Now that WordPress is installed it makes sense to do some quick housekeeping.

Here are 5 things you can do quickly in WordPress to make sure your install is ready for you to start posting.

Register at WordPress.com and Setup Akismet

Akismet is pretty much the premier anti-spam plugin for WordPress. Written by the folks who actually created WordPress itself it's included with the initial download and offers some pretty solid integration and spam protection. I use Akismet on all my blogs to block spam and keep my readers, and myself, safe from senseless often NSFW comments.

Unfortunately there's a catch.

In order to get Akismet running on your personal blog you have to create an account on WordPress.com (now WordPress.org). Thankfully it's pretty painless. Head over to WordPress.com and setup your free account to get your Akismet key. You can reuse the key on multiple sites so it's a one time thing - you also get a free blog hosted and maintained by WordPress professionals so it's not all bad!

Update the General Options

Now that WordPress is setup and spam proof head on over to the General Options tab to enter some information about yourself and your new blog. The four most important aspects of this page are the Blog Title, Tagline, your e-mail and the Date and Time. While the first three are pretty straight forward the third might take some short math.

WordPress defaults to UTC at installation which can cause some annoying problems. While on the surface it might be innocuous, having the wrong time on your posts can cause problems if you ever try to "future date" a post by changing the timestamp. Take a second to correct this by changing the value in the box labeled "Times in the blog should differ by."

On the East Coast of the US it would be -5.

Update your Permalink Structure

I can't emphasize how important it is to set this standard early on.

While you can certainly change your Permalink structure down the road it can be a daunting process. Generally for SEO purposes it's recommended to adopt a "pretty" permalink structure - that is a permalink structure that looks like a directory tree rather than a line of code. Take a peak at this post's URL to see what I mean.

To get started with this click on the "Permalinks" tab that's located under the main Options tag. If you already have something in mind you can check out the list of WordPress tags for permalinks. Otherwise you can choose something from the provided, pre-formatted, lists.

Update your User Information

From the WordPress administration panel click on the "Users" tab and then the edit tab that appears next to the default user "admin." From here you can add all sorts of great information about yourself. While this isn't essential you might find it useful if you're trying to put a more personal face on your site. From this page you can also decide whether to see the visual editor or the code one. If you're new to HTML stick with the visual editor.

With the visual rich editor you can jump back and forth from code to WYSIWYG pretty easily.

Some other helpful Things

Some folks recommend removing the "Hello World" post but personally I like to keep it around for nostalgic purposes. If you're not as nostalgic as me then feel free to replace the Hello World post with whatever you want your first post to be. Before saving it be sure to change the "Post Slug" in the left column to a blank value - WordPress will take care of the rest.

If you're looking for more to do you can also change up your Blogroll by removing the included links and adding your own. This is a great chance to link to some of the blogs you read or even to your profiles on social networking apps like FaceBook or MySpace.