Anyway, knowing that some future bloggers don’t want to wait until the book comes out I thought I could refer them to the service offered on my design site: the Start Blogging! package, which is an excellent solution for those not interested to learn the technicaldetails of running a blog. If you are impatient about starting your blog… you may want to check that out!

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Where is the wp-content/themes directory? How do I find it? Create it? Access it?
If I’ve downloaded an FTP and also have an FTP on my host, how do I get them to make the themes be accessible onto the admin of my wp site?
How do I connect the FTP to the host? And which one?…

In several posts I have tried to clarify some basic notions. So I wrote simple instructions like:

With the FTP program/client (when installed on your computer) you connect your computer and the host computer. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. The name should say all: you will be transferring the unzipped files from your computer to the host server. The wp-content/themes/ folder is there (otherwise you wouldn’t see your blog).

Start here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/FTP_Clients

The first thing you should do:
install that FTP program that you downloaded.
FTP Fugu - that’s the program’software that should be installed on your computer. Most of these gizmos have an automatic installer, you just have to start the process.

(Also, .zip files are just compressed version of all the files of a program, so the package is not that huge when downloading…}

It’s been a while since I last used Mac, but I remember there is something on it that you can see the files and folders on your computer. You should always save/store the downloaded and unzipped program files - and theme files for that matter - in their own subfolders in a logical system/structure.

Now what any FTP program does: it has two parallel windows:
- one showing the files and folders on your computer
- the other one (when connected to the server) showing the files and folders there

From here is quite logical: you can up- and download = move files in both directions.
That’s the whole idea.

Too bad I couldn’t attach an image to my explanation but I can do it now :) I wouldn’t say this a complete chapter for the book. But it gives you a very clear idea what kind of topics are a must when the target audience is the absolutely non-web-savy future bloggers. They are my potential readers (and buyers, of course). I also have the advantage of coming from a non-technical background, therefore I understand perfectly how difficult is at the beginning to grasp these ideas. Here is my promise: there will definitely be a chapter about FTP and how it works.

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I need to clarify this about WordPress related support: quite often I am posting to the WordPress Support Forums, helping users for free. Sometimes I post a lot, other times, if busy with other projects, maybe less. All the free support I can offer to WordPress users is done through the forum. (The rare exceptions are when I ask somebody in the forum to contact me privately with their login info to take a look at their blog or site admin panel. Sensitive information cannot be posted in a public forum and, if a problem seems to be too difficult to be solved by “remote”, sometimes I offer help outside of the forums…)

However, this is not a WordPress support blog. While I appreciate your trust for contacting me for help, please be aware of the existence of my web design site specialized in WordPress - Prairie Design. However, if you contact me for support on that site, that’s not free: I am for hire. You are welcome to send me a message from there and see if we can agree. On this site, however, I’d prefer to be contacted with issues regarding the topic - my upcoming WordPress book.
Thanks for the understanding.

P.S. I’ll try to reply to the messages sent till today, but I will ignore any support related email in the future.

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I am back on working on my WordPress tutorial. While I am working on it I still keep an eye on the WP Forums - to see what kind of questions are asked. A few posts in the recent days reminded me that not only completely novice users have difficulties to grasp the basic working of the WordPress script but also users who come from a more traditional web background. If somebody has dealt only with static html pages (like using MS FrontPage) it is not easy to get the idea of dynamic database driven sites or the structure of the WP themes.

So, I was wondering… should I include something (a chapter?) for future WP users who are familiar with the “classic” web and HTML but are inexperienced with PHP and MySQL based sites?

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The other day I have visited my fellow moderator, HandySolo’s blog and read about his implementation of the dofollow plugin. Actually, I went to read that post because I noticed the “You comment - I follow” logo in the sidebar. You can see a similar one on the right under ETCETERA. It is from Randa Clay’s blog.
Later I will install the plugin on my other blogs, too.

About Contact. Unfortunately, I put a wrong email address in the contact form when I set it up in a hurry. Which means, if you tried to send me a message before yesterday, that never arrived. Please, re-send your message, the form now works (has been tested). If yoou have any questions or suggestions regarding the book, and you don’t want to comment here, don’t hesitate to contact me personally through the form.

And now back to keyboard…

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Of course, even when offline I was “troubleshooting’ all the time…

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In this blog presently I use the following plugins:
For the mandatory spam protection Akismet that comes with the WP download and Bad Behavior by Michael Hampton.
The Contact page is made with the help of the secure mailform by Dagon Design.
As you could notice, Alex King’s Share This plugin is also activated.
For the tags I am using the popular and very versatile Ultimate Tag Warrior by Christine Davis.

As for the stats I decided to give the new wordpress.com plugin a try. Till now it was available only for the wordpress.com users but recently it was made into a plugin for the self-hosted WP blogs, too. (I am following the blog’s visitors with the Analytics tool as well.)

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And after the yesterday’s dilemma regarding the html vs. dynamic site - I ended up with a nicely illustrated simple explanation of how the two web site types work. I gave it to a friend to read it and got very positive feedback. Which makes me to plan further simple clarifications about web related issues. Of course, the keyword here is: simple.

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OK, I downloaded the WP files, they are on my Desktop, now what? I don’t understand what all that blabla is about server and config file. Where should I upload it? Do I need a domain? How do I upload the files. I am completely new to this, so be gentle…

You can imagine the desperation of any helper when seeing a question like this. Where to start? What should I explain first? - and the same questions are very valid even in the case of a book that is targeting the non-technical beginners.

Do they have any basic understanding how the web works? Have they ever heard at least the “word” html?
Strictly speaking, you don’t need to understand how a static HTML web page works as opposed to the database driven dynamic web sites. On the other hand, if you do know the difference - you will never end up in the Forum saying “I saved all the files from my old host/server and installed it on my new server/domain but my blog is empty! HELP, pleeeeease…”

Those are the idiots who never realized that nothing is stored in their files. Except your customized theme you can throw out all your files. You can find them anywhere, no need for them. Really. Everything that is dear to you - is in the database. Therefore I ended up with a brief comparison of the traditional HTML sites and the database driven dynamic sites using PHP. I could understand this basic concepts when my programmer son explained to me the first time… even without understanding one line of PHP code. I think my readers are not dumber, so they will understand it as well.

The many, many hours spent in the Forum gave me this enormous advantage: I know precisely what kind of mistakes to expect from a newbie. If you see the same mistake repeated by hundreds of users, you know there must be a problem, so better address it to help them.

Yes, I know, it also means there is a problem with the documentation, which is mainly written by geeks for geeks - with a few exceptions. Let’s leave that for a future post…

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After reading so many clever blog posts about making money with blogging, I’ll use ads and other ways to monetize this blog. Of course, I’ll post the results (or failures), so you can learn about those, too.

For the moment I have some Adsense ads and my affiliate referral link to Text-Ad-Links. On my other blogs TLA ads worked quite well. I didn’t have much luck with the Google Adsense, maybe this blog will change that. I’ll keep you updated.

Later on I’ll add some existing affiliate links as well, I just have to find their right placement

Although I have designed many blog themes, for this particular blog I decided not to waste time with the design (my OCPD would keep me back from writing!) and went with a ready-made theme that was advertised as ready for monetization. I removed all the references to the original site for the simple reason that in the downloaded package there was a huge number of hardcoded ads and referral links. I think for novice users it is quite hard to find and remove them, so all those ads would make money for the theme designer. I consider this an evil practice - so my response is equally evil: removed every reference to them.

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