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How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Eight

Donna — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:57:02 +0000

You’ve made it through the first seven steps of the series, “How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas”, and now you finally have all of that setup stuff out of the way. You are ready to begin adding content to your site, in the form of blog posts. A blog post is simply an entry, a piece of content. Your goal is to post an entry at least several times a week, but my preference is once a day if at all possible. Each post will be dedicated to one narrow, concise topic. Let’s say your blog is all about flying kites. A post one day may focus on a broad overview of the different kinds of kites that are available. Another post may give fine details about one particular kite design. Yet another post may be a discussion of the ideal weather conditions for kite flying. And so on and so on…

Although WordPress installs one sample post, you can ignore it for now, and just delete it later. Right now, let’s create our very first real post. Log in to your blog admin (www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin). Click on Write.

As you can see, you have a form in which to begin entering your blog post. Type in a title in the Title field. The title is of utmost importance. Make the title interesting and descriptive. If your post is about perfect weather conditions for kite flying, a good title might be “The Best Weather for Flying a Kite”.

Now enter the actual content of your post in the Post field. You’ll notice that it is similar to writing in Microsoft Word, in that there are a series of buttons that allow you to Bold, Italicize, Center, etc. above the field. Use them as you would in a word processor. You’ll notice a chain button and a broken chain button. The chain button allows you to set up a link to another web page, and the broken chain button will undo the link. So to make some text link to a web page, just highlight the text, click the chain link button, type in the web page URL in the field that pops up, and you’ve got a linked bit of text.

If you want to include a picture in your post, click on the Browse button next to the File field, and choose a picture from your computer to upload. Type in a title (description is not necessary) and click on Upload. Then choose to insert it into your post.

You’ll also want to categorize your posts, so pick from a category to the right, or add a new one. When you are happy with the final result, just click the Publish button. You’ve just blogged!

This is where all the magic begins. What you blog about, and how informative and/or entertaining you are, is all up to you. People often use the phrase “find your voice” when referring to what you, as a blogger, will convey to the readers of your blog. You have to find your own style. Perhaps you are witty or outrageously funny. Perhaps you are an ace at technical writing. Maybe you can describe things or processes so that anyone, even a novice, can understand. Whatever your style is, use it. Your readers will come to know you via your blogging voice. They will appreciate you for who you are.

It does help to read a few great blogs to get a feel for the different kinds of blogging voices and styles that are out there. Don’t copy someone else’s style, but be aware of what people like and what people don’t like. It will be obvious, trust me.

Now go on, start blogging!

“But wait”, you say, “show me the money”! You’re right, I’ve taken you a long way, and yet I still haven’t shown you how you are actually going to make a living from this. Don’t worry, that’s coming next. I haven’t forgotten about the money. For now, just sit back and create some awesome content on your new site by blogging, and then move on to the next part of the series.

The entire series of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas:

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blogging, Content, make a living in your pajamas, Microsoft, word processor, www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin
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How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas – Part Seven

Donna — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 15:08:30 +0000

In Part 6 of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas, you installed WordPress, and were rewarded with a site that is ready to go. It, unfortunately, is an ugly site, and no one wants an ugly site. So today’s lesson is a fun one. Let’s beautify the site and give it some personality – hopefully a bit of yours. You are going to find and use a pre-made theme. There are thousands of them available. The process is straightforward.

Find a theme you like and download it.
Upload it to your blog’s theme directory.
Tell WordPress you wish to use that theme.
Done. Enjoy your new beautiful web site.

I recently made note of what I believe are the best free GPL WordPress themes available. However, there are thousands of choices, so spend the day browsing through them over at themes.wordpress.net. This is a fun chore. I will often take a few hours out of my day just to browse the newest themes. So go find one you like, download it (all are free), and then come back here for detailed instructions on how to upload it and use it for your own blog.

Once you’ve downloaded your new theme, unzip it. If you don’t have a program that can unzip the files, go download and install any of the free zip file programs that PC World recommends.

Now, that it is unzipped, you need to upload the theme folder and all of its contents to your blog’s themes directory. Once again, you’ll go to your site’s control panel (www.yourdomain.com/cpanel) as directed in the email you received from your hosting company, log in, and choose File Manager.

You’ll then choose the public_html folder, by clicking on the little folder picture next to public_html.

Now, you’ll click on the folder next to wp-content, and the folder next to themes, which will take you to the themes directory. This is where you’ll be uploading your new theme folder. Click on the Upload Files link.

Browse your computer for the theme folder you just downloaded and unzipped. Click on Upload and wait until the entire folder and all of its contents have been uploaded to your blog’s theme directory.

Now log into your WordPress admin, by going to www.yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin. Click on Presentation. Look for the theme you just uploaded in the list of Available Themes, click on it, and you are done. Go to www.yourdomain.com to see your brand new, beautiful site.

Let’s do one final thing to our new WordPress blog before we begin writing content. Log in to your admin (www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin), and click on Options. Now click on Permalinks. Select name and date based, and click on the Update Permalink Structure button. Scroll down, and you’ll see a bunch of gobbledygook code listed. Grab all of that code by highlighting it and pressing Ctrl-C. Now open up Notepad on your computer and press Ctrl-V to paste that code into Notepad. Choose File / Save from Notepad’s menu, and type in “.htaccess” in the filename portion and save to your Desktop. DO NOT have .txt at the end. DO have the quotation marks in there. You want to type the quotes. “.htaccess”. Now upload this .htaccess file to the public_html directory in your Cpanel File Manager. Do so by logging into your cpanel (www.yourdomain.com/cpanel), choosing File Manager, clicking on the folder next to public_html, clicking the Upload Files link, browsing to the .htaccess file you just created on your desktop, and clicking the Upload button.

Whew! All done. Although there are a lot of things you can do with your WordPress blog to tweak it a little more, you don’t need to deal with any of that for now (or ever for that matter). If you want to learn more about WordPress, and everything you can do with your new blog, visit the official WordPress site. Otherwise, sit back, smile and get ready to begin your new career.

The entire series of How To Make a Living in Your Pajamas:

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: applying themes, beautiful site, beautiful web site, Cpanel File Manager, HTML, make a living in your pajamas, PC World, WordPress, WordPress themes, www.yourdomain.com, www.yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin, www.yourdomain.com/cpanel, www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.