I visit a lot of blogs as a part of my day-to-day life, and my number one pet peeve with finding information within the blogosphere is the inability to print efficiently. Anyone who’s tried to print a recipe from a blog post can attest to the fact that in order to get one page of cooking instructions, you also end up with sheet after sheet of paper wasted on the superfluous printing of ads, sidebars, and empty tables. Even if you fish through your print preview to look for the meat of the printing job, you’ll often find that the post itself is splayed across several pages, interspersed with the aforementioned bloggage. This is no good if you’re trying to conserve paper and printer cartridges.

This isn’t just a problem with cooking blogs, either. I read through a vast number of interesting blog posts everyday on an array of subjects, and occasionally I want to print out something to hang on my wall or pass on to someone else. Again, I find myself wading though a ton of blog chaff to get to the wheat of the post.

To sum it up, printing from a blog can be a complete and utter headache.

Thankfully, the developer community is a great source of additional functionality for those of us running WordPress. There are countless plugins available that allow us to customize our little slice of the web in whatever way we see fit. WP-Print, a plugin created by Lester Chan, allows you to add tidy printing functionality to your WordPress blog by automatically adding a link to every post that will lead to a clean, printable version of your content. Here’s an example of what the output looks like:

• Original post
• Printable post created by WP-Print

Installation instructions are located here, but I’ll summarize the steps below.

First, go here to dowload the zip file. Once you’ve decompressed the file, you should have a folder titled ‘wp-print.’ Upload this entire directory to the server where you host your WordPress blog, and put it in the wp-content/plugins folder inside of your blog’s master directory.

Next, go to your WordPress control panel and navigate to the plugin management screen by clicking the ‘plugins’ link in the upper right-hand corner of your control panel, next to ‘settings’ and ‘users.’ Scroll down until you see the WP-Print listing, and click the ‘activate’ link to the right.

After you’ve activated the plugin, you’ll want to edit its preferences. Click the ‘settings’ menu in the upper right corner of the control panel, and you should see a listing of installed plugins under the main control panel navigation bar. To get to WP-Print’s settings, click the link that says ‘print.’ Here you can edit a multitude of setting, such as if you want images or comments to print with the post (I don’t recommend you turn on comment printing, as often your readers will just want the information in your post and not necessarily extraneous information).

That’s all there is to it! WP-Print should automatically insert a link to every post you make, offering your readers a tidy way to print the entry. If you have trouble installing or configuring WP-Print, the support forum can be found here.

Stephanie Stiavetti is a feature writer, copywriter, and all around technical savant. Having spent the last decade ensconced in both the editorial and computer industries, she’s comfortable in either world and often combines the two. Her areas of expertise are food, cooking, nutrition, health/wellness, technology, and the writing lifestyle, though if she had her druthers, she would spend 100% of her time writing about her culinary exploits. Read more about her and her work at Wasabimon.

There are lots of reasons you might want to break work up into series: long posts tend to be a little overwhelming; you might want to take the time to develop ideas over days or even weeks; or maybe you want to write a serialized story. In Series adds options to your “Write” page to create new series or to add a post to an existing series. It will also add links to the other parts of the series into the post itself, allowing readers to easily move from one post in a series to the next, no matter how many posts there are in between.

If series aren’t your thing, or are inappropriate for the writing you do (maybe you post long academic essays), you can help your readers by providing a table of contents with the Table of Contents Generator plugin. TOC generator scans your posts and creates TOC entries for everything flagged as a header (with h2, h3, h4, etc. tags). You can put the TOC wherever you want (although the top of your post would seem the appropriate place) by putting the TOC code <! — TOC — > tag in the body of your post (you have to use the “Code” view for this).

If you’re posting long academic essays, you probably have footnotes. Wp-footnotes makes adding footnotes easy. Wherever you want to insert a footnote, just type the content of the footnote in double parentheses, like this:

Lots of people use footnotes ((It’s a beauty way to go!)), and they want an easy way to do it.

Wp-footnotes will replace the text in double parentheses with the appropriate superscript numeral, and throw the text to the bottom. It will also allow your readers to click the footnote marker to go straight to the footnote, and then click the “back” link to go back to where they were in the text.

If you’re the kind of writer who feels like sharing your writing life with the world, Gnomebox has several plugins just for you. Daily Word Count allows you to keep a running log of how many words you’ve written each day, and place a marker either in the sidebar of your site or in daily posts telling your readers. Lots of writers do this to keep themselves motivated — knowing that an audience is watching helps them stick to their daily goals better than if they only had to be accountable to themselves.

The Daily Word Count plugin integrates into another Gnomebox plugin, the Writing Projects Plugin, which creates a new tab under “Manage” where you can list the title, description, estimated word count, and other information about all of your projects. Again, you can post this information easily to your site either in the sidebar or inside of posts. A great way to help keep your readers informed of how the next book or screenplay is coming along.

Finally, the Submission Tracker plugin does… well, can you guess? It creates another tab under “Manage” where you can track submissions, and again, you can post the status of each submission to your site. This would be useful as a way to give your readers a peek “behind the scenes” at the nuts-and-bolts stuff of the writing business.

There are thousands of other plugins out there — chances are, if you can think of something you’d like your site to do, someone’s thought of it and written a plugin to do it. The WordPress Plugin Directory is the place to start, although not everything manages to find its way into the official directory. What plugins are other people using that they want their writing colleagues to know about?

WordPress regularly releases new versions to fix bugs and close security holes, so it’s important to keep up-to-date.WordPress Automatic Upgrade makes upgrading from one version of WordPress to another a snap. When a new version of WordPress is released, you’ll see a notice on your WordPress dashboard when you log in. When you see this, go to the “manage” tab, and then the “Automatic Upgrade” tab. From there, just follow the directions. WPAU will take the site off-line, deactivate your plugins, backup your database and files, download the new version fromWordPress.org, install it, update the database, reactivate your plugins, and bring everything back online. You can choose a fully automated upgrade, but I prefer to walk through step-by-step, because that allows me to download the backups as they’re created rather than at the end of the process (in case something goes wrong in the upgrade process — which has never happened to me, but just in case…).

You don’t want to only backup your database when there’s an update, though. While most of the files that make up your website won’t change except during upgrades, your database changes every time there’s a new post or comment. Ideally, you want to backup at least once a week, maybe more if your site gets a lot of traffic. The WordPress Database Backup plugin will allow you to create and download backups on-demand, but what’s better, it will do automated backups and email the file to you, on whatever schedule you choose. Once it’s installed, you tell it which database tables to backup — the default WordPress tables are selected by default, but lots of plugins add their own tables; I suggest selecting them all — and when to do it. From then on, every week (or whatever interval you’ve chosen) you’ll get an email with the most recent backup attached. Just keep these — I have a folder in my email program for each website I run, and the backups just go straight into their respective folder. If anything ever goes wrong with your site and you need to restore the database, you can easily upload and import the most recent database backup.

Between these two plugins, just about all the most tedious work of keeping your website up and running are taken care of for you. I’ve used both on several sites and through several upgrade/backup cycles, and both work fantastically.

Fortunately, there are several WordPress plugins that help minimize, and often eliminate entirely, spam from your comments section. The first, Akismet, is even built in. You need to activate it, though — and for that you need a “WordPress API key”. Fortunately, that’s easy enough to get — just sign up for an account at WordPress.com and they’ll send you one by email, automatically. It’s a long string of characters that, after you’ve activated Akismet, you’ll be asked to enter. Just cut-and-paste it from the email.

Akismet works by aggregating the collective judgment of its users. Every comment on an Akismet-enabled site is fed through their servers and compared with their profiles of known spam. If a new comment on your site looks like a piece of spam in Akismet’s database, it’s flagged as “spam” (you can look occasionally and make sure it’s all properly flagged, and un-flag comments you think should not be considered spam). If it looks kosher to Akismet, it’s sent back to your site. If something “spammy” gets through Akismet, you can manually flag it as spam, and Akismet will add it to their database. When you mark something as spam, it helps the rest of the network; when anyone else on the network marks something as spam, it helps you.

What Akismet is to comment spam, the Trackback Validator plugin is to trackback spam. Normally, trackbacks are notifications sent to your site when a trackback-enabled site links to your site. It’s a nice way to let someone know you’re linking to them, and it posts a link under the post they linked to so that other readers can click through and see the conversation unfold. Unfortunately, a lot of scummier sorts have hijacked the process, sending fake trackbacks to sites just to get the link. Trackback Validator checks the address the trackback links to, to make sure there really is a page there and it really does link to you, before letting the trackback show up on your site.

The third line of defense against spam is Bad Behavior, which aims to stop spam at the source by identifying “bad guys” before they can reach your site. Bad Behavior looks at the way that a visitor or alleged visitor is attempting to access your site. Since most comment spam, trackback spam, and other malicious attacks against your site are carried out by automated programs accessing the site directly (as opposed to a person accessing it via a browser), they can often be identified and, in Bad Behavior’s case, prevented from being able to access the site at all.

All three of these plugins can be used together, giving you a pretty good defense strategy against the kind of scum that has decided that your site is a great platform for whatever malicious purposes they have in mind. Once installed, the only thing you have to do is remember to check your spam queue once in a while (the WordPress dashboard will let you know how many comments are in the spam queue and need to be approved or marked as spam) to make sure you catch anything Akismet missed — which should be less and less, since Akismet is learning faster and faster the more people use it.

Installing a plugin couldn’t be easier. Using an FTP program such as FileZilla, simply upload the unzipped folder to the wp-content/plugins directory. Then log into the administrative dashboard on your site and go to the “Plugins” tab. Scroll down to the plugin you just installed and click “Activate”.

If your plugin has options, you might have to configure it. Not all plugins require any configuration — check the homepage of the plugin, or look in the folder you downloaded to see if there’s a “Readme” file. It’s sometimes tricky to find where the options are — if there’s a link in the plugins description on the “Plugins” tab, click it; otherwise, go to the “Options” (“settings” in WP 2.5) tab and see if the sub-menu has a link for your new plugin. If it’s not there, try checking the tab that seems to have the most to do with the plugin you just installed, and even the dashboard.

There are dozens of plugins that are useful for writers, some because they’re useful for everyone, and others because they are designed specifically for writers. Stay tuned here in the coming month or so for a list of some of the best WordPress plugins for writers.

Instead, create a separate “Contact Me” page and add a contact form where your visitors can easily send email directly to you, without exposing your email address. Of course, some spammers have bots that fill out these forms, but that’s much more rare and isn’t as big of a concern.

Here’s how:

1. Install the contact form plugin. Download Contact Coldform and unzip the file. Upload the unzipped folder to your plugins directory (usually at /wp-content/plugins). In WordPress, go to the “Plugins” tab and click “activate” next to the entry for “Contact Coldform”.
2. Create a new page called “Contact Me”. At the top of the WordPress administration dashboard, select “Manage” and then “Pages”. Click “Create a new page”, type “Contact Me” in the “Title” space, and add some text asking your readers to send you email using the form.
3. Add the Contact Form to your page. At the place where you want the form to appear, add this code: <! — coldform — >(if you’re using the WordPress visual editor, make sure to click the “Code” tab before entering the Coldform code).
4. Configure Coldform. Go to the “Options” tab and select “Coldform”. Fill out the form and click the “Update” button at the bottom. Other than your name and email address, you can easily use the defaults for most options.
5. That’s it. The new page should appear in the site’s menu automatically, and when you visit that page, the contact form will appear. If you’re comfortable with CSS, you can add some form-specific style information to your stylesheet, but the form default form is pretty good. Or use a Coldform skin from the website — cut and paste the code into the style.css entry in WordPress (go to “Presentation” and select “Theme Editor”; scroll to the bottom and paste in the code for your skin; hit “Save Changes” and you’re done.

There are several reason to install your own blogging software. The first is that you can use your own domain name — yourname.com is a good bet, if you can get it. The second is that you can modify and extend how the software works to keep up with your changing needs. If you decide you want advertising, or a forum, or a newsletter, you’re going to need to access the system “behind-the-scenes”.

WordPress is incredibly popular, which means that hundreds of people are developing themes (the appearance of the site) and plugins (small programs that add capabilities to your site, like adding flickr pictures or loading news stories from other sites), many of which are available for free. It’s also incredibly easy to install and use. Many webhosts will even install it for you (look for webhosts that offer “Fantastico”, a service that automatically installs and configures web-based software).

My own personal site, dwax.org, uses Drupal, and I regret it. Drupal is amazing software, but it’s not nearly as popular as WordPress, which means that I either have to figure out how to do things on my own or wait until someone more knowledgeable than myself figures it out. With WordPress, someone’s already figured out how to do most of the stuff you could possibly dream of doing with it.