Writting Settings

Video Transcript

The next item in our Settings section of our Admin’s sidebar menu is the Writings Settings panel. Go ahead and click on this link. You can define the default post category. And right now we’ve not messed with our categories over here in our post section. And we’ll cover that in a later video, but here’s where you can create additional categories to group your various posts in. And once you do that, you can just hit this drop-down box here and select which one of those categories you’re going to be posting to the most and use that as your default post category. Likewise, with the post format, by default, you have these various formats. And you can just pick the one that you want to choose as your default post format. Now on both of these, the format and the category, you can change those on a post-by-post basis. These are just the default.
So we come over here to post and go to Add New Post. Over here on the right, you can see where you can select from the different types of formats and the different types of categories. And again, right now, we only have the uncategorized category. But you can also create a new category right here and select that. So you’re not limited to just what you decide on here in the default sections.

And next up we have Post Via Email, not something that I’m going to go in a great detail about – except to say that WordPress has said for over a year now that they’re going to be removing this feature from the WordPress installation.

As a matter of fact, if we head over to codex.wordpress.org/Post_to_your_blog_using_email, they’re going to tell you right here that the built-in WordPress functionality is deprecated – meaning it’s nothing they’re messing with anymore – and will be removed in an upcoming release. Again, this has been over a year that I’m aware of. So I don’t know what upcoming release they’re referring to, but it’s been a long time.

Now they do suggest, however, some options to use this feature, just not the one that’s built into WordPress. My suggestion is skip the first two options because this one, the email plugin, has not been updated since 2013. This option here is a built-in feature into the Jetpack group of plugins. I’m just not a fan of Jetpack, and that’s my personal preference. So I’m going to suggest against this one. But if you do use Jetpack, go ahead and check that feature out. It’s already built in. You’ve already got it installed in your WordPress site. So go ahead and check it out.

This one, however, is the one I would suggest. As a matter of fact, I’m going to do a video on this to demonstrate how to use the Post Via Email feature, just not the one that’s built into WordPress. But this Postie plugin, this was last updated yesterday, as of the recording of this video. And you can get there by going to WordPress.org/plugins/postie.

Next up, we’ve got Update Services. This has a good and a bad side. Good side is that every time that you publish and update your post, this sends out a notice to all of those update services out there – and there’s a whole bunch of them, I mean hundreds of them – that hey, we’ve got some new content hitting the web. Go check it out. Now while Ping-o-Matic is a great service by itself, like I said, there are literally hundreds of other services out there. And the main purpose behind this Update Service option is to generate traffic to your site. Whenever you publish or update a post, again, this sends out a notice to everybody out there that hey, we’ve got some new content here. Come check it out. And in theory, the more update services you have listed in this box, the more traffic that you will generate to your site. Well, like I said, that’s theory though. But if you want to learn more about that, then you can check out this link here for Update Services.

Now the downside to the Update Services option is that by default, WordPress sends out this ping or notification to all of these services you have in here – not only whenever you publish a new post, but whenever you update a new post. So if within a matter of 10 or 15 minutes, you, like me, may find a new image to add to that post or find a typo or a new link or whatever, you go to add it, update it; boom, WordPress automatically sends out that notice again. And those services come check out your post and find that it’s the same thing. Very quickly, they will label you as what’s called a ping spammer – not a good thing – quickly blacklist you, take you off of their list. And that’s just again not a good thing.

So how can you prevent that? Well, there are a couple of plugins out there. One, probably the best one, is called WordPress Ping Optimizer. Just head on over to wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-ping-optimizer, and they’ve got instructions on installing and activating and how to use this. So by all means, check that out. So that’s the Update Services, the good and the bad.
Now one thing I do want to mention though is that whenever we were installing our WordPress site, there was one option to prevent search engines from indexing your site until you’re ready. Well, if you did what I suggested you to do, then you’re not going to see this option. You’re not going to see the Update Services because if you don’t want the search engines to see your site, you definitely don’t want other update services to see your site until you’re ready. So come over here to the reading panel, which, by the way, I’m going to cover in the next video. And to demonstrate what I’m referring to, go ahead and check that box there. Come on back to Writing. And you can see that the Update Services looks like this. So if yours looks like this, that’s because you unchecked that box like I told you to whenever you were installing WordPress to discourage the search engines from checking out your site until you’re ready for them to. So at that point, whenever you are ready for the search engines and the entire world to see your post, then you can go ahead and click this link here. That’ll take you back to the reading panel. Uncheck that box. Click on Save Changes. Head on back over to Writing. And then adjust this however you want. And of course, add the plugin and all that other good stuff. And that’s it.
And that’ll bring us to the end of this video on the Writing panel of our Settings section. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.