Have you ever felt that your admin settings weren't personalized enough to meet your needs?
Well, in this workshop, we'll have you configure your writing settings to help streamline all new blog posts.
I'm going to start from the dashboard of my food blog and hover over settings on the left navigation bar and click on "Writing".
You'll see the default post category is our first option on the top.
If you already have existing post categories, you'll be able to change the default option here.
You'll see Uncategorized usually comes preselected, which means I would manually need to select a different category with each new post.
I want mine to automatically go to my Recipes category, since that's what I use most often.
And now when I go to my food blog, you'll see under categories that Recipe is already selected as that new default.
Let's go to the second option under writing settings, which is default post format.
You'll see different options in the dropdown list, depending on the theme you have installed.
So for instance, I'm going to change my post format to an image, since I usually start every post in my food blog with a picture.
And now, when I go to make a new post, you'll see that the post is ready for me to add a new image.
Next, you'll find a unique feature that allows you to write and publish posts right from your email.
To use this feature, you'll need to create an email account with POP3 Access.
If you've got an email through your WordPress hosting provider, it'll probably work, or you could use other options like Gmail or Yahoo!
Just make sure your email is secret and difficult to guess.
WordPress will give a series of random strings that you could use for the email.
Any email sent to this account once it's set up will result in a blog post.
That's why you want to keep it secret.
There's a catch here, though.
WordPress has stated that this feature may be removed in an upcoming release.
So if any of the above situations sound like they'd be helpful to you, I recommend checking out some posts by email plugins.
The last section in writing settings is update services.
This refers to blog-rolling services like Pingomatic, which let other people know that you've updated your blog.
You can add any other blog-rolling services in this box, and if you've updated or changed these settings, go ahead and click Save Changes.
Great job personalizing your writing settings.