More for Bloggers

Welcome Back!

In the New Bloggers Guide, we made a few references to “another tutorial”. Well, here it is!

There are two areas that are covered in this tutorial:

• Changing how WordPress looks to you when you are logged in to write posts, check your spam queue, etc.
• Additional tools and editing facilities to help you craft your blog posts and manage their publication.

Note: If you are really anxious to learn all about the technical details of WordPress and how to exploit it to the max., there are a ton of books out there to choose from. The only problem is separating the wheat from the chaff. If you do go that route, keep in mind that bridgeblogging.com is set up as a “network of sites” (also known as “WordPress Multi-blog”). The reason it is important is that a lot of code, including all the core WordPress code, is shared among the different blog sites — so yours and everyone else blogging on bridgeblogging.com. That means there are a lot of things you simply cannot change. Also, as a condition of using bridgeblogging.com, we want to maintain the look-and-feel of the site, which includes all the blog sites we host.

Let us start by exploring the WordPress Visual Editor in more detail. In our introductory tutorial we covered some of the basic editing tools. We also referred you to the Tips and Techniques page which includes a description of Bridge Tools II. Below is a picture of the tool-bars that are displayed above the edit pane (if you want to try these things out, open a separate browser window, login and edit (or add) a post.

Remember, if you only see two tool-bars, click the Show/Hide Kitchen Sink button at the extreme right-hand end of the top tool-bar.

Road Map

In order, we will cover:

1. the Visual versus the HTML mode of the WordPress editor (it is called “TinyMCE” by the way)
2. some of the buttons in that top row in more detail than in the introductory tutorial.
3. “Distraction-Free Writing” and “Writing With Fewer Distractions”
4. the tools in the second tool-bar.
5. the Upload/Insert link/button.

In another tutorial, we will tackle a different set of topics, covering such things as managing your posts, comments, spam, etc.

Tables, the third tool-bar, will probably not be used by most of you for day-to-day blogging, so we will leave those for another day as well.

Quick Hint: This tutorial is split into several pages, just as the introductory one was. In this one, if you want to skip a topic, just scroll down to the bottom of the current page and click on the little number to go to the next page.

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