Reading Settings

The other side of the blogging coin is reading. Your WordPress Blog won't be much fun if no one reads it, though don't be fooled into thinking that your WordPress Blog isn't a success if you reach a small number of people. A small WordPress Blog is just as important as a large political or tech blog with millions of readers. You do have a few decisions to make about how your blog content is consumed, no matter how many readers you end up with.

Setting the front page

Some people refer to WordPress as a content management system, CMS, and with the addition of the Front Page Displays setting, this characterization is truer now than it's ever been. The traditional WordPress installation simply displays a list of the most recent blog posts on the index page, and that's still the default setting. Selecting a static page as your front page, however, opens some interesting possibilities. You can create a page that provides static information about you or your product, which makes your WordPress Blog look more like a traditional Web site. You can also designate a page as a Posts page, which lists your WordPress Blog posts separately. So when people visit your blog's index page, they see a page full of whatever information you want to give them, with a hyperlink to another page that is, for all intents and purposes, your WordPress Blog. This option makes it a breeze to create a dynamic site with content that's easy to update. If you decide to set up your WordPress Blog in this manner, but you don't see any pages listed in the Front Page and Posts Page drop-down menus, there's a simple explanation: You have to create the pages before you complete these settings. No matter where you decide to list your blog posts, whether it be on the index page or on a subpage, you have the option of showing as many or as few posts as you want. Just type the number in the Blog Pages Show at Most text box. Some WordPress Blogs are well suited to showing a single blog post on a page at a time; others benefit from more blog posts per page.

Configure your feeds

WordPress Blogs probably wouldn't be as popular as they are without syndication feeds. These feeds are actually text files formatted in such as a way as to make them easily parsed by clients called feed readers or RSS readers. If you think of your WordPress Blog as a magazine, your feed is a way for readers to subscribe to your publication. Just as the editor of a magazine has to decide what to publish, you have to decide what information to include in your feeds. Remember that feeds are important to a WordPress Blog; a good feed is one that makes people want to keep reading.

Number of posts

The first decision you have to make is how many posts to include in the feed. This setting is important when a person first subscribes to your feed, because it determines how many blog posts he gets right off the bat. The default setting, ten, is a good number in my opinion-just enough to get someone up to speed on your posts and not enough to overwhelm him.

Feed content

The second decision is much more basic: How much content do you want to provide in your feed? You have to keep in mind that people who subscribe to your WordPress Blog's feed are reading it in their feed readers, not by loading your Web site. As a result, they won't see any ads that you may have on your site, which makes some site owners nervous. You can give subscribers just a taste of your blog post and force them to visit your site to read the whole thing by selecting the Summary radio button. I think this method is foolish, however, for a couple of reasons:

• If someone has gone to the trouble of subscribing to your WordPress Blog, she's a pretty big fan of your work.
• People who use feed readers are pretty Web-savvy, which means that they aren't likely to click an ad and trap to zap the monkey. You won't be making any money off them with your ads anyway, so you should make it as easy as possible for them to read your stuff in the hope that they'll share it with their friends.

So I recommend that you accept the default setting, Full Text. You'll thank me later. I also suggest that you accept the default encoding for pages and feeds.