Make a Lasting Impression in WordPress

My most recent article about customising WordPress has appeared on the Peachpit site. It’s about editing the footer of your blog — Make a Lasting Impression:

The footer may be the last thing visitors see on your blog. It leaves a lasting impression, so you should use it well. In most themes, a separate file called footer.php contains this part of the site. In this article, you’ll learn how easy it is to edit the footer to display exactly the information you’d like your blog’s visitors to see.

[Via : Peachpit: Web Design Reference Guide > Customizing WordPress: Make a Lasting Impression.]

Display a Better Title in WordPress

Another of Miraz’s regular WordPress articles for Informit has just been published: Peachpit: Web Design Reference Guide > Customizing WordPress: Display a Better Title:

make a great first impression for your blog by customizing the first thing visitors see in bookmark lists and search engine results: the titles of your blog, its posts, and pages. This article shows you some easy ways to edit the title in the header file in WordPress version 2.3.1.

Video Blogging with Viddler and WordPress, Part I

What’s this all about?

One of the things I’ve been following from arm’s length is the audio and video blogging phenomena. I’m talking about sites like Utterz, Seesmic, and Viddler.

I’ve tried all three and until I tried Viddler, I couldn’t get excited about any of them. But Viddler has a few features that make video blogging easy and fun — primarily because it works so well with WordPress.

In this series of articles, I’ll explain how you can use Viddler to create video content with any compatible camera attached to your computer and get that content on your blog. And, if you’re a WordPress user, I’ll tell you about two Viddler plugins you can use to make it easy for your blog readers to find your video content on Viddler — even if you didn’t post it on your blog — and even leave video comments for you.

What is Viddler?

Viddler is an online service that enables you to upload or record videos that can then be shared with others. It’s a bit like YouTube, only classier and used by people who want to communicate rather than show off entertainment-based content.

At least that’s my take on it.

Viddler uses Flash to capture video from a camera attached to your computer. It works great with my iMac’s built-in iSight camera and microphone, as well as the iMage camera I bought for traveling with my old PowerBook.

But you don’t have to capture video directly to Viddler. You can take an existing video file and upload it. Viddler supports .mov, .mpg, .wmv, .avi, and .m4v formats. You can’t, however, upload television shows or other material that’s likely to be copyrighted. Viddler doesn’t have the same deep pockets as YouTube and probably doesn’t want to be sued. Besides, you shouldn’t be sharing that stuff anyway.

Once content is on Viddler’s server, it can be set as private, public, or available to just your friends. (Like most social networking sites, you can create a network of friends to share videos you don’t want the general public to see.) You can also share your videos with others on other social networking sites or by embedding them in your blog or e-mail messages.

Getting Started

Of course, to use Viddler, you need an account. Go to http://www.viddler.com/ and click the big green Sign Me Up button. Then follow the prompts to create a user ID and password. You’ll have to provide a real e-mail address, since Viddler will be sending you a confirmation e-mail. Once you get that e-mail, click the link in it to finish setting up your account.

You can now create or upload videos. I’ll discuss both of those tasks in future installments of this series.

Meanwhile, if you have a Viddler account, why not take a moment to share the info about it with us? Use the Comments link or form for this post to provide your Viddler username so we can check out some of your videos.

How to Create a Gravatar

A few easy steps can get your custom image on gravatar-enabled blogs.

If you read a lot of blogs, you’re probably already familiar with gravatars — custom images that represent certain commenters. These images are a kind of personal logo that identifies them and says something about their personality.

Here’s how gravatars work. A commenter creates an image suitable for a gravatar and uploads it to his account on gravatar.com. The gravatar is rated using pretty much the same ratings as the movie industry: G, PG, R, and X. These ratings are used by bloggers to set limits on the kinds of gravatars that appear on their sites — a gravatar with a G rating will appear everywhere while a gravatar with an X rating may not appear on many blogs at all.

Meanwhile, a blogger (like me) sets up her blog to enable it for gravatars. Then, when a commenter submits a comment, the blog’s gravatar plugin takes the commenter’s e-mail address (submitted in the comment form) and attempts to find a match at gravatar.com. If it finds a match, it displays the corresponding image. (The e-mail address is not used anywhere in the underlying page code.) If there’s no image on file, the plugin either displays nothing or displays a default image chosen by the blogger.

If you frequently participate in blogs by leaving comments for blog posts, you should consider creating a gravatar. Its easy and its free. Here’s how.

1. Go to gravatar.com’s Signup Page.
   
2. Enter your e-mail address in the box and click Signup. A message appears, telling you that an e-mail message has been sent to your account.
3. Check your e-mail. You should find a message from Gravatar with the subject “Welcome to Gravatar.”
4. Click the URL link in the e-mail message. Your browser opens and displays a message confirming that you have successfully activated your account.
   
5. Enter a password for your account in each of the boxes that appear and click Set Password.
6. If you want to receive a Gravatar newsletter, click the button in the next screen. Otherwise, click No Thanks.
7. Use your favorite graphics application to create an image suitable for use as a gravatar. For best results, it should be 80×80 pixels in size and not include a border. (Keep in mind that it might be displayed at smaller sizes.)
8. Save the image as a JPG, GIF, or PNG image with an Internet-friendly name (no spaces or weird characters).
9. Use your Web browser to open your My Gravatars page on gravatar.com. (You may need to log in to your account.)
   
10. Click the add a new one link.
11. In the next screen, click My computer’s hard drive.
12. In the next screen, click the Browse button. Then use the standard dialog that appears to locate, select and open the image file you created for your gravatar. The pathname appears in the File box.
    
13. Click the Next button. The file is uploaded and appears in the rating screen.
    
14. Click the appropriate button to apply a rating to the Gravatar. Don’t lie; this is important. And remember that for maximum exposure, it’s good to create a gravatar rated G or PG.
15. Your newly created Gravatar appears in the My Gravatars screen. Click it to select it for your e-mail address. When prompted, click the Confirm button. Here’s what it might look like when you’re finished:
    

You can repeat steps 10 through 14 to add additional images. You can then change your gravatar by simply selecting one of the new images. As you’ll see your gravatar changes globally wherever it’s used when you change it.

From that point on, your gravatar should appear whenever you post a comment to a gravatar-enabled blog.

Edit WordPress Theme Style Sheets

My latest WordPress article has appeared at the Peachpit Web Design Reference Guide — Customizing WordPress: Edit Theme Style Sheets:

If you want your blog to have a unique look, you must learn how to customize themes. A theme changes the look, layout, and even the content of your WordPress blog. There are many different ways to customize themes, but this article will get you started by explaining how you can edit the Kubrick theme’s CSS file to change the appearance of text in your blog.

Themes are a huge topic — we devote at least a whole chapter of WordPress 2 Visual Quickstart Guide to customizing themes, but if you’d like to take some easy steps, this article will get you underway.

Move a WordPress blog to a new host

I’ve been moving The Groupings WordPress blog from one host to another. It’s surprisingly simple, but there were a couple of glitches.

The blog has about 70 posts, half a dozen users, and half a dozen links in the Blogroll.

Prepare the new server

First I set up the new server — it has a temporary URL at this time, as we’ll be moving the domain name shortly. I uploaded the most recent WordPress to the new server and changed a few options. I also uploaded my ’standard set’ of plugins.

Export posts

Next I went to the old blog and clicked through to Manage > Export on the Dashboard. When you click the Download Export File button WordPress creates an XML file.

This caused my first problem: I have my system set for NetNewsWire to automatically add RSS feeds, so when I clicked the Download button in OmniWeb NetNewsWire leapt into action and tried to add a new feed. After having the same problem in Safari I tried Flock. Finally I was able to download the file.

Import posts

Then I went to Manage > Import on the Dashboard, and imported the file. That was easy. But I soon noticed that both the Links and the Users who hadn’t posted were missing.

Import links

There weren’t many Links but I didn’t want to do a whole lot of copy-pasting if I didn’t have to. And I didn’t: Import / export links explains what to do.

Import users

The Users …. Some had been imported (sort of) because they’d posted; others hadn’t posted and were just missing.

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I started up PHPMyAdmin for the old blog and exported the ‘users’ table into a file on my computer, opened the file into my text editor, removed the Users who already existed on the new blog, and checked I had no duplicate ID numbers. Then I opened PHPMyAdmin for the new blog and imported the Users.

Great! But I still had to copy-paste some missing information for the Users who’d posted.

Theme

Next I needed to sort out the theme. Unfortunately the theme had been updated since I installed and customised it on the old blog. I uploaded the updated theme to the new blog and spent some time adding in my previous customisations.

The BBEdit text editor is a gem for this: open two files that should be the same and choose Search > Compare Two Front Documents. BBEdit puts the two files side by side and in a window below lists all the lines that differ. Click a line in the listing to see the differences in the two files. Click an arrow in the Differences window to copy text from one file to the other.

This time I got a bit smart and created a custom.css to override style.css with my particular changes. Next time that particular part of an upgrade should be easier.

Plugins

On looking at my new blog, I realised I needed some more plugins that I had on the old blog. I moved them across and updated where necessary. I also had to modify some theme files and to customise the widget settings for the theme.

Now I just have to ask someone else to change the DNS servers, and wait till the domain name propagates.