Guide To Blogging

Administering a WordPress Blog

Modifying the Administrator

The default WordPress installation has a single user called ‘admin’ which has full privileges over the installation and this account allows you to login to your blog and begin work after initial installation.

However if you create posts whilst logged in as the admin user they will show up with ‘admin’ as the author and this is undesirable if you wish to promote a personal or business brand with your blog.

As the blog owner, the account you use to login to WordPress needs to have full privileges but you want your posts to come out under the chosen name. An easy way to achieve this is to simple edit the admin user and give it a different name which will appear on posts.

From your WordPress dashboard, click on the ‘users’ link and find the ‘admin’ username. From here you can edit various details such as the first and last name, the email address and some other fields. Type in the chosen name but for it to be shown on posts you will also need to click on the drop down box entitled ‘Display name publicly as’ and select the new name you entered.

Lastly, be sure to change the password to one of your choosing for the administrator user.

Configuring Comment Moderation

Comments are a crucial part of most blogs and as your blog grows and develops it will attract more and more comments - including a healthy dose of spam comments! We need to modify some settings so from your WordPress dashboard click ‘Settings’ and then ‘Discussion’.

The default settings have changed a bit in recent WordPress releases but here are some of the points to be aware of:

Make sure that people are allowed to comment and allow to leave trackbacks. If these are turned off you can’t get comments on your blog.

You can alter the email settings here. This is largely a matter of preference. By default WordPress will send the administrator an email when a new comment is left but that can soon become overwhelming if your blog becomes popular. I turn this off and make a point of checking my comments on a daily basis.

By default, when somebody leaves a comment it is published immediately and of course that can be good or bad depending on your point of view. If somebody posts something abusive or spammy then you might want to know about it beforehand and this is largely dependent on the topic of your blog.

WordPress comes installed with the akismet plugin which will trap about 99% of spam so the vast majority of comments that get through will be from legitimate users and I find that most people do leave genuine comments which are no problem so I prefer not to moderate too much. The only thing I find to be an occasional problem is people leaving lots of links in a signature or something so I moderate all comments with 2 or more links.

When this happens you need to manually click the ‘approve’ button for every comment in the moderation queue before it will show up on your blog. This obviously causes a delay for the comment poster so I would advise you to use this feature sparingly.

Caroline Middlebrook has written a popular blog since 2007 which earns a 4-figure monthly income. She shows you how to make money blogging and gives away free downloads of her free guides & courses.