Tag Archives: Wordpress
Mod my woo
Posted on 29. Jul, 2010 by Kenny.
I need some help from a wordpress ninja if you’re out there.
I’m using a woo theme for Children’s Ministry Online. Unfortunately, my sidebar is slightly too narrow for something I want to do. Literally, I need the sidebar to be about 4-6 pixels wider. Unfortunately it’s not as easy as just changing some numbers. In addition to some code changes, it also requires some changes to the background image (says the Woo Themes support forum). So, I’m getting some quotes from some affiliated Woo Theme Customization workers tomorrow. Do you or anyone you know have the competency to make the modifications I need? Feel free to let me know my contacting me from my contact page.
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Should I use Picassa or Flickr?
Posted on 02. Apr, 2009 by Kenny.
I’m a little stuck? Tell me what you think?
Currently I’ve got a little bit of a mess when it comes to photo management. I’m using Windows Live Sync to synchronize photos between my wife’s PC and my Mac. So when I take pictures and upload them to my MacBook, they sync over to her computer. The same happens when she uploads her pictures. It works really well this way. This means I don’t really use iPhoto to manage my photos because new photos will be added to my directory through synchronization and won’t import correctly into iPhoto.
The bigger problem though is distribution/sharing of photos. Recently I’ve been uploading photos to facebook as it’s quick and easy. However, I have family and friends who are not on facebook but they do frequent my blog. In addition, what happens when facebook becomes another myspace. I don’t really want all my photos on facebook if and when that happens. This also means I’ve got to upload photos to facebook and then upload them to my blog as well. It just seems like more work than it’s worth.
So, I’ve been looking into using Flickr or Picassa. It seems like the ideal solution. With pro accounts, I can upload most, if not all, o my photos to an online directory. Then I can embed/share albums to facebook or my blog. This way I’m storing my photos on flickr/picassa and just sharing them to other applications that friends and family use to see them.
So, which one do I use. It looks like both have good facebook applications and wordpress plugins. However, flickr cost $25 a year and I get unlimited photo uploads and photos can be as big as 20MB. Holy Cow. This seems awesome. Picassa on the other hand is a bit more expensive. They do not have unlimited storage, but an incremental storage capacity for incrementally more money. It looks like it can get pretty pricy.
So, picassa is more expensive; however, Picassa will manage your photos on your computer like iPhoto. In addition, Picassa will also do some decent photo editing. This is a nice toolset. I have Adobe Photoshop, but there’s something nice about a program that organizes your photos, edits your photos and stores them online as well.
What do you suggest? I’m thinking of using flickr for online storage but still using Picassa as a desktop client to edit photos and organize. I’m certainly open to ideas as I’m still not certain.
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Nothing quite like a fresh new template
Posted on 22. Feb, 2009 by Kenny.
A few days ago I rebuilt my church’s Chidlren’s Minsitry blog. Boy did it need it. It was uuuuuugly!
Now it looks like the site I intended for it to be.
I spent two to three days looking for a new template, I was looking for something very specific. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of free Worpress templates out there, but I couldn’t find a single one that worked. So I decided to look into a template to purchase. Within twenty minutes, I had my new template. The lesson I’ve learned: You get what you pay for.
So, what was I looking for and how did a “premium” template solve my problems? Well, let me tell you what my issues were.
- First of all, I felt the site was ugly. Now I could have found another free site to improve this part, but it was a factor.
- Second, I needed a page menu with drop down navigation. There were very few free templates that did this. I needed a place where I could keep multiple pages of related static information in an easy to navigate orientation. It was the 3-5 phone calls and emails about child dedication I was getting a week that was driving this issue.
- Last of all, I needed a way to effectively communicate to two audiences through one blog feed.
So, I purchased a template that solved all of these issues.
- First of all, I bought a theme that is much cleaner than what I had previously. It even comes with 8 or 9 other color/design options in case I get bored.
- This “premium” template allows for drop down navigation for both pages and categories. This helps me keep a cleaner menu but with the options to expand as much as I need.
- I didn’t realized I could address this until after I had already purchased the theme. I’m using a magazine format where every post is put into little blocks. However, I can create one category that is for “features.” Features are the big horizontal blocks that pop out on the page. So, all of my posts either relate to the North Campus, the South Campus or both. I decided to create a category called global and make it the feature category. So, posts that affect both the North and South Campus are in my “global” category and take prominence on the front page. So, regardless of your campus, you’ll see the information that applies to you specifically. Then every week I’ll send a targeted email to the parents of each campus with links to the posts that relate specifically to them.
So, I’m very glad I got the new template. Seriously, there’s nothing quite like a fresh new template!
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Sharing the comment love
Posted on 17. Dec, 2008 by Kenny.
I just found a great new WordPress plugin. It’s called commentluv. If you have a self hosted WordPress blog, I totally recommend loading and activating this plugin. The beautiful thing about blogging is the inter-connectivity of most blogs. It’s like a giant web of connectedness. Most of the blogs I follow I’ve found through reading comments on other blogs or through links. Comment love takes this to another level. When you leave a comment on this site, you have the opportunity to type in your website. If your website has a RSS feed (like your blog) commentluv will try to find it and post a link to your most recent blog post as an attempt at a little cross promotion.
I’ve only had this plugin active for a few days and it appears to be working on a few of the comments (I haven’t explored why it does with some and not others). So, leave a comment and check it out.
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Children’s Ministry Online maintenance
Posted on 30. Nov, 2008 by Kenny.
So, I’m in blog maintenance hell.
Over the summer I upgraded to a new version of wordpress. Somehow in the middle of it, I deleted all of my categories. Normally that wouldn’t have been a huge deal, but the way I have my permalink structure set up, the actual URL address for each post has the category in it. It basically renamed all my categories to 15 digit numbers… it was a mess. I started to make the correction to all my posts but then forgot. So I basically had several hundred blog posts with funked out categories and strange URLs.
A few weeks ago I came across a website called Website Grader. Basically it analyzes your website and tells you what sucks about it. Mine sucked pretty bad. I got a 65 out of 100. There were a few things that were pretty good, but one thing it pointed out was that it was not effectively optimized for search engines. Although a lot of my pages are indexed with Google and I get a fair amount of traffic from random web searches, my blog was not optimized like it should. What was missing? Metadata.
In every post there is some key data that Google and other search engines look for information. The Page Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords. Whenever I create a new post, I obviously write a title and I usually type in a few keywords. However, what I didn’t know was that WordPress was not transferring any of that information to my metadata. I found a WordPress plugin called “All In One SEO Pack” that gives you a place to type in all of this metadata for each post as well as the main pages.
So, as I’m fixing all the broken categories on 300+ posts, I’m also entering all the SEO metadata. It takes about 2 minutes or so per post and I’ve got over 300 posts to fix. Yeah, I’m in blog maintenance hell, aren’t I?
Oh, and after I started using the SEO plugin and and making a few other changes, my WebsiteGrader rank shot up to an 88 out of 100. Not bad!
Before
After
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Apparently I’m no longer Children’s Ministry Online…
Posted on 23. Jun, 2008 by Kenny.
Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed that on my blog home page, my title is jumbled up some how. I noticed it but didn’t do anything to fix it as I’ve been busy. Finally I decided to take a look at it. So, I deleted the title of my blog to see what happened. The result?
Apparently my template decided to give itself a name. Yes, my theme has a very “Apple” look, but I am not running the “One more thing” site. If you click on any individual blog posts, it’s blank.
So, until I figure out how to fix it, I’m either title-less or I’m the “One more thing” other site. I may have to go in and edit the code in the template… I just don’t know why it showed up now for no reason.
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Final Twitter Post… for now :)
Posted on 14. Jun, 2008 by Kenny.
Okay, I’m going to wrap up my series of Twitter posts with this one, sharing one more resource and a cool story.
I noticed that a lot of the bloggers I follow on twitter have installed and application that sends a twitter feed when they write a blog. It’s a great add-on. Now for most of these people, I already subscribe to their blog feed, so I’m going to read their post at some point. This application though provided another way for me to get to their post. However, there are many people on Twitter that I don’t subscribe to their feed. Through this little application, I’ve found some new blogs that I now follow. So it’s a great tool. Using Google I found this great post here. It has the 10 best twitter tools for wordpress blogs. I’m sure you can find the same tools for type pad, blogger or whatever blogging service you use. I installed the Twitter Updater which does what I just said. I also tried the “Twit This” application but I couldn’t get it to work. Because my Twitter feed update my facebook status, people who only follow me on facebook are more likely to follow or even discover my blog. You can’t tell me this isn’t great stuff.
Oh, and now for my story. I’ve actually heard a few people complain about linking your twitter feed to your facebook feed because it just looks kind of silly. True, I won’t argue with that at all. However, I know many people who don’t update their facebook status very often, so they either have an out of date status or no status at all. Those who twitter are more likely to update more often, so people following them on facebook see their update more often. *** I did notice that if you start your twitter with @someone’stwitterID (a personal note to someone), facebook will not bring that update into the status. ***
But here is what is cool. I was driving to camp last Sunday and made a snide remark on twitter about driving through East Texas in the dark. A friend who I haven’t seen in over 10 years and recently became a friend on facebook contacted me the next day and said, “you’re in East Texas… we should meet up.” Three days later I had a little reunion at Cracker Barrel for breakfast as I drove back home. Because Twitter, facebook and this blog are all interconnected, I have a greater possibility to communicate to the most people possible. Isn’t that what technological advancement is all about, merging services and devices to where they all talk and work together.
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Blogging from your mobile device
Posted on 18. Mar, 2008 by Kenny.
I use wordpress for my blogs. It’s easy and open for 3rd party developers to enhance the experience. As I posted earlier, I write all my blogs in Windows Live Writer and publish directly from there. I will log into wordpress only to manage my posts. The only think I haven’t really taken advantage of was blogging from my phone/mobile device. WordPress and blogger (I’m sure others do as well, but I haven’t used them) allow you to send emails to your blog which automatically turn the the messages into posts. I’ve also accessed the admin side of my blog from my phone, but the internet viewing experience isn’t that rich on most mobile devices (I know… unless it’s an iPhone).
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