serpentcouncil.com

Just a quick note to let you know I haven’t disappeared, just very busy. Boy, it would be great to blog full-time!

In case you’re wondering about the new theme, it’s a thematic child theme that I thought I would take for a spin and quite like it. Here’s the link if you want to try it out.
http://www.cozmoslabs.com/2008/10/25/byty-free-child-theme-built-thematic/

We’ll be getting back to our WordPress tutorials shortly.

Because I care (remember sharing is caring,) here are 10 articles worth reading about blogging.

1. How To “Announce” A Blog

Good article on some of the important initial steps,  appropriate considering our focus here right now.

2. 21 Ways To Increase Blog Traffic

Who doesn’t want to have more traffic?

3. Different Types of Links and How To Get Them

You may think all links are the same, but then you probably haven’t read this article.

4. 99 Ways To Promote Your Blog

I’m a sucker for lists and this is a list with 99 items!

5. 12 Reasons Why I Like Windows Live Writer

See?  a List and an article about something we use, this must be good.

6. SEO for WordPress – The Complete Guide

Good starter article to get knowledge about SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

7. Blogging Tip: How To Use Social New Aggregators as a Source for Content Ideas

A point to make is that each of these articles are on blogs with many other articles, and many other good ideas.

8. 10 Black Hat SEO Tricks You Must Not Do!

Or else we will all think you’re a dick.

9. The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs

I think its pushing it to cal this the definitive guide, but it might be the best introduction to this topic.

10. The 5 Deadly Sins of Blogging

Good points, all of them.

Now that I have had the site up for over a month, it’s time I think to add some content to the sidebar.   As it stands right now, we are not providing users with any way to access older content other then searching for it.

To do this we are going to add some additional widgets to our sidebar.   Go to Appearance > Widgets and add the Archives, Recent Posts and Categories Widgets.  In all 3 cases I am leaving the default settings, but each Widget has some options that you may want to utilize, so have a look by selecting the edit option for each.   Bear in mind that you can rearrange the order of the Widgets by selecting any of the Widgets and dragging and dropping them in the order you prefer.

Once you have them the way you like save changes and you are good to go.   There are plugins available that allow you to customize accessing old content in all sorts of different ways and we may explore those later but for now at least we have provided some easy access to some of our older content.

I want to add an image to my blog that will show up all the time so I thought it would be a good time to introduce the Text Widget.   The Text Widget basically allows you to enter any custom item you would like such as some basic text, an image, maybe even something like some Flash.

So go to Appearance > Widgets and select the “Add” link beside  Text  listed on the left hand side list of available Widgets.   

Now because I am adding a picture I have to do one of two options.   I have to either upload my image to my blog or I have to put it somewhere else on the Internet to be link to from my blog.

In this case I am going to add it to the blog.   To do this go to Media > Add New.  You should get a page like this:

Choose the “Select Files” button and browse for the image you want to upload.  You have some options available to change the name, add a caption and a description, so go ahead and do what you feel is appropriate and then select “Save All Changes.”  

Note that whenever you add a picture to a blog post using an external program such as Windows Live Writer, when you upload the post to your site, Windows Live Writer is adding all the images you use to your Media Library automatically.  So if you have been creating posts with images you should be able to browse these in your library. 

Now the easiest way to actually add this image to your Text Widget, is to use the built in post editor of WordPress, something we haven’t been using due to our preference for Windows Live Writer.   The reason we want to use the post editor here is to get the URL for the image we have uploaded to the media library and if you are not HTML proficient, you can quickly snag the code you need for the text widget itself. 

So go to Posts > Add New

It’s a little hard to see on the image above, but there are symbols beside the words Upload/Insert which represent various media objects.  The first one is the one we want which is image.

A popup box will magically appear and you will want to select “Media Library” from the choices along the top.  You will then be presented with a list of all the files in your media library.  I believe this list is sorted by date, so the newest ones should be at the top of the list.  Convenient, because that means ours should be right at the top.  Select the “Show” link beside the image you want to add and a number of options are available to you.  The defaults should be fine for you, but depending on your image and how wide your sidebar is on your theme you may need to adjust and tweak these settings.  If you are following along with me, the sidebar we are using is pretty liberal, and while I don’t have the exact dimensions available off the top of my head, my image is 300 pixels wide so if you are not any wider then that you will for sure be fine.  Click the “Insert Into Post” button and your image should be dropped into main window.  

Now you need to get the HTML code so along the right top corner of the editor you see two tabs, one for “Visual” and one for “HTML.”  I think you see where I am going with this don’t you?   Select the “HTML” tab and you should get some code instead of a picture in your editor:

You will want to copy and paste this code as I have highlighted because that is what you need for your Text Widget. 

Now go back to Appearance > Widgets.  You will get warned about navigating away from this page because you haven’t saved it but don’t worry about that as long as you have copied the HTML code.  To be safe, you may want to copy it to a text file while you do this so you don’t lose your work.   Once you are back in the Widgets section,  Select the “Edit” button on your Text Widget and paste in the HTML.

Once that is done you can click…Done!   Make sure to save your changes by clicking on the “Save Changes” button as well.

Now your site should look something like mine, with an image now in the sidebar.

That’s it!

I consider it a bit of a gap that the media library doesn’t display the URL or link to the images or items it includes.   If it did you wouldn’t need to create a dummy post, as long as you knew a little HTML, you could just grab the link from the library.

If you’ve been following along with this series, you may have noticed this at the top of my dashboard, and yours as well:

As of WordPress version 2.7, you have the option to update your site ‘automagically’ via the admin console, and that’s what we are going to do in order to upgrade to v2.7.1.

First however, we are going to do a backup, and make use of another plug-in.  The plug-in in question is WordPress Database Backup.   Go ahead and download, install and activate via the usual methods.  You can then go to Tools > Backup in order to access the options page.

The first section in options identifies what tables in the database you backup.   As you can see there are a couple of optional settings.   I would check “Exclude spam comments” as there are really no reasons to save those.   The next sections allows you to determine what to do with your backup.  Personally, I choose the default setting, “Download to your computer” because then I immediately know that the backup worked, unlike email or saving it to your web server where there would be an additional step to confirm the backup was there.   The final option is to schedule a backup and I think that’s an excellent idea.   I’ve set mine to “Once Weekly” which will then be emailed to me.   I would still suggest that whenever you make a change to your site you run a backup, but having a scheduled weekly backup is a good failsafe in case you forget, or something happens outside your control such as a problem at your hosting company.  Now that you have setup your backup strategy, if you go back up to the second option, “Backup Options” and select the Backup Now! option, the process will run.  While it’s running don’t reload the page or close your browser, it should only take a few moments and it does provide a progress bar.   At the end it will ask what you would like to do with the file just like any typically download.  Select an appropriate location on your computer and you’re good to go.   The backup file is in .gz format.   This is a compression format that most archive programs, such as WinZip, WinRar or my recommended choice, 7zip, will recognize.   The file itself is a .sql file, which is a MySQL database backup format.   I’m making a note that one of these tutorial lessons will be how to restore the backup, but I’m not going to cover it now.

To really be sure that your site is backed up nicely, I suggest another type of backup, one which is available without any additional plug-in, and that is the Export option.    Go to Tools > Export and you are given the following page:

Here you are making a backup of all your content.  This is your posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, essentially the data of your site.   There is only one option here, “Restrict Author”  this allows you to change from the default which is content authored by everyone, to selecting a specific authors content to backup.   We are going to leave it at the default for our purposes.  When you click “Download Export File” you are given another file to save, this time an .xml file.

One reason that I suggest you do this type of backup as well as a database one is that along with an Export, WordPress also provides an Import, and in the case of an issue with your site, such as it getting deleted for example, it might be easier to import your content rather then restore from the database as you can do this through the WordPress console, where as to restore the database backup you need some other access and knowledge.

It’s also useful to do exports of the data from your site in the cases where you may have a test or development version of your site elsewhere.   You can then export/import data to do testing or verification.

Now that we have our site backed up real good, let’s go ahead and upgrade.  The Upgrade option is available via the Tools menu as well as the message at the top of the console, both paths take you to the same page.

Go ahead and select “Upgrade Automatically” and wait until you see a message that says WordPress upgraded successfully.   I would recommend that you spend a few minutes looking around your site to make sure that there are no issues.   If the process didn’t work or their were some issues, I recommend utilizing the support forums at wordpress.org to search for a solution to any specific problem that you may have encountered.