Custom Search Engine Landing Page – Customized Welcome Mat

Heard the term “landing page” or “landing site” in relationship with e-Commerce and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? It is the page people arrive on your site from a search engine. If you are searching for “wordpress plugins” in a search engine, it will call up a list of results. Click on one of those results […]

Customizing Your WordPress Quicktag Buttons

If you have upgraded your WordPress blog, you may have made changes to your quicktag buttons in your previous version and need to know how to add them back. There used to be a few WordPress Plugins you could choose from to allow you to customize or add to your quicktag buttons, the buttons found […]

Customizing RSS Feed Links for WordPress.com and WordPress Sidebar Widgets

With the new feature in WordPress.com blogs to add feeds to your sidebar using Sidebar Widget enabled WordPress Themes and/or the soon-to-be-released Sidebar Widget WordPress Plugin, you now have a powerful feature to add content to your blog and accessorize your sidebar. If you would like to add feeds from another WordPress blog, the feed […]

Breaking the Limits of Customizable WordPress Themes

Binary Moon’s Regulus WordPress Theme was one of the new breed of WordPress Themes that helped break the limits of the non-customizable WordPress Themes. Using WordPress Plugins and some interesting twists and turns with WordPress tags, WordPress.com and WordPress users can now do some customization of how a WordPress Theme looks, including changing the header […]

WordPress.com Widgets – Customizing Your WordPress.com Theme Sidebar

WordPress.com announces customization features for your WordPress.com Theme sidebar called “WordPress Widgets. Some of the Themes available with WordPress.com now include a feature to permit some arranging of the sidebar. If the Theme includes the Widgets, you will see a new tab in the Presentation panel called “Sidebar Editor”. Your choices for customizing your Theme’s […]

Custom Google Search Feeds

Update: While this was a great idea, GooRSS is now defunct. GooRSS is a new custom feed generator in beta testing based upon Google search results. It’s really wonderful and something Google should implement. From the front page, enter in your search keywords and click SEARCH. At the bottom of the first page of results […]

Customizing wordpress.com Default Theme Headers

Custom Kubrick or Default Theme Headers are now live for wordpress.com users. Donncha has turned this function on in the Presentation Panel, and you can see it only if you are using the Default/Kubrick Theme. As mentioned, the Kubrick Header Switcher was developed by Andy Skelton for WordPress 1.6, the alpha-stage next version of WordPress. […]

Customizing Your Feed Titles

The joy of working with the full version of WordPress is the ability to customize everything. I’ve been trying to create a list of the various feeds available on my main site. I created such a list but when my feed reader scans the page for feeds, it lists every single one with the title […]

Customizing WordPress Administration Panels

Tips for WordPress 1.5 While some of these tips may apply to WordPress 1.6, that version is still not available to the general public. These tips and tricks apply to WordPress 1.5. WordPress is highly customizable. Every part and piece of the full WordPress version can be customized, including the WordPress Administration Panel. In general, […]

The Brute-Force Password Attack on WordPress Sites

My mother emailed me and asked if WordPress was under attack. With all the news of last week’s attack of the Boston Marathon, the attacks on WordPress and other PHP-based web publishing sites was low on the priority list for myself and others, but this is something to take seriously. As we get back to […]

Blog Exercises: Footnotes

In “Creating Footnotes in WordPress,” the tutorial explains how to use footnotes in WordPress, and applies to other blog publishing platforms. Links are the footnotes of today, linking to citations, references, and resources on the web. Yet, there are still times when footnotes are necessary, especially when the citation isn’t online or if your topic […]

Blog Exercises: Site Policies and Bloggers Code of Ethics

It’s time to start working on all of your site policies, one by one. So far, we’ve touched on some of these in Blog Exercises: The Don’ts of Blogging, Blog Exercise: Taking a Risk With What You Blog About, Blog Exercises: Comments and The Blog Bullies, and Blog Exercises: Quoting and Blockquotes. The basic policies […]

WordPress Introduction Course in Vancouver, Washington

I will be teaching the WordPress I Introduction course at Clark College Corporate and Continuing Education starting Saturdays, April 27 – July 13, 2013, 9am – noon, in Vancouver, Washington, just across the river from the Airport at the Columbia Tech Center. What a great way to get to learn about how WordPress works without […]

Blog Exercises: Does Your Site Look Spammy?

Does your site look spammy? How would you know whether or not your site looks spammy? It’s time for a spam check. Web design is hard, especially if you aren’t an expert. Yet, in many ways you are an expert if you are a fan of the web. You’ve seen enough sites to know the […]

The Secret Recipe of Comment Spam Comments

Mr. Louis Vuitton just sent me a message in my blog comments I’d like to share with you. I share this touching message because it is highly educational when it comes to the art of spam comments, and serves to remind us of why we love having Akismet, the best comment spam fighter, on our […]