But… I do bring you useful information each week, do I not?  Here’s why you care.  That particular column made using the CREF plugin stupid-easy.  You will LOVE the CREF plugin if you:

• have a cooking blog
• photo blog
• write a bunch of posts that you want linked together
• want to add links of your best work into a post or page.

I regularly make lists of my recipes on my gluten-free blog, mainly to participate in Menu memes.  Because of this CREF plugin, this is all I need to do to make my list:

• [cref ID}
• [cref ID]
• [cref ID]

Where “ID” is the number of the recipe post.  How cool is that?  No more find it, copy the url, click on the infinity symbol up there (What’s with that anyway?) and paste.  Times 7 recipes.

Another use is adding links to similar photos in your photo blog.  TOLD you it was useful!

How To

So, first download and install the plugin: Reveal ID’s so now you can see the ID numbers.

Now you are good to go with the Cross-References plugin.  Any questions?

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!

If you scroll down in your write>post screen there is a section called “Advanced Options”.  This is for you! Let’s go through them:

• Excerpt: This will override other excerpts of this post on the archives or category pages.  Click on the arrow and insert the excerpt that you like the best into this window.
• Trackbacks:  From what I understand, there are some sites that don’t automatically catch the links in your post and notify the linkee(the one you linked to).  Oh, you didn’t know that was happening?  Yup, be careful what you say in link form!  The linkee will (usually) be notified.  If they have an older system, then you can enter the url of the linkee in this window.
• Custom Fields: These fields are (in a good theme)entered into your meta data, on each post.  So if you wanted to insert the weather into the post, you would create a key: “weather”, and enter the data in the value field.  I use this to select which image to display in my portfolio.
• Comments & Pings: This is where you can turn OFF your comments, and it will override the blog’s original settings in the admin>settings>discussion panels. Turning OFF pings will (on this post only) NOT notify your linkee(the person you linked to).  So if you are talkin’ smack about someone, and you’re a bit of a scaredy cat (not that I am or anything) you would turn these off so they wouldn’t know about it.  Except if they found out.
• Password Protect This Post: Yup.  It will.  It will also show up in the loop as “This post is password protected.  Enter password here:  ” or something like this in a good theme.
• Post Author: IF you have more than one author a drop-down list will be here and you can select - oddly enough - the post author.

Some plugins will add more advanced options and let you edit them right from your write screen.

And, if you’re ready to give away a present, this here is a great tool to ‘draw’ a nearly-random number:  Like drawing numbers from a hat, without the hat.  How very geeky of you!

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.

And, to further your pleasure - try this blogging reference with cocktail recipes at the end of each chapter:  Blogging with Moxie, Being a Geek is oh-so chic!

This will appeal mostly to women(even those who don’t like pink), and those who want to start a personal or home-based-business blog.  They very gently introduce new technological terms and teach you how to use them.  It reads like a reference manual, with lots of illustrations, and points of interest, blended perfectly with hilarious antidotes.  Personally, I think the cocktails should be at the front of each chapter.  You couldn’t get more gentle than that, could you?

Click on the title to order from amazon.  (I borrowed a copy from the library, but you are going to want to buy one as a reference!)

Pink for October is a website that is dedicated to increasing the awareness and education of peeps about Breast Cancer.  Last year over 3000 websites went pink. From the Pink for October site:

Web sites will Go Pink during the month of October to bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, get people talking about breast cancer, and raise money for research.

But to be clear, raising money isn’t the primary purpose of this web event.

The hope is that you turn your site pink (in whatever way works for your site), go out to that World Wide Web thing and educate yourself about the multiple issues related to Breast Cancer, then take that newfound knowledge and tell someone else what you’ve learned.

We hope that you will:

1. Turn your web site/blog pink (however you like, it’s up to you).
2. Educate yourself about the multiple issues related to breast cancer.
3. Take that newfound knowledge and teach someone else what you know.

Now, you can turn your site pink in any way you like - just a title or text, add a pink ribbon (they have a few cute graphics on their site too), or you can add a new theme.  I designed a theme for self-hosted wordpress bloggers at Healing Graphics and Designs.  You can preview it here.  And download here.  Did I mention it is FREE? 

Cheers!

Cathy

But here are a few that I’ve finished this week…

click on the graphics to visit their sites…

Arianne has a brand new look thanks to Ruby and Roja…

Moe wanted to move from her current Blogger Blog to WordPress and she’s got a brand new look thanks to DCR Design

Juli is brand new to the blogging world and has her great new look courtesy of DCR Design

There are many more on the horizon… and I’m working on posting pictures of the other happy WordPressers in the near future…

WordPress isn’t just a great blogging platform because it does things that other platforms can’t…

It changes lives.

Until next time…

Heather

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?