Entries Tagged 'Blogging' ↓

My boyfriend and I were driving to his mom’s house the other day when I strong urge to blog came over me. I doubt there are many bloggers out there who don’t know what I’m talking about. I knew that if I didn’t get those words out of my head, they would fade away into the obscurity that is my brain and never return so I wrote those literary mofo’s down on a scrap of paper with a pen that was almost out of ink.

Thank goodness for my boyfriend who licked the tip so I could keep writing! (I have issues with sticking inanimate objects other than food on my tongue. Which reminds me, whoever came up with self-adhesive envelopes is a genius!)

I’m notorious for being way behind the times. I think I was the second last person in town to own a cell phone. I was definitely the last person in town to figure out how to text properly. This brings me to my question – how do you blog when you’re not at home? Do you use your cell phone? Do you drink gallons of coffee while you blog at a cafe? Do you talk into a voice recorder and type it out when you get home?

Or do you write on scraps of paper or napkins with an old linty pen like me?

I’d like to find a more efficient way of doing it, so please tell me how you do it!

I’ve been meaning to create video for this blog for years and now I can finally say I achieved that goal!

This is something that I get asked a lot about from my clients so I’ve created a really quick tutorial for anyone who wants to add an image into their Wordpress sidebar. This tutorial gits ‘er done without using an FTP program and without having any knowledge of HTML.

The sound quality is fairly poopy but I promise the next video will be better.

Add an Image to Your Wordpress Sidebar

If you have any questions, please leave a comment!

Since I first started blogging, I’ve written my blog posts in Notepad. Notepad is a text editor that comes with Windows. You’ll find it in Accessories. (If you use it regularly, you can “Pin” it to your Start Menu for quick access.)

At first, I used to write my posts in Notepad because I could save them to my computer easily and it was much quicker to open up Notepad than it was a heavy word processor like MS Word. At the time, my computer was a POS.

Now, I use Notepad because it is a text editor, not a word processor. When copying it into the Wordpress editor, it doesn’t bring a bunch of messed up code along with it like word processors do.

I’ve had many clients who use different word processors to write their blog posts only to find that after they paste it into Wordpress and publish it, their blog looks all kinds of messed up.

When I go into the Edit Post page, it’s a nightmare. Open tags everywhere! One client of mine had over 50 posts like that. It’s extremely time consuming to clean it all up so it’s best to avoid that problem right from the beginning.

Here’s what it looks like in the Visual tab:

And here’s what that nasty piece of work looks like in the HTML tab:

See all that weird code in there? We don’t want that.

If you are using Microsoft Word (not to be confused with Works) and you would like to continue using it to write your blog posts in it, please use the “Paste from Word” button in your Wordpress editor.

Just click on the “Kitchen Sink” button:

And hit the “Paste from Word” button:

I would still recommend using Notepad however because I’m one of those untrusting types of people and I think that Word will still sneak in a few open tags.

What is an open tag?

Any time you format text you’re using tags. Let’s take the bold tag for example. To bold the following sentence, the HTML code would look like this:

<strong>I’m a bold sentence.</strong>

The <strong> tag is the open tag, and the </strong> tag is the closing tag.

If you don’t close a word or sentence with the </strong> tag, the rest of your text will end up bold. This won’t look very cool on your blog.

So there you have it. That’s my opinion about writing blog posts in word processors and why I cringe just thinking about it.

I wanted to point out a couple resources that two of my excellent readers recommended in the hopes that they will be useful to you.

Chris from AB Web Design says the best tool he has found for color sampling is Pixie. It’s a tiny little program that tells you what the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values are for a particular color. You simply hold your mouse over the color you want.

I do this a lot of times when I see a color in a photo or on a website that I love. Now, instead of opening up Fireworks (which takes an eternity on my piece of crap machine) to find out what the hex value is, I can open up Pixie instantly and find out. Very handy.

Jack from ZedProMarketing.com uses Treepad. I haven’t used it too much yet but I can see it’s like Notepad (for keeping text files) but with a lot more features. Plus it is a much smaller program than OpenOffice or MS Office so it’s much easier to load and keep running while you’re working on other things.

For bloggers and/or web designers who have computers that are lacking in speed and memory (like mine!), these two programs are great options. Thanks for the recommendations guys!

I’ve been meaning to add a “Tweet This” button to this blog for awhile but I didn’t want the standard look of the Wordpress plugins that were available. Instead, I decided to add the code right to my theme so there would be no need for a plugin, plus I could customize the look of the button.

I decided on this graphic and just added “Tweet This” to the sign using Fireworks:

There are lots of free Twitter graphics kicking around the web or you can create your own. Either way, you’ll need one for this tutorial so I’m assuming you’re going to do that right now or you already have one.

This requires you to be registered with bit.ly which is a URL shortening service much like TinyURL. I like bit.ly because of their link tracking features and many people are now switching from TinyURL to bit.ly. If you want to use this code to track your ReTweets, you’ll need to go ahead and register with them.

You’ll need access to your server so an FTP program is recommended. If you don’t have one, you can download one for free. I’ve got a quick post about installing an FTP program here.

Once you have access to your server, you’ll need to edit your header.php file. This is in your themes folder which is located in the wp-content folder.

In your FTP program, right click the header.php file and click “Edit”. Search for the tag </head>.

Copy the code below and paste it right above that </head> tag.

<?php if ( is_single() ) { ?>
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"
src="http://bit.ly/javascript-api.js?version=latest&login=LOGIN&apiKey=KEY"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"
src="http://s.bit.ly/TweetAndTrack.js?v=1.01"></script>
<?php } ?>

Where it says LOGIN and KEY in the code above, you need to enter your own bit.ly login and API key so that you can track your links. This is important, so don’t forget.

Make sure you save your header.php file and close it. Now right click the single.php file and edit that.

Look for the part that says “php the_content”. If you need to, paste the entire file into a text editor and use the Find command to locate it.

Right under that line, paste the following code:

<a href="#" onclick="return TweetAndTrack.open(this, '<?php echo get_permalink();?>');"><span style="display:none;">RT @cassiegermsheid: "<?php the_title();?>"</span><img src="/twitter.png"></a>

Change “@cassiegermsheid” in the code above to your own Twitter name so that any ReTweets will show in your Twitter timeline.

You’ll also need to save the Twitter graphic you want to use to your root folder. You can simply drag it in there using your FTP program. Your root folder is the folder your blog was installed in.

The code above assumes your Twitter graphic will be named “twitter.png”. If it isn’t, be sure to change it in the code to match your graphic name.

Save the single.php file and close it.

Now it’s time to visit your blog and admire your work.

With this code, your Tweet This graphic will show on individual posts. If you want it to show on the main page as well, you’ll need to add this code to the header.php file. Just put it under the last code you entered, right above the </head> tag.

<?php if ( is_home() ) { ?>
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"
src="http://bit.ly/javascript-api.js?version=latest&login=LOGIN&apiKey=KEY"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"
src="http://s.bit.ly/TweetAndTrack.js?v=1.01"></script>
<?php } ?>

You’ll also need to add the same code you pasted in the single.php file to the index.php file. Look for the part that says “php the_content” again and paste it right underneath.

Now your Tweet This graphic will show on individual posts and the main page.

If there are any questions or you need help, please leave a comment.

Thanks to labnol.org for the code.