February 2, 2010
It's so easy to stop. You skip a day. Then a couple of days. Then a week. It stops being part of your routine, you stop thinking about it when you're not doing it, and soon enough, it's been a month and you feel like you've stopped altogether. No, not sex when you're married: I'm talking about blogging. And I'm guilty enough of the accidental blog hiatus myself. In fact, it seems to me that... Read more
September 5, 2009
Lorelle has news that older versions of WordPress are being attacked. Symptoms include: odd additions to permalinks - "eval" and "base64_decode". Your blog's permalinks will no longer work. a new administrator account, perhaps named Administrator (2), created but not by you. This can happen even if registration is turned off on your blog. If you haven't upgraded, DO IT NOW. As of... 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 12, 2009
There's a new release of WordPress available this morning: 2.8.4 is labelled a security release, so you should upgrade as soon as possible. If there's not a link on your dashboard, you can upgrade automatically through Tools > Upgrade. A word also about what this upgrade is for. Late yesterday (if you're in my time zone), a vulnerability was discovered: it was possible to generate a new... Read more
August 11, 2009
Conditional tags are used in WordPress to change content according to what sort of page is being displayed. is_home() will test if the page is your blog's home page; is_single() tests if it's a single post page. Why do this when the WordPress template hierarchy tests for these things anyway? Most obviously, conditional tags help to cut down the number of theme files you need: if there are... 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
July 21, 2009
I had my first sneak preview of this book at WordCamp in Birmingham last year, and was pretty excited to see the nice people at Packt putting out books specifically about WordPress. I've yet to read the rest of the series, but I must say I'm disappointed in the Theme Design offering. When a book has a title like WordPress Theme Design, you expect its remit to be pretty specific: it should be... Read more
July 21, 2009
Following on from a previous post on how to make author profile pages for WordPress, Jabril and a couple of others asked how to make a page listing all the authors of a blog, with bio information and a photo. Here's how to do that. Some things before we start: You'll need to adapt this for your own theme (probably): e.g. you might need to add get_sidebar() in the appropriate place, or... Read more
July 21, 2009
Your blog's not the only place you blog, right? If you need to link your Twitter feed and your Flickr photostream and your Facebook page and your StumbleUpon bookmarks, then you need some cute icons to link from your blog's sidebar. Here are some free ones (check the terms of use because they're not all free for commercial sites and some require backlinks). Square The most popular shape, and... Read more
July 8, 2009
One of the more frustrating things about blogging with WordPress is finding a plugin you think will do just what you need... only to find that it doesn't work. When things don't behave like you expect them to, it can be hard to know just where to start trouble-shooting. So here are some suggestions: Is the plugin uploaded to the right place? If you uploaded via FTP (rather than installing... Read more