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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