Two friends of mine are in the process of setting up WordPress blogs (seven blogs between them actually–craziness). I found myself writing out an email to one of them with some details on some of the steps I go through for each of my blogs and figured I’d write it up as a post instead as it’ll even be useful for me as reference next time.

  • Feedburner. Run to feedburner.com and set up a feed for the new blog. You’ll need to provide your current feed as the source which is generally something like http://www.yourdomain.com/?feed=rss2.
  • Install the Glued Ideas theme called Subtle. It’s a feature rich (in my experience) theme that’s simple at the same time. It also has great native support for Feedburner which makes it so you can avoid some manual tweaking of your pages to set up default feeds and other little things like subscribe-by-mail features from Feedburner. If you want to use another theme later, it’s easy enough to switch but this one should get you going very quickly.
  • Activate the Akismet spam plugin. It’s already installed, you just need to activate it. It’s really pretty amazing at doing what it intends to–which is rare in that field.
  • Install and activate Anders Drengen’s Counterize plug-in. This is a great way to track statistics for your blog such as most popular posts, top referrers, etc. and it integrates very nicely into WordPress itself.
  • Anders’s SearchHistory plugin is also a good one to consider installing.
  • I also use the WP-Amazon plugin as it makes it easy to find and link to most any product on Amazon.
  • You might as well get an Amazon Associates id from Amazon and plug it into the WP-Amazon’s config if you don’t already have one.
  • Change the permalink style in WordPress to “Date and name based” instead of the default which uses the post id. This will make identifying pages infinitely easier when viewing stats in Counterize (see above) and in general when dealing with URLs to your posts. I’m guessing there’s a disadvantage with going with this style since it’s not the default but I haven’t run into any yet and benefitted greatly. You do want to do this early on though so links to your site use the date/name based links instead though I’ve found both work regardless of the setting–you still want WordPress to know and use the style you prefer though so it’s important to set it appropriately.
  • Set up ping services (Options->Writing->Update Services) and add the following:
  • Set the timezone you’re in (Options->General) so you’re timestamps on your posts are correct. Those of us in the west coast use -8.
  • Setup email for your domain using Windows Live Custom Domains or Google for your Domain. Either one works pretty well though I use the former.
  • Get a Flickr account. It rocks and you can use your photos from Flickr directly on your blog without having to deal with uploading images to your host plus many, many more benefits.

That’s all I can think of for now. If I think of anything else or get asked a question not covered yet I’ll update this post in the future…