Posts belonging to Category 'Blogging'

Wordpress 2.9 “missed schedule” future posts error

As always, the new version of Wordpress works great on most servers, but not on some others. One common issue is scheduled posts failing to post. If you look in your Edit screen, they’ll say in orange “Missed Schedule.” You may be able to fix them on the fly by using Quick Edit (not regular [...]

How to merge blogs together

Maybe you will never, ever decide to merge the posts from one of your Wordpress blogs into another. But if you do, as I once did, you might find this list of instructions helpful. Terminology check: “merging” blog refers to the blog that’s going to have all its posts moved into another one, and the [...]

Writing for traffic

If there’s a trick to getting schmillions of visitors without a huge marketing budget, I don’t know it. But I have found that posting worthwhile stuff regularly leads to a steady increase in traffic.
By “worthwhile” I mean articles that are worth reading now and will be worth reading a few years from now. You can’t [...]

Commenters who want all your time

Those of you who blog: do you ever get commenters who want to have a long, in-depth conversation/debate with you about everything you’ve said in some article? I’ve suddenly started getting these and I can’t figure out how to slow them down. Responding is taking up time I don’t have. Any suggestions?

Feedburner Google migration is an unmitigated disaster

UPDATE: if you respond to the email that says your feeds moved over successfully, Google does actually get back to you several days later with an email that indicates they’re reading the emails and getting to them as they can, but are overwhelmed at the moment. This might be the best way to make sure [...]

Once again, full feeds work better

About once a year, I change some of my blog feeds from full posts to summaries, just to see what happens. Every time, my feed subscriber numbers fall. My latest experiment was no exception. My unique visitors also fell (and not just due to Thanksgiving), as did the amount of comments my posts received. Surprisingly
Of [...]

Wordpress 2.7 – they did listen

I haven’t played extensively with Wordpress 2.7 yet, but remember how 2.5 sucked? And we were told we could whine all we wanted but it wouldn’t help? Wordpress 2.7 appears to be a very big improvement which did indeed take into account the issues we were complaining about.
It has automatic updating built in, so you [...]

Make a leaderboard load after the content in Wordpress

I’m not a great themer. I take other people’s themes that seem to work predictably and I doctor them. My themes have to comply with everything Mark lists here, and while some people don’t worry about having your content as close to the top of the source code as possible, I think it’s crucial. I’ve [...]

If the styling for captions in Wordpress 2.6 doesn’t seem to work…

I had some trouble getting the captions to look good in Wordpress 2.6. Here’s how I solved it.
First, I added this code from the default theme to my style sheet:
/* Captions */
.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}
.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}
.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text [...]

Link a Dink – better than Alinks

I love Alinks and all its cool functions for making phrases on my site automatically turn into links, but one thing about it was driving me crazy:
It spits a huge block of code into your source, between the bot and your content. Go check your source code, if you use it. See that? See how [...]