Mrs. Mecomber’s Scrapbook

I CAN’T believe that Wordpress already ha a new version. What is it, a new one every two or three months?? I have a lot of blogs, so it is quite a bit of work for me.

However, WordPress 2.6 looks smashing. I found this video explaining some new developments. I am going to enjoy updating this!

I have seen this plugin at work on many blogs, and it is indeed awesome! I am going to be uploading it and using it myself, soon. It’s the AWSOM plugin. It creates a drop down menu of all your archives, by title. I have seen others using it and I love it! I am an archive browser (and even a sometimes medical id bracelet reader, lol), so I appreciate how user-friendly it is.

The AWSOM Archive (formerly called AWSOM Drop Down Archive) is a Wordpress plugin that allows you to place any type of Posts archive you want anywhere in your site.

It works with all versions of Wordpress.

In a recent post of mine, a visitor asked where she could get photos for her blog. The Internet is a freedom-loving place, so there are scads of photos everywhere, but if you are like me, I prefer the copyright-free photos, or photos with permissions. You don’t want to steal other people’s photos (and don’t download MP3 files for your MP3 players unless you have permission, too).

Here’s a terrific plugin for photos– it’s the Photo Dropper plugin (Wordpress only). You can use this plugin to search the Flickr photo database for copyright-free photos. The plugin automatically displays a link from where the photo is taken, so that the author of the photo gets credit. Read all about the Photo Dropper plugin here. I’ve tried it on one of my other blogs, and it works well.

I’ve been hearing that some blogs are getting “hacked.” I’m still in the process os understanding how a blog can be hacked (there are numerous ways). I think it is a heinous thing to do, but the perpetrators always get away with it. As I dig deeper into the Wordpress forums (about as exciting as perusing a life insurance quote), I’ll be sure to let you know what I discover.

I did find this handy little tip: set up a Secret Key for your Wordpress blog. If you are computer-challeneged, this might be something you’d want to skip or get help with. You DO NOT want to go tinkering around with your php files if you don’t know what you’re doing!! But for those of you who are experienced, this may prove a worthy exercise.

Like I said, I’ll be posting more about all these things in days to come. Until then– blog safely and BACK UP YOUR BLOG on a regular basis!

I can’t believe it. A month after Wordpress releases their greatest, much-heralded new version (2.5), there’s another update to it already! I am flabbergasted. Updates are major events for many bloggers. I have five Wordpress blogs, so it’s a horrible hassle. Apparently, this new update plugs a few security holes and adds a few new features.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with the change from 2.3.1 to 2.5, honestly. There were some features I liked (the Dashboard organization is good), but some I loathed (not being able to switch widgets from sidebar to sidebar). I am very reluctant to move to 2.5.1… although I know I will very soon.

If you have Wordpress blogs and hate the hassle of updating them (*constantly*), check out a free plugin: Wordpress Automatic Upgrade. Remember: ALWAYS back up your MySQL files and backing up your Wordpress files with their handy exporter isn’t a bad idea, either (Dashboard >> Manage >> Export). And before using any automatic upgrader, it’s wise to deactivate all your plugins manually, even though the upgraders say they do it automatically.

Soon my days of looking for Blogger templates will be over. But I do still have a few small blogs over there. I’m content with those templates. Since moving several blogs and websites onto Wordpress and using the Bluehost hosting service (of which I highly recommend), I’ve been scouring the Internet for applicable themes. These days, having a classy Wordpress theme is as valuable as owning Branson real estate! A smooth, readable blog in crucial if you want people to read your blog. Here’s a great batch of Wordpress themes I’ve found.

These themes have special .php files for those 125×125 widgets that is all the rage on blogs right now. (Scroll down, you’ll see that I have some). They are very convenient.

Also very popular are the “magazine” style themes. These require a little more knowledge with coding and Wordpress. They are not easily manageable if you are a “point and click” blogger. But the styles are beautiful.

And, if you are wanting to build your very own Wordpress theme, I’ve found a terrific tutorial here. This is a several part series and is well done.

If you discover any other themes out there, please leave a comment. I am always looking for more to add to my list of themes.

Jenn at FrugalUpstate is hosting the Second Annual Improve Your Blog Month at her blog. It’s a wonderful way for us all to do a little e-cleaning for our cyber-homes. I am in the process of updating everything amongst my SEVEN blogs, lol. I recently migrated two Blogger blogs onto my own domain- using Wordpress and Bluehost web hosting service (an EXCELLENT hosting service!). It was an interesting experience, lol! The hardest part was getting my old Blogger links to match my new Wordpress links. I wanted the urls to remain the exact same. More on that later!

I thought I’d contribute to the event by publishing some of my old tutorials that I have posted here. These links are simple tutorials, many with pictures, that make improving your blog a little easier. I had originally written such tutorials not because I know more than some of the geeks out there, but because I am a simple lady and I need simple tutorials. I’ve tried to make thesr tutorials geared for the simple people whose lives don’t revolve around html code, but who like to have a nice blog or website. I hope they are a blessing to you.

Free Blogger Templates

Free Blogger and Wordpress Templates and Links to Helpful Tools (this is on my NY Traveler blog)

Working with Photos

Helpful Sites for Designing and Decorating Your Blog

How to BackUp Your Blogger Blog

How to Add StumbleUpon Button to Your Blogger Blog Posts

How To Customize Your Header in Blogger- a Thorough Guide

How To Put Blogrolls in a Scrolling Box

Best Free Fonts

Free Color Match Mixer

HTML Color Code Mixer

How To Add Custom Text in a Wordpress Blog Category Page

Good Tutorial Website

Titles Wordpress Plugin

Photo-Dropper Flickr Plugin For Wordpress

How To Add Custom Text in a Wordpress Blog Category Page

As always, feel free to leave your comments or ideas, or other thing that have proved helpful for you. This may help the next person. Have fun!

I caught wind of a wonderful Wordpress plugin that allows you to shows “unconventional” fonts on your website.

Fonts on websites are a curious thing. Your blog posts might look wonderful with the “Brady Bunch” or “Comic Superhero” fonts. Your computer displays them beautifully. But any other person viewing viewing your page still sees the same old Arial, Georgia, Trebuchet, or Times New Roman fonts. Why is that?

It’s because that other computer user doesn’t have the “Brady Bunch” or “Comic Superhero” fonts installed on their computer. Those kinds of fonts are “specialty” fonts. They are not common to most computers. Most computers’ default fonts are the Arial, Georgia, Trebuchet, or Times New Roman.

I’ve lamented many times how boring the typical default fonts are on computers. I like artsy stuff, and I like a variety of fonts. Well, guess what, I caught wind of a wonderful Wordpress plugin that allows you to shows “unconventional” fonts on your website. TTFTitles Plugin for Wordpress users.

This plugin lets you use images to replace the titles of your posts, thus circumventing the problem of guessing what fonts your end-users might have installed.

Nice! I have yet to use it. It looks complicated, so I have to find some quiet time to go over it. But if you have been desiring the same effect for your blog, you might want to look into this plugin. Please come back and comment if you use it, and let me know how it goes.

There’s a fantastic new plugin for Wordpress users. It’s the Photo Dropper Flickr Wordpress plugin. It looks absolutely terrific!

Photo Dropper is a Wordpress plugin that lets you add Flickr photos to your posts.

It searches for Creative Commons licensed photos - images that are licensed for shared use - and lets you drop them into your posts - right from your dashboard with just 1 click.

Impressive. Might even be more impressive than those new-fangled motion sensor lights I’ve heard about (and which we need to get, since we spend a fortune on our lights burning all night long).

Check out the plugin if you have Wordpress. I have a few, and intend to install it. I’ll be back to let you know how it goes.

If you do use it, be sure to check the Flickr photos you are capturing. Nothing worse than transgressing copyright laws. Except stealing. Be nice.

HT Blogging with Cents for the plugin heads-up.

I have a Wordpress-based travel blog, New York Traveler.net, and I utilize Google Maps as an interactive method of mapping my travels and for easy reference. Google Maps are great because you can do so much with them, and you can customize the size you want to put the map on your blog. So I put my New York Travel map on a separate page on the blog. Yet I was only able to put a small portion of my map on the page, because all my blog’s pages have the basic blog’s template header, footer, and sidebars. I wanted to keep the header and footer, but I didn’t want the sidebars and I wanted the map to expand the entire width of the page.

I only wanted to have this style for just that one map page– all my other pages I still wanted the sidebars. There was nothing in the Wordpress options that enabled me to change the page’s style for only this one page.

I am pleased to say that I figured it out! It wasn’t terribly difficult (trial and error). It helped immensely to do a little research. I’m hoping that this technique can help you somewhat. Obviously, unless you have the same Wordpress theme that I have, your results may differ. But the basics are very similar. If you are comfortable with doing a little coding, this will come easy.

I’m going to direct you first to this Wordpress tutorial about Pages, from their documentation site. Read it and understand it.

Second, read this tutorial I did on how to add text to a category page. You might not be doing this exact thing, but the concept is pretty much the same. Because what you are going to do with Pages here is you are going to create a new .php file with code in it, and upload it to your server. It’s the same general idea, and I think my tutorial will give you that added edge of know-how that may help you avoid a slip-up later. It’s brief and concise, so check that out.

I am assuming that you have some knowledge of working with coding and that you are familiar with making pages in Wordpress. Let’s get down to business.

When you write a page, you have the option of choosing a different template to display it. Look for yourself. Go to your Wordpress dashboard and choose “Write” and then “Write Page.” Look in the sidebar on the right. Do you see a choice that says “Page Template”? There’s a dropdown menu there. I had some things in there, but they didn’t do anything. Once we create and upload our special page template, it will appear in this dropdown menu; so remember this.

I’m going to give you instructions on building a new page template leaving the header and footer intact, just as I did with mine. Because there are so many, many ways to design a page, I’ll leave all those design decisions up to you! I wanted to retain my blog header and footer, and just remove the sidebars and widen the post box. There are certainly ways to remove or add whatever you want. But that’s a whole ‘nother ball game! For this tutorial, I’ll just show you how I made my own page template the way I wanted it, and you can take the information from there and explore your other options. The Wordpress forum is a great place to start for more information.

OK, so… open up Notepad (or your favorite code editor– I like Notepad Pro+). Copy the following code:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Travel Map
*/
?>

…and paste it into the Notepad document.

You are going to change the Template Name to something you yourself choose, but before you do, go to your Wordpress Dashboard, to your Theme Editor page (”Presentation” and “Theme Editor”). Here’s hoping your Wordpress theme has something called a “Page Template.” It might be titled something different, but it should have the “official” name “page.php.” This is pretty universal for Wordpress. Click to view the page.php file. This is what mine looks like.

Copy all that information and paste it into your new Notepad document underneath the code I had you put in it already. Save the document and name it something you’ll remember– just be sure to name it as a .php file. For example, I named my page Travel Map.php. This is the special template I am using for my Travel Map. Whatever you name it, make sure it is unique. DO NOT name it with a name that may be another Wordpress file! Even if you have to name it something weird like Snarfer.php or Special page template.php, that’s fine. It will easier to locate later, too. Be careful and be sure you don’t name it after another Wordpress file! It could mess up your files.

Now, go back to your Notepad document and get rid of the “Travel Map”– unless you really want to name your new Page template that, lol. Give it that name that you have chosen

This here:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Travel Map
*/
?>

should now be something like this:

<?php
/*
Template Name: WHATEVER-YOU-ARE-NAMING-YOUR-PAGE-TEMPLATE
*/
?>

So you should have your Notepad document saved as a unique .php file, with the information you copied and pasted from the regular page.php file. If you were to upload this file and use it, there would be no difference between this and all your other pages. Let’s change things a little. First, here’s an example of the file I had:

With my own Travel Map page template, I wanted to keep the header and the footer, and just remove those sidebars. This would enable me to fit in a huge Google map. All I did was change the code. Look at the image below.

You can see that all I changed was

<div id=”primary-content”>

to

<div id=”content” class=”widecolumn”>

You are almost done! Save this Notepad document and upload it into your Wordpress files. This file needs to go into your Theme folder, whichever theme you use. For example, I used my FTP program and put this file in public_html/wp-content/themes/unamed-one021-b. The folder “Unnamed-One 021-b” is the name of my theme; funny, huh? I love the theme despite it’s weird name.

OK, once your file is uploaded, you can go back to your Wordpress Dashboard area. Go to your “Presentation” and “Theme Editor” page and make sure your new .php file is listed there. If it is, all systems are go and you can start using your new special page template! Go to “Write” and “Write Page” and check the dropdown menu on the right. You should see it there. Choose that, and your new page will have that new design!

This coding that we did removed the sidebars and widened the post area. You can see the live demo at work– go to my blog’s home page here and you’ll see the sidebars. Go to the special Travel Map here and you’ll see no sidebars.

For additional coding and design help, refer to the Wordpress document about pages that I mentioned earlier. I found it helpful and no doubt you will also.

Here’s a quick article on adding custom text to a categories page for your Wordpress blog. First, a little background.

Wordpress sorts your blog posts into categories. See here for the definition from Wordpress. Wordpress also has something they call a “template hierarchy.” A good explanation comes from Tina Gasperson’s blog:

Because most WordPress themes have a single template for archives, aptly named archive.php, it’s not immediately apparent how to place a text ad on a specific category results page. But never fear: by default, WordPress searches using what it calls a “template hierarchy.” By taking advantage of the template hierarchy, it’s easy to make a special page that keeps your text ad where it belongs.

The template hierarchy works like this: if your visitor clicks on category #3, WordPress first looks for the most specific template: category-3.php. If it doesn’t find that, then it goes after the more generic category.php, and then archive.php, and if it doesn’t find that, it finally drops back to index.php. Armed with this knowledge, you can create a category-specific template using archive.php as a base.

Yes, armed with the knowledge of how Wordpress works, you can guide the system using this template hierarchy. You can make Wordpress show special text on certain category pages. This is not a difficult task, but I will assume that you know about coding and are familiar with the Wordpress format. This is how you do it.

So let’s say you want to post some text (for example, a text ad) under a certain category– but not all your categories. Let’s say you want to post a text ad under your category named “blogging.” Wordpress calls this category “blogging,” but Wordpress also assigns an Identity Number to this category, too. You need to find this ID number before you can do anything.

Log in to your Wordpress blog and go to “Manage” and choose “Categories.” You’ll see your list of categories. Since we are going to alter the “blogging” category, look for it in the list. Look for the ID Number.

In the image above, the ID Number we want is 73.

Now, go to “Presentation” (somewhere to the right of “Manage”) and choose “Theme Editor” tab. You will probably have a different theme than I, and your php files will look different, too. But the basic bones should be there. In the “Theme Editor” screen, look to the right-hand side and you’ll see a long list of links. Listed here are php files, like Style sheet, Header, Main Index Template, etc. Don’t worry if you don’t have the same ones that I do, or vice versa– it really depends on the theme you are using. However, some files should be the same. Just like people all have heads and eyes but different hair and eye color… your theme should have certain “body parts” but the styles may vary. Look for the php file called “archives.php.” Click it. When the page reloads, make sure it says “Editing “archive.php” at the top.

Copy all of the code in this file. Now, open up a new Notepad file. Paste the copied archive.php code into this new Notepad page. Now you are going to save the Notepad page, but you need to rename it using the ID Number of that category you wanted to change. Remember how our “blogging” category has an ID if 73? This is what I named my Notepad page:

Be sure to name your file exactly that (just use your own ID Number for your own category). Make sure there is a hypen and make sure you have the .php. Save the Notepad file but don’t close it yet!

You need to put in your text ad. Grab your text and paste it in like this (mine is in red):

<?php get_header(); ?>
<div id=”primary-content”>
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/theloop.php’); ?>

<p>
The kinder, gentler computer geek, <a href=”www.mrsmecombersscrapbook.com”>Mrs. Mecomber</a>, has recently issued her top ten free software programs for 2008.
</p>

</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Do you see how you are inserting your code between these two lines of code?

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/theloop.php’); ?>

</div>

Of course, your text ad will be different, unless you want to give me some free advertising.

Now, save your Notepad file again. Upload this file into your FTP program. Go back to your Administrative page in Wordpress (you may need to refresh or click a link elsewhere and come back to the page). You should now see your “category-IDNUMBER.php” file in the right-hand side.

You’ll notice that the Archive files remains unchanged, too.

Your text should now show up in only that category page. Ain’t Wordpress fun?