Entries Tagged 'Wordpress' ↓

One of the things I’ve always meant to do for my blog was to create a favicon. After customizing this new theme, I finally bit the bullet and did it!

A favicon is just a little icon that shows up in the address bar of your browser, the tabbed browsing bar, and the bookmark list. In most browsers anyway.

Having a favicon for your blog will make it a lot more noticeable and help it stand out amongst the very large blogging crowd.

Creating a favicon can be fairly simple. I spent about one minute creating mine. I never said I was a graphic artist so I hope you’ll forgive my plain “M”. It’s better than nothing, right?

I use Macromedia Fireworks 8 to create my graphics. I installed a “Favicon” plugin so I could export my 16×16 pixel graphic with the .ico extention, but there are favicon generators online that will help you create one with a few clicks. Just be careful you’re using an image that is your own or isn’t copyrighted.

Once my own favicon was saved, I used my FTP program to copy and paste it into my theme’s folder. So the path should be:

http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/your_theme/favicon.ico.

Next, I opened up my header.php file in my theme folder and added this bit of code right before the closing </head> tag:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/favicon.ico” />

Now I have a favicon on every page of my blog. One of these days I’ll create something a bit more artistic, but this will work until then.

Mamas got a brand new bag!

I’ve freshened up the theme of my blog a little bit. I spent a couple hours yesterday creating a new header and customizing the Copyblogger theme for WordPress. I’m one of maybe two people who doesn’t have the Thesis theme yet, but I will soon. In the meantime, this will have to do.

I plan on adding quite a few more things over the next week including some new WordPress plugins I’ve been wanting to try. In the next week or two I’ll be detailing some of the things I did to make this theme unique so make sure you’re subscribed to my feed so you don’t miss those posts.

I’d love to hear any feedback you have. What are your thoughts on the new theme?

Also, please let me know if you find anything buggy.

A lot of times I like to point my wonderful readers (like you!) to some cool web pages or products that I’ve found. In some cases, I like to contact the author of those pages or products to let them know that I’m linking to them, and also to find out if they’d prefer a specific keyword or phrase for the anchor text.

I recently wanted to contact someone for this very reason but gave up after ten minutes because I could not find a “contact” page anywhere.

If you’re reading this, and you have yet to create a contact page for your blog or website, I encourage you to stop what you’re doing and go do that now! Here’s a contact form plugin for WordPress that’s quick and easy to install.

It’s very important that you are accessible for many reasons. Maybe someone just wants to comment on how great your site is. Maybe someone would like to submit a guest article. Or maybe they’d like to contact you for an interview or ask about advertising on your site. These are just a few of many possible reasons.

If you don’t have an “about me” page or “contact me” page, it may seem like you don’t want to be accessible and people may wonder why. Having a way for your audience to contact you (even if it’s through a virtual assistant) establishes a sense of trust and credibility. You could be missing out on a lot by ignoring this.

If you’re blogging with WordPress, chances are you have a few “Draft” posts kicking around. As I’m writing this, I have 17 sitting in my Drafts folder. That is 17 too many.

I know some bloggers who have hundreds! What a waste of time, creativity, and energy.

My blogging challenge for this week is to clean that puppy out.

I started this challenge on a poopy day (Thursday) so it will end next Thursday. Next time I’ll try to start a challenge on an actual Monday.

If you have over 100 draft posts, it may be a bit unrealistic to get them all published in one week, but there are a few things you can do to help.

• Group relevant posts together and condense them into one post or a series of posts. This would be a great way to increase RSS subscribers – encourage them to sign up for your feed so they don’t miss future parts of the series.
• Outsource the bigger posts that require research to finish. If you have a virtual assistant or even a family member who can help out, take advantage of it. If you don’t have the money to pay for it, try bartering services.
• Be ruthless – delete posts that are full of fluff and information that isn’t beneficial or useful for your readers.

How about you? How many draft posts do you have sitting in WordPress? Are you up for the challenge?

Coding and designing is not my strong point, but these past few weeks I have learned a lot and am proud to say that I pulled some CSS code right out of my butt and it actually worked! It’s great to be able to have an idea of what you want a web page to do and know what code to write to make it do exactly that.

One of the tools I’ve been using will have to take most of that credit – WampServer. I’m not exactly sure what took me so long to download this, but I’m almost sick to my stomach when I think about how much time I’ve wasted before installing it.

This handy dandy little program is perfect for anyone who customizes WordPress themes. I’m sure there are lots of other methods but this one works perfectly for me, and it’s allowed me to learn CSS much more quickly than before. Did I mention that WampServer is free?

So what does WampServer do?

Let’s say you want to spruce up your WordPress theme a little bit, or put up a brand new theme, but you don’t want all your visitors to see any changes (or mistakes) you’ve made until you’re finished. Installing WampServer allows you to use your computer like a server so you can install WordPress locally. You can make all the changes you want and nobody will ever see. When you’re done, just copy the code and paste over your existing WordPress files on your regular server.

This is also a great way to mess around with some code to see what does what. Delete some code, save the file, refresh your page, and see what happened. Now you know what that chunk of CSS you just deleted was for. If it was something slightly important, just overwrite the file with the original one you’ve smartly kept on backup.

After years of messing around with CSS, this is hands down the best method I’ve used to figure out just what the hell I’m doing – and in such a short amount of time. Not to mention the fact that I can customize a WordPress theme in a fraction of the time it used to take me. There’s gold in that thar WampServer.