Blogging is easy and fun. It’s a very efficient way of getting a message out to all sorts of people. If you’re new to blogging it’s almost inevitable you’ll have some problems initially so we’ve put together some tips to make it a better experience for you and your readers.
Long posts:
Sometimes, you’ve got a bit to say – what starts as a message ends up as an essay!
- Web browsers are not word processors. Depending on your browser you may not be able to undo or recover a post if you move away from the page. If I’m writing a post, I prefer to do it in a text editor (eg: notepad on a PC or TextEdit on a mac), so I can save my work as I go. Then I can paste it into Wordpress and not risk losing everything if something goes wrong. If that causes problems, you can past a bit in, click “Save and Continue Editing”, then add a bit more to see what breaks it. There should be no size limit that most of us would reach when posting. The same technique should work for long comments.
- Don’t use Word! Note, that I did not recommend MS Word for preparing posts ‘offline’. In fact any ‘Rich Text’ editing program can cause problems when you copy and paste into Wordpress because they bring styles and formats that are not understood.
- Start with a summary. Not everyone is interested in what you write (amazing, I know!), so instead of making them scroll past three screens of your post, start with a summary and use the <!–more–> tag. In the visual editor, it’s that little icon that looks like a page cut with a dotted line. If you’re old skool and use the code editor, it’s the ‘more’ button. That way readers of the blog stream only see your summary, but can see your whole post by clicking the automated ‘more’ link or the title of your post.
Pictures
- You can upload pictures, but… the blogs here use CSS based layouts – you don’t need to know about that, but you should know that pictures that are too big for the layout will make it hard for users of some browsers to read the blog. On the other hand, you can still upload larger pictures and not break the layout by using the ’slimbox’ tool I’ve outlined in this post… and it’s quite cool too!