In case you’re wondering about the new theme, it’s a thematic child theme that I thought I would take for a spin and quite like it. Here’s the link if you want to try it out.
http://www.cozmoslabs.com/2008/10/25/byty-free-child-theme-built-thematic/

We’ll be getting back to our WordPress tutorials shortly.

1. How To “Announce” A Blog

Good article on some of the important initial steps,  appropriate considering our focus here right now.

2. 21 Ways To Increase Blog Traffic

Who doesn’t want to have more traffic?

3. Different Types of Links and How To Get Them

You may think all links are the same, but then you probably haven’t read this article.

4. 99 Ways To Promote Your Blog

I’m a sucker for lists and this is a list with 99 items!

5. 12 Reasons Why I Like Windows Live Writer

See?  a List and an article about something we use, this must be good.

6. SEO for WordPress – The Complete Guide

Good starter article to get knowledge about SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

7. Blogging Tip: How To Use Social New Aggregators as a Source for Content Ideas

A point to make is that each of these articles are on blogs with many other articles, and many other good ideas.

8. 10 Black Hat SEO Tricks You Must Not Do!

Or else we will all think you’re a dick.

9. The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs

I think its pushing it to cal this the definitive guide, but it might be the best introduction to this topic.

10. The 5 Deadly Sins of Blogging

Good points, all of them.

To do this we are going to add some additional widgets to our sidebar.   Go to Appearance > Widgets and add the Archives, Recent Posts and Categories Widgets.  In all 3 cases I am leaving the default settings, but each Widget has some options that you may want to utilize, so have a look by selecting the edit option for each.   Bear in mind that you can rearrange the order of the Widgets by selecting any of the Widgets and dragging and dropping them in the order you prefer.

Once you have them the way you like save changes and you are good to go.   There are plugins available that allow you to customize accessing old content in all sorts of different ways and we may explore those later but for now at least we have provided some easy access to some of our older content.

So go to Appearance > Widgets and select the “Add” link beside  Text  listed on the left hand side list of available Widgets.   

Now because I am adding a picture I have to do one of two options.   I have to either upload my image to my blog or I have to put it somewhere else on the Internet to be link to from my blog.

In this case I am going to add it to the blog.   To do this go to Media > Add New.  You should get a page like this:

Choose the “Select Files” button and browse for the image you want to upload.  You have some options available to change the name, add a caption and a description, so go ahead and do what you feel is appropriate and then select “Save All Changes.”  

Note that whenever you add a picture to a blog post using an external program such as Windows Live Writer, when you upload the post to your site, Windows Live Writer is adding all the images you use to your Media Library automatically.  So if you have been creating posts with images you should be able to browse these in your library. 

Now the easiest way to actually add this image to your Text Widget, is to use the built in post editor of WordPress, something we haven’t been using due to our preference for Windows Live Writer.   The reason we want to use the post editor here is to get the URL for the image we have uploaded to the media library and if you are not HTML proficient, you can quickly snag the code you need for the text widget itself. 

So go to Posts > Add New

It’s a little hard to see on the image above, but there are symbols beside the words Upload/Insert which represent various media objects.  The first one is the one we want which is image.

A popup box will magically appear and you will want to select “Media Library” from the choices along the top.  You will then be presented with a list of all the files in your media library.  I believe this list is sorted by date, so the newest ones should be at the top of the list.  Convenient, because that means ours should be right at the top.  Select the “Show” link beside the image you want to add and a number of options are available to you.  The defaults should be fine for you, but depending on your image and how wide your sidebar is on your theme you may need to adjust and tweak these settings.  If you are following along with me, the sidebar we are using is pretty liberal, and while I don’t have the exact dimensions available off the top of my head, my image is 300 pixels wide so if you are not any wider then that you will for sure be fine.  Click the “Insert Into Post” button and your image should be dropped into main window.  

Now you need to get the HTML code so along the right top corner of the editor you see two tabs, one for “Visual” and one for “HTML.”  I think you see where I am going with this don’t you?   Select the “HTML” tab and you should get some code instead of a picture in your editor:

You will want to copy and paste this code as I have highlighted because that is what you need for your Text Widget. 

Now go back to Appearance > Widgets.  You will get warned about navigating away from this page because you haven’t saved it but don’t worry about that as long as you have copied the HTML code.  To be safe, you may want to copy it to a text file while you do this so you don’t lose your work.   Once you are back in the Widgets section,  Select the “Edit” button on your Text Widget and paste in the HTML.

Once that is done you can click…Done!   Make sure to save your changes by clicking on the “Save Changes” button as well.

Now your site should look something like mine, with an image now in the sidebar.

That’s it!

I consider it a bit of a gap that the media library doesn’t display the URL or link to the images or items it includes.   If it did you wouldn’t need to create a dummy post, as long as you knew a little HTML, you could just grab the link from the library.

As of WordPress version 2.7, you have the option to update your site ‘automagically’ via the admin console, and that’s what we are going to do in order to upgrade to v2.7.1.

First however, we are going to do a backup, and make use of another plug-in.  The plug-in in question is WordPress Database Backup.   Go ahead and download, install and activate via the usual methods.  You can then go to Tools > Backup in order to access the options page.

The first section in options identifies what tables in the database you backup.   As you can see there are a couple of optional settings.   I would check “Exclude spam comments” as there are really no reasons to save those.   The next sections allows you to determine what to do with your backup.  Personally, I choose the default setting, “Download to your computer” because then I immediately know that the backup worked, unlike email or saving it to your web server where there would be an additional step to confirm the backup was there.   The final option is to schedule a backup and I think that’s an excellent idea.   I’ve set mine to “Once Weekly” which will then be emailed to me.   I would still suggest that whenever you make a change to your site you run a backup, but having a scheduled weekly backup is a good failsafe in case you forget, or something happens outside your control such as a problem at your hosting company.  Now that you have setup your backup strategy, if you go back up to the second option, “Backup Options” and select the Backup Now! option, the process will run.  While it’s running don’t reload the page or close your browser, it should only take a few moments and it does provide a progress bar.   At the end it will ask what you would like to do with the file just like any typically download.  Select an appropriate location on your computer and you’re good to go.   The backup file is in .gz format.   This is a compression format that most archive programs, such as WinZip, WinRar or my recommended choice, 7zip, will recognize.   The file itself is a .sql file, which is a MySQL database backup format.   I’m making a note that one of these tutorial lessons will be how to restore the backup, but I’m not going to cover it now.

To really be sure that your site is backed up nicely, I suggest another type of backup, one which is available without any additional plug-in, and that is the Export option.    Go to Tools > Export and you are given the following page:

Here you are making a backup of all your content.  This is your posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, essentially the data of your site.   There is only one option here, “Restrict Author”  this allows you to change from the default which is content authored by everyone, to selecting a specific authors content to backup.   We are going to leave it at the default for our purposes.  When you click “Download Export File” you are given another file to save, this time an .xml file.

One reason that I suggest you do this type of backup as well as a database one is that along with an Export, WordPress also provides an Import, and in the case of an issue with your site, such as it getting deleted for example, it might be easier to import your content rather then restore from the database as you can do this through the WordPress console, where as to restore the database backup you need some other access and knowledge.

It’s also useful to do exports of the data from your site in the cases where you may have a test or development version of your site elsewhere.   You can then export/import data to do testing or verification.

Now that we have our site backed up real good, let’s go ahead and upgrade.  The Upgrade option is available via the Tools menu as well as the message at the top of the console, both paths take you to the same page.

Go ahead and select “Upgrade Automatically” and wait until you see a message that says WordPress upgraded successfully.   I would recommend that you spend a few minutes looking around your site to make sure that there are no issues.   If the process didn’t work or their were some issues, I recommend utilizing the support forums at wordpress.org to search for a solution to any specific problem that you may have encountered.

Now, once you have done that, go and download and install this plug-in:  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-lightbox/

Once they are both installed, click on an image in one of your blog posts(or one of mine) and the screen should turn black and your image should appear.  Nice eh?   This is know as a lightbox.   The first plug-in we installed creates the lightbox using a java scripting language called jquery which we will be discussing later.   The second plug-in “auto magically” adds the code to make the lightbox appear for each of your images, both existing and as you go forward.   Otherwise, you would have to specify the code to do that for each image you add, and any images you previously added would require a retrofit to make lightbox work.   We could have installed this right at the beginning but it’s more dramatic this way don’t you think?

My philosophy with plugins is try to only use them if they add real value.  We have already installed seven with more to come, so we try to be careful in deciding what to add.

To access Google Analytics, go to http://www.google.com/analytics/. As you already have a Google account just follow the prompts to sign up for a account.   I’m not going to go through the steps as I already have an account and may not see the same screens as a new user, but you are basically going to provide your web address and some other basic information.

There is also a Terms of Service that you should read carefully, as you will be allowing Google to access and store information about your website, and you should be comfortable with what that means.

Now we come to the most important step.   Google will provide you with a tracking code.   This is a block of code that will be placed in the code of all of our web page which allows Google to collect data.   I’m not going to go into the specifics of how it works.  If you’re interested in finding out more information then you should read through the documentation on the Google Analytic site, but suffice to say we need this code.   For now copy and paste it into a new .txt file.   You can also come back to the Google Analytic site at anytime and get this tracking code now that you are signed up.

Now we’ll switch over to the WordPress world and guess what?   We are going to install another plug-in.   This one is called “Ultimate GA” and is found here.  Grab the newest .zip file on offer and download, install and activate as per usual.  Come back here when you are done.

Ready?   OK, if you were working ahead, you might have already noticed there is now a Settings > Ultimate GA section that was added by the installation of this plug-in, so let’s go there.

You should have a page like this:

The first thing we need to do is provide our Google Analytic account ID.  This information is found in the tracking code, and as described in the plug-in instructions.   Once you have replaced the placeholder account ID with your real one, you are pretty much ready to go and can select update options.   As you might have guessed we don’t need to put the Google Analytics tracking code in all our pages, the plug-in handles that for us.   It just needed the account ID as that is the only specific thing different about each tracking code.   you can validate it works by viewing your own blog, selecting “View Source”  and seeing the tracking code embedded in the header information.  One note, logout of your blog before doing this, as their is logic built in to this plug-in which doesn’t add the tracking information for site administrators.   This is so your analytics data doesn’t include all the times you visit your own site and refresh pages to see edits you might make.

You can change this, as well as some additional settings by logging back into your blog and going back to the Ultimate GA section and clicking on Advanced configuration.  I’m going to leave mine on the default settings at this point but if you want to find out what other options you have at your disposal you can read the plug-in documentation at it’s home page - http://www.oratransplant.nl/uga/

Don’t forget to also go and look at your Google Analytics page and see what kind of traffic might be coming to your website.  Their is a wealth of information here, and combined with the information that you already have access to from Google Webmaster tools, you can start to shape your website or more specifically blogs future.   For me, it’s laying the groundwork or foundation for all the future possibilities that might come to pass.

As long as you have a Google account, you should see this page…

Follow the instructions to get started and setup on Google Webmaster, once you have done that you will need to add a site.  Put the address for your site in the Add Site text box and select “Add Site.”

Once you have done that your site should appear as a hotlink.  Select that link and it will start walking you through the steps to setup your site on this tool.

First you are asked to “Verify your site.”   This is a little complicated but fairly easy.  Select the “Upload an HTML file option.”   It will then ask you to create an html file with a specific name.  Just open up your favourite text or HTML editor and create a blank file with the name specified.   Then all you have to do is upload this to your site using your favourite FTP program, or any web based tool you’re hosting provider has to the root directory of your site.  Once you have completed this then select “Verify” and this should complete this step!

You now get a page with a host of information that will help you learn about your users, and you have also let Google know about your site.   This is important because of how important Google is in terms of people finding out about you.   There is one more thing that we want to do here, and that is link Google to our sitemap.   First however we are going to install a plug-in that will generate our sitemap and keep it up to date as we change our site.   A sitemap is the organized structure of your website and Google uses it, as do other search engines to apply some logic to how sites our organized.   Because we will be adding new content constantly, as is the nature of blogs, we want to have our sitemap dynamically updated to represent these changes.  Arne Brachhold’s plug-in will do this for us, and you can download it from his site.

Install and activate it the usual way and then go to Settings > XML-Sitemap, which is a new option available to you introduced by this  plug-in.  Their are TONS of options available here, and as always I encourage you to learn more about what they can do, but that is outside the scope(for now at least) of what we want to cover here.   Here we are going to leave all the options as is, and just select the generate a sitemap option at the top of the page.  If successful you should get a page like this returned:

If you used the defaults as I did, your sitemap would be located at http://yoursite/sitemap.xml.   You can verify this by scrolling down and checking in the XML-Sitemap options page.   copy that address, whether it’s the default or not and go back to the Google Webmaster tools and share this link there:

Now the most popular site and search engine in the world knows about your blog.  There are more options you can explore in Google Webmaster tools and if you were paying attention in the XML-Sitemap options, there were options for setting up similar options with Yahoo! and Microsoft.  Now that you know the basics, feel free to explore more and decide what is right for you to add to, or just make note of there options in case you want to come back to them later.  

These behind the scenes things may not make a lot of sense at this point if you don’t have a lot of familiarity with setting up a blog, but will come in handy later.  

One more of these next time as we set up Google Analytics and then we’ll move on to some other stuff.

Now, with your google account go to Feedburner.com and select Get Started.

Then you are given the option to "burn" a feed as below:

As you can see, I’m all set to burn my feed.   Click Next and Feedburner will query your site to determine what feeds are available to it.   By default when you setup WordPress, it will create 2 feeds.  One regular one which will be all your blog posts, and a second one for comments.    We are only going to deal with the regular one right now so select that and click Next.

I made one small change here to the feed name and shortened it from the default it gave me, serpentcouncilcom to serpentcouncil.   Select Next yet again and your feed is setup.

You now have the option of adding some additional features to your feed via FeedBurner which is one of the reasons we have selected to use FeedBurner.

First it asks what to track, I suggest that you just select everything it offers.  I did!

Now it’s the integration step.   You will be shown a bunch of option for all different blog types.  The one you are interested in is "Self-Hosted WordPress" (of course.)

When you click the link under that it will open another page which is a Google support page about FeedBurner.   The key aspect that we are interested in right now from this page is the link to the FeedBurner plugin.

Once you have downloaded this, you need to install it and activate it, which you can do per the method previously covered.  

Once that is done, go to Settings in your WordPress admin section and you will have a new option for Feedburner.  Click on that and you will presented with 2 text boxes.  One for your primary feed and one for your comment feed.   Put your feed address in the primary one.  In case you forgot what that was it will be something like mine listed here:  http://feeds2.feedburner.com/serpentcouncil.  You can check yours in your profile page at FeedBurner.com by clicking "My Feeds", select the name of your site(it will be in big blue letters" and then "Edit Feed Details."  Look for Feed Address.   That might sound complicated but it really isn’t and now your feed is managed through FeedBurner which is better then not being managed by FeedBurner.  If you don’t believe me then you should read this article - How and Why to use Feedburner.

Now that we have all that sorted out, we need to re-activate the link to subscribing to our feed which we removed when we were setting up our sidebar.   Go to Appearance > Widgets and select RSS Links from available Widgets.  Once it’s over on the list on the right select Edit.   The only option is to give it a tile, in my case I’m going with "Subscribe to the Feed."

We can do more with this later, but functionality wise, this is what we need.

Next time we are going to get into Google WebMaster tools and setup a sitemap

I have built up a reasonable body of work here on this blog, and noticed actually while searching for something else to do with WordPress that this blog appeared(albeit, well down in the search results.)

So what is left to do before this blog is ready for the general public?  One is an “About” page.   This is a page that tells people about the proprietor of the site they are visiting.  Maybe a little background, a picture, a biography, whatever you want.

For the purposes of this tutorial, and because I don’t really want a lot of information on my “about” page I will keep mine short.

Now because, we are not doing a blog post, you will actually not be able to use Windows Live Writer to create and edit your post.  So we will log into the admin section of our blog and select Pages.   As you will see their is already an About page created.  This is their by default.  Select  “edit”  and this opens the page up in the WordPress editor.  I am going to change the header/title to “About Me” just to make a change that we will see and replace the standard text that came with WordPress with my own:

Nothing fancy, just a starting point that I can add to at a later date.  As with many of the other features of WordPress, there is much more beyond what I have discussed with Pages, and I encourage you to read more as always at the WordPress Codex , or search via your favourite search engine for other WordPress information.   One of the great things about WordPress is the size of the community and the terrific amount of help their is available out on the interweb.

Next time, we finalize the blog for a public launch, but don’t worry that doesn’t mean we are finished with it.  This is really literally just the beginning.