Wordpress Tips - Including Scheduling posts and adding images to sidebar.

Image via Wikipedia

I often get asked for advice on utilising certain WordPress features. The latest couple of things that have come up are about scheduling posts (I am amazed how many people don’t even know they can do this!) and how to add the images of those lovely blog awards to your sidebar on your blog. So here goes…

Scheduling Posts

So, I’m writing this post on Sunday. I want it to go out on Tuesday morning but I won’t be at my computer so I can’t open my draft and click ‘publish’. Instead I will schedule it now.

When you are writing a post over on the right hand side, where the ‘publish’ button is there are some other options above ‘publish’ and below ‘save draft’ and ‘preview’. Each of these has an ‘edit’ option next to them.

To schedule a post you will need to click the edit option next to ‘Publish  immediately‘

This will bring up some boxes with date and time options that you can adjust to suit when you want to publish your post. When you have chosen the date and time you would like your post published, click ok.

The ‘Publish’ button should now have changed to a ‘schedule’ button so when you click it your post will be scheduled to publish at the time and date you selected – simple eh!?

The other options in the ‘publish’ box

When you start writing a post the options in the ‘publish’ box will usually be set to standard options:

Status: Draft

Visibility: Public

Schedule: Immediately

Publicize: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn (This will only have the options you have activated listed here, so don’t panic if your’s doesn’t have these as you probably haven’t set them up)

If you click edit next to ‘Status’ you can save your post as ‘pending review’ instead of as a draft – this is useful if someone else reviews your posts before they are published.

With ‘Visibility’ you can choose to make your post ‘public’ ‘password protected’ or ‘private’ you can also choose to ‘stick this post to the front page’ – this is useful if you want to keep a specific post on your home page for a certain length of time (or permanently) and also if you have a theme with a widget such as the carousel on my home page you can use this to make certain posts appear there.

Publish – discussed above.

Publicize – here you can chose which of the activated social media sites you wish your post to be published to, you need to set up the sites separately before you can use this feature, but if you have this done you can then set a ‘custom message’ to publish with the link to your post.

Adding images to your sidebar

Okay, again this is actually quite simple.

First of all you need a URL for the image you want to add.

To get this go to wherever the image you want to use is online.

Place your cursor over the image and right click.

This will bring up a list of options – choose ‘Open image in new tab’ (or similarly worded phrase depending on your browser)

With the image now open in its own tab copy the URL from the address bar.

Return to WordPress with your copied URL.

Go to Appearance - Widgets

Place an ‘Image’ widget in your sidebar box, by dragging it over.

Open the widget, by clicking the little arrow.

Paste the URL of your image into the Image URL: box

You can now add a title or caption for your image and adjust the size and position of the image as well as giving a link to the original image for when others click on it.

Don’t forget to click SAVE when you are done and then your image should appear on your sidebar on your homepage.

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For more tips you can check out the post I wrote about 5 basic elements of WordPress here

I hope you have found these tips useful. Don’t forget is you ever need a hand with the basics of using your WordPress blog the first place you should check out is the Learn WordPress.com site - http://learn.wordpress.com/

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