Getting your own blog to look the way you want it and have all the right elements included takes a bit of time and effort. The problem is not so much that it’s a difficult thing to do - just surf the net and you’ll find literally millions of people blogging these days. They all managed to set up their blogs…
But when you want it optimized for the search engines, offer subscriptions, promote any products you sell and include some other cool features, you have to work your way through quite a list of little tasks. And before you know it, you are literally lost in all the stuff that needs to be taken care of.
Reviewing my own blogs, I found that I forget things all the time…
It is for this reason I created a set of process maps and action sheets which outline the step-by-step installation process. They are a great help to me. Not only does it take me about a third of the time to get a blog set up now, I also have a decent administration of what exactly I installed on my blogs and where to find the resource documentation.
WordPress is open source software. As my personal thank you to everyone who has contributed to making WordPress the great blogging script which it is, I decided to make my WP Blog Installation Action Sheets freely available to everyone who is looking for some more structure in the blog installation and customization process.
This is a pdf file which requires Acrobat Reader 7.0 to open and read. In addition it has been zipped to save on bandwidth. For additional help with downloading and opening the file please see this page…
File name: WPBlogInstallationActionSheets.pdf (WPBlogInstallationActionSheets.zip)
Contents:
- Very brief introduction
- Blog installation check list (27 steps)
- Blog installation process map (visual tool)
- Blog log / design forms
- Blog installation process map including recommended tweaks
- Blog resources forms (service accounts & plugins)
When you decide to download and use the action sheets, please let me know how you like them. You can use the comment form below to submit any feedback. And if you have any questions about how to use these sheets, please post these here as well. I prefer answering questions in public so everyone can benefit from the information.
I look forward to hearing back from you!
Patricia Ritsema van Eck
P.S.
This is a “no-strings-attached” download, meaning you don’t need to register for it first. However, if you want to be informed about upgrades to the action sheets please register a Thin Electrons membership.
Knowing myself I’m likely to include some more action sheets in the future and I’m also very open to improving them according to any feedback I receive…
Bookmark to:
(6 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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September 9th, 2006 at 11:45 am
WP Feedburner Plugin
After installing the feedburner plugin some browsers don’t redirect the blog feed properly to the feedburner feed. Instead they show a 200 OK error page which includes the redirect link.
This will cause problems with feed readers…
I posted the solution to this problem here:
http://thinelectrons.com/blog/wp-blog-installation-action-sheets/feedburner-plugin/
September 9th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
WP-Stats Widget Plugin
WP-Stats has a new feature which allows you to show your blog statistics in the sidebar. Very cool so I wanted this too.
However, the feature is a widget and this is supposed to be activated from within admin/presentation/sidebar widgets where you can ‘drag’ the stats widget into the sideabar - which of course didn’t show up by default in my blog…
I’ve posted all the steps I took to get those stats showing up in my sidebar here:
http://thinelectrons.com/blog/wp-blog-installation-action-sheets/wp-stats-widget-plugin/
September 10th, 2006 at 8:01 pm
Extra Security…
Looking for some additional info on trackbacks, I stumbled upon this WP forum page:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/72930
Which in turn convinced me to install 3 more plugins on top of Askimet to get better security. I do detest spammers and crackers and having been on the receiving end of their script hacks recently, the extra plugins do give my paranoia sub-personality some more peace of mind…
Additional security plugins:
September 11th, 2006 at 7:31 pm
Word Cloud Issue…
After a week of slaving away on optimizing this blog according to my own action sheets, I figured I was finally ready to transfer my word clouds to the blog so I could start launching them officially.
Much to my surprise they showed up all wrong! Very frustrating experience and at first I thought it must be a conflicting style sheet or something.
After examining the source code for the page as it appeared on the blog, I found that each word tag had been wrapped into its own paragraph tags (<p>). Duh?!
The problem was obviously the way WordPress handled the way the cloud pages were included…
Luckily there are so many wonderful pluggers around and as always, there was a plugin alreay available to fix the problem.
I posted the information on fixing the word cloud issue here:
http://thinelectrons.com/blog/wp-blog-installation-action-sheets/exec-php-and-mime-plugins/
March 22nd, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Patricia!
I’m so damn happy for you! You’ve got a really nice setup here and a lot of really good information. I wish you paid a little more homage to things other than “white hat” but, still, I remember you from early on in the IB and am glad to see you are still going strong!
Sam
March 31st, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Hey Sam!
Thanks for the compliments.
I remember you too - especially all the funny headlines you crafted for IB members. Haven’t been in the member’s area much the last year. Too busy running my sites…
“Black hat” SEO is not my style. It always sounds interesting in a sense but I really don’t agree with some of the ethics employed by many BH marketers.
Hope you’re doing well!
Patricia
November 8th, 2008 at 6:45 am
good!
January 14th, 2009 at 1:49 am
In the drawing room there was now no one with Steiner save the band of young men. wow goldThese had by this time dropped
February 5th, 2010 at 8:26 pm
Thanks, I like it!
February 20th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Yooo great job with this post! LOL it did something for me.