Spontaneous ∂erivation

Last time I talked about the advantages and disadvantages of a Wordpress.com blog versus an individual Wordpress install as a platform for your web serial.

This time I’m focusing on the basic settings and plugins a web serial would need/want, with special discussion of a Wordpress.com versus an individual Wordpress install. Web serials have somewhat different needs from a normal blog.

If you’re planning on your own Wordpress installation, this article assumes that either you or your web hosting has already set up your Wordpress install.

Both Wordpress.com and Individual Installations

Basic Settings

On the left-hand menu of the dashboard for your particular blog, there’s a link to basic settings. It’ll take you to the settings page, and also expand the sub-menu items for Settings.

You’re automatically put into General Settings first. On the side menu under Settings will now display various links to the settings pages, the most important of which we’ll discuss below individually.

From here, I’m going to focus on the necessary options, and leave the other options for you to play with.

Don’t forget to click the save button at the bottom of each settings page to save your settings.

General Settings

Important fields: Blog Title, Tagline, Language, Email address, and Time Zone.

Reading Settings

Important fields: “For each article in a feed”

This is the most important RSS feed setting, I think.

If you select “Full Text”, your readers can easily read your story in their RSS feed, and you can also add your blog to Amazon’s Kindle website for subscription via Kindle. However, this a) opens you up to people who scrape RSS content, which is bad enough for a blog, but in some ways I think is worse for a web serial, b) you’ll miss out on people visiting your site, which is where your extra menus and possible ads and possible donation buttons are, c) you’ll have less control over how your story is displayed for people who read via RSS feeds (doesn’t matter for 99% of serials).

If you select “Summary”, you may annoy people who read only through RSS, and you won’t be able to use Amazon’s Kindle subscriptions. However, you also avoid the disadvantages above.

When in doubt, go with Summary; you can change it later if you want to.

(And yes, I personally prefer full text for RSS feeds, and know plenty of other people do. But while it’s very reader-friendly, it’s less writer-friendly, and most readers will visit your site directly. Plus a Summary RSS feed will still provide direct links to your individual posts.)

Discussion Settings

Important fields: “Default article settings”

I’m going to go against popular wisdom for blogs again, and suggest you turn off commenting by default. Mostly because this avoids inadvertant spoilers and avoids needing to a) moderate people, and b) kick out spam.

If you still want to host discussion separately, you can create a special post that allows comments specifically, or you can use a forum of some sort.

Appearance Settings

This is a whole ‘nother section of your Wordpress administration, and it’s the easiest and most fun to play with. Select a theme, and select and rearrange widgets with drag-and-drop, and so on. Some themes allow you to set a Customer Header, which also appears in the Appearance sub-menu if your theme happens to support it (some don’t).

Most themes have a sane set of default widgets, but I suggest that you have the following:

• a Text widget, with a short blurb about your serial; it can accept arbitrary HTML, so you can include images and links. This is a good place to put a link to the very first entry of your serial so that people can follow happily along.
• a Recent Posts widget, for that omnipresent access to your most recent post.
• an Archives widget.
• another Text widget, with Paypal donation/subscription links.

Wordpress.com Only

Removing Related Links From Posts

On Wordpress.com, by default your posts will have an automatically generated section at the end with random “related” links that hit other blogs.

For web serials, this can be distracting. Really distracting. Turning this option off will lose you the possibility of getting your links randomly generated on other Wordpress.com blog posts, but I think such links are terrible for a web serial anyways.

You can turn this off via a sub-section under Appearances, called “Extras”.

Straight-up HTML is in some ways the simplest way to kit up a little website. But on the other hand, it’s also the hardest, especially if you’re

• Making regular updates,
• Live web statistics,
• Automatic UTF-8 encoding so that typographical quotes and dashes look professional on multiple browsers,
• Automatic RSS feed generation with UTF-8 encoding,
• iPhone-special and even Android-special views of your website (and the iPhone is getting rather popular amongst SF readers),

and so on.

So a blogging platform is nice to have. Wordpress¹ is one of the easiest and nicest, and even has a free site a la Blogger.com where you can set up multiple free blogs with many of the most necessary features above, though not all of them (the last, iPhone views, in particular).

If you decide to set up your own Wordpress install, that’s not much harder (even John Scalzi, for quite some time, could keep up his own Wordpress install without a dedicated web elf, and he’s not the most technical of writers). You can even set it up as a subset of your author website, just for your serial(s).

The future installments of this little technical-advice-for-layman-writers series, in fact, will mostly focus on Wordpress as a platform.

So here are your two options, and their pros and cons: a) using Wordpress.com, or b) using your own Wordpress install.

Wordpress.com Advantages

For the busy writer, this is the fastest way to set up a blog, with minimum fuss, the most important features, and it’s free with possible pay-for-use upgrades if you like.

Pros:

• Someone else takes care of house-keeping the Wordpress software, some of the more useful plugins, the hardware, the security, the backups, and the DNS and web URLs.

• You can have your own blog addresses, ending in wordpress.com, for free. You can also have your very own domain with a paid upgrade, if you like to do so later (you can even have multiple domains point at a single blog).

• Easy set up (even easier than Blogger, I think).

• Features like live statistics, RSS feeds, commenting (which can be turned off) with spam protection, polls, etc.

• Themes you can choose from, many of which allow you to set the header image for your serial blog to give it an identity (and usually this is enough).

Cons:

• You can’t install your own plugins. This is actually nice in some ways, since it increases security, but can be limiting in other ways. For instance, no iPhone special view plugin.

• You can’t install your own themes without a pay-for upgrade.

• You can’t even edit the CSS or code of the existing themes without a pay-for upgrade.

• If you want to switch to your own hosting, it’s going to be difficult to pry domains and add redirection (no plugins, no theme editing) from the cold, cold hands of Wordpress.com. This is a rather big con.

Your Own Wordpress Install Advantages

Pros:

• Many hosting sites will install Wordpress for you, and even upgrade it (although Wordpress has added features like a one-click upgrade, which makes the already easy administration dead easy if you want to do that yourself). Some hosting companies is better at this than others.

  For instance, my hosting, EsoSoft, takes care of lotsa things like insane DNS crap, and debugging things that go wrong with my Wordpress install. Their prices are reasonable, their support is great, their hosting is reliable, there is no upload/download cap, and Smart Bitches, Trashy Books uses them—and they’re a fairly high-traffic review blog. Esosoft even went out of its way to add extra servers when SMTB got a much higher than usual traffic rate.

• You can install your own plugins (including all the ones that Wordpress.com provides).

• You can install and edit your own themes and their CSS.

• Ability to use your own domain without extra payment on top of the web hosting, naturally.

Cons:

• You still have more things to take care of than with a Wordpress.com blog, although most hosting sites will still take care of many of these things for you. Not backups or security usually, though that’s easy enough to fix.

• Unless you’re messing around with Wordpress Mu, multiple blog addresses will be annoying.

My Recommendation

If you desperately need free, use Wordpress.com.

If you can spare a little bit of money, EsoSoft and your own Wordpress install is a great place to be.

1. And yes, I was a Wordpress skeptic for many years. [↩]