I’ve started a few WordPress blogs before, although none of them has exactly “stuck.” But for all of them, there’s a few minimum things I do.
When you first setup WordPress, right when you login for the first time, you’re given the option to let search engines spider your site. I always turn this off. As a systems administrator, I’ve had to spend many many hours troubleshooting why WordPress sites have started making the server unstable. Very often, the cause are a whole slew of aggressive search engine bots aggressively spidering the site all at once. The worst is Baidu spider. It’s even worse when it’s trying to spider PHP scripts, and those scripts are trying to process, but it’s not actually transmitting any information to the spider because of their very nature. I just leave it off.
I also enable Akismet. Spammers are a bane to the internet, and any little step that I can take to block them, I do it. Akismet takes a few steps to setup, but I think it’s worth it. Aside from the annoyance factor, spammers are very destructive once they’ve leeched onto an insecure blog. They’ll keep hitting the comments over and over again, while the server is churning away to try to keep up with requests, until the server falls over and I have to get in there and figure out what’s going on.
The latest and shiniest WordPress also by default includes HashCash, which apparently automatically blocks spambots using Javascript. Damn right I’ll use another tool to block those jerks. For this install, I enabled HashCash, and kudos to the developer if it works as advertised.
Last but not least, I always tweak the appearance. I kept with the stock WordPress theme, but now the WordPress Dashboard includes an easy way to replace the header image. I tweaked the settings for that image so I could use one of my own. It’s a picture I took at my grandmother’s house the last time I visited Chicago. You can view the full image and the whole explanation of that image here.