, ill write about PHP programming and writing your own customization to your theme and probably create our own. Till then!

End.

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Tags: blogging, cutline, technorati, themes, widgets

Permalink | May 11th, 2008

5 Responses to “Starting a Blog : Finishing touches”

Starting a Blog: PT. 2 Setting up your blog Says:
May 11th, 2008 at 8:20 am
[...] ← Starting a Blog : PT.1 The Prerequisites Starting a Blog : PT. 3 Finishing touches [...]
CajenSoft » Blog Archive » Starting a Blog - Wordpress: Install and Publish Says:
May 11th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
[...] do. You can play with the settings, assign widgets, change your themes or publish your first post! In Part 3 we will discuss finishing touches. In the meantime, go crazy over your new blog! Leave a comment if [...]
Fernando (Who am I?) Says:
July 9th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Hello Cajen, thanks to your tutorial I was able to create a Wordpress blog. But I\’m having some problems. The blog doesn\’t show any images. I\’ve tried different themes, and the pictures that comes with the themes doesn\’t show up.
I\’ve also tried uploading my own pictures and replace the theme pictures with my pictures, but they still don\’t show up. I\’m pretty sure it\’s not an uploading problem or a problem with the image files.
The weird thing is, if I right click in the place whete the pictures should be, I\’m able to see the picture properties, so it acts as if the pictures were there, we just can\’t see them.

I\’ve been reading many sites, trying to find a solution for this problem and I\’ve tried changing the htaccess file (although I don\’t know anything about this subject), I\’ve tried changing the permission levels and I\’ve also read it could be something related to hotlinking (but I don\’t know how to change this).
I tried to see if it was a problem with the host server, but I don\’t know anything about this, so it\’s hard to know what to look for.

Well, this is the adress of my blog: http://www.fmf-design.net63.net

I would be really thankfull if you could help me.
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2.6 (1 person)
Cajen (Who am I?) Says:
July 10th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
hey Fernando! I’m glad this has helped you. i’ve left a msg at your blog, pls check it. email me for any questions. thanks and good luck to your blog!
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2.6 (1 person)
grace (Who am I?)(new comment) Says:
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:04 am
Hi.I am a newbie here,in fact i just launched my first blog just to day so i could taste Blogger.com and it’s features.I have a hard time linking my site or following other sites. can you teach how to use the linking and following. how do i know if some one visit my site? I hope you don’t mind my asking.thanks
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2.5 (1 person)