Lately I have spent more time on writing the book itself than updating this blog. Some very dear old freinds of ours visited us here in Montreal and we spent time together going to see the usual turist attractions: Vieux Montreal - the old city, the old port, Mont Royal etc.
Of course, even when offline I was “troubleshooting’ all the time…
Usually, I keep the number of plugins on all my blogs to a minimum. I don’t feel I have to use a plugin just because it is “cool”, however, I am very grateful for those plugins that provide exactly the features I often need in different setups.
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.)
Tags: plugins wordpressToday (Thursday) I wrote mainly about how to prepare a computer for blogging with WordPress: what kind of tools, software one will likely need in order to manage all the tasks during the setup and later while blogging. For example, for those who plan to post many pictures I would strongly advise to have an image editing program to avoid uploading a 900KB 1200×1000px picture in a narrow column blog.
(Even if you think no normal person would do something like that, believe me, it happens…)
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.
Tags: book dynamic web sites html images wordpressWhole day I was struggling with this question: how much general information regarding the WWW should I include in the introductory chapters?
I am fully aware there is a huge amount of information out there, even with a simple search anybody could find it. But in the WordPress Support Forums I have had to answer question like:
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…
Tags: database documentation dynamic web sites html newbie mistakes php wordpressThis blog is on a brand new domain having installed WordPress a day ago. And while the main purpose of it is to document the progress of the book titled WordPress 101, it can also serve as a demonstration how to build a blogging site from scratch.
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.
Tags: adsense blog building monetize theme TLASign up for a Text-Link-Ads account and start earning money from your blog.
