Disclaimer: If I would have waited and gone to the WordPress Conference a lot of this heartache could have been avoided I suspect. Having said that, nothing beats hands-on experience. The more you use something, the more comfortable you become. In just two short weeks I feel I have gone as far as I can go with .com on its own and am ready to move on.

As far as my blog goes, I am just interested in writing so I have different needs for my blog than people who are setting up a business website, something interactive or something where you want streaming video or music, etc. etc. These are all things that need to be considered when fashioning your blog. If you are going to stay on .com for the foreseeable future, I suggest you get the upgrade package.

So just a few short days ago, I wrote this:

After an exhaustive search, I finally found something that I think might actually be the basic beginner’s guide for using your blog – not codes or SEO or keywords or L, M, N, O, P. I hate how they always talk about things like “well obviously everyone knows that, pffft” so who needs to explain it. I mean Codex, html, keyword generators come on. I was all WTF as I started to read. (If you barely know what I’m talking about, welcome to my world.) This Easy Guide is great!

Dashboard – that’s what I would define as your ‘toolbar’, or.

This is where you manipulate the appearance and settings of your blog.

Let’s skip to the meat – do not delete the first email that you get from WordPress, it’s a virtual bible of where to go to do what. After almost an hour of … (see below, or save your time and go to your initial email).

Change your blog settings … bingo!

Right so after you log in, if you click below your avatar (picture of you, if you’ve imported an image, drawing of a face if not) at the top what I would call a toolbar area (I am probably using the wrong terms here but) a drop-down menu appears:

If you you go down to the bottom link and hover a pop-out menu appears:

Dashboard
New Posts
Site Stats
Manage Comments
Read Blog

Okay Dashboard is where you do all the editing to your blog.

If you want to get to what I would call your home page, you click read blog.

Okay now we’re cooking with gas and there’s three hours of my life I’ll never get back, (repeats mantra – “labour of love, labour of love, labour of love”.)