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
photo credit: steepwaysWhile we're on the topic of WP authors, while I was making my author profile yesterday, I wanted to change the "slug" - the bit in the URL that labels the particular author. By default, the URL of author pages ishttp://domain.com/author/slug For most users, this "slug" is set to the user name: while you can't change a user name, you might very well want to change the... Read more
June 3, 2009
Another quickie via Google searchers: how do you automatically publish your RSS feed to Twitter? Firstly, be sure that you want to. I've seen eBay sellers and other ecommerce merchants publishing their product listings to Twitter. If that's a couple of dozen items at a time, at one tweet each, it's a surefire way to lose a lot of followers. Think about what you'd like to read. Automation... Read more
May 20, 2009
We looked at plugins to link WordPress and Twitter before, but if all you want to do is add your Tweets to your blog's sidebar, there's an even easier way to do it: plug your Twitter account's RSS feed into an RSS widget, and you can have everything set up in about two clicks. You'll find the RSS feed for your Twitter account linked from your own Twitter page in the the sidebar: it's marked... 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 4, 2009
Here's an easy one (though judging by the number of Google searches that end up here, it's something lots of people are having problems with) - sign into your WordPress admin panel go to Settings > Reading look for the box that says "Blog pages show at most" change the number to the number you want This setting normally (depending on how your theme's set up) affects your home page,... 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
May 2, 2009
WordPress doesn't just publish the all-posts feed: in fact, it automatically publishes feeds to just about everything on your blog. Below are a few examples; I've included both the URL and the code to automatically generate the relevent link; after all, the feed's no use if your readers can't find it. URLs given assume you've set up pretty permalinks in Settings > Reading. Edit the bits in... 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 28, 2009
Blogs traditionally have shown newest posts first: that ease of finding what's new is arguably what's made them so popular with both writers and readers. But there are times when you'll want to list posts in the other order: oldest first. If you're using WordPress as a content management system and building content in categories, your first post might be the most important, so you'll want it at... Read more