And with success, comes trouble. In the case of blogs, that's comment spam. I recently went back to a blog which I'd left for a year to find more than 50,000 spam comments awaiting my approval, advertising everything from - well, there was nothing I really wanted to buy Dealing with blog comments is a battle - between blogger and spammer, and between spammer (who needs to be inconvenienced) and legitimate commenter, who doesn't. And it's managing that second battle that can cause many difficult decisions for bloggers on the best way to set up their blog.

Let's look first at what you can do, and then we'll consider why you might want to do it.

Comments settings are accessible from the WordPress dashboard under Settings > Discussion.

• The first two options relate to pingbacks.
• Allow people to post comments on the article is the master switch: if this is not checked, then by default, commenting will be switched off for all posts on your blog. You could, however, choose to switch it on again for individual posts under "Discussion" on the Add New Post page.
• Comment author must fill out name and e-mail only relates to filling out the form, not to verification of the information: there is no checking that the email address is a valid one.
• Users must be registered and logged in to comment will force users to register before they can comment. If you don't have "anyone can register" set in Users settings, then this will effectively stop commenting for anyone but the blog author(s). (This is a pretty common cause of "lots of traffic but no comments" syndrome!)
• Automatically close comments on articles older than xx days: most spam is on older posts, so closing comments after real discussion is finished is a good way to knock out lots of spam. Change the default "14" days if discussions on your own blog go on longer than this: most don't.
• Enable threaded (nested) comments lets commenters reply to previous commenters, rather than just to the bottom of a long comment thread.
• Break comments into pages... can speed up page loading on posts with hundreds of comments (it's not worth worrying about if you get fewer than hundreds).
• Comments should be displayed with the older/newer comments at the top of each page: the convention is to show oldest comments at the top; you should stick with that unless you have a very good reason not to.
• Email me whenever...: you might not want an email every time anyone posts a comment, but you should get one each time a comment is held for moderation, i.e. a blog admin needs to manually approve its publication. It's only polite to moderate comments reasonably promptly.

Moderation section

• Checking An administrator must always approve the comment means that you will manually have to approve every comment that appears on your blog.
• Checking Comment author must have a previously approved comment means that you'll need to approve each commenter's first comment, but after that, they'll be published automatically. The check is done against emails, so if you have commenters who use a range of different email addresses, approval would need to be done for each of them.
• Hold a comment in the queue if it contains xx or more links. Spammers commonly post a list of dozens of links.
• Comment moderation and comment blacklist lists allow you to set your own lists of words that will throw comments into moderation or be marked as spam. Useful to filter out your own least-favourite profanities or pharmaceuticals.
• We'll come to avatars in another post, but this is where you set up the options for "little pictures in comments".

So given all these options, which do you set? Two general principles about blog comments:

1. Let plugins do the donkey work for getting rid of spam. It should be the odd spam comment that slips through to your comment settings to deal with.
2. It's your blog; do what works for your content and your readers, do what makes you happy. You can always change settings if you change your mind.

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

You'll get the comments your blog invites

The thought of letting people write what they like on your website can be a daunting one, but in practice, once you've shut the spammers out, you'll mostly get the comments your blog invites. If you write snarky, ascerbic posts about religion or politics, you'll get snarky, ascerbic commenters - some of whom will agree with you, and some of whom won't. If you post pictures of kittens, you'll probably get less snark, tho ur komentz miyt reed liyk dis. If you have a business blog, you might be worried that disgruntled customers will take out their frustrations in your blog comments; if this is the case, you should probably revise your customer service processes. And most people, basically, are good: instances of real nastiness in blog comments are thankfully rare.

If you want comments, make commenting easy

If you don't want comments, then turn them off. It's your blog. But you'll have a better time blogging if you do allow comments: conversation, feedback, discussion, argument and even the odd insult make blogging more interesting for you, and reading your blog more interesting for your readers. If you're only posting, you're preaching to the wind: is anyone listening? does anyone agree, disagree, even care? how will you know?

Commenting should be easy for your commenters. Don't seek to moderate dissent by putting hurdles in the way of dissenters: all you'll do is put off the moderate people, and ensure that only the most rabidly furious make it through to your blog. Requiring registration will put most people off: don't do it.

But do require name and email address. Though WordPress doesn't check the validity of the email address, most people do give you a real one, and I think that slight lack of anonymity does act to curb the worst excesses of keyboard-warrior behaviour.

Increase the number of allowed links above the default 2. Spammers who post lists of links post dozens, but many innocent commenters include a couple of links in a well-considered comment. Give those people a break.

If you want conversation on your blog, turn off admin approval. One of the nicest things that happens on any blog is when commenters start talking to each other; that's the point at which it's turned into a conversation. Having admin approve every comment stifles that, because conversations only really happen in real time. At the very least, turn on "commenter must have previously approved comment" so that you only need to approve the person: telling your regular commenters that you *still* don't approve them and *still* need to check everything they say before you publish it, tells them that you don't trust them. Worse still, if you can't moderate comments quickly, it sends out messages like their opinion isn't important, or (in the extreme) that you're censoring them.

photo credit: Rob Gallop

This isn't to say that you have to publish everything. Use the moderation list in a way that's meaningful for your content. A comments policy can also help your readers to know beforehand what's acceptable; it can also help you if you decide not to publish a comment, to have a pre-existing document to point to, explaining exactly why something's not allowed. (At very least, you should probably decide, and state, what level of sweariness you'll permit.)

Be careful with the blacklist filter. This matches partial words, so - as the form says - "press" will match "WordPress". Potentially this can turn it into a Scunthorpe filter, so add words sparingly and as needed.

It's okay to delete comments

I suffered over this one, but the conclusion I have come to is this: I believe that people have the right to free speech, and that means they have the right to their own blog. It does not mean they have the right to say what they like in my comments, particularly when they want to promote their own agenda in a way that makes things unpleasant for me and the rest of my readers. To put it rather more graphically, that everyone has the right to crap, doesn't mean they have the right to crap on my living room carpet. Remember: it's your blog.

"Unapprove"

Deleting is permanent, so throwing something into moderation so it's not visible on the published blog can be a way to give yourself time to calm down, think rationally, even take advice before you make the decision to let it stand, or remove it. From the admin section for Comments, you can "unapprove" individual comments, and they will be held awaiting your later approval.

A feed is, simply, another way for people to read your blog posts that doesn't require them to actually visit your site to do so. If you read a lot of blogs and news sites, clicking through to all of the websites to see if there's anything new can get tedious. Feeds allow your readers to "subscribe" to your blog: that is, add your feed to a feed reader - software that will automatically notify them when you've published a new post, and allow them to read it without even having to click to visit your site.

What Is RSS.com explains more about how this works.

But I want people to visit my site!

When you publish your RSS feed, you have the choice to show whole posts, or just a teaser: a shortened version of the whole thing. The setting can be changed for WordPress in Settings > Reading.

There's been a lot of debate in recent years about whether it's better to publish full or partial feeds. People who argue for partial feeds say that they'd rather have people come to their site to read their posts (and click their advertising while they're there): a feed is, for them, a notification system that says "come to my site, there's something new", rather than handing over the content to be read whenever their readers choose. They also say that full feeds make it easy for other people to steal their words and republish them on spam blogs.

I say that both of these arguments are trumped by the fact that partial feeds are really annoying. *You* might prefer me to come look at your advertising; *I* prefer to read your posts in my feedreader at my convenience. And that way, I'm actually more likely to read what you've said; if I have to click to read more, the first part of your post had better be a really compelling bit of writing, otherwise I'm just going to move onto the next blog.

If you want advertising, there are plenty of ways to advertise on your RSS feed - Google has Adsense for Feeds, and there are WordPress plugins to add banner ads to your feeds too.

If you're undecided whether you want to offer full or partial feeds, you can always offer both: the Dual Feeds plugin will automate this. On TameBay we publish a full feed with "all rights reserved" - just for personal reading use - and a partial feed with a Creative Commons licence that anyone can republish, because they'll be linking back to us.

[This issue of blog content theft is a much bigger one than this post has room for. I'll be revisiting it at a later date, but if you're having problems with people taking your words as their own, I'd recommend a visit to the excellent Plagiarism Today.]

Default feeds and where to find them

The orange logo above has become the standard for feeds. Most themes will include some variant of it as a link to your feed, allowing your readers to find it and subscribe easily. If that's not the case, don't panic: WordPress automatically generates feeds for you, so all you have to do is link them.

If you've set up pretty permalinks for your blog, the main feed for your posts will be at
http://domain.com/feed/

If for some reason you haven't or can't set up pretty permalinks, then you can provide your readers with direct links to one of several flavours of feeds WordPress generates: RSS2 is the WP default, and either of its possible URLs should work fine in any up-to-date feedreader:

http://domain.com/wp-rss2.php

http://domain.com/?feed=rss2

If you prefer Atom 1.0, then go for one of

http://domain.com/wp-atom.php

http://domain.com/?feed=atom

You can generate these automatically with the following PHP code (especially useful if your domain name might change or you're making a theme for publishing):

<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>
<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>

Who's reading my feed?

One of the problems in the early days of RSS (and one big argument used by proponants of partial feeds) was that it was difficult to tell just how many people were reading your feed. That's changed, thanks to a lovely company called Feedburner, which is now owned by Google.

Feedburner allows you to redirect your feed through their servers, where number of subscribers and all sorts of other data can be monitored. They also reproduce your feed as an email subscription option for readers who'd rather have your blog emailed to them. The service is free, and absolutely invaluable.

To get started, install the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin (can be downloaded from Google and uploaded via FTP, or just installed automatically through the WordPress plugins admin section).

Coming tomorrow: posts are not the only feed. WordPress offers many more feeds, from comments to individual tags, categories and authors. If you're not already, why not subscribe to my feed ready for the next post.

If you've got a brand new install of WordPress, you've probably just got one user, and that user is probably called something like "admin". Which is all very well for signing into the WordPress admin section, but probably not the name you want next to your posts.

Editing your profile

Click on the "Users" tab from the Dashboard and you'll see a list of all the users currently registered on your blog. To change profile info, click on the relevent user name. You can change and add a lot of information on this next screen: most of it isn't necessary because it doesn't show up in most themes (but see below if you want it to).
Options that you will probably want to fill out are the real name and nickname fields; these are what WordPress uses to determine the name that it gives for the author of your posts. It'll make some suggestions in the drop-down box next to "Display name publicly as", but if you don't like any of those,

• add the display name you want to the nickname field,
• click the "update profile" button
• then select the new nickname from the drop-down list
• and update your profile again.

Changing your password

Scroll to the bottom of your user profile, and the form to change your password is there. Though it's tempting to abandon the hideously random one WP auto-generates, do pick something reasonably secure

Changing your avatar

The "avatar" is the little picture which shows up beside your name in the users' list, and also beside your comments in most new-ish WP themes. If you have the shadowy person-shape, or worse still the blue Gravatar logo, go to Gravatar.com and sign up for an account.

If you want to change your picture, again that needs to be done through Gravatar not through the WordPress dashboard. And if you want multiple pictures to use depending on where you're writing, you can also do that through Gravatar.

Adding the author's information to the post

Not all themes include the author's name next to the post. Some people think that if there's only one author, it's pretty pointless having their name on all their posts. I disagree: I'd like to be top of Google for my own name, and having it on every blog post I write will help that. And of course, if you have a multi-author blog, you probably want to have each writer's name by their posts.

If your theme's missing this information, it's easy to add in: Post written by <?php the_author(); ?> will add the "display name publicly" field to your blog, and there are several other tags to show the author's first or last name, email, URL, description, etc. etc. If you have a lot of guest posters, you can use this information to - for example - display a short bio at the end of the post.

Adding more users

Click on Users > Add New to add a new user (yes, it's that simple ). You'll have to fill out the username, email address and password; WordPress will then email details of the registration to your new author. You'll also need to select what role you want the new user to have; which you pick will depend on how much freedom you want them to have on the blog.

• Administrators can do anything, including adding and removing plugins and themes, and removing other users.
• Editors can publish and edit all posts*, but cannot change the appearance or functionality of the blog.
• Authors can publish and edit their own posts, but no one else's.
• Contributors can write and edit their own posts, but not publish them.
• Subscribers can only leave comments

If you want your new user to be able to publish their own posts without your approval, you might make them an Author; if you'd prefer to check over what they've written first, make them a Contributor. It's easy to alter a user's access level (just change it from Dashboard > Users), so I would recommend choosing a lower level and increasing it if necessary; making everyone an Administrator is potentially asking for trouble.

* WordPress 2.7.1 doesn't allow Editors to edit Administrators' posts. It's not quite clear at the moment if this is deliberate or a bug; I guess we'll find out when 2.8 is released later this month!

For every post you write, WordPress generates one single page just with that post on it. The URL of that page is commonly known as its "permalink"; it's short for permanent link, the link where that post will always be found, even when it's moved off your blog's front page.

By default, WordPress permalinks look like this:
http://blogmum.com/?p=16
This is both bad and ugly: bad, because the "?" tells search engines that this is a dynamically generated page, potentially with unstable content, and ugly because - well, read it. It tells neither your human readers nor Google anything about what's on the page it links to.

It's much better to use meaningful permalinks like this:

http://blogmum.com/2008/11/keep-your-wordpress-blog-secure/

Not only can anyone looking at your URL immediately get an idea of what your post will be about, but search engines can see it too, which will increase your chances of being found for the keywords in your title (you *are* thinking about Google when you write your post titles, aren't you?).

How to make pretty permalinks

Fortunately, there is a fairly easy cure for this. In WP Admin, Settings > Permalinks allows you to set up human-readable permalinks in the style of your choice. WordPress gives you a range of elements you can include in your link:

• Timestamp elements: year, month, date, hour, minutes and seconds
• Post title and post number
• Category and author of the post

Several of these are pre-set in the dashboard and can be selected by clicking the radio buttons; if you want to create your own style, choose the appropriate tags and type them into the "custom structure" box.

Which elements should you include?

• Always include the post name; these words are a huge boost to your SEO.
• Each permalink should begin with numeric data (year, or post number) rather than text: beginning permalinks with textual data can cause performance problems.
• Each permalink should end with the post name (or the post number) so that a unique URL is generated.
• If you've imported a lot of blog posts from another blogging system (e.g. Blogger), then mirroring the existing permalink style ensures that links to your old posts stay valid in WordPress.
• Year, month and perhaps date can help human readers to see when they're looking at an old post.
• Adding some numerical data (dates or post numbers) is advisable to prevent conflicts with other parts of your WP install.
• Hours, minutes and seconds are probably unnecessary (if they seem necessary, maybe you should post a bit less often...).
• If your blog has multiple authors, adding the author field to the permalink is an option.

Personally, I like year/month/post title: it's short enough, but meaningful to both human readers and search engines.

Need a shorter URL?

The cool thing about WordPress's behaviour here is that the old, ugly URL will still work: it just redirects to your new, sexy URL. So if you've got year and month and date and a long post title, and the resulting very long URL is going to break in emails or be too long for Twitter, you can still use the domain/?p=post_number one, and anyone using it will be redirected to your pretty link automatically.

If you need to find the post number, go into Manage Posts and hover over the post title: the last number of the URL in your browser status bar is the post number.

A custom field is simply a way to add the same type of information to some or all of your WP posts. Just as all posts can currently have a title, category and tags, as well as content, you might choose to add custom fields to show your mood, the music you're listening to, the deal of the week on your ecommerce website or the filename of a thumbnail picture you want to display with your post.

Many plugins also utilise custom fields: for example, if you're running the Sociable plugin to allow your readers to share your posts via social media, you'll see "sociableoff" as an custom fields option - unsurprisingly, it allows you to switch off Sociable for individual posts.

How to set custom fields

Let's take a simple example: I want to add my mood to each post. The Custom Fields section is towards the bottom of the Add New Post page.

To add a new custom field, put the field key, e.g. "mood", in the "name" box, and the value, e.g. "cheerful", in the "value" box. Click the "add custom field" to save.

Adding a new custom field

If you've previously set a custom field, the name will appear in a drop-down list in the Custom Fields section. So for your next post, "moods" will already be available, and you can just add your new mood to the value box.

Using an existing custom field in a new post

How to show custom fields in your posts

Here's the simplest way to get a custom field to show in your posts. Just add this code to your theme where you want the custom field information to show:

<?php $my_custom_field = get_post_meta($post->ID, "mood", true);
echo "<p>Mood: ".$my_custom_field."</p>"; ?>

"mood" in the first line within the double quotes should be the name of the custom field you want to show (but make sure you preserve the quotes).

Find out more about using custom fields from the WordPress Codex.

This question came via the Skribit widget in my sidebar: if there's a question you'd like answered, please post it!

Plugins are additions to the basic WordPress functionality, which allow you make it do just about anything you can imagine, from adding polls to your posts to controlling banner ads. Find them in the official WordPress plugin directory. Like themes, they're extremely easy to add to your WP install.

The least you need to know

• Download and unzip your chosen plugin
• Upload the plugin folder or single .php file to /wp-content/plugins/
• From your dashboard, click on 'plugins', and 'activate' your chosen plugins.
• Find where the plugin management is hiding, and make any customisations you need.

Managing and updating plugins

Most plugins will come with some kind of customisability or options that you can change to suit your particular requirements. The link to manage these options might appear under "manage" on your dashboard, or under "settings". A few show up on the top of the plugin management page. Some even add their own top-level link to your dashboard. I think WordPress might do well to add a "plugin management" tab and have all plugins work from there, because as it stands, it can be rather confusing. Don't be afraid to do a little searching about if your plugin management page doesn't appear where you're expecting first-off.

Like the core WordPress install, plugins change: new features are added, security is updated, incompatibilities are ironed out. WP will tell you when one of your plugins needs to be updated: just watch out for the bubble on your dashboard. Most plugins can be automatically updated from within WordPress: there's no messing about with FTP here.

If it all goes wrong...

... don't panic. Sometimes some plugins conflict with others you already have installed; even more rarely, they're released prematurely and don't work correctly. Normally, you can just go to Plugins on the dashboard and disable the guilty party. If you can't get access to your dashboard, deleting the plugin file from /wp-content/plugins/ via FTP should resolve the problem.

A theme is a collection of files which modify the appearance and layout of your blog. WordPress separates the files that make your blog pretty from the files that make it work - so that you can change the appearance easily and quickly without needing to rebuild the core functionality of the program.

The least you need to know

• Find a theme you like
• Download and unzip it
• Upload the theme folder to wp-content/themes/
• Activate it in the Design section of your dashboard.

What to look for in a theme

Choosing a theme can be a overwhelming process. There are literally thousands out there to choose from, so where do you start? Think about what you'll need from a theme first:

• do you want a casual feel, or something more formal and business-like?
• do you have a specific image you want to portray - sporty, fashionable, healthy - or will you be more abstract?
• what colours do you like? does your blog theme need to match branding you have elsewhere?
• what content will you have other than blog posts? do you need space to pimp your eBay listings, your website, or for other advertising?
• do you need space to import content from Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, elsewhere?
• how do you want the header to look? do you need space for your logo? or photographs? or do you want a very minimal header that leads straight into the main content?
• are you picky about which side the sidebar(s) go?
• where do you want the navigation placed: across the top, down the side, a mixture of both?
• do you like fixed-width layouts, or fluid-width which stretch to the full width of the browser window?
• do you want a reverse-chronological theme where the newest post is always at the top, or something more magazine-like and organised by category?

Many people begin with their colour requirements - "I want a red theme" - but as colour is one of the easiest things to change, it makes sense to start with the more fixed elements, like layout, sidebars, space for advertising, first. Pick a few themes that might be what you want, and preview them all on your own blog (see below): it's surprising how different a theme can look when it's using your own content.

Finding themes

The official WP theme directory has just started up again; it's a little thin right now, but expect to see it grow rapidly. In the meantime, there are dozens if not hundreds of lists of WP themes for your perusing pleasure: here are a few I like:

• Smashing Magazine's top 100 list with lovely big preview graphics
• WP Themes 360 has some nice designs
• WordPress.pro has a few designs which seem to have business potential
• Brian Gardner's themes which include Revolution, on which TameBay was built
• Pingable's list of 20 free magazine themes, some of which were nearly TameBay

Premium and sponsored themes

Most WordPress themes are free, donated to the community by their creators. A few are "premium", that is, paid-for themes. Although these have the disadvantage that you have to pony up some dough, they have two advantages: firstly, you're unlikely to find as many people using them as the popular freebies, and secondly, you may get some form of support from the designer, which you're less likely to do with free themes.

Sponsored themes are a little more invidious: they are supported by advertising links in the footer and/or sidebars. Some people object to this, and some don't, but it's something to be aware of: you should know what you're advertising on your own blog.

Making your own theme

It's outside the scope of this blog post, but if you're reasonably confident in HTML, CSS and PHP, you can make your own blog theme . This can be particularly useful if you want your blog to fit the design of a larger site, for example if you're integrating it with your ecommerce store. WordPress give some advice to those embarking on this path.

Installing a theme

• Download and unzip your chosen theme
• Upload the entire theme folder (not just its contents) to /wp-content/themes/
• Click the "Design" tab on your dashboard
• Click the thumbnail of your new theme to preview it with your blog
• If you're happy, click the "Activate..." link from the top right

Just testing

It's easy, so test out a few themes you might like:

Next time, we'll be looking at WordPress plugins, essential add-ons to make your blog a better place to play.

Related Posts

FTP for absolute beginners

because there are no dummies or complete idiots around here.

I've assumed some basic knowledge of t'internet and web hosting here, including how zip files and FTP work. If anything needs more clarification, leave me a comment.

Why WordPress?

There are lots of blog management systems, and not all of them take effort to install like WordPress does. If you use BlogSpot, for example, you can be up and running in a minute or two. But WordPress more than pays off a little effort to get started:

• the content stays on your own server and can be backed up, by you, so you know it's always going to be there,
• the sheer range of stuff you can do with WordPress is unmatched by any other BMS I've seen,
• the community around WP is a great place to be,
• and it's free.

So lets get started.

The least you need to know

• Download the latest version of WordPress from wordpress.org.
• Edit wp-config-sample.php with your own database details, and save as wp-config.php
• Upload to your hosting
• Open /wp-admin/install.php in your browser, and follow the instructions from there.

Sounds easy, yes? Lets look at each stage in detail.

Hosting

You will need some web hosting to run WordPress. The up-to-date minimum requirements are available via WP's site: they're pretty basic, and most web hosting accounts will be adequate. If, for example, you're already running your own ecommerce site, you can almost certainly run a WP blog on the same hosting. If you're not sure, WP provide a handy email to copy to your hosts to check.

If you don't have hosting yet, WP have a number of recommended hosts: they're all in the US, but that largely doesn't matter, and several of them offer one-click WP install. This can be an advantage getting started, but do check that the version you're being offered is the most recent one, and remember you'll have to keep it updated yourself when new releases come out.

Get the software

You can always find the latest release of WordPress via wordpress.org. If you downloaded it a while back but haven't installed it yet, check that there isn't a newer release before you go any further: new releases add security features as well as functionality, so it's important to keep your WP install up to date.

Once downloaded to your computer, you'll need to unzip the software. If this doesn't happen automatically (and it should), there are any number of free utilities to do this for you. Save everything on your PC somewhere where you can find it again easily.

Edit wp-config-sample.php

This is the file that gives WordPress the specific information about your own database installation. You'll need to edit the bits in red (be careful you don't delete any inverted commas by mistake):

define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere');    // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere');     // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');    // 99% chance you won't need to change this value 

The bits after // on each line are comments to help you.

Where do you find this info?

• Your hosting package may come with a database already set up. Check your control panel or the welcome email you received when you opened your account.
• You may need to manually set up a database yourself; look on your control panel for something like database or MySQL management.
• If in doubt, your hosts will be able to give you the information.

In the same file, you'll see three "secret key" phrases: change these to something long and nonsensical.

Use Notepad or another plain text editor, *not* Word, to edit PHP files. Save the edited file as wp-config.php (.php is the file extension: if your text editor tries to call it wp-config.php.txt or similar, override that).

Upload WordPress

You now have a folder on your PC called Wordpress, with all the WP files in it: you need to upload the *contents* of that folder to the directory on your server where you want the blog to appear.

So now you need to decide what you want the URL of your blog to look like.

• If your blog is part of a larger site, you might want it in its own directory, for example www.domain.com/blog: upload the WP package to that directory.
• If the entire domain *is* your blog, then upload to the root public HTML directory (which might even be called public_html, depending on your hosts).

Don't upload the WordPress folder itself, only its contents, or you'll end up with URLs that look like www.domain.com/blog/wordpress.

Once the upload is complete, open [your blog directory]/wp-admin/install.php in your browser, and follow the on-screen instructions. You'll need to tell WordPress the title of your blog and your email address, and then it will install everything for you. At the end of the installation, you'll be given an admin password. This should also be emailed to you, but make a note of it now - WP generates some fantastically random passwords, so I'd make the next thing you do...

Set up your admin user account and password

Click the "users" link from the top right, and then the "admin" user name. You can fill out some important details here including how you want your name to display on your posts (unless you want to be called "admin" forever), and also change your password to something you can remember.

Now would also be a good time to bookmark your admin dashboard: it lives at /wp-admin/ if you forget.

And we're done!

You should now have a plain-vanilla install of WordPress, that looks something like the screen shot to the left. This is now functional, and you can start writing: click "Write" from the top of your admin dashboard to write a post. WordPress comes with one post and one comment "pre-installed"; you probably want to delete these, so go into "Manage" to remove them.

It's worth taking a bit of time to look around the WordPress dashboard at this point: generally, things you might want to use often (Write, Manage, Comments) are the big links on the left, and things you'll use less often are the smaller links on the right. It can look a little daunting at first, but once you get used to what lives where, it's really pretty straightforward.

Next weekend, we'll be looking at making things pretty with WordPress themes.