Why publish?
- Isn’t it complicated, expensive and time consuming?
- Where would I publish?
- How do I write the web pages?
- But I don’t know the language for web pages (HTML)
- I don’t know how to run a web server
- How would I afford it?
What does WordPress offer?
- Your own site name – with your unique prefix (usually your callsign but it’s up to you) followed by wordpress.com. This page was originally posted on vk2uh.wordpress.com.
- A web interface for editing and making changes to your site configuration so you don’t need to install new software on your home computer or learn HTML rules
- Automatic page and post management, menu generation, photo image storage
- All this is free – but WordPress adds advertisements to your pages and posts.
For more advanced users you can also create content with interactions with other sites such as Flickr, extensions via other developers. You can also purchase a domain name licence and get WordPress to host it, or install WordPress on your own website space. In fact you won’t need to search for how to do that, because WordPress will offer it to you. Before taking that step, I suggest you consider whether you want to buy a domain name using your current callsign. What if your callsign changes?
How do I create a WordPress website?
- Go to wordpress.com, create a new account using any word or name as the site identifier (your callsign, perhaps) – it must be unique
- Set options as described below
- Write a home page and a post.
Settings suggested for a site on WordPress.com
After registering and getting your confirmation email, log in to your site at yourname.wordpress.com/wp-admin , using “yourname” as the user id and your chosen password.
Go to Settings > General
- Give your site a name, tagline, set time zone and date format
- Save Changes
Go to Settings > Discussion Settings
- Find the option “Allow people to post comments on new articles” and deselect it (turn it off). You might want to enable it after adding more pages and posts.
Go to Appearance > Themes
Choose a theme you like. You can change this any time you want to.
Go to Appearance > Widgets
Select any widgets you want to appear in the Right hand column. Click the widget and drag it over to the Main Sidebar heading on the right hand side.
Recommended basic widgets are: Tag cloud, Links
Go to Appearance > Header
The initial setting is that a different image is displayed every time the page is generated by WordPress.
Change the header image to a photo you have taken, one of your shack, the view from your favourite portable location, etc.
Go To Pages
Add a new page titled About. Here you can put as little or as much as you like about your site and yourself. A link to this page will then appear automatically in the site header.
Delete standard page and post
Delete the sample Post “hello world” and the sample Page provided by WordPress. You can also delete the Links provided by WordPress, unless you want to keep them. You are free to delete or add anything.
WordPress normally will display your site as a blog (web log) and the home page will contain your latest POST, followed by the previous post etc. You can change that so that a standard PAGE is displayed as your home page. See Settings > Reading . The page you nominate needs to exist before you use this option.
Summary: The Three Steps needed to get your projects onto the web
Step 1 – open a free account at WordPress.com
Step 2 –set your website as per my suggestions above
Step 3 – write some content as a new Post. You now have your own website.
Creating new Posts or Pages using content from an existing document or PDF
To create a post or page you use the menu as described above. When you want to simply republish a document you have written using Word or another software, you need to copy the text of that document into your new post or page. Don’t paste a screenshot of the document – that won’t be able to be used as conveniently as the text itself. Also, it won’t be indexed by search engines because a screen shot is just an image.
Open your document using Word or whatever else you used to create the document. Copy the text using CTRL-C (Windows) or Apple-C (Mac) or whatever else your esoteric operating system uses to copy text. For a PDF you can open the document using Acrobat viewer.
Now change to your web browser with the WordPress site where you have a new post or page waiting to have its content added. If you didn’t already create a new post or page, do it now. Then paste the text you copied from your document editor and it will appear as the text in your post or page. Now check that the paragraph spacing, heading styles, links and other text highlighting are all displayed as you want them. Finally Save your document as a draft, or when satisfied, select Publish.
Pages and Posts – what’s the difference?
WordPress has two types of documents that can contain the same kind of material – text, images, photos, diagrams, links etc. So how do you know which to use?
Pages are treated as static content that may not change very often, or not change much. So you find pages are used for an “about” page, containing information about the writer and the purpose of the blog or website. Pages may also be used for information that is reference material that applies to the whole site. A menu entry in the header of your site is created and displayed for every page you create.
Posts are used to post short items about specific topics. Some bloggers write a post every day, others write one a month. The idea of a post onto a “web log” or “blog” is that it is like a diary entry, recording ideas, reporting activity or commenting on other blogs. Each post is included in the list of recent posts, in the archive list and each post can be allocated a general topic and also can be given any number of tags. Tags can be used to link all your posts about antennas together, your posts about SOTA or your posts about contests, so if someone wants to read all your posts about antennas, they can select antennas in the Tag list and will be automatically shown a list of your posts that have that tag.
So you could consider pages to be the general information about you or your site/blog, and posts are a collection of chronological items, usually to record what happened on a particular day, or event such as a contest, a portable operation, a SOTA activation, a bit of equipment you reviewed, built or tested. Or commenting on propagation conditions, antenna experiments etc.
WordPress normally displays the posts in reverse chronological order. ie. most recent post is at the top of the blog list.
Copyright issues
While you could republish documents written by others, you need to be sure that it is necessary and legal. At least you must acknowledge the author and source, if you have permission to republish. You otherwise infringe copyright by republishing an entire document. If it is published on the web, it is far better to link to that document. That ensures that the author is given proper recognition. It also ensures that changes to that document are immediately visible to anyone opening the document using the link on your website. If you copied the content, you won’t get the benefit of changes or corrections.
Saving unfinished documents
Sometimes you set out to create a post and find that you haven’t yet moved the photo you need from your camera to your computer. As a precaution against something going wrong while you do that, save your post as a draft. That allows you to continue working on your document without revealing the new (unfinished) content publicly until you are satisfied it is ready.
References:
http://www.Wordpress.com
- the WordPress blog home page where you will find the options for creating an account.
- the wordpress software home page – this is what you would need to consult if you were installing WordPress as an application on your own website.
- a tutorial site for WordPress users
Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress provides more information about the software product, rather than the blog hosting service at wordpress.org.
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