Well, I’m sure that everyone who reads this will probably laugh themselves silly. I don’t know what to write about except what I am experiencing, though. All the stuff on this site is like magic. Imagine my amazement that I can just change the look by clicking on a theme. So I did that for a while, going back and forth.
Then I spent a pleasant half hour reading about spam and blocking spam and wondering if it is worth it to go to all that trouble, especially since they are talking about going to links and downloading them and not actually telling the beknighted computer illiterate exactly what you have to do to do that if they wanted to. And then, if all spam has such common words in it, why not just block it automatically and save us computer morons from having to do this task.
And someone tells you to use your widgets? Your WHAT? What and where are they? If I knew that I suppose I would use them, but, but…
Then, you ask, why is such an idiot even bothering to make a blog? I don’t know. Except that I went to a few and thought they were cool and wished I had people who talked to me. So I guess I am just looking for my fifteen minutes of fame.
Yup – yer widgets. Widgets are wonderful things.
If you go to Dashboard/Presentation you’ll see Sidebar Widgets there, next to Themes/Custom Header. Your sidebar is the stuff on the side – categories, archive, blogroll, etc. At the moment you have the default sidebar for this theme.
To customize your sidebar go to Sidebar Widgets and start dragging and dropping other things over that you might like to have on your sidebar. Like, pages, the calendar, blog stats, recent posts, etc. And once that is done – very important! – click on Save Changes and voilá!, you’ll have more stuff in your sidebar. You can also always move them around in any order you like by dragging and dropping and saving changes. Also, when you try out other themes, your chosen sidebar stuff will appear on the new one, so you don’t have to keep redoing them.
Easy peasy, eh?
As for WHY you have chosen to make a blog, why not pop over here and read some other people’s comments on that.
http://azahar.wordpress.com/2006/07/20/why-do-you-blog/
Sorry – me again! Re: the spam thing. I haven’t done anything specific about that as on WordPress we all have Akismet working for us. It filters out the most obvious spam stuff but it’s good to check it now and again as I’ve had some friends comments end up there – in which case you just ‘de-spam’ it and then it shows up in the comments. You can find Akismet when you go to Dashboard/Manage. I tend to delete all my spam every day or so.
I think it’s good to allow for up to 2 links in your comments. That way you won’t end up with so much stuff awaiting moderation. And 2 links is a safe amount that won’t end up with spam comments.
Also check regularly for posts awaiting moderation (Dashboard/Manage) as you may find some there that need accepting.
If you ever want to delete or edit a comment just go to Dashboard/Manage/Posts and click on the comments number. Then you’ll get a page where you can go to any comment and either delete or edit it.
I’m one of the computer morons you speak of, so I’m the last one you’d ever want to ask for technical assistance, but you were kind enough to say hello over on my Blog, so I wanted to take the opportunity to do likewise. I believe I have seen you around on h2g2 recently? I’m known as “psychocandy”, or “PC” over there.
Anyway, nice to meet you, and welcome to the blogosphere! I look forward to hearing from you again!
Right – bloglist.
First go to Dashboard/Manage/Categories/Add New
Then add a new category for your links. Call them links, friends, blogs, whatever. Save Category and then go to…
Dashboard/Blogroll/Add link
Put in name of the person and their URL. Click the category you’ve made for this on the right (links, friends, whatever) and then click on Add Link.
And there you go.
shit – my comment didn’t go through again …
oh sorry, yes it did but for some reason it ended up in front of psychocandy’s even though I posted after her … very strange.