Finessing the Blog

One of the things that I am learn­ing very quickly these days, is that things are never as easy as they seem in technoland!!

Wel­come to Tech­noland source: Bald­heretic; Flickr, Cre­ative Commons

Every­thing I had been read­ing recently had indi­cated how easy set­ting up a pro­fes­sional blog was on WordPress.org. And for the most part it is, but there are still things I am try­ing to fig­ure out how to do that require a bit more than a beginner’s level of techno-literacy, like set­ting up a shop­ping cart.

In the mean­time, while I was learn­ing about SEO tech­niques I tried my hand at adding a few things to this blog. There are a few lit­tle gad­gets that WordPress.com themes auto­mat­i­cally come with, that WordPress.org themes don’t, and the most cru­cial of these (at least for me) is the Stats cal­cu­la­tor. So off I went in search of how to add a stats cal­cu­la­tor to my site and very quickly dis­cov­ered the joy of plu­g­ins.

Plu­g­ins are great!! Most are easy to use and they enhance the func­tion­al­ity of your blog (how’s that for sound­ing ‘techie’ .  All you need to do is to go to the WordPress.org web­site, at http://www.wordpress.org, click on the tab labeled “Extend”, then click on the “Plu­g­ins Direc­tory”, and then have fun search­ing for the plu­gin you want.

For this blog, I added:

• the wordpress.com stats plu­gin, so I can obsess over daily vis­i­tor stats;
• the WP-Print plu­gin, this puts the ‘print’ icon on every page and post, not as easy to install as the other two plu­gin as it requires you to go into the HTML cod­ing and add a line of code. ; and
• the WP-Table Reloaded plu­gin, which is what I have used to cre­ate my e-book store until I learn more about adding a shop­ping cart.

Most plu­g­ins are straight for­ward. You just down­load the file to your computer’s desk­top then go to ‘Plu­g­ins”, “Add New” in the col­umn on the left hand side of your Word­Press theme’s desk­top. Upload the plu­gin into the Theme (same pro­ce­dure as you use for upload­ing pho­tos, etc., into your blog’s con­tent), and then click the ‘Acti­vate’ but­ton. And voilà, a neat new func­tion has been added to your blog.

Adding the WP-Print plu­gin was a lit­tle bit more dif­fi­cult. Actu­ally it was more scary than dif­fi­cult. Just fol­low the instruc­tions that come with the plu­gin and you should be fine. My prob­lem was I didn’t trust the instruc­tions so was a bit con­cerned about doing this. You need to access the HTML cod­ing by going to “Appear­ance” “Edi­tor” in your theme’s desk­top. There is a list of file names down the right-hand side of your screen. You just click on the file name that the instruc­tions indi­cate, add the line of cod­ing (I had the instruc­tions open in my browser and just did a ‘cut’ and ‘paste’ to make sure I had the cod­ing cor­rect) exactly where the instruc­tions tell you to, save and exit, and you are done.

While plu­g­ins are gen­er­ally listed in your desk­top under “Plu­g­ins” “Installed”, the Table plu­gin locates itself under “Tools”.  To use the Table plu­gin, you have to go to your blog’s ‘post box’, the area where you type in your con­tent and click on the ‘HTML’ tab (on the top right hand side of the post box). The ‘table’ but­ton shows up in the line of cod­ing but­tons that run across the top of the post box.

The last two plu­g­ins I added to this blog were Tweet­meme and the plu­gin to the email ‘Sub­scribe’ feed. With ‘Tweet­meme”, you down­load the plu­gin from http://tweetmeme.com (to down­load the plu­gin, you need to go down the page — it’s located on the right hand side). You just down­load and install Tweet­meme as you would any other plu­gin. Tweet­meme allows read­ers of you posts to instantly pub­lish the post on Twit­ter — great for mar­ket­ing you site. Tweet­meme shows up under “Set­tings” in this Word­Press Theme’s desktop.

The plu­gin for the newslet­ter was a bit more com­pli­cated to deal with than your reg­u­lar plu­gin, so I will explain the how and what of adding this to your blog in my next post.

Two final words about plu­g­ins ~~ plu­g­ins can either be a great way to enhance your blog, or they can be a dis­as­ter. The trick is to be very cau­tious of where you get your plu­g­ins from. The one’s that I have used so far have either been from the WordPress.org’s web­site, or from very rep­utable sources. Plu­g­ins are code so can con­tain all the nasty viruses, worms, tro­jans, etc., that plague Inter­net users. Make sure that the plu­g­ins you are using won’t dam­age either your blog, or your computer.

The other point about using rep­utable plu­g­ins is that these plu­g­ins will gen­er­ally be quickly updated each time Word­Press is updated, so they will con­tinue to work with your blog. For exam­ple, the recent update to Word­Press 2.8 left a lot of plu­g­ins unus­able — mind you, this is also a good rea­son not to update to the lat­est ver­sion of Word­Press too soon after it is released.

TTFN

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