Putting pictures in WordPress posts and pages is easy, but not exactly intuitive. This is a fast tutorial to show you how it’s done with minimum effort.

Did you know that you create a new WordPress user, and set them to ‘contributor’ rather than to author or editor?  When you do that, their option after writing a post automatically changes to ’submit for review’ rather than ‘publish’. It’s pretty slick, and seems like it would be a good way to encourage guest authors on the blog…

I added a new user, then logged in to post as that new user, and here’s what I saw at the “Write” screen -

I’ve always recommended that people not paste text directly into WordPress from Microsoft Word, and instead suggested that they open their Microsoft Notepad, paste into Notepad, then copy and paste back into WordPress. This extra step removes the stupid formatting put in place by Microsoft Word.

Apparently, a recent addition to WordPress (maybe 2.3?) added a button on the WordPress text editor that allows you to paste information directly from Microsoft Word, and instantly strips out all the formatting. I’m exactly not sure how long it’s been there, but it works very well.

Having a big ping list added to your WordPress blog is not going to make or break you, but the more exposure, the better, right?

At a recent presentation I gave about using Wordpress, I was adding a slide about the ping list, and decided to count them. I was surprised to see that there were only 46, but that’s what I put in the slide.

Apparently, at some point over the last couple of dozen installations, I dropped off a batch from my list, and even my own blog was running short.

One of the benefits of even having a blog is getting people to comment, because that adds more content and freshens your pages, known as UGC, or “User Generated Content”.

However, most people don’t even bother to update the default comment invitation lines that appear in their WordPress blog, because it’s just not something you think about.

If you scroll down below you’ll see that I’ve customized the comment message on this blog, and it’s really easy to do.

First, login to your WordPress admin, then go to presentation - theme editor.

Click on your single.php file over on the right.

One of the first things you should do on a new WordPress install is to update your permalinks, and it’s really not very hard, but one of the things that gives people problems is that their .htaccess file isn’t writable.

If you’re on an Apache host, you most likely have mod rewrite, and you most likely already have an htaccess file, in my experience.

The first thing you need to do is make sure that your htaccess file is writable, and this can be done with your FTP software or your file manager inside your web hosting control.

Changing the permalinks structure on an existing WordPress blog can be dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Once you have an established URL structure, a change can cause you to not only lose search engine visibility, but all of your PageRank will drop to zero, and all of your inbound links will no longer work. That can’t be good!

Additionally, if all of the page names in the search engines index cease to exist, then anyone that ever clicks on one of your Serps would be taken to a 404 error. That’s bad!

I’ve now redone the home page of the site, and added the final shoppingcart item,  which is a simple Wordpress theme match without a content importation.  In my rush to get the site live, I completely left that out, but now the shopping page is complete.

As a quick lesson in SEO, I’ll point out that on the homepage I’ve added text links to the purchase page,  using different anchor text five times.

Because I don’t have a lot of content on this site yet, I’ve chosen to place four primary search phrases there, made them bold, and then linked all four to my shopping cart page.