How to Use the WordPress Development Blog

Hi, and welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com. Today’s tutorial, I’m going to go over the WordPress development blog and how you can change it according to your tastes. So by default, the WordPress development blog is on your Dashboard. So many times, you may need to scroll down to actually see it. And as you can see, here it is. I’m circling it with my mouse. And there are two articles here, each one has a title, a date, and a short excerpt of what the actual article is about. But some people may want to change it.

Some people may not want this specific update on their Dashboard. So what you can do to change this is when you hover your mouse over the title box, you click where it says “Configure.” And this will open up an area where you can change a few options. And the first, you want to enter in the preferred RSS feed. And you can find this anywhere you’d like, so I’m going to go ahead and copy and paste the one that I want to use, and it’s from the New York Times.

And you also have the option to change the title. So I may want to just change this to “New York Times feed.” And then you have the option to choose how many items you want displayed. Now as you saw before, there were only two articles displayed, but I may change my mind and want to have three. By default, it always shows two, but you can actually go up to 20 and have 20 displayed.

Next, you want to choose the item content that you actually want shown. So this could be if you want the actual excerpt shown or if you want more of a full summary shown. And then here, you can click if you want the author to be available on the actual article. And then lastly, you have the option to choose if you want the date to be shown. And I’m going to keep it the way it is, but I’m actually going to also check the author box so we can see how this comes out.

And then finally, what you want to do is you want to submit what you have changed. If you do not want to save your changes and you want to go back and keep it the way it is, you could also just come up here and click cancel and nothing that you just added will be saved. But what I do want to do is go ahead and save it. And now, as you can see my items changed and now I have the new title, New York Times feed. Instead of two items, there are three. And you can also still see the title and the date.

And since the author is not available, it’s not shown. But if it was, it would come up next to these items as well. And any time I want to ever go back and change this, I can keep just going to “Configure” and changing the options that you just saw.

And this is your WordPress development blog and how you change it. Thank you for watching.

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About the Author

Andy Johnson

Andy Johnson has been on the Internet since the its dawn(ie his first computer program was recorded on cassette tape) and his first hard drive cost about as much his current MacBook. His first byline was in 1993 for a local newspaper rag he eventually helmed, and his last “real job” was at a computer start up which ended when it ended. Throughout it all he’s freelanced and blogged. Now he is mesmerized by Search Engine Optimization forever trying to “rise to the top” for the right reasons. He’s been married to his wife Julia for as long as he can remember and has two lovely, wonderful children. He looks forward to sharing the latest in the technical best for all the online entrepreneurs.