April 17, 2009
There are lots of reasons you might want to exclude one particular category from your blog's front page. Today, for example, I wanted the "Quote of the Day" on WhoTube to be only in the sidebar, not in the main column of content. In my personal blog, I want to exclude my Twitter archives from the front page. And happily, this is a very easy thing to do; you don't even need a plugin, just one... Read more
April 6, 2009
So you've found a theme you like, and added it to your WordPress installation, but when you go to your dashboard to activate it, it's not there. The most likely cause of this is that the theme hasn't been uploaded exactly correctly, and therefore WP can't see it. Here's how to check: Open up your FTP client. Navigate on the server side to wp-content/themes. Do you see the theme folder... Read more
April 5, 2009
Confession time: I have made supreme messes with categories in the past. One blog had, at its worst, 83 categories - of which more than a dozen only had one post in them. Another went to the opposite extreme, and had one single category called "Stuff". Again, hardly helpful. Adding the possibility of tags as well just made this worse: is "stuff" a category or a tag? Any blogger is free to... Read more
April 4, 2009
Update: I've now written a plugin that does this, so download that rather than editing theme files, if you prefer. I've spent a lot of time over the last 24 hours trying to change WordPress's the_excerpt() function to play the way I want it to. This is the inbuilt function that (by default) cuts your post's content down to just the first 55 words: it's used extensively in magazine-style... Read more
April 3, 2009
Perma- what now? For every post you write, WordPress generates one single page just with that post on it. The URL of that page is commonly known as its "permalink"; it's short for permanent link, the link where that post will always be found, even when it's moved off your blog's front page. By default, WordPress permalinks look like this: http://blogmum.com/?p=16 This is both bad and... Read more
December 27, 2008
I've been looking a lot at WordPress themes recently, and it never ceases to amaze me that so many people are giving away such incredibly good design work. We're lucky to be part of this community. But then there are always the ones where you think, what were they on? What were they thinking of? Inevitably, that's a personal thing: someone reading this will be thinking that this blog is a whole... Read more
December 7, 2008
Once upon a time, if you wanted to add a picture to a blog post, you had to upload the image file via FTP and then write a whole bunch of HTML and CSS to make it appear in your post just the way you wanted it to. But no more. WordPress lets you easily embed pictures in posts, and change how they appear: if you want clickable thumbnails or to make the text flow nicely around the image, all that... Read more
December 2, 2008
"Recent comments" are an essential addition to the sidebar of just about every blog. They tell your visitors that they're important, and I know from experience that many people will come back to your blog to read new comments, even if there are no new posts. If you're blogging for business, they tell your customers that you trust and respect them enough to let them leave feedback right there on... Read more
November 27, 2008
So you have your shiny new WordPress install. You have your lovely theme you've downloaded or had made for you. How do you get the theme onto your blog? The least you need to know If you already know what FTP is, then this is all you need to do: download the theme you want to use unzip the theme to your computer upload the unzipped theme via FTP to your wp-content/themes directory from your... Read more
November 26, 2008
A cool but easy-to-miss feature in Wordpress 2.6 and above is post revisions. If you've edited a post but wish you hadn't, you have an automatically-generated series of previous versions saved in WordPress, which you can roll back to at the click of a button. In WP2.6.x the Post Revisions channel is minimised at the bottom of the edit page. In WP2.7 by default, it's right there in the middle... Read more