Setting Up Your Own Blog Part Two

Hi and welcome to the second part of my series called Setting Up Your Own Blog. If you missed the first part of my series, you can read it here. Okay, by now you should have already come up with a name for your blog, chosen a hosting service and used their “1 click” install feature to get you’re WordPress blog installed and now your ready to take the next steps for your blog.

The first thing that we want to do is select a WordPress theme for your blog. Since WordPress is the #1 choice of os package for many bloggers, there are many free and premium themes to choose from.

Take a few minutes and take a look at some of your favorite blogs and get an idea of what themes those sites use and decide if any of them are a choice for your own blog.

Free themes are a great way to go at first with your blog. Many of the free themes available today offer many ways to customize them so that they give your blog it’s own unique look and feel. Premium blog themes are custom designed and also have many customizable features and they are very affordable.

After you’ve selected your theme and installed it, it’s time to add “plug-ins” for your blog. Plug-Ins help add functionality to your WordPress blog. Some are more important in my own opinion than others, and so below you’ll find a list of some of the plug-ins that are used on this site:

• Akismet
• Evermore
• Google XML Sitemaps with qTranslate Support
• Wordbooker

I do have more plug-ins installed, but these are the basic one’s that you should have for your blog in the beginning. I did not include an “SEO” plug-in, because the latest editions of WordPress include an SEO program that in my opinion does it all and that’s Yoast for WordPress.

So after you’ve installed your plug-ins and possibly had to configure some of them to function properly, the next thing to do is check what are called your “ping settings.”

A ping, is a way that we alert a server that we have updated our blog. Below you will find a list that you can actually copy and paste into your “writing settings” area to make things easier for you:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://rpc.twingly.com

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://www.feedsubmitter.com

http://blo.gs/ping.php

http://www.pingerati.net

http://www.pingmyblog.com

http://geourl.org/ping

http://ipings.com

http://www.weblogalot.com/ping

Wow! That’s some list…aren’t you glad you won’t have to type each one of those in manually? Well after you’ve accomplished all of that comes the fun stuff and that’s creating your content, and that’s what I’ll be talking about in the third and final installment of this series about Starting Your Own Blog.