September 8, 2009
There have (unsurprisingly) been a lot of blog posts written in the last few days about WordPress security and what you can do to keep your blog safe from hackers. I'll be chucking my own twopennorth in shortly, but for now, I want to look at one of the recommendations in more detail: "get rid of the user called 'admin'". This is a pretty sensible piece of advice. On most WP installs, "admin"... Read more
August 28, 2009
This post is about moving a self-hosted WordPress blog from one web host to another. If you're wanting to move from WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress, that's a very much easier process, which will be covered in the next post. Image by Nion My worst every serve move was for a friend who phoned me at 3.30pm to say that her hosting company were being shut down at 5pm: "can you help?!" As... Read more
August 2, 2009
If you're new to WordPress, the_excerpt() is a template tag that allows you to include just the first 55 words of a post. It's useful if you want a magazine-style front page with lots of snippets of posts; some themes also use it in sidebars for teasers for recent posts. The problem with the_excerpt() is it's not very flexible. It's fixed at 55 words. It's wrapped in <p> tags. The... Read more
May 23, 2009
We looked before at the difference between WordPress categories and tags, but what do you do if you have a million different categories that really should be tags? Fortunately, WP has a built-in tool which allows you to easily convert categories into tags: find it in Admin > Posts > Categories, linked down at the bottom on the right. It's slightly mis-named, as it doesn't actually... Read more
May 21, 2009
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
May 18, 2009
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
May 17, 2009
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
May 9, 2009
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
May 5, 2009
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
May 3, 2009
I had a little argument with someone last week. WordPress is, they said, a pile of rubbish. They'd spent an hour typing up a post and WP refused to publish it! Or rather, it said it had published it, but it refused to show up on the front page except as a link in the sidebar. That sidebar link was the easy clue: what they'd written was a page, not a post. And their response, quite rightly, was... Read more