Getting Hands On

In our introductory post we worked on generating some broad ideas about how you could visually represent your blog. Now that’s out of the way, let’s get hands on in putting those thoughts into action. In future posts, we’ll look at how you might want to explore the Custom Design Upgrade and go to town on custom typefaces, tweaking your CSS, and really getting stuck into tweaking your color schemes to suit your taste. But to start with, it’s amazing how big an impact playing with the header of your blog can have, and getting creative with image widgets can add to the effect. Better still, both are baked right into your blog whether you have upgrades or not.

Headers

Chances are the header of your blog is what people will see first when they arrive to have a look around. Think of it as your store front, your book cover, and the “face” of your blog all rolled into one, and you’ll quickly appreciate how important making a first impression can be.

The extent to which you can change the header of your blog will depend on the theme you’re using, if your theme even has a header, so that’s worth bearing in mind. But whichever theme you have on your blog, you’ll be able to get at the header from your dashboard by *cough* heading to Appearance > Header. If that option isn’t available, chances are you don’t have a theme that has a header in the first place. In that case, you’ll either want to consider switching themes, ignore the whole header business, or check out the Appearance > Theme Options to see if there are other tweaks you can make.

We won’t go into the nitty gritty of header editing here, because there’s a support document all about that. Instead, we’ll take a look at some creative examples of headers that might spark a few ideas for your own design.

Header Inspiration

If you’re stuck for ideas as to how you could make your header work harder for you, here are a few ideas from fellow WordPress.com bloggers:

Explode the Box

One way you can make your header stand out is to stop thinking of it as a rectangular slab of color or a boxy slither of photo.

On Capture Rapture, the header blends seamlessly into the navigation bar at the top, creating more of an impact. This has been achieved by setting the navigation bar to a custom color, an option available to users of the Triton Lite theme, and then using the exact same color from the navigation bar in the header image.

The Bump Life takes a different approach to the same concept, by nibbling away at the edges of the header “box” using the same color as that used for the background, creating a slightly distressed, painterly look to the header:

The design of Small World Supper Club rounds off the edges of the header by using the same white as the background color.

So there you have three examples that look completely different, but nevertheless manage to break out of the boxy, typical header approach by matching the  color at the edges of their header images with that of the background or navigation bar elements of the blog.

Signature Look

Another approach to personalizing your header is to hand write, draw, or letter your blog title in such a way as to create a personal “signature” that nobody will mistake for another blog. The good news for those of us with illegible scrawls rather than beautifully formed letterforms is that you can always cheat and make use of any of the hundreds of freely available handwritten font styles out there on the web.

Witchin in the Kitchen makes use of freehand titles and taglines that instantly sets it apart from the pack — after all, what’s more personal than your own handwriting?

While Eggton and American Vagabond take the photo-header in a new direction by introducing bold, freehand typography into the mix, again, setting their blogs apart from those using the standard system font, at the standard size, in the standard location:

Playful Typography

As the hand written examples above show, you don’t need to settle for a run-of-the-mill typeface for your header, such as the one included as default in your theme. In addition to being able to customize your fonts via the Custom Design upgrade, you can also take your type in bold, image-driven directions with a little imagination:

Life Absorbed uses a photo header, but the photo is of a hand-made, three-dimensional cardboard model of the blog’s title. Not something you see very often:

Sage + Clare makes beautiful use of bold, high-impact typography and a beautiful masking effect to color the type in a unique and original way:

Image Widgets

Headers are the neon hotel signs of blog branding: up front, bold, clearly distinguishable, and ideally, captivating at first glance. Creative use of image widgets, on the other hand, are more about the details, like the interior decor of the same hotel.

The technique we’re interested in here is replacing vanilla lists of pages or categories on your blog, with unique, branded images that can be clicked on to take people where you’d most like them to go. It’s easier shown than described, so in a moment we’ll jump right into some great examples. You can read everything you need to know about setting up your own image widgets on the WordPress.com support all about them.

In brief, the steps look a little like this:

1. Make sure you’re using a theme that supports widgets. If you aren’t, when you head to the Appearance menu from your dashboard, you won’t see Widgets as an option. In that case, you’ll either need to change themes or forget about using image widgets. The good news is that most themes will allow you to use widgets. Huzzah.
2. Create one or more image widgets. You can do that from the Appearance > Widgets menu. If you’re not sure what that even means, or how to go about it, head to the support doc all about widgets and you’ll be up to speed in a minute or so.
3. Upload some images for your sidebar. You’ll get some ideas about the type of thing you might consider in the examples below. If you’re not sure how to upload images, head over to this support doc on the Media uploader tool.
   
4. Point your image widget at the image you want it to display. If you get stuck with that, check out the image widget support doc.
5. Add a link (optional). If you want your image widget to take readers to a different part of your blog, you’ll want to add a link to the place you’d like them to be taken before saving your widget.

Ok, enough of all that. Let’s see how WordPress.com bloggers are making creative use of image widgets.

Image Widget Inspiration

The key to image widgets that work effectively is making sure that they match the overall look and feel of your blog. Pay particular attention to the header (are they using the same color scheme, the same typography, or playing off one another?) but also consider how they sit with the palette and overall look you’ve created through your choice of theme and other design decisions you’ve made.

Debbie Does Doodles and Kate’s Creative Space reinforce the themes of their blogs in a visually inventive way, using images and typography for sidebar navigation that underline a focus on art, crafts, books, and paper-based media:

Adventures of a Wannabe-Writer underlines the focus on the act of writing by using strong black and white images of writerly objects, along with a hand-written font that adds a personal, writerly flourish to proceedings. While Design by Lulu makes great use of a single color and unified design aesthetic to tie together header, sidebar and the other design elements of the blog.

One Young Love and Miss Zoe find creative ways to draw their readers’ attention toward their other social media streams, at once personalizing and underlining these other spots on the web that interested site visitors might want to check out next:

More Sidebar Inspiration & Tips

If you didn’t catch them already, be sure to check out our earlier Widgets 101 and Widgets 201 posts for some great tips on customizing your own sidebar.

Show and Tell

So hopefully that’s demonstrated that by spending a little thought and time on the look of your blog, principally through the use of headers and image widgets, you can really underline the themes you’re writing about, create a memorable, stand-out brand for your blog, and attract the eye as well as the mind.

We’d love to see how you’ve added some visual identity to your blogs. Link them up in the comments and let us know what you think.

Comments are content just as much as your posts, and the Recent Comments widget elevates them to your sidebar; it gives commenters some extra love and lures more readers into the conversation by shining a spotlight on the scintillating discussion that’s already happening. The widget also shows the title of the post each readers is commenting on, which helps both emphasize posts that are already generating a lot of buzz and point up that older post that just got a one-off comment.

Either way, showing off your commenters draws people deeper into your site and your community. It also gives your regulars a quick way to see who’s been weighing in. You can even personalize your blogular community by including commenters’ Gravatars next to their comments, helping readers put faces to names.

To add the Recent Comments widget, just head to your widgets page and drag the Recent Comments widget into your sidebar. Make sure to configure all the options — the number of comments to show, whether and what size Gravatars to use — and to give it a title that jives with your blog. (Sure, “Recent Comments” is clear, but “The Latest and Greatest” or “From the Peanut Gallery…” are just more fun.)

This  PDF provides instructions on how to add media (photos, MP3) to customize the appearance of your site.

If you’re short on time and want to skip ahead:

• Image widget essentials
• Custom-made image widgets
• Visual identity: branding your blog

Image widget essentials

First, let’s make sure we’ve got the basics down. To activate an Image Widget in your sidebar, go to Appearance » Widgets in your dashboard and locate the widget that says “Image” under Available Widgets. Then, drag it to the right, where you’d like it to appear.

Be sure to fill in the required fields for this widget — the “Image URL” is important, as WordPress.com needs to know where your image is saved so it can display your image. In other words, you need to grab the image’s URL, which you can do by going into your Media Library (Media » Library), clicking the “Edit” link under the image, and copying the link under “File URL.”

This URL is what you’ll insert in the “Image URL” field, shown in the screenshot on the right.

You can also use an image URL on another website — be sure to check the URL in your browser before adding it to the widget to confirm it ends with an extension specific to an image file (such as .jpg, .gif, .png).

Also, do take advantage of the “Link URL” field at the bottom. If you want an image in your sidebar to direct readers somewhere on your site (or elsewhere), specify the link here.

Custom-made image widgets

Connor at adventures of a wanna-be writer created Image Widgets for his sidebar (on the right), each labeled with text and linked to specific categories on his blog. We like how the black-and-white images (and the font of the image text and captions) work together as a cohesive visual set, and how the objects in the images evoke the literary life.

You can create similar images, too. If you have a working knowledge of Photoshop, whipping up sidebar images is probably a snap. If you don’t have Photoshop, or are a design and photo editing newbie, use one of the free (and very handy) online photo editors out there (like PicMonkey, Pixlr, or FotoFlexer) to transform your images with text, textures and effects, overlays and icons, frames, and more.

Let’s say I want to create an Image Widget for my sidebar that, when clicked, directs my readers to a page on my blog of galleries of ocean photographs. I can do this easily by adding effects to one of my own images.

So, here’s what I’ve done: I grabbed this Instagram image of the Pacific Ocean from my feed; dropped it into PicMonkey; and used its various effects to insert text, add texture, and crop and frame it — all in less than a minute. Here’s the result:

Next, I’ll add this image to my Media Library, copy the “File URL” as described in the section above, and insert this URL into the field in the widget. I’ll control the size by inputting the dimensions (in pixels) for the “Width” and “Height.” And voilà — I’ve created a custom-made Image Widget, which I can link to a gallery page on my site.

The process is pretty simple — all you need are some images to experiment with and an online photo editor. Custom-made Image Widgets help to shape your site’s overall aesthetic, as Connor’s widgets illustrate above, and contribute to the visual branding your blog, which we’ll talk about next.

Visual identity: branding your blog

Not too long ago, Pick talked about branding your blog: creating an overall mood and ensuring your site visually represents you and your interests. We like the look of Zoe’s blog, Miss Zoe: The Art of Creating, because she creates a visual identity using color, font, and pattern — not just in her sidebar, but everywhere.

Miss Zoe’s custom header image

Miss Zoe’s image widgets

The pattern used in her custom header — underneath the name of her blog — matches up perfectly with her custom-made image widgets, which direct users to her social media profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, as well as a contact email link.

In your dashboard, you’ll find many widgets, including ones for Twitter, Flickr, About.me, and more. They work in different ways — some display your latest content (tweets, Flickr photos), while others simply link to your profiles elsewhere.

Creating your own images for your favorite social networks will help to visually unify your site, especially when combined with a specific color palette. You can specify a custom link color in Oxygen, Zoe’s current theme (and her shade of powder blue is #0da4d3, in case you’re wondering!). The image backgrounds and header design match this color, creating a nice visual package.

So, consider how you can use color in Image Widgets, as well as other features like a custom header and custom background image, to visually brand your blog.

If you’re interested in experimenting with backgrounds and textures, browse options on sites like Subtle Patterns, My Site My Way, Squidfingers, and GRSites.

Have questions? Ideas? Let us know in the comments.

Now of course is a requirement that it should not be too expensive and server uptime is over 99% with a decent speed. You are just starting this blog project and it is not sure if it ever really end on a success. Therefore, there should be a good quality and expenditure balance. Also it does matter if the costs are minimal, but your website is painfully slow and every now and again not available. What is the problem of such web host? Google spider simply can not index your pages faster. Yes, speed of crawl is directly related to the speed and uptime of your web server. You can see the data from your Google webmaster tool crawl and downloaded graphs.

Of course there are many cheap providers, where you can save even one or two Dollars per month. But with mass host people complains in different blogs about their bad experiences. The performance deteriorates sooner or later, and just to move to from one server another is not so simple.

Server requirement for WordPress installation

There are a few requirements that have to meet the needs web server to easily run to WordPress:

• PHP
  As a minimum prerequisite, the current version is 5.3.6 but you should ideally have PHP 5.2 or higher enabled, for the upcoming version of WordPress 3.2 is supposedly need PHP 5+ You can always check which version of PHP is now in use from official PHP web portal.
• MySQL
  A similar situation arises when the database is needed. WordPress currently runs with MySQL version 4.1.2, but WordPress 3.2 is require at least version 5.0.15. Here is the official website of MySQL.
• mod_rewrite
  The Apache module “mod_rewrite” is responsible for ensuring that WordPress can be equipped with nice looking URLs. It should therefore be present. Here is the official website of Apache.
• Memory Limit
  First of all, the reason for having a memory limit is to prevent poorly written scripts for eating up all available memory on a server (from the PHP Manual). So the original idea of this setting is to set the memory limit in the servers configuration. That is normally the job of the administrator and an application should not deal with it on it is own. Otherwise there would be no need to have such a limit.

The conditions are so straightforward, but the above points should be fulfilled. If the host is not indicates these details on the order page, then just write an email and ask for it. This has the additional advantage that one can thus test the same time support.

PHP, MySQL, Apache and WordPress: all are open source (and free), unlike closed source (for example Microsoft Windows). You must understand that, for these open source platforms, today we can create a website: otherwise it would be very costly for us. Read more on Wikipedia on open source.

Server location

This is important. You can test our website from Webpagetest website; change the location from U.S. (where our server is located) to India (where I live and writing this!): you will see the difference. More the geographical distance from  the visitor’s location; the page load time will be more. It is simple logic and needs no explanation.

What is the importance of this information? If your target visitors are from India, obviously you should choose a server that is located in India. On the other hand, if your visitors are from U.S. , definitely you will choose a server located in U.S.

We previously wrote about page loading speed and its impact on SEO.

WordPress installation

The WordPress installation itself is done quickly and easily.

Option 1 :  Pre-installed by Hosting service provider

Some providers offer the option to install with a few clicks with several well-known open source software solutions.

Option 2 : Manual Installation

You need some FTP tool ( FileZilla is recommended) together with FTP access.

In addition, you must first create a new database in the web space and admin password which are then required for installation. WordPress itself has written five minutes very nicely.

Other information

If you need faster website, you have to think of dedicated server, cost will be definitely high. CDN (Content Delivery Network) is also needed along with a dedicated server for better performance. If you are thinking of dedicated server and CDN, it is better to consult with professional, because it will be a mess and only loss of money without fruitful result if the right combination is not chosen.

We prefer Linux server (over Windows server) which are cheaper and more reliable (above 98% servers uses Linux). Mac servers are said to be great with very low downtime, but the cost is very high.

We are using NameCheap hosting service’s Business plan; which as you can see, almost works as good as dedicated server at a lesser cost.

To know more, please visit our website : http://thecustomizewindows.com/

Before Moving WordPress

Before Moving WordPress it is important to evaluate the current situation. If you are moving WordPress from one host to another good one, then it is very important to do the work using either a fresh formatted computer with some Linux distro or from someone’s Linux or Mac computer. There is every possibility of having malwares on Windows and Shell commands are easy to run by default from UNIX based system.

Next evaluation is how much you know or rather how much you can learn in the process of Moving WordPress. Marriage, typically happens once in life, so is about Moving WordPress. If you are Moving WordPress for 5th or nth times – you will admit that your web host was never good and it was the sole reason for Moving WordPress – you must not get the pain of moving WordPress again by selecting a good host.

Probably you are moving WordPress from a bad server to a good server.

Things to understand Before Moving WordPress

The basic logics for Moving WordPress :

• You need to download the full FTP content before Moving WordPress. Its quite time taking process. If you are great in using UNIX commands and have the shell access, simply tar it and download on your hard disk.
• The next step for moving wordpress is to get the MySQL backup. Best is to use PHPMyAdmin and select all the tables and compress it to download.
• So you got everything ready for Moving WordPress. Ideally this is the proper full backup that should be taken not only for  Moving WordPress, but for regular safeguard too.

But in case you can not access the PHPMyAdmin :

• Then use some plugin to get the MySQL data needed for Moving WordPress. Search in WordPress repository for such plugins.
• You need to download the full FTP content as usually.

In situation where you have no access neither FTP nor PHPMyAdmin :

• In this case there is nice plugin named PressBackup. Install it, it will make the whole thing in to a single compress file.

WordPress default export function for Moving WordPress :

• Practically useless for bigger websites as there is restriction in size, but yes this is a method to restore the MySQL database.
• FTP content as usually will have to be downloaded for this method of Moving WordPress.

WordPress is not a Suitcase to move

The biggest point is, Moving WordPress is basically not an ‘by default’ feature. Quite obviously with any CMS this is true. Best method for Moving WordPress in complex type of case is to use PressBackup plugin. Simply it will recognize which folder and database is of whom. These bad habits of improper setup are usually due to cPanel. With cPanel everyone is WordPress expert now. They run those nasty scripts to install WordPress. Basically they are careless about the FTP or MySQL database hierarchy. If you are thinking if you ask them for such Moving WordPress which they themselves made – they will simply blame the innocent user for nothing or delete many important things to ease their process for Moving WordPress.

Final Steps for Moving WordPress

So you got the backups of the full website. The final steps for Moving WordPress are :

• Change the Name-Server to point to new server
• Add the old domain to new server
• Install a fresh WordPress on it
• Restore the FTP content
• Restore the MySQL content

Making moving WordPress easy with shell commands

We use easy methods for moving WordPress for our Managed WordPress service. If you know UNIX commands, its practically becomes very easy. Easy does not means it has no risks – at any time if a backup fails in this process to move, you have to cry. That is why, we usually either use a test domain or use offline Installation to test the backups whether working or not, before moving WordPress.

To know more, please visit our website : http://thecustomizewindows.com/

HTML Pages Generated from WordPress : Implications and Limitations

We are pointing to use the HTML output from WordPress for following the method to serve HTML Pages Generated from WordPress, just like we described in an tutorial Creating a WordPress Generated Website on Rackspace Cloud Files.

So basically you will have :

• The slimmed down version of WordPress without any PHP file
• There is no question of any MySQL database
• There is no question of getting hacked via SQL injection
• PHP still can be executed within the HTML pages, if the server supports PHP
• Simple Apache server is enough
• No caching is required
• Page loading Speed will be faster
• URL can be controlled by .htaccess
• Easy to add conversion tracking codes
• Costs less as simply a CDN and domain name can be used for hosting

 Limitations :

However, this method has limitations for using HTML Pages Generated from WordPress for a complete website too :

• Impractical for blogs or where the dynamic PHP is required too much
• Technically difficult to implement
• Demands some PHP to be retained for full potentiality of WordPress
• Every time FTP access / CDN access is required

HTML Pages Generated from WordPress : More Tips

Now you know how to create virtual appliance on your computer. That knowledge can be combined to make the setup more versatile. At least some of our websites, which we use WordPress, but need not to change any thing regularly, are quite good candidate to use this method as it preserves the URLs.

To know more, please visit our website : http://thecustomizewindows.com/

Headlines DEFINITELY grab the reader!  Keep the blog brief, and to the point.  FYI, Thanks to Revlon for the wonderful graphic!   

This link  provides more information about using/creating videos.

Whether or not you like Instagram, it’s a popular photo app, and some of you may want to display these images, in all their filtered glory, on your own blogs. You can embed them in your posts, pages, and even in your sidebar to create visual effects.

If you’d like to skip ahead, click through to these individual sections:

• Embed an Instagram photo into a post or page
• Embed an Instagram photo in your sidebar
• Embed an Instagram photo in your mobile app

Embed an Instagram photo

Copy the image’s URL from your web browser’s address bar while viewing the image:

While you’re editing a post or page, paste the URL on its own line:

http://instagram.com/p/WaQPXBgdon/

So for example, this text and URL . . .

. . . will display this on your blog:

The URL automatically embeds the largest size of the image that fits into the content area. You can control the size of an image using the Instagram shortcode — remember when we talked about shortcodes? For example, this . . .

[instagram url=http://instagram.com/p/WaQPXBgdon/ width=275]

. . . embeds this wee image instead:

Your sidebar, instagrammed

Now that you know how to control the width of an image with shortcode, consider sprucing up your sidebar with Instagram images using a Text Widget. You can see a sample Text Widget in a blog’s sidebar on the right, with two embedded Instagram images.

To achieve this, I added width=200 to the shortcodes for these two photographs, which shrunk them considerably. As you previously learned in Widgets 101, Text Widgets are simple but powerful — with text and HTML, you can create a nifty section in your sidebar. Here, I added one-line descriptions under these images.

Remember that each theme is different; you can find the measurements of your current theme’s areas (in pixels) on your theme’s page in the Theme Showcase. Scroll down your theme’s page to find a gray box of “quick specs,” which lists various measurements, including the sidebar. Use these measurements as a guide when you set your Instagram image’s width so you know it will fit!

Embedding Instagram on your phone

If you’d like to grab an image URL from your Instagram stream and paste it into a post you’re editing in your mobile app, click the button on the bottom right of the Instagram photo you want to embed:

In some apps, like WordPress for iOS, you can then follow a prompt to copy the URL. Click on “Copy Share URL,” as shown here . . .

. . . and paste the URL into your post editor, where you’d like your image to appear in the post. (For example, on the iPhone, tap the screen where you want to embed the image, and you’ll see an option to paste the link.) There you go! You can embed from Instagram into your WordPress.com post, right from your mobile app.

Sacramento SEO Gold

Ongoing services include 12-month commitment for Blogging, article publishing, press release promotion, video creation and social media management. Incorporates the previously announced See Me and Listen to Me 6000 packages.

The See Me package includes a wireframe and a 5-page WordPress web site and blog. A wireframe is a graphical outline of a web site. It shows how pages link to each other. The See Me package includes one year domain registration, e-mail and hosting ($120 value). YourSEOWizard will work with you to:

•.Identify your competitors.

• Identify key phrases your ideal customers use when looking for someone who provides the goods and services you offer.

• Create professional pages at LinkedIn and Facebook, and create links to these from the blog.

With the See Me package, you can go from no Internet presence at all to a presence you can promote on brochures, business cards and signage. It is a good, first step for business owners who want to attract more business from the Internet.

The Listen to Me 6000 package creates sufficient content for web sites, blogs, articles, press releases and videos. YourSEOWizard.com staff interviews you, records the interview and transcribes the recordings. This content is then returned as a Microsoft Word document. Staff edits this to make it blog-friendly. This is used as a client Declaration of Expertise. Staff blogs this content at least four times per week.  Listen To Me is available in 2000 word, 4,000 word and 6,000 word packages. The 6,000 word package is included in Sacramento SEO Gold.

Sacramento SEO Gold + I Want It Now

In addition to Sacramento SEO Gold (above), the I Want It Now package is for clients who want quick results. The I Want It Now package has a page 1 guarantee. The client will appear on page 1 for at least one of their targeted key phrases before being asked to pay. I Want It Now includes placing an entry in an Iframe on a partner web site. This partner has servers and domains which have been on the Internet for at least 12 years. Clients choosing I Want It Now leverage the SEO friendliness of these servers. A public website must be in production before engaging I Want It Now

But if publishing to your blog from your phone is new to you, read on. I’ll cover the basics for popular WordPress.com mobile apps and introduce you to helpful features so you can post on the go — and participate in this month’s challenges!

If you already have a WordPress.com app on your phone, dive into the sections below:

• iOS
• Android
• BlackBerry
• Mobile resources

If you don’t have your app installed yet, find the one you need on this page and — from your mobile device — visit the appropriate “Download” link to install and set the app up on your phone. You’ll see download links for other mobile apps, too (Windows Phone, Nokia, webOS, Windows 8).

WordPress for iOS

You can blog on the go with the WordPress iOS app, which you can download in the App Store. From your iPhone, you can write a post, add photos, create links and quotes, format text, and more. Here are some quick tips:

Work on a wider screen. If you need more room, rotate your phone horizontally — WordPress will adjust to a wider, more comfortable layout.

Autosave your stuff. In a rush and need to catch a train? Drafting a quick post on the street but not ready to publish? As you write, your draft is saved as you type — an “Autosaved” message will appear at the bottom right of your iPhone screen.

Publish a photo post instantly.  Want to publish a single image quickly? Click on the “Photo” button in your app dashboard — it looks like this:

You’ll see prompts to “Add Photo from Library” or “Take Photo.” In other words, you can access an existing image in your Camera Roll (or Instagram stream), or you can click “Take Photo” to snap a new photo on the spot.

The Quick Photo screen will pop up, where you can insert the title and text for your post and select which blog to which you’d like to publish (if you have multiple WordPress.com blogs linked to the app):

Add multiple images. Alternatively, you can add a set of photos to a post — existing images in your Camera Roll or new ones you can snap with your camera that instant! As you’re creating a new post, just click on the picture icon, which you’ll find at the bottom right of the post editor:

As you upload images, you’ll see a Media screen that lists the photos you’ve attached to the post:

Format text, insert a link, or add a quote. As you write and edit your post, you’ll see a few handy tools above the keypad you can use to create bold (b), italicized (i), or strikeout (del) text; create a link; or add a quote. On the left, you’ll also see a button that takes you to even more options, like creating a bullet list (with the ul and li buttons), adding a “more” tag (using the more option), and using other bits of code (via the code button).

Preview your post. What’s great about the iOS app is you can now preview your post — text and images and all — before hitting “Publish,” just as you do from the WordPress.com dashboard editor on your computer. Even if you’re away from your desk, you can make the necessary edits to ensure you share your very best work — right from your phone:

I’m excited to see what you come up with for this Friday’s first phoneography challenge! If you have support or troubleshooting questions, visit the WordPress for iOS FAQ or Forums pages.

WordPress for Android

For all of you with Android phones in your pockets, we’ve got the WordPress for Android app, which you can download in the Google Play Store. Some highlights to keep in mind as you prep for this month’s challenges:

Navigate easily. In your app’s dashboard, just tap the New Post, Quick Photo, or Quick Video icons to create a post or go directly to your phone’s camera to take a shot or record a clip in an instant. There’s also an Action Bar, which lets you refresh content, switch between your blogs with ease, or return to your dashboard no matter where you are in the app:

Control and format your content. In the full-screen post editor, you’ll see a formatting toolbar above the keyboard which lets you bold, italicize, underline, and strike out text; insert links, add quotes, and more. You can edit titles, captions, and the placement and size of images, too.

Set different post formats. Choose a specific post format using the dropdown menu in the post editor.

Keep your content secure. The app will autosave posts you’re editing every 60 seconds, so you don’t have to worry about losing a post-in-progress, especially if you’re in transit, lose your signal, or are composing a post on a park bench and suddenly have to run off. (Hey, it happens.)

Those are the basics to start blogging from your Android! If you have support or troubleshooting questions, visit the WordPress for Android Help page.

WordPress for BlackBerry

For BlackBerry users, there’s a WordPress for BlackBerry app just for you, available for download in the BlackBerry World (here are direct download links for PlayBook and BlackBerry 10 and for BlackBerry 7 or lower). Our developers are working on improvements for BlackBerry 10 devices and PlayBook. For a glimpse of what you can do within your app, click on the BlackBerry image below to see a slideshow of the dashboard:

BlackBerry OS10

In the BlackBerry app, you can:

• Create new posts (and pages) and publish quick photos and videos. With the Quick Photo option, the app will take you directly to your phone’s camera to take a picture in a snap.
• Use the Action Bar at the top of your screen to quickly change between blogs and refresh your content.

I can’t wait to see what you capture and create on your BlackBerry! If you have support or troubleshooting questions, visit the FAQ or Forums pages. 

Mobile Resources

The apps above have other features — for example, you can see your blog’s notifications, moderate comments, view your stats, and more. Visit the specific app pages for details, as well as their FAQs, in the section below. You’ll also find download links and support pages for Windows Phone, Nokia, and webOS.

Finally, if these apps don’t meet your needs, remember you can always post by email from any email-enabled device.

• WordPress.com Apps – Information on the current apps available to WordPress.com users
• WordPress for iOS – for iPhone or iPad users (Download | FAQ)
• WordPress for Android – for Android-powered mobile users (Download | FAQ)
• WordPress for BlackBerry – for Blackberry users (Download | FAQ)
• WordPress for Windows Phone – for Windows Phone users (Download | FAQ)
• WordPress for Nokia – for Nokia mobile users (Download | Forum)
• WordPress for webOS – for webOS device owners (Download | FAQ)

Start poking around in your WordPress.com app — your first phoneography challenge is this Friday!