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.

Stats for WordPress

If you want to keep track of visitors to your blog, you’ll probably be interested in the WordPress.com Stats plugin.

Set up for stats

Download and install the plugin. Then go to WordPress.com and sign up for a username. Check your email for the API key.

Now go back to your blog’s Dashboard, click on the Plugins link and then the WordPress.com Stats link. Enter your API key.

After giving the plugin some time to collect stats — a day or two, or maybe a week if your blog doesn’t have many visitors, log in to your blog’s Dashboard and click on the Blog Stats link.

Got an error?

At this point you may be taken directly to your stats or you may see a login page.

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At worst, you may see an error message. This happens to me because I look after blogs for others and have several WordPress.com usernames. In that case go to WordPress.com and log out. Then try the Blog Stats link in your blog’s Dashboard again.

Log in to the stats if necessary

Now comes the confusing part: log in with your WordPress.com username and password, not your blog’s username and password.

Now try that Blog Stats link again.

View the stats

If you don’t have the ‘multiple personality’ problems that I face you were probably able to just click on the stats link and see your stats. Over time these build up to be incredibly useful. All kinds of things are clickable. Try clicking the various links and icons you see. There’s masses of great information available here.

See which posts are popular, where visitors came from, what they clicked on, their search terms. Track posts over time. Track visitors by day, week and month.

There’s enough here to keep you happy for a long while.

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.

CommentLuv

Yesterday, while following up on a pingback — I get a ton of pingback spam from sploggers — I discovered a legitimate link to an article on my blog. (Imagine that!) I decided to thank the author of the post linked to mine with a comment. So I filled in the comment form and clicked the submit button. And here’s what I saw in her blog:

Note the last line. It includes the name of and a link to the most recent post on my blog (when the comment was posted). How cool is that?

I searched Google and found CommentLuv. This incredibly easy to install WordPress plugin gets dropped in your Plugins folder and activated from within the Plugins administration panel. That’s it. From that point forward, anyone who posts a comment and includes a link to their blog will have their most recent blog entry, pulled off their RSS feed, included as a link with the comment.

So I included it on my blog. Try it out now by posting a Comment on the original copy of this post.