Free WordPress blog accounts: Dashboard, pages, categories & links

As I’ve mentioned, we’re putting some effort into working with 2 different blogging platforms – the Mediafactory (MF) blogs for Media students, and the free WordPress (WP) blogs for everyone else.

If you have a free WP account and want to use the same dashboard as the MF, here’s a quick little hack: once logged into your blog, type in your blog home page address (should be there already) then add the following: /wp-admin .  So the URL in your browser bar should look like this:

Browser bar

with your blog name in place of netmed2016testblog, obvs.  This will take you to the same dashboard as the MF blogs, and while there are a lot more options, it’s all there in front of you.  A few students had trouble adding links, so if you want to do that, check out WP support here.

I would recommend this way of doing things, so we all have a common experience.  However, if that all sounds like too much, read on…

If you want to keen the free WordPress blog more simplistic, try to use the ‘dashboard’ (which you can access by clicking the ‘My Sites’ button top left, should look like this) as much as possible to add new posts, and for any other functionality that is available.  It is limited however, so to add in things like widgets, make links visible in your sidebar, edit menus and the like you’ll need to select ‘customise’ .  The ‘customise’ function will edit your chosen theme template, so this might be a little trickier – but persevere and remember you should be able to undo pretty much anything you don’t like.

The distinction: through dashboard, you create content.  Posts, Categories (look to the left when you create a post), Pages, and more.  In ‘customise’, you tell your blog how you want to display your content: adding pages or categories as menu items, adding content to your sidebar through widgets, or even creating custom menus (but I don’t know why you would want to do that just yet).

A tricky one: the blogroll.  If you add the ‘links’ widget, you get a pre-defined list of site added to your sidebar.  You have to go into the wp-admin version of dashboard to change this (details at the top of this post).  So to add custom links, create a ‘Text’ Widget, then add in each link one by one. This is where our basic HTML comes in handy.  To add a link to the Netmed2016 blog, use copy and paste this code into the text widget:

<a href=”http://www.mediafactory.org.au/2016-networked-media”>NetMed2016 blog</a>

I’ll let you figure out how to add more!

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