How to exclude categories from the home page of your WordPress blog
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
What's the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?
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
Twednesday: Suppose You Stopped Asking People To Follow You On Twitter?
Wednesday means it's post-about-Twitter day around here... except that this week, I'm a guest poster on the excellent Twitip.com. Many thanks to Darren, Lara and their amazing and thoughtful community for allowing me to share some thoughts.... Read more
Why doesn't my WordPress theme show up?
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
What's the difference between WordPress categories and tags?
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
WordPress excerpts just the way you want them
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
WordPress Permalinks
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
WordPress Custom Fields
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
Email still dominates web sharing
With traditional media flapping about Facebook and all a-twitter about Twitter, you'd be forgiven for thinking that social media sites were all people used to communicate online. But according to figures released this week, if you want to send a funny or amusing link to a friend, you're most likely to do it by good, old-fashioned email. The figures come from ShareThis, who make the... Read more
WordCamp UK 2009 is in Cardiff
2009's WordCamp UK will be in Cardiff on the 18 and 19 July. I really enjoyed last year's event (watching actual WordPress developers live-edit TameBay's theme was a bit of a highlight) though if I'm honest, it's for WP afficianadoes rather than those who are just vaguely into a little personal blogging. I'm almost certain I'll be there: Cardiff's a bit of a trek from here but I'm trying to... Read more
