Bud Smith wrote his first book for Que about buying computers fifteen years ago–and had to do his online research for it using dial-up Internet. Since then, he’s lived and worked in Silicon Valley; London, England; Auckland and Christchurch New Zealand; and San Francisco and written a dozen more books. And he does most of his online work at broadband speeds–except when he’s using the Web on his cell phone, which is slower than his old dial-up modem. Bud runs a WordPress-based blog at gvDaily.com.

Michael McCallister is devoted to the idea that technology need not be feared and can be mastered by anyone. He has been writing about technology in general and open source software in particular, for the whole of the twenty-first century and part of the last century, too. He tries to help build the open source community, from which derives WordPress and so much else that is good, true, and pure in life (the parts of life that run on computers, anyway). While Bud has moved hither and yon, Michael has lived the relatively boring, stable life in the central United States (Milwaukee, Madison, and Boulder). Michael has been running “Notes from the Metaverse” on WordPress since 2006 at www.michaelmccallister.com.

Part I: Getting Started with Your Blog

Chapter 1: Getting Started with WordPress     9

Chapter 2: Starting Your Blog Right     27

Chapter 3: Creating Your Blog’s Look     51

Part II: Running Your Blog

Chapter 4: Creating Your First Post     81

Chapter 5: Taking Posts Further     101

Chapter 6: Using HTML in Your Widgets and Blog     123

Chapter 7: Adding Features to Your Blog     147

Chapter 8: Tracking Statistics and Bringing In Visitors     167

Part III: Taking Your Blog Further

Chapter 9: Adding Graphics to Your Posts     191

Chapter 10: Adding Upgrades, Audio, and Video     209

Part IV: Building Your Own WordPress Installation

Chapter 11: Installing and Upgrading WordPress Software     229

Chapter 12: The WordPress Toolkit: Themes     257

Chapter 13: The WordPress Toolkit: Plug-Ins     271

Chapter 14: Style Sheets for Building Themes     287

Chapter 15: PHP Basics: Themes and Plug-Ins     321

Part V: Appendices

Appendix A: WordPress.com Versus WordPress.org     349

Appendix B: WordPress Documentation     357

Appendix C: Examples of WordPress Blogs     363

Appendix D: Examples of WordPress.com Blogs     367

Appendix E: WordPress Site Maps     371

Appendix F: Importing Content from Other Systems     385

Index     391

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