December 19, 2009
If you've ever seen a number higher than 1 in the Orange Dot of Doom by your plugins, you're going to love this one. 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,... Read more
November 27, 2009
If your blog isn't quite ready to face the world, what do you do? You might be working on content, you might be reworking your theme, but the fact is that for most of us, WordPress is an online application, and visible to other eyes, even when we're not ready for them to look. Here's a simple way to make sure that you're the only one who can see your blog until you're ready to share it with the... Read more
September 17, 2009
Akismet is one of the plugins that comes bundled with self-hosted WordPress blogs. It's designed to stop spam comments from showing up on your blog, and though it won't be enough on its own once your blog gets properly indexed, for new bloggers it should do the trick. In order for Akismet to work properly, you'll need to grab an API key from WordPress.com. That's right, from WordPress dot... Read more
September 8, 2009
There are lots of reasons why people don't keep WordPress up to date. Most excuses revolve around time and busy-ness and forgetting: a few bloggers have the more legitimate cause that they know crucial plugins will break with newer versions than what they're using. And one dear chum gave as her reason for still being on 2.7 the other day, "well, Sue, we're not all as obsessed by our blogs as you... 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 20, 2009
No Curly Quotes Better Excerpt... Read more
August 16, 2009
One of the most annoying things WordPress does is to turn perfectly good inverted commas and double quotes into curly quotes ‘ ’ and “ ”. This might look pretty (depending on what font you're using, it actually looks rather ugly), but if you're using WordPress to share snippets of code, it messes things up horribly. I blogged before about how to turn this behaviour off... Read more
August 14, 2009
It's weird how everyone wants to know the same thing at once: today's question (it's been asked by three separate people) is "how do you get those little links for Facebook and Twitter on the bottom of your posts?" There are any number of ways to add individual site buttons to your posts, but here are four plugins that make it easy for you and link to a whole bunch of different networks at once.... Read more
August 6, 2009
I love Twitter Tools. It's one of my favourite plugins for two reasons: it does a whole bunch of different things that I'd expect to need different plugins for, and it always works. But one thing's always slightly bugged me. When it creates a tweet for a new blog post, it sends Twitter the whole, long pretty permalink, and Twitter automatically shortens that to a bit.ly URL. Frankly, I'd... 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