What to do first setting up my WordPress blog?

Posted by Wonder
October 1, 2008

After installing, I wrote my first post and upgraded WordPress. All very easy.

I thought perhaps I’d start by adding a theme.

I looked at 3,421 themes and loved hundreds of them before I stumbled across a plugin.

So, the next thing I did was install Bad Behaviour, a plugin I thought I couldn’t live without which I found in my search for an easy to edit theme.

I suppose I’ll have to explain that paranoid action later, too?

Anyway, then, I’m like, what do I do now?

Fortunately for me, I happened across Yan’s blog with a checklist of what to do after you install WordPress. Now, how simple is that?

  1. I’d already added the site name so the first thing I did from Yan’s list was to add a tagline. Not a good one but all I could think of right now.
  2. Of course, I followed his suggestion to add some more ping services. Here’s the list I added:
    • http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/
    • http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
    • http://ping.feedburner.com
    • http://www.bloglines.com/ping
    • http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
    • http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
  3. Next, I attended to my feed and comment settings as Yan directed.
  4. On to creating a new user so I could really be me on my blog and, yes, my name really is “Wonder” and not “admin”.
  5. The next step took me a little time as I didn’t really understand what permalinks were, let alone how to set them up. Yan got me started in the right direction thinking about being a little search engine friendly and I installed Platinum SEO to help me out with that. (I had a bit of a problem there however. Didn’t realize that the folder was inside another folder and loaded the outer folder up to my site. Three hours later, DUH! Not due to the plugin at all but due to my haste to get going!)
  6. Now, I’m up to number 7 on Yan’s list. Pick a theme.

Uh, oh! I’ll be back in a month or three ;)

W

WordPress

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Comments

Oh thanks for having the trust in me and I hope everything is fine over here. However, I think the very first thing you should do is to get yourself a theme. For whatever you do, don’t ever use the default.

Let me know if you need anything else..

Yan

Comment by Blog for Beginners on October 2, 2008 @ 8:15 am

Hey Yan! Thanks for the visit and the great setup tutorial!

I’ll be back over to check out some of your more in depth SEO articles in a bit. Hope you don’t mind I’m adding you to my “Blog Roll” to make it easy to visit :)

I don’t know though, I think this default theme is kind of growing on me already :) Just kidding. I’m looking for a theme but they’re all too “not me”.

Comment by Wonder on October 2, 2008 @ 11:26 am

You are welcome to put me on your blogroll. If you need anything, feel free to let me know….I’m always there.

Yan

Comment by Blog for Beginners on October 6, 2008 @ 11:10 pm

As innocent as a babe unborn ;)

Comment by AbsetTolofoes on November 17, 2008 @ 8:58 am
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