March 5, 2010
I've spent most of this week with my nose in Google Adwords. I've even been dreaming about keywords relating to the UK property rental industry, and there is nothing I can't tell you about the relative merits of "rentals" versus "lettings". So you'd think that I might be up for hearing other people's thoughts on keywords, and I would... unless you call me a loser in the process. A link to... Read more
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
January 19, 2010
It's the 19th January: did you update the copyright line on your blog yet? Or are you still saying copyright 2009? Or worse still, 2008, 2007 or 1999? I like to edit my WordPress theme's footer so that it automatically updates with the new year. Here's the code if you want to do the same: © <?php bloginfo('name'); ?> 2008 - <?php echo date("Y"); ?> Obviously you'll... Read more
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
September 7, 2009
One feature WordPress lacks is the facility to edit multiple posts at once. If you've changed your URL, for example, you'll be faced with editing dozens or even hundreds of hard-coded image tags in your posts. Moving domains from one host to another often causes WP to render single quotes as “ or â€~, and British pound signs as Á£ - editing all those by hand isn't a task I'd relish... 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
July 26, 2009
I have to say that if you've ever had the slightest inclination to write a WordPress plugin, Vladimir Prelovac's book is exactly what you need. I'll write a proper review once I've finished it, because (like reading the best erotica) I have to keep stopping. So if for no other reason than to amuse future-me at how basic I once was, here's what I wrote this afternoon. It translates blog posts into... 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 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
June 7, 2009
There are some snippets of code that stand you in very good stead, and this one, to find and display the first image in a post, is one such. I wrote it for Dan's blog nearly a year ago, and have used it so many times since, most recently just yesterday for Taexalia's new blog theme. If you have a magazine-style theme, wanting to find the first image in a post and display it on your home page... Read more