Archive for “WordPressing”

The following entries were made in the “WordPressing” category.


Adding your own WordPress Smilies

Posted July 21st, 2007 by Mike Cherim

On a site I’m making I added a table of available smilies on one of the pages in the help section (similar to the smiley list my daughter has on her blog). It’s part of the site’s help section. The audience will be a mix of somewhat savvy surfers and complete novices. Many I’d say won’t know what a blog is. Thus I’m offering a lot of passive site support. While making this table of smilies I decided to add three of my own. It’s really quite easy. Here’s how I did it:

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Suggestions for Setting Up WordPress

Posted June 25th, 2007 by Mike Cherim

When I install a brand new copy of WordPress I typically have a ritual of sorts as I fire it up. The default configuration is okay, but I do make changes to better suit my needs and tastes. I feel this is a very important step and worthy of due consideration. I’m not saying this what you should do, nor am I working on their latest version so there’s no doubt that if you’re using version 2.2, some of these practices may be slightly different.

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Making a WordPress Pull Quote

Posted May 17th, 2007 by Mike Cherim

A pull quote is a selected blockquoted passage from the post it accompanies used to reveal or emphasize a portion of the post.

On most of my posts you’ll typically see some sort of decorative image. I do this to jazz things up a bit and give my posts a sprinkling of good old fashioned artistic love. I think it compliments the posts. I started thinking, though, that a pull quote would also be cool. I’m sure you’ve seen them elsewhere. Now you can learn a decent way to make them a built-in WordPress feature. This may be especially useful to theme makers, but anyone can do this.

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Optimizing WordPress for Search Engines

Posted April 10th, 2007 by Mike Cherim

I’ve written about the natural marriage between WordPress and Search Engines and what to do to enhance it before, but I wanted to offer something a bit more definitive and specific this time around. I think I have finally tweaked my practices to the point I don’t think they can really be improved upon. I think so, anyway. I will provide copy-and-paste scriptlets in order of importance — especially useful to WordPress theme developers. But before I do, there are some things you need to know if you don’t already.

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Building a Dynamic WordPress Nav Menu

Posted February 8th, 2007 by Mike Cherim

More and more people are using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS), and for good reason. It’s well supported, produces good mark-up, and it’s flexible. But when using it as a CMS it suddenly becomes very important to optimize the support of WordPress “Pages.” Unlike post, archive, and category links, a web site’s “Pages” have the utmost importance. This article will teach you how to produce a dynamic WordPress “Pages” navigation menu that looks good and behaves as a main navigation menu should.

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Enhancing the WordPress Title Element

Posted February 5th, 2007 by Mike Cherim

I have written about page titles in WordPress before, but when I made my new theme I found another alternative. I feel this method provides slightly better results across a wider range of installations.

In the header.php file you need to look for the title element. It looks like this: <title></title>, but this is the element only, shown without its content. What you’ll probably see is this code (on one line):

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Posting Author Info in WordPress

Posted January 25th, 2007 by Mike Cherim

On this page, any page with a sidebar, you’ll notice a little “Blog Author” box (see right). Big deal, right? Well, what’s cool is how I got it there. It’s a feature I added to my latest WordPress theme. I think it’s neat. Since it can be implemented on any theme it is worth noting with an explanation of how other WordPress users can use the feature. I’ve logged into quite a few blog admin areas to know it’s under-utilized but this short tutorial may change that.

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Beast-Blog v2: Accessible WordPress Theme

Posted January 22nd, 2007 by Mike Cherim

It’s more than a Rebootification Project. It’s a lot more accessible, more usable, friendlier, better than before, and quite simply more. Yes. I’m extremely pleased to announce the launch of my Beast-Blog Theme v.2.0 and its dedicated support blog, now sporting the new design. Finally a new version of my long-popular version one of the same name. This has been long overdue and was screaming for a technical upgrade.

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WordPress-Ready Contact Form v.2.0WP

Posted October 25th, 2006 by Mike Cherim

On October 3rd I announced that I released my Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0. It was also requested at that time that it made available for use with WordPress. Well, now it is. I teamed up with Mike Jolley and together we took my form script and made a WordPress plugin that you can download on the Official v.2.0WP Download Page (see WordPress Version Demo). Check it out. (Also see Mike Jolley’s Official Page.) I think you’re going to be very pleased.

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