How to edit a WordPress theme
Sooner or later, how much you love the WordPress theme you've chosen, you're going to want to change something about it. Maybe you'll want your post titles to be a little larger, or to change fonts or link colours, or to make your sidebar wider. If you already know HTML, CSS and PHP, then head on over to the Theme Editor and start playing. But for everyone else, this post will be a brief... Read more
Twednesday : Instant Twitter for your blog (no plugin required)
We looked at plugins to link WordPress and Twitter before, but if all you want to do is add your Tweets to your blog's sidebar, there's an even easier way to do it: plug your Twitter account's RSS feed into an RSS widget, and you can have everything set up in about two clicks. You'll find the RSS feed for your Twitter account linked from your own Twitter page in the the sidebar: it's marked... Read more
WordPress Comments
I think more blog inches have been expended discussing commenting than any other aspect of blogging - and perhaps rightly so. Commenting was, when it first started, revolutionary: it turned the internet from a broadcast medium into something so much richer. I don't think it's overstating the case to say that existence of the Web 2.0, post-Cluetrain internet-as-conversation many of us take for... Read more
How to publish your blog on the Kindle (and why you should do it asap)
Amazon have now made their Kindle platform available to all bloggers. Publishing via the portable book reader was previously open only to big blogs, but a new self-publishing tool means that just about every blogger can have their blog available through the Kindle store. Sign up for an account at Kindle Publishing. All you'll need to add are details of your feed, a screenshot and logo, and... Read more
What's a slug?
Several Google searches for this question lately, so let's have a look at this particularly odd bit of WordPress jargon. "Slug" refers to the part of the URL used to point to an individual post, a category archive or a tag archive. This post's title is "What's a slug?" but its slug is whats-a-slug: WordPress automatically makes the post title into a URL-friendly version by removing punctuation... Read more
WordPress 2.8 : a sneaky peek
Photo courtesy of Eurovision TV The Beta 1 version of WordPress 2.8 was released last night (in the middle of the Eurovision Song Content - what were they thinking of?!). I'm now testing it in a couple of places, and it has some lovely new features: The theme installer is probably the headline for most people. New themes, like plugins, can now be installed from within the WordPress... Read more
How to make a WordPress tag archive
My how to make an archive page post the other day inexplicably and inexcusably neglected to include consideration of tags. This post should put that right. Adding a list of tags to your archives is actually pretty easy, but it uses a function you might not expect: wp_tag_cloud, which has a useful "format" parameter, allowing you to output a list of tags either as a list, or "flat" - just... Read more
Turn off curly quotes in WordPress
If - like me - you're using WP to share code - PHP, HTML, javascript or whatever - you're probably getting very frustrated with seeing the quotes get messed up in the code you're posting. By default, WordPress turns straight quotes ' ' and " " into curly quotes ‘ ’ and “ ”. Which might be all very pretty if you're just writing text, but if you're posting code snippets,... Read more
How to make a WordPress archive page
So, you want an archive page: a single page like an index or site map for your blog, with all your individual post titles in a list, as well as links to monthly entries and category entries - click "blog archive" up there at the top if you want to see any example of what I mean. Archive pages can make it easy for readers to see at a glance how much your blog has to offer; they're also great to... Read more
Showing part-posts on your WordPress home page: the "more" tag
Another Google-inspired quickie. 
If you have a theme that normally shows full posts on the front page and archive pages, sometimes you'll want to change that behaviour just for a single post: perhaps it's just too long for the front page, perhaps it's got material in it that you want to warn people about before it's suddenly in their face, perhaps a cliffhanger-style cut suits the style of... Read more
Maybe you know some alternative?
