April 17, 2009
There are lots of reasons you might want to exclude one particular category from your blog's front page. Today, for example, I wanted the "Quote of the Day" on WhoTube to be only in the sidebar, not in the main column of content. In my personal blog, I want to exclude my Twitter archives from the front page. And happily, this is a very easy thing to do; you don't even need a plugin, just one... Read more
April 16, 2009
Talk about frequently asked questions: four people have asked me this one this week already! But there must be plenty of others who, like me when I first approached WP, don't even realise there is a difference, or that there are two different flavours of WordPress to deal with. The least you need to know WordPress.com is a free, hosted blog system (similar to Blogger). Your blog lives on... Read more
April 6, 2009
So you've found a theme you like, and added it to your WordPress installation, but when you go to your dashboard to activate it, it's not there. The most likely cause of this is that the theme hasn't been uploaded exactly correctly, and therefore WP can't see it. Here's how to check: Open up your FTP client. Navigate on the server side to wp-content/themes. Do you see the theme folder... Read more
April 5, 2009
Confession time: I have made supreme messes with categories in the past. One blog had, at its worst, 83 categories - of which more than a dozen only had one post in them. Another went to the opposite extreme, and had one single category called "Stuff". Again, hardly helpful. Adding the possibility of tags as well just made this worse: is "stuff" a category or a tag? Any blogger is free to... Read more
April 4, 2009
Update: I've now written a plugin that does this, so download that rather than editing theme files, if you prefer. I've spent a lot of time over the last 24 hours trying to change WordPress's the_excerpt() function to play the way I want it to. This is the inbuilt function that (by default) cuts your post's content down to just the first 55 words: it's used extensively in magazine-style... Read more
April 3, 2009
Perma- what now? For every post you write, WordPress generates one single page just with that post on it. The URL of that page is commonly known as its "permalink"; it's short for permanent link, the link where that post will always be found, even when it's moved off your blog's front page. By default, WordPress permalinks look like this: http://blogmum.com/?p=16 This is both bad and... Read more
March 3, 2009
What is a custom field? A custom field is simply a way to add the same type of information to some or all of your WP posts. Just as all posts can currently have a title, category and tags, as well as content, you might choose to add custom fields to show your mood, the music you're listening to, the deal of the week on your ecommerce website or the filename of a thumbnail picture you want to... Read more
December 27, 2008
I've been looking a lot at WordPress themes recently, and it never ceases to amaze me that so many people are giving away such incredibly good design work. We're lucky to be part of this community. But then there are always the ones where you think, what were they on? What were they thinking of? Inevitably, that's a personal thing: someone reading this will be thinking that this blog is a whole... Read more
December 7, 2008
Once upon a time, if you wanted to add a picture to a blog post, you had to upload the image file via FTP and then write a whole bunch of HTML and CSS to make it appear in your post just the way you wanted it to. But no more. WordPress lets you easily embed pictures in posts, and change how they appear: if you want clickable thumbnails or to make the text flow nicely around the image, all that... Read more
December 2, 2008
One of the really nice things about how WordPress handles discussion of your blog posts, is the ability to take the conversation beyond just your own blog. Pingbacks mean that you can track who's talking about you on their own blogs, automatically:Sharon writes a blog postTracey writes a blog post linking to Sharon's postthe blog software leaves a link ("pingback") to Tracey's post automatically... Read more