ProBlogger’s Guide to your First Week of Blogging

If you’re starting a blog, you might as well do it right and learn from the master: Darren Rowse aka Problogger. He has just released a brand new ebook that will guide you through all the important decisions that you have to make. From selecting the topic of your blog to figuring out exactly what to write and how to promote it.

I’ve been reading Darren’s blogs for years and I have learned so much from him over that time, but I can say without a doubt in my mind that what you will learn by reading this book will save you the years that it has taken me to pick up on his tricks and secrets. If you don’t feel the same way, no worries, Darren offers a money back guarantee on all of his ebooks…

The book is on sale for only $9.99 USD for a limited time. This is 50% off the regular price, so don’t wait! If you buy before May 17th you’ll also go into a draw to win a prize worth over $850!

I wanted to change my default Post Category in WordPress from “Uncategorized” (which is how WordPress comes “out of the box”) to something that I’m much more likely to write about.  I mean seriously, how often am I going to write about topics with no category??  So I went to the “Posts” menu, chose “Categories”, and spent several minutes trying to figure out how to:

1. change the default Post Category, and
2. delete “Uncategorized” from my list of possible post categories

But I couldn’t do it.  You can delete categories, but not the default category.  And there is no way in the “Categories” panel to reassign the default.  After a quick Google search I found a blog post that helped me figure out how to do it:

This is definitely an oddity…  Instead of going to the “Categories” panel, you have to go to the “Writing” panel inside the “Settings” menu.  From there you can set both the default Post Category and the default Link Category (“Blogroll” is the out of the box default for Links, and I always change that to “Links”, which I find much more intuitve). 

I also found that I could change the size of the post box from the meagre 10 lines that I had been fighting with to 20 lines.  This simple change makes it much easier to see what I’m writing about (I knew this one was there, but hadn’t gotten around to changing it yet).