This video covers the answer to “Is WordPress easy to use?”

For more about using WordPress, its setup, and what you’ll need to get started, see our Getting Started with Web Hosting page.

For this, we will assume you have signed in at Inlinkz.com and upgraded to a premium account (only $19.99 per YEAR- amazing!)

Lets set up the situation: you have a website that accepts submissions of a Wordless Wednesday, or Menu Plan Monday, or any other theme.  Using Inlinkz, you can let your readers submit their own posts.  Here’s how to set it up:

1.  Sign into Inlinkz.com.

2.  Click on “Create new collection”

3.  Give your new collection a name (no one but you will see it).

4.  Enter a description that will be displayed on your post/page.  Here is where you can welcome them, provide a link to any rules and instructions for your readers to link back to you(covered below).

5.  Then set a description for others at Inlinkz to find your ‘meme’/collection.

6.  How long will this collection be open?  And will you be repeating this every week or month?

7.  Select “Thumbs” for the image linkies, or “Links” for plain link collection.

8.  Select number of columns (3 works well)

9.  Select size of images (150px works well for larger images, 3 across)

10.  Show just a clickable image, or also a name & image.

11. Select whether the most recent (last) link should be at the top or bottom of the list.

12.  Check for email notifications whenever anyone posts a new link. This will automatically go to the account holder.

13.  Here you also decide if users will be emailed a notification of the new link, and if they will be allowed to delete the link once submitted.

14.  Then click Submit.

15.  Return to the dashboard, and click on “Advanced Options” under the new collection.

16.  Allow permalinks (1): this means the link may NOT go to a main site like desperatelyseekingwp.com, instead it has to link to the real post, like: desperatelyseekingwp.com/2012/01/how-to-use-inlinkz

17.  Require Link Back (2): this means the new link will not live until Inlinkz detects a link back to your site in the linked post.  It will specifically look for the link you put in the next box (3).

18.  Moderation on new entries: new links will NOT go live, until you visit inlinkz, and approve them.

19.  Go back to dashboard (via link at top of page), and click “get script” link under the new collection.

20.  Copy this box (Code n.1)

21.  Open your post or page in your WordPress dashboard.  Open the html tab:

22.  Paste your code where you’d like the collection & submission form to be displayed.

23.  Update, and view the page/post to view the submission form.  Test the form by uploading a new image.

Step Zero:  Prepare Blogger

Have blogger feeds at Full.  And comment feeds at Full.

Step One: Download Atom Files

1. Download the Blogger Backup Utility that comes with a nice easy setup wizard.
2. Settings: Save Comments [Y], Save posts as:  [Atom, all posts in single file]  Max Posts: [100 Posts per file]  Get only recent Posts: [No Limit - Get them All].
3. Download your backups to a memorable folder ( “Transfer” in the Downloads folder for ease of use – for me, it looks like C:\Users\Sony\Downloads\Transfer ).

Step Two: Download a Conversion Utility

Because there are NO import tools to import Atom to WordPress, we have to convert it to RSS and then we can use the RSS upload utility.  But you’re gonna have to use the command line (if you dont know what that is, I’ll show you in a moment).  This tutorial is for Windows Users.

1. First you have to have the Microsoft XML utility.  (I’m not sure if thats built in or not.  Just download this to be sure.)  Select the first one and set it up on your computer (has set up wizard)
2. Download the MSXSL utility and save it to the Downloads\Transfer folder.

Step Three: Download Atom 2 Rss Transformation Stylesheet. 

Another thing that I’ve just become aware of, is that you can take an Atom XML file and convert it to an RSS XML (both types of XML formatting) using an XML stylesheet.  Thank heavens we dont have to learn how to create these, as the work was done for us by geekhood.net.

1. Navigate to Atom2Rss.xsl
2. Click on “View Source”
3. Copy that and paste into a text editor (not Word Processor).
4. Save as atom2rss.xsl into our Downloads/transfer folder

There should now be the XML (atom) files from the backup, the msxsl.exe file, and the atom2rss.xsl file in the downloads/transfer folder.

Step Four: Executing the Conversion

Now you have to use the dreaded “command line”.  It will bring back the days of the TRS-80 and give you nightmares of blinking cursors, but it is the only way that I found to do this.

To open a command line window, navigate to the start button, in the search box at the bottom, type “cmd” no quotes.  It will show one option with the scary black box icon.  Click it.

Remember our old commands?  dir will give you a list of the contents of the directory;  cd will let you change directory?  My default location is c:\Users\Sony.  So to get to our new transfer folder, I type:

cd downloads/transfer

To execute the conversion for each file, where my first backup file is backupfile1.xml, I typed this:

msxsl.exe -o newbackup1.rss backupfile1.xml atom2rss.xsl

And voila, the new file in rss format – newbackup1.rss is created in the transfer directory!

*props to Darren for the commands here!

Step Five: Import to WordPress

Then the easy part – navigate to Tools> Import > RSS and follow the steps to download the importer and run the plugin.  Select each of your new files in turn to upload into WP.

If you’ve been thinking about purchasing the StudioPress / Genesis package, and humming and hawing over it – now is the time!  The price is going up next month!  We are not usually early adopters into software – I like to play it safe for a little while – see how it does, if support is going to wane, what the reviews are going to be like.

Mashable calls Genesis the “best of the best” among premium frameworks.

Adopting early into StudioPress has been one of the best decisions of my career!

Here’s what you get for $299 at the moment:

• incredible support!! Way beyond the normal support in forums – these developers expect that Genesis will be taken and twisted to our clients’ needs and are ready to help.
• 44 professionally designed themes (with PSDs)
• unlimited upgrades to each and every one (they tend to keep the child themes updated before adding new ones – so the child themes are always up to date both design-wise and code-wise)
• Search Engine Optimized by Greg Boser (we still use SEO for WP by Yoast plugin)
• Secured code by Mark Jaquith
• small selection of custom widgets, we add some more of our own
• Free upgrades for life (Genesis 1.8 came out with built-in responsiveness)
• Free themes for life (see #2) & any additional ones
• Over 65,000 installations so far, so people like Bill Erickson and Nick the Geek are developing awesome advanced tutorials

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