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Hi, guys, and welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com. Today, I’m going to be walking you through the writing settings section of WordPress. So to get to your writing settings, you want to come down to the navigation menu where it says “Settings.” And you’re going to open up your submenu and scroll down to where it says, “Writing.”

And this is going to bring us to your Writing Settings page. This is the page where you set your basic options for when and how you write all of your posts. So the first section is where you choose pretty much the size and formatting of your posts. So first, you choose the size that you want your post textbox to be. And by default, it’s 10 lines, but I chose 20. So the bigger the number, the taller the box will be on the writing posts page.

The next section is the formatting section, and here, you can either check the first box to convert emoticons to graphics. So if you’re typing any smiley face from your keyboard, WordPress, by clicking this box, will automatically change that into a graphic on display. And then if you click the second box, this will allow WordPress to correct invalidly nested HTML codes automatically.

And then your next three options is your default options. So first, if you forget to post certain items into a category and you want them to always be posted to a specific category, especially when you forget, you choose this item right here. And every single post that you create will automatically go into this category. And by default, it’s always under “Uncategorized.”

And then next, you choose your default post formatting option. So you can choose it to be standard, a side, or a gallery. And then last, you have your default link category. So any time that you forget to categorize a link, by default, they will go under the category you select right here.

Then your next option is the Press This option, and Press This is an application that lets you grab bits of the Web, so you can click text and videos and images from any webpage. And then you can edit it and even save or publish it in your posts from your site. And what you could do is either click it and drag and bring it to your bookmarks bar, or you can actually just right-click it , and it will open up this box where you can actually save it to your favorites, edit it from here, and then save it or publish it.

Our next option here on the Writing Settings page is our Post via e-mail. Now if you’re not around your computer a lot and you want to constantly publish posts from your email, you can do that by setting up these options right here. So you would enter your server information, your login name, your password. You even have the option to select a default mail category as well, and this is where you would set this up so that you can – at any time – from your email publish posts to your blog.

And the next section is the Remote Publishing section. And here, by clicking either of these boxes, it enables Atom Publishing Protocol and other publishing protocols to allow you to post on your blog from a remote website or a desktop publishing application. So by default, these are both disabled. But if you check the first one, it will add on publishing protocol. And if you click the second box, it will enable different publishing protocols, such as WordPress, Moveable Type, MetaWeblog, et cetera.

And then our very last section here on the Writings page is your Update Services. And here, you can select which ping service you want to notify when you’ve made new posts or updates to your blogs. So by default, it has pingomatic.com, but you can choose any website you want and enter it into this text box here. You can also, for more information, click this Update Services link, which will bring you to the WordPress codex page to give you more information on the Update Services section of the Writing Settings page.

And then, of course, once you’re done, you want to save these changes. And this is how you set your Writing Settings portion of WordPress. Thank you for watching.