For the last few days, I have been following the instructions in this post by Dennis Howlett: How to migrate a monster WordPress blog.
This method is only needed if you don’t have full server access to take a MySQL dump and a wp-content dump in order to migrate a blog using PHPMyAdmin or equivalent.
Continue reading “Migrating a HUGE WordPress blog”
This is coming up for me every now and then as a question from the perplexed.
It’s obviously not quite as obvious as it could be.
Continue reading “How to change your display name on wordpress.com”
If you see this pop up in your RSS feed, and you have a few moments to spare, could you hop on over with your smartphone’s browser and see how it all looks? I’m testing out the WordPress Mobile Pack plugin.
The Big New Upgrade is now in Beta-1 testing. I’m going to be installing the beta on a test blog next week (school holidays really cut into hackfest time) and seeing how it plays. Of course, they may well be up to Beta-2 testing by then.
The new features to look forward to:
I’d be most interested to hear from anybody playing around with the Betas.
A custom Default Avatar is an option that is built into the Hybrid framework, a happenstance which nudged me about my procrastination in implementing this on other WP sites.
How to do it: Continue reading “Customising devault avatars in WordPress”
I don’t understand why anyone who blogs would not have some sort of “Latest Comments” widget in the sidebar, but it appears that quite a few don’t. I wonder if they realise that this might be why they don’t get as many comments on every post as they might like?
I find that on sites without a comments widget the discussions on older posts just wither away as new posts take the sweet spot at the top of the front page. With a comments widget, people can see that a discussion is ongoing on a post they’ve already read and perhaps commented on, and are encouraged to check those latest comments and maybe add more to the discussion. Without a comments widget, they have to want to revisit that post they’ve already read just on the offchance that new comments have been added. How many of the readers are going to do that?
Sure, they could subscribe to the blogs Comments RSS feed, or maybe just the specific Comments feed for that post if they are tech-savvy enough, but how many do? I generally don’t follow comments by RSS, the option just doesn’t appeal. If someone like me who follows hundreds of Posts feeds by RSS isn’t generally going to click on a post’s Comments feed, how many others do you think are going to do it?
Continue reading “No reader’s comments display in your sidebar? Do you want more comments or not?”
I’ve added a dictionary plugin so that I can go mad with acronyms, initialisms and jargon to my heart’s content and still let newbie webtech readers understand what I’m going on about – I’d appreciate some accessibility testing from those using screen readers. I think it needs some better styling to indicate which words have a dictionary link for a start.
Here’s some of the terms that I have defined:
How does that work for you, dear readers?
So far pretty slick. It doesn’t seem to have broken any of the multimedia plugins and I’m enjoying some of the new features – the theme editor that remembers where you were at last save is long overdue!
As per major new release SOP, there’s an announcement post listing all the new features for 2.9 up at the WordPress Dev Blog (video too).
P.S. Heh, I just added a new category for “wordpress” all in lower case – and the category list autocorrected that to the official capitalised “WordPress”! Warms the cockles of my pedantic little heart, that does.
I see otherwise well-done amateur websites ruined by a lack of knowledge about images on the web all the time.
Too many people take an image straight out of their digital camera (or an image meant to be sent to a printer at high resolution) that is huge (1000-3000+ pixels wide), upload it directly to their server and insert it into a page as-is, using HTML to shrink the display to only 500 pixels wide, or maybe only 150 pixels wide. When you first realise that browsers can shrink or expand images to any size you like, it seems like a cool trick, and it is. But it’s also a trap. Browser-shrinking very large images creates the following problems:
Basic HTML for bloggers
Every now and then I get asked about this, by both authors and commentors, so I’m listing a few good resources here so that they’re all together in one place.
For Blog Authors:
Continue reading “Basic HTML for bloggers”
Posted in Web 101 | Tagged blogging, commenting, HTML, tutorials, XHTML | Leave a response