If you don't see the upgrade link on your dashboard yet, go to Tools > Upgrade and use the link from there.

The short answer is no, Twitter Tools will only send the automatic notifications of a new blog post to ONE Twitter account. And that's one Twitter account per WordPress install, not one Twitter account per blogger.

The easy way around that is to use Twitter Tools to automatically publish to one Twitter account, and something else to publish to another. I like Twitter Feed, which will publish not only to Twitter, but to Facebook as well, and has various bits of customisability, including whether you publish title and content or just title; post prefix ("New blog post: ") *and* post suffix, which can be useful for adding hashtags.

The neat thing about this set up is that you can publish two entirely different feeds. For example, with TameBay (which has multiple authors), I might want to publish *all* posts to @TameBay, but only the ones I've written myself to @blogmum. So for the latter, I'll use the author RSS feed rather than the "all posts" one.

And if you're publishing to more than two Twitter accounts, Twitter Feed will let you publish as many feeds to as many accounts as you like.

I like to edit my WordPress theme's footer so that it automatically updates with the new year. Here's the code if you want to do the same:

&copy; <?php bloginfo('name'); ?> 2008 - <?php echo date("Y"); ?>

Obviously you'll want to change the first date to the year in which you started blogging.

WordPress 2.9 now has an "upgrade all plugins with an available upgrade" feature, so you can upgrade everything in one click, rather than having to do them all... one... by... one... Bizarrely, the feature has been hidden in Tools > Upgrade rather than put on the plugins page, so lots of people aren't going to spot it. Hopefully that could be changed in a future release.

In the meantime, *you* know, faithful reader, so happy upgrading.

You will need: the WP Holding Page theme; the Theme Test Drive plugin, and of course a WP install.

Install and activate the above. Basically, we're going to use the theme to show everyone else a holding page, and the plugin to ensure that signed-in admins can see the new theme and content we're working on.

Change the WPHP options to show the holding page messages you want. The nice thing about this "theme" is that it doesn't show ANY WP posts, so if you're working on content, you can publish it and see what it looks like without anyone else being able to see it.

Now we need to make sure that you can see the "real" theme. From the dashboard, go to Appearance > Theme Test Drive Options, select the theme you want from the drop down menu and click "enable theme drive". From this point, you'll be able to see the theme you just picked, but anyone else just surfing in on your blog will see the holding page.

When you're happy your blog is ready to face the world, then click "disable theme drive" on the TTD Options page, enable the theme you really want to use from Appearance > Themes, and you're done.

In order for Akismet to work properly, you'll need to grab an API key from WordPress.com. That's right, from WordPress dot com, even though you have a self-hosted WP blog. Here's where to find it:

• You'll need to sign up for an account with WordPress.com first.
• You'll have the option to get a free WP blog, or just a user name; if you're only signing up to get the API key, then the latter will be fine.
• Once you've got your account, sign in,
• and navigate to My Account > Edit Profile (currently on a drop-down menu from the top left).
• Your API key is at the top of the profile page.
• Add it to your self-hosted WordPress blog under Plugins > Akismet Configuration.

What if you have more than one blog? WP API keys will work on as many blogs as you want them to. And if all this WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress stuff has you confused, this post should help.

The function we want is get_pages(), which passes the list of pages as an array to PHP to process. You can then test for the existence of children, and mark parent pages accordingly. This snippet of code picks up only top-level parent pages, and marks them with a ">" -

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<?php
//get our list of pages for PHP to process
$pages = get_pages('sort_column=menu_order'); 
//for each page in our list
  foreach ($pages as $page) {
//if it's not a child itself
        if (!$page->post_parent) {
//link the page
	echo "<li><a href=\"".get_page_link($page->ID)."\">".$page->post_title;
//see if it has children
        $children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$page->ID."&echo=0"); 
//if it does have children, put the arrow in
	if ($children) { echo " &gt; "; }
	echo "</a></li>";
  } 
}
  ?>

I must admit, it's a lot of code just for a couple of arrows, but if you're making - say - a navigation bar and want to indicate when fly-out menus are available, this is your boy.

If you want to exclude any particular page from the list, change line 8 to skip the page ID number you don't want:

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if ((!$page->post_parent) && ($page->ID <> 999)) {

* I feel I want to add that people do call me about other stuff than WordPress. Sometimes

Which is why I loved the idea of a plugin which Donncha reviewed earlier today. Upgrade Notification by Email checks with WordPress.org once a day, and emails you if the version you're using isn't the latest one. It's perfect for people who don't check their Dashboard often, or who have several dozen WP installs to look after.

Photo credit: Freschje

This is a pretty sensible piece of advice. On most WP installs, "admin" is the default user name; if you want to hack a blog, it's a good place to start guessing. Which halves the security of the username/password combo, because only the password has to be guessed.

So when you're setting up a new WordPress blog, pick something other than "admin" for your user name. But what do you do if your existing blog is has "admin" for a username? Unfortunately, WP doesn't have an easy way to change a user name. You can do it through PHPMyAdmin, but a couple of people I know have managed to lock themselves out of WordPress altogether trying that.

The easiest way is to create a whole new administrator through WP's admin:

• From Users > Add New, create a new account. Pick a strong password. You'll need to use an email address that hasn't been used for any other user of your blog. Assign the new user the role of Administrator.
• Sign in as the new Administrator.
• Assign all of admin's posts to the new user: from Posts, choose Bulk Actions > Edit from the dropdown menu at the top. If you have a lot (pages and pages) of posts, you can reassign them automatically as part of the user deletion routine, but I always feel much safer moving the posts first!
• Go to Users > Authors & Users, and choose delete for the user "admin".
• If "admin" has any posts left attributed to them, you'll see the message shown below; assign all of admin's posts to your new user ID.

One other note re. comments: reassigning posts to a different author will break some minor features in comments. My gravatar stopped showing up (even though my new ID's email address was also registered with gravatar.com) and CSS that I had to highlight the comment as being by an author no longer highlighted my comments. The only way I found to fix this was through PHPMyAdmin, changing wp_comments table's user_id from my old ID number to my new one.

The above routine will remove "admin" as a user of your blog and help to keep your WordPress a little more secure. It should go without saying that this isn't enough: there are other things you should be doing, primarily keeping your install up to date.

Assuming your hosting provides access to your database through PHPMyAdmin or similar, editing multiple posts is easy. Sign into PHPMyAdmin, and find the table name which holds your blog posts; most likely this is wp_posts, but the wp_ prefix may be something else. Click the SQL button and enter the following:

UPDATE [wp_posts table] SET post_content = replace(post_content, "[old text]", "[replacement text]")

editing the square brackets and what's in them with your table name, old and replacement text strings. Remember, both the old text and the replacement text will need to be in quotes. If you want to get rid of some text but not replace it with anything, then leave the replacement text as just a pair of double quotes marks.

It would be remiss of me not to say that you should back up before you start messing about with PHPMyAdmin. But you're backing up your blog regularly anyway, right?