Refining Your Post Options

After you write the post, you can choose a few extra options before you
publish it for the entire world to see. These settings apply to the post you’re
currently working on — not to any future or past posts. You can find these
options below and to the right of the Post text box (see Figure 1-4). Click the
title of each option — the settings for that specific option expand.
You can reposition the different post option modules on the Add New Post page to fit the way you use this page.

Here are the options that appear below the Post text box:

✦ Excerpt: Excerpts are short summaries of your posts. Many bloggers
use snippets to show teasers of their blog posts, thereby encourag-
ing the reader to click the Read More links to read the posts in their
entirety. Type your short summary in the Excerpt box. Excerpts can be
any length, in terms of words; however, the point is to keep it short and

sweet, and tease your readers into clicking the Read More link. Figure

1-5 shows a blog post published to Lisa’s site; however, it displays only an excerpt of the post on the front page — requiring the reader to click the Continue Reading link to view the post in its entirety.

✦ Send Trackbacks: If you want to send a trackback to another blog, enter

the blog’s trackback URL in the Send Trackbacks To text box. You can
send trackbacks to more than one blog; just be sure to separate track-
back URLs with a space between each. For more on trackbacks, refer to
✦ Custom Fields: Custom fields add extra data to your posts, and you can
fully configure them. You can read more about the Custom Fields feature
in WordPress in Book IV, Chapter 6.
✦ Discussion: Decide whether to let readers submit comments through the
comment system by selecting the Allow Comments on this Post check
box. By default, the box is checked; uncheck it to disallow comments on this post.
✦ Author: If you’re running a multi-author blog, you can select the name
of the author who wrote this post. By default, your own author name
appears selected in the Author drop-down menu.

Here are the options that appear to the right of the Post text box:

✦ Publish: Publishing and privacy options for your post, which we cover
in more detail in the following section of this chapter.
✦ Categories: You can file your posts in different categories to organize
them by subject. (See more about organizing your posts by category.
Select the check box to the left of the category you
want to use. You can toggle between listing all categories or seeing just
the categories that you use the most by clicking the All Categories or
Most Used links, respectively.
Don’t see the category you need? Click Add New Category, and you can
add a category right there on the Add New Post page that appears.
✦ Post Tags: Type your desired tags in the Add New Tag text box. Be sure
to separate each tag with a comma so that WordPress knows where
each tag begins and ends. Cats, Kittens, Feline represents three
different tags, for example, but without the commas, WordPress would
consider those three words to be one tag. See Book III, Chapter 7 for
more information on tags and how to use them.
✦ Featured Image: Some WordPress themes are configured to use an
image (photo) to represent each post that you have on your blog. The
image can appear on the home/front page, blog page, archives, or any-
where within the content display on your Web site. If you’re using a
theme that has this option, you can easily define the post thumbnail by
clicking Set Featured Image below the Featured Image module on the
Add New Post page. More information about using Featured Images can
be found in Book VI, Chapter 6.
When you finish setting the options for your post, don’t navigate away from
this page; you haven’t yet fully saved your options. The following section on
publishing your post covers all the options you need for saving your post
settings!