Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else: Siobhan on WPMU.org has a nicely illustrated, researched and explained article on why users should never search for “Free WordPress Themes” in Google or any other search engine. Not enough can be said to avoid the malicious theme hawkers on the Internet and I appreciate the work and the explanation. The problem is that most users, who are new to the ways of WordPress, will still use Google to search for themes and will download the first link that provides them with a free theme that catches their fancy. I would go so far as to say that somewhat knowledgeable users might still be tempted to ignore any possible bad effects from these themes; e.g. users continue to flock to sites that provide collections of serial numbers online in spite of being riddled with porn and adware. My […]
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‘WordPress Tips’ Category
Today is Blog Action Day 2010, and this year’s topic is water. To many of us, water is a commonplace item. We don’t have to walk for miles for a simple drink of water or risk our lives with every sip, yet over 800 people world-wide have no access to clean water, and over 3 million people succumb to water-related diseases every year. Organizations like Charity: Water, Children’s Safe Drinking Water, and Water.org are collecting donations to provide wells and water filtration to communities around the world, so wouldn’t it be nice if you could set a fundraising goal on your WordPress blog and share the experience with your readers? Tracking your fundraising progress on your own blog is incredibly easy thanks to ChipIn. Just register for a free account and create a new event. Once your event has been setup, click the “Create Widgets Now” button. Customize your widget […]
[Continue Reading...]Gravatar recently launched Hovercards, a new feature that servers as a nifty bridge between your Gravatar and your Gravatar Profile. Hovercards have already been enabled throughout WordPress.com and WordPress.org, and there is an official plugin in the works, but what if you can’t wait for the official plugin to add Hovercards to your WordPress blog? If your theme has a functions.php file, just add the following line within the file: wp_enqueue_script( ‘gprofiles’, ‘http://s.gravatar.com/js/gprofiles.js’, array( ‘jquery’ ), ‘e’, true ); If your theme doesn’t have a functions.php file, or you’d rather not mess with it, use a plain text editor to create a file called hovercards.php with the following content, then use an FTP or SFTP client to upload it to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory, and activate it via the Plugins section of the admin panel. <?php /* Plugin Name: Hovercards */ wp_enqueue_script( ‘gprofiles’, ‘http://s.gravatar.com/js/gprofiles.js’, array( ‘jquery’ ), ‘e’, true ); ?> […]
[Continue Reading...]WordPress 2.6 introduced a post revisions feature, which automatically saves a draft as you begin to write a post or page and saves a revision for each change made afterwards. That’s right, every time you make even the slightest alteration to a post or page, a new revision is saved. Now don’t get me wrong, this is an incredibly useful feature, especially if you accidentally cut half of your post during a late night edit or lose power while composing your latest masterpiece, but these revisions can slowly build up in your database. If it’s been a few days since you’ve last edited your blog, chances are that you don’t need to keep any revisions around, and they’re probably just siting in your database taking up space and growing cobwebs. To remove all of your revisions safely without harming your published posts and pages, backup your database, then use either […]
[Continue Reading...]There are many gallery plugins out there for WordPress, but did you know that WordPress has had its own gallery system since the release of version 2.5 over two years ago? To get started with a native WordPress gallery, you’ll need to create or edit the post or page that you want the gallery to appear in and then click the “Add an Image” button. You can use this to upload all of your images at full size and WordPress will automatically generate the various sizes (including thumbnails) for you. Now, it’s important to note that once you add an image via this method while writing or editing a post or page, it will be assigned to that specific post or page, which is how WordPress keeps track of the gallery’s content. Once you have uploaded all the desired images, click the “Add an Image” button again, select the “Gallery” tab, […]
[Continue Reading...]You can’t be too careful these days. You’ve put a lot of work into your blog, and it would be a shame to see it lost forever just because you accidentally deleted something you shouldn’t have, it was hacked, or your server had a catastrophic meltdown. There are many ways to backup WordPress, so I’m just going to cover some of the easiest and most complete methods. First of all, your files are easy to backup. Since WordPress can be downloaded at any time, you only need to worry about files that you’ve customized or uploaded, which should leave only your wp-config.php file and everything under the /wp-content/ directory. You can easily backup these files by accessing your server via FTP or SFTP and downloading them. Now for the database, which includes all of your content and settings. Just like almost everything in life, there’s the easy way and the […]
[Continue Reading...]I’m sure you’ve all heard about the new Twitter button, which finally provides an official way to share links to Twitter and display the number times each link has been shared, but how do you go about adding it to WordPress? If you love messing with your theme, you can use the official Twitter button generator to generate just a few lines of HTML code that can be inserted into your theme templates, but why not use a plugin to simplify the whole process? I highly recommend Simple Twitter Connect. This plugin, or rather series of plugins, will provide a simple yet customizable way to automatically add the new Twitter button to your posts and pages. You’ll also enjoy a wealth of additional features, including the ability to automatically tweet your posts while publishing, display a list of followers, use your Twitter credentials to login to the admin panel, and […]
[Continue Reading...]About a month ago I posted about how fast WordPress 3.0 was being downloaded and there was a terrific discussion about the sheer amount of data that was being grabbed to get at the 3.0 version of WordPress. We even had some comments as to why it was being downloaded at that scale. Well as of today the download counter reads that it has been downloaded just over 10.3 million times since it was released last month and the counter keeps rolling along! So what is it that makes the WordPress platform so popular? What is it that drives people to download it over 10 million times? If you had the opportunity to talk to a non WordPress user what would you tell them about it to show that it is worth downloading and putting to use for a website? What is your favorite thing about WordPress? What is your […]
[Continue Reading...]There comes a time you may have to leave one web host for another. No matter the reason the idea of relocating an entire website – especially one that has been online for sometime – can seem very daunting. With a WordPress based site – I found it easier than expected – way easier. My WindowsObserver.com website has 1,100 posts, 9 pages, 4 categories, 2,436 comments, uses 17 widgets, and has 35 active plug-ins. On top of all those elements I use Windows Live Writer to create all of my content and I use a good bit of screenshots and graphics in my posts. As a result I have over 40MB of images (1,100 files) to go along with my 1,100 postings. Now for the purposes of this story I am not going to get into a comparison of hosting services or the like. The landscape is massive out there […]
[Continue Reading...]About the Author
- Mark Ghosh
An avid fan of business, education, technology and finance. I lead a lean, highly focussed and capable team of Java Back End developers and Front End developers through a maze of complex software wizardry to fulfill the web maintenance needs of a large chemical manufacturer. As per Myers-Briggs Personality Types, I am an ESTJ. I pride in a project completed on time and according to plan. My hobbies include all kinds of technology, anything that I can taste and anything that goes fast or flies in the air. I like to read business books and comics in my spare time.
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