Everybody’s got one, do you?

It’s one of the cool things about blogs.  You can read them in your very own “feed reader”.  And for those who do this, it is quite likely the ONLY way they will read your blog.  So, we need to make sure that your blog is EASY PEASY for others to subscribe to.  (Subscribe = how they grab your blog and feed it to their reader.)

1.  Find an image of those RSS buttons. Here’s over 35 styles, each with 8 or more different colors and designs.  I’ll use one from my photobucket account.  You may use this one too if you like.

Once you have selected your image, you need to copy the location like this:

<img src=”http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll40/o2cathy/blog%20artwork/feed.png” alt=”button” />

If you have one uploaded to your blog, go to your “manage” panel, and find the image in your media library.  Copy the url (location) from that image.

2.  Find the Address of YOUR feed. Wordpress publishes several feeds for you.  They have their own names, and you can see where they are coded in the header of your blog (if you look under View Page Source).

If you are using the feedburner widget, and have a feedburner url, use that instead.  It will be:

www.feeds.feedburner.com/mommymotivation.

In your page source it will be something like this:

www.mommymotivation.me/feed/rss/.

Or, if you are NOT using permalinks, like this:

www.mommymotivation.me/?feed=rss.

There are several options that you can use, and 3 or 4 different feeds to access.  Find more options on the wordpress manual, here.

3.  Put these two things together in a text widget. In your design admin tab, under “widgets” select the sidebar that you’d like it to appear in.  Then select the “text” widget on the left.  Open it up, enter a title and your feed details like this:

<div id=”rss” style=”text-align:center;”>

<img style=”border:none;” src=”http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll40/o2cathy/blog%20artwork/feed.png” alt=”button” />  <a href=”www.mommymotivation.me/feed/rss” title=”feed”>Subscribe to my Feed.</a>

(Replace the red text with the URL’s that you found in step 1 & 2.)

Sit back and revel in the fact that you did something nice for all your loyal fans today.

Cheers!

Filed under Must Have Plugins, a light brush of code, using themes, wordpress basics | Comment (0)

Don’t do what I did

The easiest way to really screw up your blog is to make changes in the Theme Editor. They are permanent, and they are ‘uploaded’ immediately to the internet.  So there is no “undo” button.  If you want to change the font, colors, width of a column, etc, you can do this on your own computer, where there is an undo button.  I swear, it’s the better way.  I know this.  From experience. 

So in your administration panel, under “design” is “theme editor”.  At the top of the Theme Editor is a “Select Theme To Edit” title and a drop-down box.  Select your current theme.  If you’re not sure what it is called, go to the Design>> Themes tab, at the top is “Current Theme”, including a screenshot and some information including the title.

Back to the Theme Editor.  Select your current theme from the drop-down menu.  On the right hand side is a whole list of templates.  At the bottom of that list, there is a subsection, titled, “Styles”.  Select the main style sheet.  It is usually titled, “style.css”.

Now, instead of rewriting the styles online, I highly recommend selecting the text with your mouse, and copying it.  Paste it into a Text Editor(NOT a word processor like Word).  Crimson Editor is an excellent one that is available off the internet, and is open-source (free).  Once you’ve gotten those styles on your own computer, in said program, hack to your heart’s content.  When you’re finished, select the styles, copy them.  Go back to the Design tab>>Theme Editor>>current theme>>styles>>style.css.  And paste it right over the old one.

Refresh your page to see what you’ve done.  Oh dear.

Go back to your text editor, which is still open, right?  Click on undo until you’re your fingers fall off.  Select and copy the original styles.  Go back to your once-beautiful-blog, Design tab>> Theme Editor>> current theme>>styles>>style.css.  And paste the original code overtop of your shiny new code.  That should put you right back again.

This is the easiest way to avoid making irreversable mistakes.  Or you can do what I did: make the changes online, which is cool because you can see the changes live as you write it.  And then do something that you can’t remember how to reverse.  Something really aweful.  Then all you have to do is find that darned theme on your hard-drive, the one that you uploaded a year ago, and upload a brand new fresh style.css.  And begin again. Uggg.  Do it the first way, trust me.

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Every Post needs an Author

Every post needs an author, unless of course, you are the owner, author, and keeper of the blog.  If you would like to have your name on each post that you write, it is as simple as one line of code.  I’ve written it for you (me and the wordpress authors), and given you the step by step below:

For most templates you will want this in the main index.php, archive.php and category.php templates.  You find these templates in the “Design” administration panel, under “Edit Themes”.  Select your current theme from the drop-down menu.  It should be automatically selected for most people.

Then select from the right hand column the template that you’d like to work on.  Look for this bit here:

<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

                <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark"
title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>">
<?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

                <small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> </small>

                <div class="entry">

Select and copy this bit:

<?php _e("By ");?><?php the_author();?>

And voila!  You should have something like this:

<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

                <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to
<?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

                <small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?>
<?php _e("By ");?><?php the_author();?>
</small>

                <div class="entry">

Any questions?

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Your Questions Answered: Changing the Font Size

A few days ago I posed the question on Twitter, “What do you want to know about Wordpress?” And surprisingly, people read my tweets because I got four good questions.

So I’ll start with the first.

The Bloggess wants to know how she can change her font size on her blog.

It’s a good question.  The themes we get come with certain font sizes and they may be too small for us to read, so we fear that our readers won’t be able to.

It might also be that we can’t stand Times New Roman 12, so we want to change it to Century Gothic 14.

What ever it is that you want to do, regarding your font size, color, and type, you can do so within your Stylesheet (typically the style.css file under Design->Theme Editor.

(Note:  For Wordpress.com users, you can also change the font size, color and type, but you will need to pay the $15 CSS upgrade charge.)

Each theme is different when trying to change the stylesheet.  Each designer calls various aspects of their stylesheet by different names and if you’re not able to spot sight it, then you have to get a little more creative.  (Or download Firebug for Firefox)

Using Firebug, I was able to see that the post content uses Gerorgia 12 pt font.  So, let’s say that she wants to make that 14 points.

She’ll find this section of her stylesheet (line 273, so you know that it’s a ways down the page):

.post-content, .page-content {

-x-system-font:none;

border-top:1px solid #BBC4A3;

font-family:Georgia,Verdana,Arial,serif;

font-size:12px;

font-size-adjust:none;

font-stretch:normal;

font-style:normal;

font-variant:normal;

font-weight:normal;

line-height:normal;

margin:3px 0;

padding:10px 0;

}

Filed under a light brush of code, wordpress basics, your questions answered | Comments (2)

How to remove the generic title of your blog…

When you install your wordpress blog, the only things it asks you for is your blog name and your email address.

So you enter them.  Then you upload the fancy new “clothes” that you’ve just had designed for you and your blog title, appears in the header.

You do what seems the simplest fix and that’s to take it out of the Title line in the settings, but then you realize that your RSS feed doesn’t show your blog title.

And we can’t have that, can we?

Believe it or not, there’s a simple fix.

For most templates, you’re going to want to go into your header.php file and find the string that looks like this…

<a href=”<?php echo get_option(’home’); ?>/”><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></a>

Take out the part that says <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?>

Save your changes and your Title should no longer show up.

That easy.

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Adding a Button

First thing, we need a button. It should be around 125px or 1.25 inches square. Just for demonstration purposes, let’s use, what shall we say? This guy?

Okay. Moving on.

STEP ONE:

To upload your button, log in to your blog. Go to the admin area. And then the [write] > [post] area. At the top of the write-post screen, is [Add media:] and a picture of a box. Click the box.

At the [Upload Media] screen, click on the [Choose Files to Upload] button near the top. Select your file from your computer. WP will upload it to your server for you. Then open another screen. Like this one:

See the arrow on this screen shot? That is the Link URL. Click on that, [select all], [copy].

STEP TWO Now, we move into the coding part of things. But we’ll go slow, and I’ll provide all the code! You just need to have your mouse handy to copy and paste.

First if your theme uses widgets, go to the [Design] >[Widgets] tab. Select your sidebar from the dropdown menu. If there are no dropdowns, then you only have one sidebar. You’re good to go.

#2: Add a text/html widget to your sidebar. Just click on it, and drag it over to the sidebar area. Copy and paste this into the bottom square. Replace the red text with your blog url, name, and image url from step 1.

<a href="http://www.myblog.com" title="Fabulously Me">
<img src="insert url here" style="border:none; text-align:center;" alt="image" />
</a>

#3: in the top square, type a title. Ie: Grab my button!

And that is it!

If you have your sidebars hard-coded (is that like hard-wired? Is that even the right word? I’m famous (in my own mind) for making words up just fyi. Anyhow, the ones with the NOT widgets. Those ones.

#1: At the top of your admin screen, you’ll see the tab [Design]. Click on that, then select [Theme Editor].

#2: Select the name of the theme that you are using from the drop down menu.

#3 Click on the sidebar.php file. There should be a number of sections in there that start with a <li> or

<li class="blah">

<?php code, code, and more code, ;?>

</li>

Somewhere before or after the <li>…</li> sections, insert this:

<a href="<?php bloginfo('url');?>" title="<?php bloginfo('name');?>">
<img src="insert url here" style="border:none; text-align:center;" alt="image" />
</a>

Replace the red text with the image URL that you copied in step 1. That’s it!

Send me a link to have a look! And I’ll respond to questions left here as well.

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