Spyin’ On Dem Dere Vis’tors.

So you want t’ spy on dem dere visitors?  All you need t’b doin’ is ta download this har plugin- Shortstat. It be a great little thin’. I’dunno dere what e’ery number does sayr. But I luve t’ one that tells me whar people be comin’ from. Aarh - and t’ one dere dat does say what thar be typin’ i’google. And then thar be still t’ classic - how many dem visits t’ yer blog?

Translation:  So you want to spy on your visitors?  All you need is to download this plugin: Shortstat. Although I’m not sure what all the numbers are, it is a great little thing.  I love the section that tells me where the people are coming from, what they typed in google to get here, and the classic - how many visitors I’ve had.

Enjoy Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Cathy

Mandatory Upgrade

Ok - don’t shoot the messenger!  THEY said “Mandatory Upgrade”.

I would never, knowing you, ever, remotely come close, to being that bossy with y’all.  Okay, maybe I would.  And this is probably one of those rare (ahem) times.

Wordpress 2.6.2 is considered a “Mandatory Upgrade” for a lot of geekaleze reasons.  But at the end of a lot of confusing schtuff, this is what they say:

“The attack is difficult to accomplish,  but its mere possibility means we recommend upgrading to 2.6.2.”

And by attack - they do mean security attack.

I read through the geekaleze, translating to english when needed, and this is the Cathy-version: On the RARE chance that someone figures out how to enter a username in this particularly mean way, they can reset the password of another user.  And if they understand the current weakness in SQL they may be able to predict the automatically generated password that they just reset.  And this will only happen if you allow open registration.

Open registration is automatic unless you change the options under “Settings” - “General” - “Membership”.  And people do not need to register to comment if you have unchecked the next box in that same screen.   So there you have it:  upgrade!

Good luck!

Cathy

To back up, see this post.

To upgrade, see this post.

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;

}

You are gonna look soooo smart

All you’ll need now is a pocket protector. 

There is a little known very cool thingie in Wordpress that comes with every installation - meaning, its already there - the Bookmarklet. Once activated, this looks like another of your bookmarks in your Bookmarks or Favorites folder.  But hiding underneath it is the coolest thing!

First, to activate it:

• in your administration panels, in the write post screen, in the sidebar, is a “Shortcuts” paragraph.  In there is a link called “Press This”.  Follow the instructions:  just right click and save as a bookmark.  Now, it looks like a bookmark in your list right?
• In older versions of wordpress, I think the link is called “Bookmark it!” and it is located at the bottom of the write post screen.
• This function was removed from version 2.5 and reinstated as “Press This!” in 2.6.

To use it:

This is the cool part:  while you are reading your favorite blogs (ahem!) and you see something that you want to publish to your readers (I can think of something), just go to the Bookmarks or “Favorites” menu and click on your Press This link.  It will automatically open a new screen.  AND it will be the write-post screen of your blog!  AND it will have the link to what you were just reading already in the post ready for you to write up!  If you don’t want to write a new post at that moment, that’s ok.  Simply press the save button and it will save it as a draft.

How cool is that?

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.

Creating links in your post

1. You are typing a lovely post, title & text. (See my blog for some excellent examples, absolutely shameless I know.) 

2. Select the text that you want to turn into a link.

3. Click on the “link” icon as shown.

4. Link URL: This is the only thing that I ever complete. This is the full text hyperlink thingie: starting with “http://”.

Target: You can use this if you would like the link to open in a new window, new tab, or in the current browser.

Title: This is the text that will appear when the link is hovered over. Ie: “link to Cathy’s site”.

Class: I believe this is referring to a css class. Perhaps if you are attaching a link to an image this would come into play. Like I said, only the top blank- Link URL - is necessary.

5. Once you click on the “insert” button, your new linked text should be a different color, and most likely underlined.

6. To break the text, click the broken link. To change the link, click the “link icon” again and complete the details with the new link.

Finding and Using a Gravatar

Is your theme gravatar-enabled?  If it is, you’ll see a small image in each comment.

Gravatars are images that represent your online presence anywhere on the internet.  Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatars.

With WP 2.6 we can now include a default image that matches your site instead of the little grey head.  We can set the size of the gravatar and placement within the comments.  How cool is that?  All these mods are done through the code in your theme, and why you need your site designed by a professional me.   I imagine there are plugins that modify this sort of thing too.  But Heather’s our plugin gal, I’ll let her cover that.

To find your personal avatar, you can draw your own or find some cuties here or here.  Then go to gravatar.com and upload your image to match your email address.  Anywhere on the internet that you sign in using your email address, will now be able to view your gravatar.  It will display on those sites only if they are gravatar-enabled.  Is yours?

Find and Replace is a Gift from God…

Seriously.

You know it’s true.  How much time to we save when we complete a find and replace?  Alot.  And a lot of hassles and headaches too.

I know of so many people who, after blogging for many months, or years even, decided that they were going to stop using their children’s real names.  And so what did they do?

They went back, post by post, and edited them.

By hand.

Can you imagine how long that would take you if you decided to do that today?

You’re shuttering aren’t you?

I know.

Saturday night I had the distinct pleasure of helping Beth and Christy over at Ruby and Roja move their blog to Wordpress self-hosted.  They did an awesome job as the designers.  Because that’s what they do.  And they are good at it.

My job was to make it look like they wanted to within WordPress and then make it function the way that they wanted.  So we set up a test blog, got it all layed out the way we wanted it and then moved it over in the middle of the night.

However, when we moved it, all of the links pointed back to the test site.  All of the graphics.  All of the internal links.  All of the permalinks.

All 575 URLs that were contained within that site.

Lucky for me though, I remembered the plugin that Krissy told me about months ago, so I hopped over to her blog and started looking for it.  I knew she had blogged about it and I found it.  The Search Regex Plugin by Urban Giraffe.

Coincidentally, they were also the ones that told me that I had 575 links.

I installed the plugin, activated it and then did a search for the domain of the test blog and replaced with with rubyandroja.com

It took a minute, if that.

So, if you’ve got a mountain of terms or links that you need to change, I highly recommend this plugin.

And here’s another benefit of self-hosted WordPress… you could never do that with the other platforms… just sayin’.

ISP, FTP, HTML, OMG, LOL

When I began, my hubby set me up with a blog. On some site. Now if you’re like me, you have no idea what in the world is going on behind the scenes, you just really love google, and some blogs you’ve been reading. And maybe you do your banking online and search for phone numbers.

Perfect!

Wordpress is for you, honey!

It is all a little overwhelming at first, but here is what information I could gather from picking my hubby’s brain (like sticking a fork in an electrical outlet).

Here’s a diagram of the “internet”.

1. You.

2. Your “host” company.

3. The WEB.

Let’s start with #3 just to mess wi’ya.

I used to ask my hubby - where is the internet? WHAT is the internet? Have you ever asked a technically-inclined person this question? They don’t react well.

This is why: it isn’t really a thing or a place. It is organic. Growing. changing shape. etc. Just like a fib… Have you seen Larry and the Fib from Outer Space? I have. Too many times. Um… fib, fib, oh yeah - internet.

So with all these computers, and new ones added all the time, there are huge issues with how to get them all to communicate the same language. So far it speaks HTML or XML, PHP and a couple others. We don’t even use the same electrical current! And don’t get me started on the States - rebels that they are, have an entirely new way of doing stuff than anyone else. Not like us, we Canadians are a nice passive bunch. A little behind, off to one side, and very nice. I’ve heard.

Review:

• Internet - fib, I mean growing mass of connected computers
• HTML, PHP, XML - languages that all/most computers on the above mass, understand.
• Canadians - RULE.

———————————————————

So where were we? Ah, yes. #2: the Host.

So to keep the Canadians and the Europians and the Americans all playing nice, we have this huge mass of computers, the internet, all over the world. No one person has access to all of it. There is not too much control in any one person’s hands. That’s why tracking online criminal activity is so difficult for the authorities.

And to further keep individual users safe, we are separated from the internet. Plus, our cute little pink laptops couldn’t filter through all that information and get it down into bite sized pieces. We need bigger and better to do that. That’s our favorite HOST.

These host set-ups are one of the things that separate my 8 year old on Barbie.com from Harry in sickville. The host filters content so that we can google it. And it provides a wall of safety between our home’s pc and the big bad web.

So if I want a website (Canadians Rock), then I call my host company, and rent space on their server to get me connected to the internet. Usually an annual or monthly fee. The next step is getting my cool name on the site.

A note about domain names: If you have a website, then you store all that content (in html or similar language) on your host’s server. And then IT communicates with the rest of the internet to let them know what content is on there. At DSW, Heather offers domain name registration too. This is a separate service, provided by registrars. Somebody has to check to see if the name is used, and rents out the name to you for an annual fee. Now that you have a “name” you have something to call that space on your host’s server. Which would otherwise be called something like 168.651.11. Catchy, eh?

Review:

• Host/ host server/ host company: the computer between you and the internet. It filters content, and provides safety.
• Domain Name: a pretty name for your space on the host server.

————————————————————-

And if you’re still reading, you deserve a prize. But not from me. Heather? And maybe the low-down on individual users. YOU.

So how do YOU, get your site to the internet. So far, we’ve:

1. thunk up a name, and registered it (approx $10)
2. found our favorite host company (ahem!) $20.

Now, you need some stuff from your host company in order to get all your pretty names, and content onto her server. You need:

FTP address

This is the address on the internet where you go to administer your host package. If my domain is http://canadiansrock.com, (I wonder if that’s a beer site?) then it is usually ftp://canadiansrock.com. Or sometimes numbers after the site: http://canadiansrock.com:2082.

Password & Login Name

You know?

FTP Client

This one isn’t essential, but, well, yeah, it IS. Instead of using your ftp address & control panel, you really ought to use this program. It opens up a window, and lets you drag and drop programs from your computer to your ftp address without ever having to log on and use a server-based program. It makes me feel safer to be on my own computer and not my host’s server, while I mess around with wordpress. Not that I mess around. it’s just my recommendation to you people.

Review:

• FTP: the address on the host server for uploading content
• Password & login: duh.
• FTP Client: the program that you should use for messing around

Once, you have FileZilla downloaded to your computer. Go here to learn how to set it up the first time. Once the set up is done, you’re rockin, like a Canadian.

————————————————————

Now you know the main stuff & concepts behind some of the weirdo names in techy-land. If you get all this under your ‘do, you are SO ready to upload wordpress and begin playing with it! See our tutorial here for upgrading/ installing wordpress.

And we have a winner

Heather’s the winner of the blog installtion and we’re tickled pink as she doesn’t have a blog… so we can get her off on the right foot.

Didn’t win?  Never fear!  We can still help!

Contact us and we’ll get you up and running!