Newbies guide to blogging (Part Four)

Everybody’s doing it. Blogging’s the thing these days, and you don’t need to be a computer geek to make it happen. In this article I explain about the toolbars that might appear when you edit a post in WordPress. [First published October 2006. Some details may be a bit dated.]

This post continues from Newbies guide to blogging (Part Three).

Editing options

The one thing that might confuse you a bit is how different web browsers offer different toolbars when you write a post. There’s also a setting in the Users > Your profile section of the Dashboard that affects whether or not you see an editing toolbar.

There are three ‘formats’ for the blog post entry box:

1. visual rich editor (gives you buttons such as ‘bold’, ‘list’ and so on).
2. quicktags (gives you buttons for HTML codes).
3. plain (you can enter HTML, if you like).

The visual rich editor

If you don’t know anything about HTML, your best choice is probably the visual rich editor. To make sure this is turned on go to the Users > Your profile section of the Dashboard, scroll down to the Personal Options section and ensure the box to Use the visual rich editor when writing is checked, as shown in Screenshot 11.

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Screenshot 11: Ensure the Visual rich editor is enabled.
Screenshot 12: Use the toolbar buttons in the Visual rich editor.

Now, if you’re using the right web browser, you can easily select a word or phrase and click on a button on the toolbar to format it. Screenshot 12 shows that I’ve selected the word ‘favourite’ and am about to click the ‘b’ button to make it bold.

Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer

Screenshots 13, 14 and 15 show how three different web browsers handle the Visual rich editor. Safari just doesn’t show it, Firefox (and Flock, a Firefox derivative) and Internet Explorer for Windows do.

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Screenshot 13: Safari doesn’t show the Visual rich editor.
Screenshot 14: Firefox for Windows and Mac does show the Visual rich editor.
Screenshot 15: Internet Explorer for Windows does show the Visual rich editor.

Whether you’re a computer geek or not, you will also find the recently published book, WordPress 2 Visual Quickstart Guide (affiliate link), extremely useful. In 304 pages it provides simple step by step instructions, with plenty of screenshots, for both the free WordPress.com blogging service and for anyone who wants to set up a WordPress blog on their own web server. The book was written by Maria Langer, author of more than 60 books for Mac users, and Miraz Jordan, writer. ISBN: 0-321-45019-1.

This article includes Windows screenshots (made on a Mac running Parallels software). This article was first published in Macguide magazine Issue #29 September / October 2006 and may have been modified from the original.

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