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
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
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 28, 2009
Just because I've been playing with this, and someone else will surely find it useful... I like the Author Image plugin because it allows users to add their image directly to their profile in WP admin, rather than sending them off to Gravatar to sign up there. However, the plugin's a bit limited as to what you can output: it generates a whole img src with an attached CSS class, so if you want... Read more
June 22, 2009
photo credit: Hamed SaberIn the last few days, I've heard from a few people who've upgraded to WordPress 2.8 that they're missing some or all of the visual editor from the Add New Post page: even if the "Visual" tab is selected (not the "HTML" one), buttons are missing. People have also reported the dashboard page not loading properly. The issues seem to be reported more widely in Firefox... Read more
April 29, 2009
Tools to hook up Twitter and WordPress - there are dozens of them, from tools to broadcast your blog posts to your Twitter followers, to - ah - tools to allow your blog readers to broadcast your blog posts to *their* Twitter followers. Here are a few of my favourite WordPress plugins for Twitter. Twitter Tools If you blog and Twitter, you need this. Twitter Tools can do a plethora of useful... Read more
April 16, 2009
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
December 2, 2008
One of the really nice things about how WordPress handles discussion of your blog posts, is the ability to take the conversation beyond just your own blog. Pingbacks mean that you can track who's talking about you on their own blogs, automatically:Sharon writes a blog postTracey writes a blog post linking to Sharon's postthe blog software leaves a link ("pingback") to Tracey's post automatically... Read more
November 19, 2008
I love blogging and I love WordPress. And so do comment spammers. If you've got a brand-new blog, you've probably got a month or so before the spam comments advertising everything from pharmaceuticals to porn start. Here's how to keep them off your blog. Akismet looks at the content of comments left on your blog, and analyses their spamminess. Comments it believes are spam don't appear on your... Read more