Photographs and graphic images are an integral part of our blogs today. We want to show people what our words often can’t. Besides, pictures are fun to look at.
WordPress offers fairly simple image uploading and the automatic creation of thumbnails, but there are a lot more you can do with your images with WordPress Plugins.
A few days ago when I made some modifications to my blog’s template and added a featured posts box, I was asked how did I do that. It’s nothing too difficult or technical. All I did was installed the required Plugins, inserted the right code, and did a bit of styling to specify three of my favorite posts as featured.
There are a number of reasons why you might want to display a specific post on a specific part of your blog. You may want to display only one post on your blog homepage but still want to show the latest entries in the sidebar, or you may want to highlight the important posts, just like I did, to drive more visitors to those posts.
The following method gives you complete control over how, where, and which parts of your selected posts are shown. More…
Yesterday, I covered the basic code found in the footer of the WordPress Default Theme, and gave you some ideas on how to add some impact and navigation to your WordPress footer. Now, let’s look at some examples on how to customize your WordPress Theme footer.
You will need a text editor and the footer PHP file of your WordPress Theme. Make a backup copy, and copies along the way, just in case you want to take a step back from the changes you made.
Begin the customization process of your WordPress Theme Footer by determining what you want to be in the footer of your blog. Here are some ideas: More…
With the push towards a successful blog being defined by its comments, a new WordPress Plugin has appeared that may push the comment frenzy even more.
PlanetOzh has created the Liz Strauss Comment Counter by Ozh WordPress Plugin which honors the popular blog conversation expert, Liz Strauss.
Recently, two different clients lost their WordPress password. One couldn’t find the log in password for her WordPress blog. Since she is always logged in, she didn’t use it regularly and mislaid the original copy. The other had set up a test WordPress blog on their server ages ago for handling upgrades and conversions, and now wanted to upgrade to WordPress 2.7 to prepare his Theme for the new version, misplacing his password, too. Then I had a computer glitch the same week during a WordPress install and the password step was somehow bypassed, locking me out of the new WordPress install.
For whatever reasons, all three of us couldn’t get the password to work that was emailed to us by WordPress. Without access to the WordPress Administration Panels where we can change our passwords, we’re left hunting for other methods.
Blog Security is one of the top security blogs out there keeping an eye on all things blog security and WordPress. They’ve just released two great articles WordPress fans need to check out.
First is news of a video and blog post by Guvnr called “10 Tips to Make WordPress Hack Proof. The effort involved tips from BlogSecurity’s popular WordPress Security Whitepaper, inspiring them to update and improve it soon.
The second is “How to Firewall Your WordPress Blog” by Jaimie Sirovich of SEO Egghead guest blogging on BlogSecurity. He covers options to help you make your WordPress blog more secure with a variety of WordPress Plugins.
Don’t forget that the best line of defense protection for your WordPress blog begins with a strong password, followed by regularly upgrading your WordPress blog, especially after mandatory security alerts.
There is a lot of misinformation on the web about blog and WordPress Security. Many will tell you that CAPTCHAs and their paid services will protect you and your WordPress blog. They will give you a lot of out-dated steps to take. Don’t be fooled. Get your information from the official and reputable WordPress resources. WordPress is inherently secure. It should be. It is used by some of the top government agencies in the United States and around the world.
The current version of WordPress is very secure with no critical security vulnerabilities reported since its release. There are, however, some security issues with WordPress Plugins so make sure you check in with your favorite WordPress Plugin authors and your Plugins Panel for updates on a regular basis.
For the Full Version of WordPress Only
There is a lot you can do with feeds on WordPress blogs, and I’ll be talking about that more over the next few months, but here is an interesting new WordPress Plugin and technique for creating feeds on a Page on your blog.
Shaolin Tiger’s “How to Use RSS Feeds on Your WordPress Site” describes a simple step-by-step technique for creating a Page to host incoming RSS feeds using the WordPress Feedlist Plugin.
Follow the instructions, replacing “http://www.spymy.com/” with whatever feed link URL you would like and with little effort or complex programming, you can showcase feeds on your blog.
This technique is not limited to Pages on your WordPress blog. You can also use the same technique in your template files such as in your sidebar, header, or footer.
Personally, when I visit the front page of a WordPress blog, I don’t mind seeing the full content of each recent post. You an control how many posts are found on the front page of your full version WordPress blog by choosing Options > Reading > Show Number of Posts on the Front Page in the Administration Panel on the full version of WordPress and Blog Pages: Show at most… on WordPress.com blogs. Choose whatever number you like. Depending upon the length of your typical posts, this could be 1, 3, 5, or even 25. Whatever you feel is appropriate.
However, when I do a search on a WordPress blog, or visit the categories, archives, or any other multi-post pages, I’m intent on finding what I want, not reading through every post that may or may not apply. I’m on a quest, so I want information fast. This particular WordPress Theme, Rubric by Hadley Wickham, shows full posts on search and category pages – check it out (NOTE: The first post you see may be this post so scroll down the page) and witness my frustration. I’d love to change it, but I have no control over WordPress.com Themes.
Avatars, or the well known Gravatars, are tiny images, often called your online identity, picture, badge, logo, or graphic image which represent you and/or your blog. Some use photographs of their face or body, or a body part like an eye, nose, or hand. Others use pictures of animals, flowers, scenics, or graphic images. Many professional bloggers use their logo.
Many people like to see these graphic representatives of their blog next to their comments, or now, with the new addition of avatars and Gravatars to WordPress.com, in their WordPress Administration Dashboard listing of the top posts, My Comments comment follow panel, and on the Comments Panel, as well as within the comments of many WordPress Themes.
A lot of people are martyrs and want to get their hands in the dirt and design their own WordPress Theme from scratch. That’s okay. I did that, and then got smarter. Let’s start with the smarter choice.
wp-content/themes folder. Open the style.css style sheet file in a Text Editor and rename the header section at the top to something different, like “My Test Theme” or “Ripping and Tearing”. Just give it a different name. Depending upon how much you will end up modifying the Theme, you can either leave the author credit inside or not, it’s up to you and the copyright terms of the WordPress Theme. More…One of the reasons that I’m so madly in love with WordPress is the thousands of plugins available. It doesn’t matter what you want to accomplish on your blog, there’s probably a plugin that will allow you to do it.
This list is the 15 most incredible WordPress plugins. Only the best plugins have made it while anything less than amazing has been kicked to the street.
Each of these plugins are used at Site Sketch 101 and I personally recommend each of them to you. The following plugins are posted in the order that I recommend them. More…
Description:Now you too can show the WordPress download counter on your website! This plugin adds a widget to your blog that shows the current download count and even refreshes the count every 15 seconds automatically.No demo here on my blog as my current theme isn’t widgetized and I haven’t made the plugin work with anything but widgets. I have plans for the future though to allow you to display the counter anywhere.Requirements:
By now, everyone has heard of the great educational benefit of the Internet. Is it all hype? Most certainly not. In fact, as part of my work for Michigan State University, I have used the Internet as an integral part of various educational programs at all levels.In this lesson, the following questions about education on the Internet will be answered:
How can I get in touch with other teachers through the Internet?
What are some specific K-12 resources on the Internet?
What are some resources available for higher education institutions?
Can you give me some examples of how one would find research and other academic information on the Internet?
You first are going to learn how you might connect with some other educators. From there, you will look at some resources geared specifically toward higher education professionals.
Educators on the Internet
Bob Matthews is an elementary mathematics and special education teacher at Green Hills School in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is interested in distance education, math, and special education. If our hypothetical teacher wants to get in touch with other teachers and resources, what would he do? That’s what you will find out.
Your Old Friend the Listserv
A vast number of K-12 teachers take advantage of the hundreds of educational listservs that are out there. They can locate listservs on many topics and can contact professionals and experts in their fields with the click of a mouse.
Bob is no different. He has decided that he would like to start off subscribing to three such listservs to see what will happen. Because he has read this book, he is going to start out at the Catalist Web site at http://segate.sunet.se/lists/LIST_Q.html (which was reviewed at length in Lesson 8, “Communicating with the World: Using Mailing Lists”).First, he is interested in distance education, so he would like to see if there are any listservs out there to help him. When he types in distance education in the search field at Catalist, he sees that there are indeed some listservs in which he’s interested. After reading the information on how to subscribe to that list, Bob returns to the search page to search for a mathematics listserv. Because he doesn’t really know where to begin, he searches for math,mathematics so that Catalist will find any listserv with either of these words in the title.
He is rewarded with 64 matches. Many of them are not really what he is looking for. However, two of them, the Methods of Teaching Mathematics at teachmat@listserv.uic.edu and the Mathematical, Logical, and Word Puzzles Discussion List at PUZZLE-L@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU, look particularly interesting.Finally, he conducts a search for special education and finds the Special. Education Discussion List at SPECED-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU among the several matches. After he has subscribed to these lists, he will probably monitor his e-mail for a few days to see what shows up, introduce himself to his new electronic colleagues, and begin gathering information.
K-12 News
There are other places Bob can go on the Internet to find other people who are interested in the same topics as he. After he starts WinVN, his newsreader, and brings up a list of all the newsgroups his news server carries, he is ready to find some relevant newsgroup. Maybe you’d like to find some newsgroups you are interested in, too.
To Do: Look for Interesting Newsgroups
1. By choosing Group|Find or clicking the Search toolbar button, search for distance. You will notice that WinVN locates the alt.education. distance newsgroup (see Figure 22.2).
2. With the group highlighted, choose Group|Subscribe Selected Groups.
3. Repeat the first two steps by conducting a search for math. Choose Group|Find Next (or press the F3 key) until you locate k12.ed.math.
4. Repeat the first two steps again, this time looking for special. If you repeat the search several times, you will find the group k12.ed.special.
You might notice that a few of the newsgroups you found were in the k12.* hierarchy. You might want to spend some time perusing the groups there. If you are a K-12 educator, you are sure to find a group that interests you.Also, if you are interested in what educators in other countries are doing in education, just keep searching your newsgroups, and you’ll come in contact with educators all over the world. If you continue your search for math, you will find math-related newsgroups in Canada, Germany, Taiwan, and other locales.
K-12 on the Internet
It should be noted right away that, in essence, there really is little difference between
finding educational resources and finding any other information on the Internet. World
Wide Web and Gopher search engines are useful, as are many of the libraries and files
available through Telnet and FTP.
Don’t hesitate to use the same resources you would use for other purposes when you are
looking for information on education. For example, an Excite search for k-12
+education produced over two million hits! The Internet is particularly useful to
educators for many reasons, and you’re going to look at these other resources in a little
more detail now.
E-mail still makes up a majority of Internet traffic today because everyone with Internet access has an e-mail account, even though he or she may not have access to newsgroups,the World Wide Web, or other portions of the Internet. Undoubtedly, 20 million people can send a lot of e-mail!In this lesson, you find the answers to the following questions:
What is an e-mail address?
Are all e-mail addresses the same?
What are some examples of how to use e-mail?
What are the basic parts of an e-mail message?
Should I follow any rules or etiquette when using e-mail?
No matter what e-mail client you use, you will find the concepts and principles in this lesson universal.
Everyone seems to be talking about the Internet these days. Every television commercial points you to a Web site with more information. At this stage of the game, you should be considering how you want to connect to the Internet. Most users subscribe to an Internet service provider (ISP) for their dial-in access. An ISP serves to link you to the Internet when you need access, saving you from paying for a 24-hour connection.
You can find answers to the following questions:
What features should I look for in an ISP?
What is the average cost of an ISP?
Should I use a national or local ISP?
What questions should I ask if I want a Web site? I’ll try to answer these questions and more as you go in search of an Internet service provider.