Website Tech

Category: Blogging

  • WordPress Multi-Site Domain Mapping

    Important: This was written in 2012, when you needed to use a plugin for domain mapping. With version 5.something of WordPress, and with version 6+, domain mapping is built into the WordPress core.

    If you were using the obsolete plugin for domain mapping, you should document the exact domain names you were mapping to, for each site. Then, network disable it and then delete it.

    In new versions of WordPress, you simply put the domain name you want into My Sites, Network Admin, Sites, then hover over the site you want, click Edit, in the Info tab edit the “Site Address (URL)” field. Use the full URL, including https://

    You still have to set the DNS so the domain name points to your WordPress Multi-Site installation.

    With WordPress version 3+ or 4+ in Multi-Site Mode, and the Domain Mapping Plugin, you can map domain names to any of your blogs. I’ll walk you through the steps to install the plugin (you have to move a few files and edit some configuration settings). Then I’ll show how to specify the mappings you want. (There are several blogs with partial instructions, that didn’t explain the configuration settings and didn’t give examples of how to specify the mappings — but you won’t have to figure it out because I did!)

    (more…)

  • WordPress 3 Allow Posts in Menu (as well as Pages)

    In WordPress 3.3 (and probably earlier versions) you can make custom menus in your blog.

    Go to Appearance, Menus (/wp-admin/nav-menus.php) and you can add Pages or Custom Links to your menu.

    But how do you put specific Posts on your menu?

    Click on Screen Options (top right corner of the screen), and you’ll see check  boxes for all the types of items you can put in a menu, plus some other information such as the link target and CSS classes.

    You will probably want to change the text that gets displayed in the menu (the default is the post title). Click on the drop-down arrow by each menu item, and you can change the Navigation Label (what shows in the menu) and the Description (displayed in some themes).

  • WordPress: Image Too Big? Resize It

    A client blog site had an image that was too big for the theme, so it stuck out over text.

    You could use a dedicated image editing program to change the size of the image, using algorithms that keep the quality of the image as good as possible. One great program is Irfanview (free, I used it to add the red boxes on the images on this page).

    WordPress however has built-in tools to crop (change what portion of an image gets displayed) or scale (proportionally adjust the display size of the image) . No having to FTP the image to your computer, edit it, upload the changes, and change the size  in your HTML. Here’s how to do it:

    New Image:

    You can resize an image when you add it to your post, just use the settings on the Add an Image screen:

    WordPress Add Image screen
    (This image was too large to fit in the post, at 612 x 512 pixels, so I picked Medium (300 x 166). Click on it to see it full size.)

    In the Size section, pick “Full Size” if the image is below about 500 pixels wide, depending on the Theme you are using. (The size is shown in the bottom right of the section, as Full Size. The image being imported when I grabbed the screen image was 448 wide by 249 tall.)

    Existing Image:

    Click on the Media button. You’ll see the Media Library. Find the image you want to edit.

    Hover over the image, and you’ll see a link to Edit it. Click that link.

    On the Edit Media screen, click the Edit Image button.

    This screen lets you crop the image (only display a portion of it). Drag the mouse over the picture, adjust the edges of the white crop area by dragging the square handles (click the Image Crop “Help” link to see keyboard hints), click the Crop icon (the left-most icon). [Note: Some Themes and some Plug-Ins will interfere with the Crop feature, you may have to disable plug-ins or crop outside of WordPress.]

    Click the Scale button to show the detail fields. You’ll get fields to adjust the size. As you change the width or height the other gets automatically adjusted to keep the proportions correct. Many Themes have room for about 500 pixels wide.

    You will need the new URL for the picture (the old URL will have the original size). This is at the bottom of the Edit Media screen, in File URL.

    After you’ve saved your changes, go back to your post, and put in the URL of the new image. (If you don’t, the post will keep showing the original image…)

     

  • Search engine friendly blog posts

    I have all my blog posts showing up in Google nicely, for example:

    Business, Real Estate and Investing Products | Lerner Consulting, Inc.
    May 21, 2010 … Real Estate Investing methods, techniques, resources. Cost $thousands less than the major workshops, yet speed your making money through …
    www.lernerconsult.com/blog/business-real-estate-investing-products/ – Cached

    Always write your own Excerpt, and keep it short: search engines use it for the Description of your post, so keep the length to 160 characters or less (or at least, have the 1st 160 characters be a good description).

    I use the “All in One SEO Pack” plugin, from http://semperfiwebdesign.com/
    This gives me a place to easily edit:

    • the format of my Permalinks (the URL for the blog post)
    • the format of my search engine Titles, for posts, pages, categories, and archives
    • the individual post Title and Description (for search engines, different than the blog post title)
    • how Categories get used in Meta keywords
    • the Excerpt (that will show up many places, including used as the default meta description)

    The plug-in manages specifying Canonical URLs, so different ways of reaching a page get tracked in search engines consistently.

    I also use the “WP to Twitter” plugin, from http://www.joedolson.com/articles/wp-to-twitter/
    With this, every time I post to my blog, my Twitter followers get notified. I specify what I want said, and the plug-in even tells me how many characters I have used. (Since it tells you how many characters you’ve used, it’s also good for making your Excerpt the size you want, 160 characters or less.)

  • WordPress add-ons to improve your blog

    You want to have people find what they want to read on your blog? Well, you can customize your WordPress blog so that is easier.

    Is the appearance of your blog important to you? Do you want to have the appearance match the mood and style of your writing? You can have that.

    Changing the overall appearance of your blog

    There are hundreds of ways you can customize how your WordPress blog looks, and dozens of great features you can add. So many you could spend hours just picking which ones interest you the most.  Then you’d have to spend hours installing them, testing them, finding out which options to use. Even if you’re tech-minded, it’s too much to do, and trying out different looks is not what you should be spending your time on.

    When you are starting to blog, what is most important is writing. So here’s what I found that experts have recommended or people have said they really want to have on their blogs.

    Start with these WordPress add-ons, and configure them this way. (Later, when you’re rich and famous and have lots of people reading your blog, you can add more enhancements if you want to.)

    Themes and Appearance

    I found many themes I liked (themes specify the overall structure of how is information organized on the page) at http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/themes and styles (the colors and fonts that make up the “look” of your blog) at http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/styles and was done searching. I’m using the Carrington template, and haven’t changed the style: it looks professional, easy to read, and is organized better while I am composing my posts than the default template is.

    Social Networking: how do I let people on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc know I’ve blogged?

    Twitter lets people who are interested in what you are doing stay connected with you. Let them know a mixture of your activities, what you enjoy, what you need, what you are working on, and what you offer. With these tools, you very easily post on Twitter what you blogged about.

    Twitter Tools –
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/
    Creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. Create a daily digest post of your tweets. Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post.

    Twitter Widget Pro –
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-widget-pro/
    A widget that properly handles displaying twitter feeds on the sidebar of your blog, including @username and link parsing. It supports displaying profiles images, and even lets you control whether to display the time and date of a tweet or how log ago it happened (about 5 hours ago, etc). Requires PHP5 on your server.

    Facelook WordPress Plugin –
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facelook-facebook-badge-wordpress-plugin/
    Brings your FaceBook badge into your blog

    How can I make it easier for people to find what they want to read? (How do I do search engine optimization on blog posts?)

    All in One SEO Pack –
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
    I’ll write a tutorial on using this tool well. Briefly, you can easily change all the important elements of your blog posts so search engines bring people to the specific posts they are interested in.

    I want to know what people think of what I write. Can I have people rate my posts?

    Rating of posts and pages and comments
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gd-star-rating/
    (the manual is available at http://wp.gdragon.info/plugins/gd-star-rating/, or direct link for the GD Star Rating User Guide 1.0.5 – http://wp.gdragon.info/download/12/)

    My blog is very important. How can I back it up?

    WP-DB-Backup –
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/

    I have great quotes I’d love to put on my blog to make it more interesting. Can I?

    Quotes Collection
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quotes-collection/
    This adds a nice interface to add, edit and manage quotes. Quotes can be displayed in a page by placing a piece of code (quick tags), selected by source or tag . This also helps keep your blog entries fresh, in a way that adds content, that search engines love.

    I want to mention books, and have links to Amazon near them. How do I do that?

    Amazon Showcase WordPress Widget –
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/amazon-showcase-wordpress-widget/

    Where’d you get those amazing space photos from?

    NASA Image Of The Day –
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nasa-image-of-the-day/