When we organise webspace for someone, we offer them the option of FTP access. Many people who I’ve offered it to did not know what it was or how to use it. So I asked Sephy to take a moment and write one of his great how to information posts. Sephy has a knack of taking something scary and changing it to something you can understand, so if you are one of the people we are hosting a site for you will want to read his post.

How-to: Upload files using FTP

Resizing Images

Image Resizing Made Simple – in case you missed Sephy’s explanation of how to easily resize images.

So one sits down at the computer this morning only to find several spam comments in the moderation queue. It seems the drug spammers have found my site again. But I – and all the bloggers who I have created wordpress blogs for – have a secret weapon in the fight against spammers. So secret in fact that I haven’t told them much about it or how to use it. So that is why I am writing this post.

First let us find out what drug spam looks like.

You see the words underlined in red in the URL’s? Those are the drug names. They will always be spelled right. You can block the drug words within the comments themselves using the TanTan Noodles Simple Spam Filter plugin. If you only did that, you would start to see the drug names spelled wrong within the comments. The spam would not stop. So my Other Half modified our version of TanTan Noodles to enable you to block words within the URL’s. Here’s how you do it.

Tan Tan Noodles Simple Spam Filter

First of all, where do you find this spam filter?

Comments (light blue)

Spam Filter (dark blue)

Here is the screen you will see when you click on spam filter – yours may not have all the words mine does, though.

How To Block Spam -

All you need to do is enter in the word you want to block. If it is a word that was in the URL, put it under banned patterns. If it is a word found within the comments, put it into the banned words list. The plugin looks at your Akismet spam and puts words that you may want to add at the bottom of the page. You can click on those words to add them to the banned words list. Once you have finished putting the words in, click on save rules. Then you’re done – and so are the spammers.

What will the spammers see?

Not a great deal, because they are usually robots or computer scripts, not real people. But if they were real people they would get this screen -

If they are a robot or a computer script, they can’t click on the button. That is how the spam gets blocked. From time to time it may be possible that one of your regular commentors will use a banned word and they will see this screen. It tends to freak them out a little. So it is a good idea to try and keep the banned words to words not used in every day comments.

Take Care With Banned Words.

You will see a bit of spam that simply says “Hi, great site” – I blocked the word great for a while but then I unblocked it after a commentor told me they saw the screen and they weren’t sure what to do..  it is easier for me to manually handle that kind of spam than to scare my commentors. They don’t show up anywhere near as often as the drug spammers do. Overnight I had 8 drug spam comments and another 2 more showed up before I put in the new drug words.

Any Questions?

If you have questions, the comments section is open. Feel free to ask away!

There’s a few basic things you need to know in order to write a post in WordPress. We’re going to take a look at the write posts screen and explore a couple of the features. This post ended up being a lot longer than I expected, so check back tomorrow for more on writing a post, in particular what options you have in the right sidebar and how to post in the future.

Where Is Write Post?

Click on Write (light blue)

Click on Write Post (dark blue)

The Write Post Screen

The write post screen may look confusing to those of you switching over from Blogger however it is very similar to what you had over there. It does contain more options. Here is an image of how my write post screen looks -

You can customise the height of the editing box and I have done that, so yours may look a little different. If you want to make your editing box taller, go to -

options (light blue)

writing (dark blue)

Size of the post box – I believe the default is 10, so you can adjust the number upwards if you want it bigger. Mine is set to 15.

The Advanced tinyMCE editor.

If you are using the Advanced tinyMCE editor, you can tell what the buttons do simply by hovering your mouse over them. There are some buttons you will use more than other buttons. Headings and adding links are two ones I constantly use, so let us take a look at how they work.

Headings.

In HTML you have a couple of choices when it comes to headings. The best choice and the one that means less work for you is to use the header tags. These tags are also used by some search engine bots when they visit your site to pick up keywords so it is a good idea to use the header tags rather than make the text bigger and bold manually.

Advanced tinyMCE gives you a little drop down box where you can pick the header tags.

Simply highlight the text you want as a heading, then click on the little arrow to drop the box down, and choose what header tag you want to use. I highly recommend you go in and play with this. Perhaps make yourself a draft post (don’t post it!) that looks like this -

Header 1

Header 2

Header 3

Header 4

Header 5

Header 6

Just so you can see what they look like. You can preview a post at any time by clicking on preview. Don’t worry, it won’t take you away from the page you are writing the post on. Mine opens in a new tab, yours may open in a new window.

Adding Links

This is something we bloggers do constantly. You have a lot of extra options thanks to the Advanced tinyMCE editor. Some of them are quite complicated and I don’t know what they do. I’ll only mention the ones you are most likely to need or use. Here’s how you make a link.

Use your mouse to highlight the text you want to put a link on.

Click on Insert/edit link, which is the little chain link icon, I put a circle around it for you.

When you do that a little box will pop up. If you want, all you need to do is enter in the link where it says link url, click insert, and you’re done.

Some bloggers want their links to open in a new window so that when a reader clicks on the link, it does not take them away from their site. Me personally, I don’t recommend doing this. In general web etiquette it is considered a bit rude to force people to open links in a new window. I know if I middle click on a link it will open in a new window. I know I can right click and open it in a new tab if I want to. I also know how to get back to the site I was on if I click away from it. But just in case you want to do it -

Click on the little drop down box arrow, and select open link in new window.

The final linking thing I will show you is how to give your link a title. All you have to do is enter in some text where it says title. How easy is that!

Then click insert, and you’re done. Want to see what it does? Hover your mouse over this link right here. You see how a little box pops up with text in it? Like this?

Of course there are a lot more features in the write post screen. I’ll be talking about them more over the next few days.

Missing Something?

You don’t have the Advanced tinyMCE editor installed? Check this post out from Courtney Tuttle.
Secret ‘Blogging Traffic Booster’ In WordPress – also note the explanation re header tags and traffic.

Other Great Links -

Image Resizing Made Simple – in case you missed Sephy’s explanation of how to easily resize images.
How to Add a YouTube Video to a WordPress Blog – Note that the youtube brackets plugin is a part of the standard package I give you when I install your wordpress blog. Great post Meg, I was going to cover it at some point and now I don’t need to. Yay less work for me!

This is a quick one for Lightening. It is simple once you know how – and know a couple of important rules. The most important one is this -

WordPress DOES NOT resize your pictures the way Blogger used to.

You have two options. You can show a thumbnail and people can click for a larger image.

Or make sure your images are less wide than your content box. I generally try to stick to around 430 wide for my images.

Realistically, people don’t click on images to make them bigger unless they are really small, this much I can tell you from experience. So I personally think the options here are excellent.

Uploading An Image

Scroll down the write post page until you come to the upload images box. It is just below All In One SEO if you have that installed. Where does it put the images when you upload them? On your server space that comes with your blog, usually into your wp-content/images folder.

Click on browse.

The following box will popup. Find the image you want to upload which should be on your computer somewhere and click on open.

Once you have done this the popup box will go away. Now if you did not want a title or description for your photo, you could press upload now and it would upload the image. However putting a title on your photo means that when someone hovers their mouse over it they will see the title you put in, and it means the search bots will pick that title up. If you look at my song of the day photos you will see they always have a title that tells you what the photo is actually of. So it is worth putting a title in.

Once you have entered your title and a description if you want one, click on upload. This may take a few moments depending on the size of your image. Once it is done you will see this -

You can choose if you want a thumbnail or a full size image. Just be aware that if your full size image is huge, it may throw out your sidebars. So unless you have made the image smaller than your content area, always choose thumbnail.

I’m not sure what the link to options actually do. I am sure someone reading this does, and if they could explain it in the comments I’d appreciate it greatly. I just stick to the one I know, which is file.

Questions? Comments?

The comments section is open, so feel free to ask any questions you may have. Hopefully I have the answers!