If you’ve ever wanted to publish a specific post on a particular day in the future, it’s very simple to do if you’re using WordPress.

Once you have written your post, instead of hitting the save or publish button, click the edit button next to publish immediately.

This will open up other options (see image below).  Select the month, date, and time when you’d like your post published, and press the publish button.

Don’t make the common mistake of pressing save.   While save seems to make more sense, it is in fact the incorrect button to press. Hit publish instead, and on the time and date you’ve set, WordPress will automatically publish your post.

See?  Easy!

Sphere: Related Content

You may have seen this symbol  next to links on various pages of the Web. It denotes that the link (which is usually placed before the symbol) is an external link.

If you’ve ever wanted to differentiate internal links from external links on your blog, there is a fairly simple way of doing it, and all it requires is a few lines of text added to your stylesheet.

In this post, we’ll show you how to do it.

Why differentiate between internal and external links?

Today, most people scan, they don’t read the full text of a blog. By representing your external links visually, visitors can see - at a glance - that you’ve given them quick access to relevant and related content that is not solely on your site. This is significant because the easier you make it for your visitors; the more information you supply, the more likely they are to subscribe to your RSS feed, or return to your site next time around.

How to differentiate between internal and external links on your blog

You won’t need to change anything on your existing posts; you’ll just need to make a few small changes to your style sheet.

This change will automatically update every post you have ever written.

Step 1: Copy the ‘external’ Image File

You need to copy the image file, external.gif, to the images sub-folder within your current WordPress theme folder.

Step 2: Add ‘external’ Image to Links

To create links that appear within posts as:

Add the following to your style sheet:

a
{
  background: url(/category/all_things_wordpress/images/external.gif) no-repeat right top;
  padding-right: 12px;
}

The right padding value of 12 pixels ensures that the image does not overlap the text of the link.

Step 3: Differentiate Between Relative and Absolute Links

A handy feature of CSS is that you can apply a style not only to a HTML tag, but optionally based on the contents of any of the HTML tag’s attributes.

For example, to apply the above style to only those link references which contain “http:”, you modify the style sheet entries as follows:

a[href^="http:"]
{
  background: url(/category/all_things_wordpress/images/external.gif) no-repeat right top;
  padding-right: 12px;
}

But this is only useful, if links to other posts are relative and not absolute links. An example of a relative link is ‘<a href=”another-post”>…</a>‘; whereas, an absolute link is ‘<a href=”http://blog.example.com/another-post”>…</a>‘.

Step 4: Exclude Absolute Links to Your Blog or Web Site

Now WordPress always uses absolute links. So to ensure that any link to your own blog or Web site does not have the external image applied, you follow the above style with entries which undo this change. The entries are specific to domain name of the blog or Web site.

For BlogWell, all our links start with http://blog-well.com. You will need to replace “http://blog-well.com” in the entries below with the domain name of your blog or Web site:

a[href^="http:"]
{
  background: url(/category/all_things_wordpress/images/external.gif) no-repeat right top;
  padding-right: 12px;
}
a[href^=http://blog-well.com]
{
  background: none;
  padding-right: 0px;
} 

Step 5: Add a Class to Exclude the ‘external’ Image

Sometimes you may want some links which go outside of your blog or Web site to not have the external image applied. You can do this on a case by case basis by using a link class of ‘noexternallink’. Within your post you would write the link as:

<a class='noexternallink' href='http://example.com'>Example</a>

And the style sheet would contain:

a[href^="http:"]
{
  background: url(/category/all_things_wordpress/images/external.gif) no-repeat right top;
  padding-right: 12px;
}
a.noexternallink[href^="http:"],
a[href^=http://blog-well.com]
{
  background: none;
  padding-right: 0px;
}

Note than ‘a.noexternallink[href^="http:"]‘ and ‘a[href^="/index.html"]‘ are separated by a comma. This is very important, since it ensures that the background of none and right padding of 0 pixels are applied to both ‘a.noexternallink[href^="http:"]‘ and ‘a[href^="/index.html"]‘. If you forget the comma, then it will only be applied, should ‘a[href^="/index.html"]‘ follow a ‘a.noexternallink[href^="http:"]‘.

Step 6: Exclude ‘external’ Image from Header and Footer Items

Within BlogWell’s theme we did not want any links within the header or footer to use the external image. Our theme uses the DIV HTML tag to identify the header and footer, and use the ID values of ‘header’ and ‘footer’ for each respectively.

<div id='header'>
...
</div>
...
<div id='footer'>
...
</div>

Without having to change all the links within the header and footer to use the ‘noexternallink’ class for links, we can easily prevent any links within the header and footer DIVs by using the following:

a[href^="http:"]
{
  background: url(/category/all_things_wordpress/images/external.gif) no-repeat right top;
  padding-right: 12px;
}
#header a[href^="http:"],
#footer a[href^="http:"],
a.noexternallink[href^="http:"],
a[href^=http://blog-well.com]
{
  background: none;
  padding-right: 0px;
}

Step 7: Exclude ‘external’ Image from Sidebar Items

If you didn’t want the external image to be applied to any links within any of the sidebars, you can do the following:

a[href^="http:"]
{
  background: url(/category/all_things_wordpress/images/external.gif) no-repeat right top;
  padding-right: 12px;
}
#header a[href^="http:"],
#footer a[href^="http:"],
#sidebar a[href^="http:"],
a.noexternallink[href^="http:"],
a[href^=http://blog-well.com]
{
  background: none;
  padding-right: 0px;
}

Step 8: Include Both Normal and Secure HTTP Links

If you use Secure HTTP, then your links will start with “https:”. To handle either standard HTTP (http://) or Secure HTTP (https://), then the above style sheet entries would be:

a[href^="http:"], a[href^="https:"]
{
  background: url(/category/all_things_wordpress/images/external.gif) no-repeat right top;
  padding-right: 12px;
}
#header a[href^="http:"], #header a[href^="https:"],
#footer a[href^="http:"], #footer a[href^="https:"],
#sidebar a[href^="http:"], #sidebar a[href^="https:"],
a.noexternallink[href^="http:"], a.noexternallink[href^="https:"]
a[href^="/index.html"], a[href^=https://blog-well.com]
{
  background: none;
  padding-right: 0px;
}

Step 9: Review Padding Styles for Existing Links in Your Theme

A word or caution, as now links within the blog or Web Site will have a right padding of 0 pixels. If your theme explicitly sets the right padding for some items, then you will need to mark these settings as important which will ensure that value is used instead of the new value of 0 which is set in the above style sheet entries.

For example, BlogWell’s menu in the header, uses links which have a right padding of 20 pixels. So after adding the above entries to our theme’s style sheet, our menu appeared as:

The style entry which sets the menu’s right padding is:

#topnav ul li a
{
  padding-right: 20px;
}

CSS allows style sheet attributes to be marked as important, which means they will not be overridden by other style sheet entries. We can use the “!important” tag to ensure that the right padding of 20 pixels is used rather than it be overridden by the 0 pixel padding of our external link entries.

#topnav ul li a
{
  padding-right: 20px !important;
}

Our menu is now restored to its correct state:

Step 10: Review

To highlight external links within your blog or Web site do the following:

1) Copy external.gif to the images sub-folder of your current WordPress’ theme folder.

2) Add the following lines to your style sheet:

a[href^="http:"], a[href^="https:"]
{
  background: url(/category/all_things_wordpress/images/external.gif) no-repeat right top;
  padding-right: 12px;
}
#header a[href^="http:"], #header a[href^="https:"],
#footer a[href^="http:"], #footer a[href^="https:"],
#sidebar a[href^="http:"], #sidebar a[href^="https:"],
a.noexternallink[href^="http:"], a.noexternallink[href^="https:"]
a[href^="/index.html"], a[href^=https://blog-well.com]
{
  background: none;
  padding-right: 0px;
}

3) Review your style sheet to see if any entries explicitly set the right padding value, in which case you may need to mark them with the “!important” tag.

A Final Word on Browsers

Should the link wrap around to a new line, Mozilla Firefox will display the external image correctly, following the end of the link on the new line.

 

However, Microsoft Internet Explorer will display the external image incorrectly at the end of the first line without any margin so it overlaps the text.

 

Sphere: Related Content

We have had a lot of positive feedback for our “ Redirecting a WordPress.com Blog” document, and a common issue is redirection not working due to the permalinks of the new blog not being set to the style used by WordPress.com.

This was first raised by Eric P and he helped out by writing his own execllent post on redirecting a WordPress.com blog - thanks Eric.

With our PDF document on moving a WordPress.com blog to your own self hosted blog proving popular, we have updated it to include a section on setting the permalinks of your new blog, so that all the necessary information is in the one place.

Thanks again to all the excellent feedback we have received.

Sphere: Related Content

A lot of new bloggers want to include advertising on their site, but find the idea of adding an advertisement to their sidebar daunting. If your blog runs on WordPress software, it’s a simple matter of using your text widgets to show ads. In this post, we’ll show you how.

There are a number of WordPress themes readily available that support ads, and make managing them relatively easy and pain free (at least that’s what they say). But, no doubt, you have already invested time choosing and customizing/tweaking your current theme.

Rather than change designs now, a simple approach is to use the standard WordPress Text Widget to show image ads. Once you have had experience with displaying ads, you can then decide whether it is worth changing your theme to accommodate the ads.

What is an ad?

When you sign up for ads, typically via an affiliate program, you will be provided with a username and password which will allow you to login and select the ads you wish to run on your blog.

Nearly all affiliate programs will provide the HTML code that you need to add to your blog. All you will need to do is to copy this HTML code to the clipboard and then paste it into a text widget.

If we walk through an example, you’ll see it really is that simple.

For an image based ad, the HTML will be of the form:

<a href=”…”><img src=”…” /></a>

Where:

<a href=”…”>…</a>

Is the link which takes your reader to the Web site of the product/service being advertised.

and <img src=”…” />

Is the reference to the image to be displayed, which is taken from the affiliate program’s Web site. You will not need to upload any images to your blog.

I read Raymond Chen’s blog The Old New Thing. Now Raymond has written a book based on his blog, aptly called The Old New Thing, and has an image of the book on his blog, which is linked the book’s details on Amazon.

I will use this as an example, for which the HTML code is:

<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321440307?ie=UTF8& tag=tholneth-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325& creativeASIN=0321440307″><img border=”0″ src=”http://images.amazon.com/images/P/ 0321440307.01._AA_SCMZZZZZZZ_V33963393_.jpg” /></a>

NOTE: A few extra spaces have been added to the URL values so that they wrap nicely within this post - just so you know.

The URL has two parts. Everything up to the question mark i.e. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321440307 - is the link to the book’s details on Amazon; everything after the question mark are name/value pairs which contain Raymond’s affiliate information and how to display the information about the book.

The URL to the book’s details is:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321440307?ie=UTF8& tag=tholneth-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325& creativeASIN=0321440307

The URL to the image is:

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/ 0321440307.01._AA_SCMZZZZZZZ_V33963393_.jpg

How to put an image ad into a text widget

The simplest thing to do is to display one ad per text widget.

Within the Design - Widgets section of your WordPress Dashboard, add a new Text Widget.

• Do not enter a title for the Text Widget (the single line edit box at the top).

• Enter the ad’s HTML code into the main edit box of the text widget.

Saving the changes, will show the following within your blog:

To center the image within the text widget

To center the image within the text widget all you need do is, within Design - Theme Editor section of your WordPress Dashboard, add the following to your theme’s style sheet.

.textwidget { text-align: center; }

The text widget will now appear with the image centered.

One disadvantage of this approach is that all text widgets will be centered. So if you are using text widgets to display something other than ads which you do not need centered, then you will need to differentiate text widgets which display ads from those which don’t display ads.

You can do this by enclosing the ad’s HTML within a DIV tag as follows:

<div class=’ad’>…</div>

So the text widget now looks like this:

Within the theme’s style sheet add the following at the end:

.ad { text-align: center; }

How to include two ads per text widget

If you want to display two ads per text widget you will most likely want to center this both horizontally and vertically.

You do this by enclosing the HTML code for the two ads within the text widget as follows:

<table class=’ad’><tr><td>…</td><td>…</td></tr></table>

Replacing … with the HTML for the 2 ads required:

The ads will appear as follows:

You can force the ads to be aligned horizontally and vertically by adding the following to your theme’s style sheet:

.ad { width: 100% }
.ad tr td { text-align: center; vertical-align: middle; }

The ads will be aligned as follows:

Google and Advertising

Google’s PageRank flows from blogs and Web sites via links. This means your PageRank benefits when you receive links from sites with a higher PageRank, and sites you link to will benefit from your PageRank.

As a result, many sneaky webmasters began buying and selling links to manipulate search rankings. In an attempt to curb this practice, Google made the decision that all paid links should be disclosed.

The ads you are running are links, and since the advertisers are paying you to have the link on your blog, you must describe the ad links as “nofollow,” this tells Google to not consider the link for the purposes of calculating its PageRank. If you don’t abide by this rule, your blog will be penalized; it may even be removed from the search results.

Adding “nofollow” to ad links

The easiest way to disclose your link is by adding the text rel=”nofollow” to the link.

So the Amazon link to Raymond Chen’s book on Amazon becomes:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321440307?
ie=UTF8&tag=tholneth-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&
creativeASIN=0321440307″><img border=”0″ src=”http://images.amazon.com/images/P/
0321440307.01._AA_SCMZZZZZZZ_V33963393_.jpg” /></a>

You may need to add rel=”nofollow” to any HTML code you receive via affiliate programs.

Wikipedia has more information on nofollow.

Sphere: Related Content

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today that it has acquired Automattic, a company that offers open source and social media technology to Web publishers.

Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said, “We are thrilled that our acquisition of Automattic has closed. With Automattic, Google now has the leading content management system and blogging platform, which will enable us to rapidly bring to market advances in technology and infrastructure that will dramatically improve the effectiveness, measurability and performance of digital media for publishers, while improving the relevance of advertising for users.”

Automattic own WordPress.com (free blogging service), Akismet (anti-spam services), WordPress.org (WordPress development vehicle) and bbPress (WordPress based forum management).

Google will be revolutionizing advertising on personal and business blogs by sharing ad profits with blog authors by offering 25% to bloggers for providing content.

Asked if they had considered Movable Type, Mr. Schmidt replied with a succinct “No.”

Negotiations concluded late Sunday evening (March 30, 2008) at the end of Dallas WordCamp.

As part of the deal, the WordPress source control system will be reviewed and for each line of code added or modified, the responsible developer will receive $100.

Matt Mullenweg will join Google as Vice President of Social Media.

Sergey Brin, Google’s Co-Founder and President, Technology, said they are inspired by the efforts of the Automattic team and the WordPress community, and plan on leveraging WordPress to replace at least three products currently in development: Blogger, Picasa and Google Page Creator. “We backed the wrong horse with Blogger, and quite frankly Page Creator will just never graduate from Google Labs,” he explained.

Larry Page, Google Co-Founder and President, Products went on to comment that by embracing open source software, Google will continue to provide a free software offering to the online community. Asked if he thought that this weakened their position by allowing competitors to start a similar service, Larry responding by saying that the software is only the delivery vehicle. The value added by Google will be the service provided, which includes; data center facilities, (Automattic currently only has three), advertising revenue, support, on-going development within the open source community, and the customizability, through Google owned themes and plug-ins. “The only way we can make true advances in computer technology is by embracing the development efforts of everyone on the planet though open source projects, and not just those at Google.”

The Automattic team will be relocating to Hangar One at Moffett Field, once it has been made fit for occupation, which is estimated to cost in excess of $200 $54.2 million due to PCB contamination. They plan on setting up bungee cords and climbing walls to provide the ultimate development environment.

Matt said that he asked for a full size replica of the USS Macon, but settled on access to the Google plane on weekends, which has landing rights at Moffett Field instead.

Automattic employees will be given the option to live in San Francisco or any other Silicon Valley city, and Google will pay up to $1 million per Automattic employee for housing. Google will be extending its shuttle service to include a fleet of helicopters, in an attempt to reduce travel time for employees.

“Matt.er“, Matt’s next project, which will use the core WordPress engine, merges traditional blogging software with functionality made popular by Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube.

“Matt.er” will encompass “all things that matter,” explained Matt. “With Google’s ginormous processing power, we will have the resources available to provide the level of functionality we have only previously dreamed about with continuous 24×7 support, and unlimited scalability.”

Sergey Brin added that Google have been looking for the “ killer best way to advertise and monetize the social networks” and they have found it in WordPress.

Following the news the WordPress community has started a Save WordPress Web site to ensure that continued access to the latest software is available.

Read the full Google Press release.

About Google Inc.

Google’s innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.

About Automattic

Automattic is a premier provider of blogging (WordPress) and anti-spam (Akismet) technology and services. The world’s top publishers utilize Automattic’s expertise in content management systems, rich media, video, mobile, search and blogging platforms to help them make the most of the digital medium. From its position at the nerve center of digital distribution, Automattic provides superior insights and insider knowledge to its customers. Learn more at http://automattic.com.

Sphere: Related Content

2008 is now 48 days old, yet there are a number of sites which still think its 2007.

To name but a few:

• Hollywood Reporter
• Klutz
• Palo Alto Unified School District

Rather than include the year in the site’s footer as text, which has to be manually updated, why not use the date on your server to do the work for you.

If you use PHP on your server, like every WordPress blog does, you can replace “2007″, or even “2008″ so you are ready for next year, with the following snippet:

<?php echo date(’Y'); ?>

Although this does rely on server’s date and time being correct. You can ensure that your server has the correct date and time by synchronizing your server with an Internet Time Server. The National Institute of Standards and Technology provides a number of time servers through the United States. Be sure to check the status of the time servers to help you make the best choice.

Love or hate them, Microsoft provides a list of time servers available throughout the world.

For Windows users you configure the use of an Internet Time Server within the “Internet Time” tab of the “Date and Time Properties” section of the Control Panel - just make sure that you have set the correct time zone.

Rather than exclusively copyrighting the content of your Web site or blog, wouldn’t it be better to allow people to re-use the content and give a credit in return? For businesses who wants everyone to know about their products this would be the sensible approach.

BlogWell uses a Creative Commons licensing, which allows anyone to share and remix our work, provided we receive an attribution and that any such work is licensed in a similar manner (i.e. it too can be shared and remixed by others). You can see the specific license we use in the footer - check it out.

We suggest that you should review the reason why your site contains a copyright - most times this is simply due it being present in the site template or WordPress theme.

Sphere: Related Content

Photo credit: nruboc

While providing great content is critical if you want to establish a loyal audience, it is only one of a variety of ingredients. Other factors come into play; most importantly, your visitors need to see that you’ve made every effort to accommodate their needs; that you’ve put much thought into their experience on your site.

To create a blog that stands out from the others, use this list of useful WordPress plugins to show your readers that you have made the effort, and you’ll be rewarded with return visitors and growth.

So what do your visitors really want?

Visitors want answers

Visitors turn up at your site through search engines or links. If they don’t find the answer to their question within your post – they’re off. You need to give them every opportunity to find what they are looking for through your site, rather than sending them back to the search engines - or worse - sending them away unhappy with both your site, and the site that directed them to you.

Although these plugins may ultimately send your visitor another site, they are useful because your visitor won’t need to go back to the search engine and start all over again – and they will remember you for trying to make life a little easier for them.

Search Everything

The default search utility in WordPress allows visitors to search your posts only. This may not always be enough; what if you have a resource page that holds the answer to the question posed? You don’t want your visitors to miss that.

Written by Dan Cameron, Search Everything gives your visitors more options in search by allowing them to search pages, attachments, comments, and custom fields.

Sphere Related Content

Sphere mixes content from mainstream media with content from blogs. Although this plugin will ultimately send your visitor to another site, it is useful because it means your visitor doesn’t need to go to the search engines and start all over again. They will remember you for making life a little easier for them.

By putting the widget on your site, your visitors get to see a list of related content from around the Web. This list is divided into two sections, one showing related content from the blogosphere, the other showing related content from mainstream media. Both provide the title, date, and source. The date is an especially nice feature – how often have you searched on something only to be directed to a page that is 3 years old and no longer current?

Note: Sphere can be used on most blogging platforms.

Visitors want an easy way to revisit a post

While many visitors will visit a site and add it to their favorites, more and more people are using online bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Furl, and Diigo to create links to posts they want to return to. And, while many of these folk have added the various buttons to their browser, some are removing them to make space for a larger viewable area on their screen.

Other visitors, who are not comfortable with bookmarking sites, may need a way to easily send themselves the link, or print the page up to keep a hard copy. Your job is to provide every option to your visitor in the most unobtrusive and simple way.

Consider these WordPress plugins to help your visitor refer back to your post:

Share This

Written by Alex King, the Share This plugin lets your visitors mark a post for revisiting by providing a link, at the end of each post, to various bookmarking sites. This plugin also offers your visitors the ability to send, via e-mail, a link to your post.

WP E-mail

Rather than just send a link to the post via e-mail, Lester Chan’s WP E-mail lets you send the entire post or page to yourself, or to a friend. This is particularly useful for less tech/Web inclined of your visitors – almost everyone knows how to use e-mail.

WP Print

Another great plugin by Lester Chan, WP Print displays a nicely formatted, printable version of your post. Once you enable the plugin, it will put a link to the printable page on each post.

This is particularly useful for readers that want to print up a tutorial or how to.

Visitors want to read replies to their comments easily

More people are commenting on the Web than every before, and most of them want a simple and easy way to see whether their comment has been responded to.

Additionally, if they have taken the time to comment, it means that they are interested in the subject matter, and may be interested in what others think about the same topic.

Rather than make them come back to your site regularly to check if there are additional comments, offer them the chance to subscribe to the comments only.

Subscribe to Comments

Subscribe to Comments is a plugin that allows visitors that comment, an opportunity to subscribe to e-mail notifications of subsequent comments. Written by Mark Jaquith, the plugin also allows your visitors to unsubscribe from specific posts, block all notifications, and change their e-mail address.

Visitors don’t like their mistakes broadcast to the world

How many times have you been to a site, submitted a comment, and just as you press the submit button (or while you are rereading your comment), you find a typo, or an incomplete sentence?

Give your readers the opportunity to edit their mistakes before their comment is published; there is no nicer way to show reader appreciation.

Edit comments TX

Michael Woehrer’s Edit Comments TX plugin gives your visitors a 30 minute (customizable) time frame to edit any comment they leave.

Sexy Comments

Written by Matthew Batchelder, Sexy Comments lets your visitors preview comments, but offers you a whole lot more. It replaces the standard WordPress comments section with a much prettier one, and has additional features that include the option to highlight author comments, and a way to reply to specific comments.

Visitors like to be noticed

Not long ago, I left a comment on a blog I had not visited before. Within the hour, I received an e-mail from the blogger thanking me for visiting and commenting. It was a simple thing, one that I suspected was automated, but it still made me smile.

People like to feel important. They like to be acknowledged. If you don’t have the time to personally send an e-mail to each new commenter, consider Comment Relish.

Comment Relish

Comment Relish is a WordPress plugin developed to send an e-mail message to users who comment on your site who have never commented before. The message is defined within the plugin’s preferences, and numerous tags have been included that let you select the information for the message easily (e.g. timestamp, author name, comment, etc.). Written by Justin Shattuck.

Visitors like to contact you in a variety of ways

While most sites have a contact page that offers a contact form, e-mail address, telephone number, or physical location, few offer the ability for instant SMS.

Admittedly this is not for everyone, but you just may find that your visitors like to contact you this way. In any case, it is a nice extra to offer your visitors; the option to contact you wherever you are, and whenever they want.

Quick SMS

Quick SMS, written by Martin Fitzpatrick, lets visitors to your site send an instant SMS message to your mobile.

Sphere: Related Content

Image: AODdesign

Yes it can be done.

Forget what you have read in the forums ( Why can’t I redirect my blog? and Can I redirect my blog?) and don’t bother trying to get your head around the too technical product announcement ( New Feature: Domains).

We have written a step by step guide on how to redirect your established WordPress.com blog to your own self-hosted blog on your own domain - Redirecting a WordPress.com Blog (PDF 739 KB).

Why do this?

We just like WordPress - that’s all.

Update: Based on the excellent comments, we have updated the original document to include a section on setting the permalink style to that used by WordPress.com - thank you everyone for helping us make this better.

Sphere: Related Content

Dear Automattic,

Thank you for, quite simply, the best blogging platform around.  WordPress.com is a great way to befriend you.

However…

My back’s killing me, my brain hurts, and my eyes are rolling on the floor somewhere…

Here’s the thing:

I want to move from WordPress.com to GoDaddy using WordPress.

• Setting up WordPress on GoDaddy - painless
• Exporting - no sweat
• Importing - still not sweating
• Hacking together our own theme - done
• Automattically redirecting to our new domain - no way Jose!

Not only that, I have spent 90 minutes reading countless forum comments to come to the realisation that the “Domains” offering only goes one way; the opposite direction of where I need to go

Yes, I can put up a “I have moved” post, but this is so Web 1.0, and code is poetry - don’t you know?

Other like minds are in need of it too - see?

So Automattic, when you have some spare time, please please please fix it.  If not, then please have a big red ”no we do not provide this” on the “Domains” page  :-)

</rant>

PS: The X-hacker comment is very cute

Sphere: Related Content

 

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of talking with Lisa Sabin-Wilson, author of the new book, WordPress for Dummies, for Tech Talk Radio Australia.

Unfortunately my recording didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped and the interview was cut down to about six minutes; my producer, Andrew McColm has promised to do another interview with Lisa in the coming weeks. 

In the meantime, here’s a transcript of the interview:

Lid: WordPress for Dummies.  Long time needed; now you’ve done it, what inspired you?

LSW: Very long time needed.  It’s about time WordPress got into the dummies format for WordPress users everywhere.  What inspired me to write it is my love for the product

I’ve been using WordPress since 2003 which is when it first came out.  I was originally using Six Apart’s product, Movable Type, to blog with, and when WordPress came out I made the move and haven’t looked back since

Lid:   So why is WordPress so great?

LSW: There are several reasons why WordPress is so great.  It’s free; and that appeals to people everywhere, from all walks of life.  The biggest reason - it is so easy to use. 

The really great thing about WordPress is that is perfect for the beginner who doesn’t necessarily know anything about coding HTML, or PHP, or CSS, or any of those alphabet type names.  It is perfect for the new user because they can just log in; start posting, publish, and they’re done; their blog is up and they’re speaking to the world. 

But what is excellent about it is that the product is so flexible, and so sensible that advanced users who do know, and who are savvy with web development, CSS, theme development, and PHP can also extend the product to fit and suit their needs as well. So it kind of covers all walks of life from a technology standpoint. 

Lid: It also doesn’t dump advertising generally on your site

LSW: No it doesn’t advertise at all on your site

Lid: Tell me about the different flavors because this is where a lot of confusion stems from: dot com, dot org and MU.

LSW: There are the three different versions which are covered in the book; it gives a version of WordPress for everybody.  So if you start with WordPress in its basic, simplest form, you’re talking about WordPress.com which is the hosted version of WordPress. 

And what’s really nice about WordPress.com is that anybody can set up a WordPress powered blog within five minutes.  They don’t have to install any software, or configure anything, or pay for Web hosting because it is all free, and the WordPress.com folk take care of all of that for you.  It’s all right there and you don’t have to do a thing.

The next step from there is the WordPress.org software which is considered self hosted.  What you need for that, is you do need a Web hosting account, you do need to have a domain name, and you will have to install the software on your own server, so WordPress.org does require a bit of technical knowledge and ability, whereas WordPress.com doesn’t require that at all.

And then WordPress MU – MU stands for multi user, and you will find sites like James Farmer – who is down there with WordCamp [Melbourne] this week, using it for his very, very successful place at  edublogs.

WordPress MU is actually the software that WordPress.com runs on, and it allows you the ability to run several blogs on one domain.  So you can have users signing up with just their user name and they could have a blog on like lidija.wordpress.com, and it allows you to have several hundred, up to thousands of blogs, within one network.  So, it’s really good for blog communities and blog networks; people that want to really go in that direction. 

So WordPress covers all genres of bloggers out there, which is a whole other thing that makes them really great.

Lid: With MU – is there a cost involved with that?

LSW: No, as with everything else with WordPress, MU is free.  WordPress.com, WordPress.org, WordPress MU – it’s all free, open source software and anybody can use it.

Lid: What about spam - how do they deal with that?

LSW: Spam is a problem with any blogging platform, it doesn’t matter what you’re using whether WordPress, Movable Type.  The folk at Automattic, which are Matt Mullenweg and the guys who are behind the WordPress development, developed a plugin for combating spam called Akismet. 

It is a very popular plugin for WordPress, that kind that stops spam in its tracks.  It checks the comments and trackbacks that are coming into the blog, runs it through several different spam filters, and makes a determination on whether or not it is a legitimate comment or if it is spam.

When Akismet hit the market it really made a huge - tremendous - difference with the amount of spam bloggers were getting on a daily basis, because we get upwards of several hundred, several thousand comments per day and it gets a little hairy.

Lid: Should users delete it, or mark it as spam?

LSW: Akismet learns, it learns with user input, so if everybody is marking these comments as spam, it allows Akismet to recognize these types of comments, either from their IP, or different headers they are sending to the server, so that they can filter them as spam in the future.  Hopefully at some point they’ll be able to catch all the spammers - which would be really nice.

Lid: How does WordPress compare to the other products – Movable Type, Blogger, TypePad

LSW: To be fair to the other products out there, and I do want to be fair, each provides a different type of service depending on what you want to do for your blog; I’ve worked with probably all of the blogging platforms available out there and what I’m finding is that WordPress is easy to use. 

I set up Web sites and develop Web sites for my clients.  My goal is to create and set up sites that my clients are able to manage and maintain themselves - not have to pay me to maintain them for them.

[Lid: Lisa’s business is E.Webscapes]

Lid: Wall Street Journal, New York Times:  Who else is using WordPress?
 
LSW: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Le monde in France, Harvard University, CNN, and lots of celebrities are using it.  Rosie O’Donnell is using it to power her blog.

WordPress exploded; it really exploded.  It is a very popular software and I still believe the reason for that is because it is so easy to use.  And that it’s free.  These companies are able to pay, but they choose wordpress because they find it to be easier for them and the people that work for them to use and update and maintain their websites

Lid: So who is blogging - why do people blog, and what types of people blog?

LSW: Types of people range from people who want to post pictures of their cats and dogs, to people who are running businesses large and small.  Personal bloggers use WordPress and blog on the Internet to keep in touch with friends kind of as a hobby to do, but you’ve also got businesses who are using blogs to reach their consumers and reach their client base interact with their client base and create more of a presence the Internet, which is really, by the way, important for businesses these days - to have that Internet presence.  And to have a blog really allows you to do that, because not only are you present on the Internet, but you’re interacting and there is feedback back and forth between you and your consumer base, which consumers are expecting more and more of. 

Lid: Tell me a little about plugins and themes and tricky things

LSW: With WordPress.com you’re not able to use plugins.  You’re not able to install them and you can only use the themes that they have available to you.  So, what we’re really talking about when we talk about using WordPress plugins is the WordPress.org self hosted software.

So you have your hosting account, you’ve installed WordPress, and now you’re able to expand your blog and your site through the use of WordPress plugins.  And there are literally thousands of them available out there.  You can find them by searching Google, but you can also find them at the WordPress.org website. [ WordPress Plugins]

These plugin developers create plugins that allow you to do things like give your readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog via e-mail.  If you subscribe to my blog via e-mail then you would get an e-mail every single time I made a new post to my blog.   So if you were that interested in what I had to say that would be great. 

But that is not something WordPress does out of the box.  That would be an example of a plugin or if you want to think of it as an add-on.  

There are literally thousands of possibilities of what you can do in terms of managing comments, managing your posts, creating image galleries, using a lot of the social media sites, like Digg, Technorati, or Netscape.com.  You can do anything from provide a better experience for your readers, increase publicity on your site, and even revenue - make money with your site.  A lot of big bloggers are making some decent cash running WordPress blogs.

The themes, same as the plugins, there are thousands of WordPress themes out there.  There is one website, themes.wordpress.net.  There, users can find thousands of themes that they can just download, install on their blogs and activate with just a click of a button.  It allows you to have a different theme, or find a theme that you like, or change your theme every day if you really wanted to; I mean the possibilities are really endless.  And again, all; of this stuff is free.

Recently Matt Mullenweg who is kind of the head honcho over there, came in and took over the theme site a few moths ago, and cleaned it up, and made sure that the themes there were decent working themes and good representations of WordPress.  That would be the best bet for people looking for free wordpress themes

Lid: He pulled out stuff that had ads embedded in it didn’t he

LSW: There was a strange trend going on for the last year.  We were speaking of spammers, comment spammers, and the same genre of people found out that it is not that difficult to get a link to their site by creating WordPress themes and putting their links, in essence, in the footer of the site.  So all of a sudden at the WordPress theme site, you saw hundreds of themes going up with gobs of advertising links at the bottom.  Same type of stuff you see in your comment spam box – Viagra, porn sites, pharmaceutical companies - all in the footer of these WordPress themes.  It kind of left a bad taste in the mouth for a lot of people in the WordPress community. 

Lid: What are your 3 favorite plugins?

LSW: There is a plugin Alex King made called Share This.  Once you’ve installed it on your blog, it puts a little icon on every singe post you make that allows users to submit your post to the various bookmark sites Digg, Technorati, Netscape. 

Before Alex’s plugin, you would have seen a lot of blogs with all of those different social bookmarking icons underneath the post – so you could have anywhere from 5-12 icons mucking up the look of the post.  That I love, my clients love that.  It cleans everything up and it makes it very simple. 

He’s got his WordPress projects listed on his site, and he’s developed several very useful [plugins].  He’s actually one of the original developers of WordPress.  I don’t think he’s working with them anymore but he is very involved in the WordPress community through providing great plugins and again, free. 

Lester Chan.  He is a student, and he uses his WordPress plugins to put forward as he is going through school.  People make donations to him because his work is fabulous.  He’s got a couple of plugins that are just fabulous and one is called WordPress Print, and once you’ve installed it, it allows you and your readers to click an icon in your post, and it creates a beautifully formatted post that you can print

WordPress Database Manager, which is not a plugin that provides much value for your readers but it is a good plug in for you, the person that is managing the website because it allows you to manage your database, which is your mySQL database, that stores all of the data from your blog; all of your posts, comments, trackbacks, all settings, links categories – everything.

And it allows you to make a very nice back up.  If I can just say a word about back ups – any WordPress users, it is really essential and extremely important to keep that database backed up because should anything happen to it; you lose everything you’ve worked for. 

Lid: Business blogging - where is that going?

LSW: Business blogging has yet to reach its potential.  I think that over the last couple of years there has been a real surge in business blogging and business are trying to make their way, and muddle through, and find their niche in the blogging market. 

I think that as time goes by, people that are consumers of Internet technology are really learning and discovering the potentials are there.  You’re seeing the emergence of social networking, you know like Facebook and My Space and Twitter, and all of these different types of social networking sites that are changing the face of PR and Marketing.  I think we’re going to see some more refined emergence of business blogging out there as people really fine tune what they’re doing.  Using blogs for business is really a great tool, really a super tool for reaching consumers, client base, colleagues, and networking.
 
Lid: Future of Web publishing?

LSW: Interesting.  You talk to people and think, what is the next great thing, what is the next new thing?  And blogging really hit the Internet 2004 ish, 2003 – when it really became the big thing, and as I said, it is going to become more refined now as people are using it more as community rather than individual blogs.

We’ll start seeing communities of niche areas and niche markets when it comes to businesses and when it comes to personal blogging your going to a see a lot more communities revolving around different interests.  It already is becoming more of a group effort as people contribute to the discussion and conversation regarding several different topics of interest – you can find a blog on about just about anything; and if there is a blog about it there is a group about it; changing the conversation and changing the discussion on the Internet.  It’s very exciting to watch and experience. 

Lid: Blogs – the word blog – had this awful stigma attached – that’s changed a lot recently

LSW: I have been doing it since about 1998.  In terms of Internet years, I’m just ancient.  Then, you didn’t even want to admit you even had a blog because it was so ridiculous and it had that stigma attached to it you know, “Internet blog” but it has really gained a lot of street cred; credibility because people are seeing it as a really viable tool.

We talked about business, but aside from business blogs, in the area of politics, at least in this country, in the United States, blogs have a real strong voice here and politicians in our government, from 2004 have really recognized the power of what they call the citizen journalist; the power of the voice, and blogs really started giving the average Joe a voice in what is going on in this country.  I think that blogs now are recognized by media, by government, by business, as a real solid strong force to be reckoned with

Lid: Your website, Just a girl in the world, how did you get the name?

LSW: So many people ask me that, and it is such an easy question.  It is the name of a song by a group called No Doubt, and a singer by the name of Gwen Stefani.  I like that song because it just says, tongue in cheek, I’m just a girl - what could you expect form me? The feeling behind it is, don’t underestimate me just because I’m a girl.

In the tech field, not so much now, because we are becoming more aware, but back when I first started in technology, women were a rare presence and so I became the token geek girl in my professional circle.  I’ve had the domain for about 5–6 years now.  Just a girl in the world

Lid: If anyone wants to know more about your book, they can just go visit your site at just a girl in the world – links form there I take it?

LSW: I do post regular updates – I have been writing this book since January 2007 and so though all that if anybody is interested, they can read my archives.  Sort of read the path and journey that I’ve been on with this book during this past year.

Lid: Give us a brief overview of how it all came to be?

LSW: I was approached.  It came about from a speaking engagement that I had in 2006.  I spoke at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference, an annual conference held in Texas every year.  I was a panel speaker there on the topic of Web design and blog design, and of course using WordPress as an example of what you can do with blogs and how you can make them look nice. 

Through that I made several contacts from the industry and one of them was with an author who had authored several Wiley books in the past, and she had approached me with a publisher, one of the acquisition editors from Wiley Publishing, whether or not I would be interested in publishing, co-authoring a WordPress for Dummies book at the time.  And I thought I can co-author, that is not a big deal, I can write a few chapters on WordPress and what I know about WordPress.

And that worked.  As long as I’m sharing the blame with somebody, and that was in March 2006.  I really didn’t hear anything for the rest of the year until December 2006 when the editor from Wiley contacted me and said, “You know, we thought you’d like to be the co-author, but how would you like to be the lead and only author of the book because the other person we have in mind just can’t.”

I like WordPress, I love WordPress.   I’ve used it so much and the opportunity to share my knowledge and to share my passion about the product really inspired me to say, yeah I’ll take a chance, and jump off that cliff and write a book.  My English teacher would be laughing right now. 

I started in January of 2007 and finished officially in September of 2007 and it was quite a ride because between those months, WordPress released 3 or 4 different versions of the software.

Every time I got one of those e-mail updates, “We’re anticipating the release of the new version of WordPress,” I’m going ‘NOOOO – stop” but, WordPress is a very progressive platform and the developers are aggressively trying to make it the best it could possibly be, so I can’t fault them for that - and I couldn’t ask them to slow down just because I was writing the book.

Lid: Google likes WordPress; they seem to get into results very quickly.

LSW: WordPress blogs do that.  It has a lot to do with how permalinks are structured in WordPress.  If you’re using the custom permalink option you can set your permalink to whatever you’d like, but if you do a post called WordPress for Dummies, those words are actually in the URL and search engines love that.

There are some SEO or search optimization tips for WordPress in the book as well.

SEO, a lot of it is common sense if you start to understand how the search engines work, and what they are looking for.  And really, anyone can do SEO on their own site by doing a little bit of research and using WordPress.

Lid: If you had to recommend three really great sites for bloggers to get reputable information from, what would they be?

LSW: To blog well, as business and to make money, Pro Blogger.  He runs an extremely successful, very popular site and it is that way because he provides very useful content; brilliant content.

Weblog Tools Collection.  That is a site that provides you with all sorts of information about blogging, but they have a special focus on WordPress.  You will find weekly updates about new WordPress plugins, new WordPress themes, new that you can do with WordPress to make your blog better, or make more money, or that type of thing

The final place that I would recommend for bloggers that are looking for information on WordPress is Blog Herald

Lid: Lorelle is writing there now isn’t she?

LSW: She blogs at lorelle.wordpress.com, you can also find her at Blog Herald.  She recently wrote and published a new book called Blogging Tips: What bloggers won’t tell you about blogging, and I have read, I haven’t gotten myself a copy yet, but I do have it on order,  but I have read extremely good reviews about that book where she provides information to bloggers about content, about keeping readers engaged and she is just a vessel of knowledge when it comes to blogging and when it comes to WordPress.  She has got an amazing knowledge about WordPress; I believe she is one of the main contributors to the wordpress codex. 

Lid: She is.  She spoke at WordCamp here in San Francisco and gave a book to everyone who attended. 

Lid: If you’re a WordPress user, Google WordPress for Dummies, go to amazon.com, buy the book, and then you should do a review because people like to see what others think.

LSW: Yes, the reviews are very, very helpful, and I would be interested to hear feedback from readers of the book.  It is something to work on a project for an entire year, but it is really nice to get feedback on it, and to know that your hard work really resulted in helping people find their way

Lid: Lisa thank you so much for your time.

LSW: Thank you Lidija, it’s been a lot of fun

Sphere: Related Content