Posts Tagged ‘web programming’
Adding plugins to my blog
Saturday, November 7th, 2009I have been adding more plugins to my WordPress blog. I know most of you aren’t interested, but someone may be. There are literally thousands of plugins that you can add to a WordPress blog (find them at the WordPress->Extend->plugins page). Of the three new plugins that I have added, two were to help me administer my blog, and one was to add content for my readers. They were Broken Link Checker, User Locker, and Daily Fitness Tips.
For anyone that wants to add a pluggin, the process is simple. Search the WordPress plugins for a plugin you want to use. Download the plugin to your computer. Extract the files into a folder. It can be helpful to read the readme file if there is one. Upload the folder to your blog’s wp-content/plugins directory (I use FileZilla). Activate the plugin from your blog’s Dashboard by clicking the Plugins menu. Some plugins have to be configured, others don’t.
I used this process with each of the plugins that I chose. Broken Link Checker will do what it’s name implies – every few days it will go through my blog and check for broken links. If it finds one, it will let me know. User Locker will prevent someone from endlessly trying to login by trying out different passwords. This is to help prevent hacking and spam. Currently, I have it set for 5 tries. Daily Fitness Tips displays the box in the right-hand sidebar that displays a different fitness tip everyday. Of the three plugins I installed, this is the only one that I had problems with. Not that there was any problem with the plugin, I just had a problem activating it since I have a customized blog that did not allow me to use the widgets interface to activate it. Since I could not just drop the widget in a sidebar (which is how you normally activate a widget), I had to search through the code for the php function that is called to start the widget. The one that seemed to work was workoutbox_widget_generator. So, I added the following code into my right sidebar:
<li>
<?php workoutbox_widget_generator(); ?>
</li>
As far as I can tell, everything seems to be working. If you notice any problems in your web browser, please let me know.
Updates and changes
Friday, November 6th, 2009Today I have been doing a lot of updating on this site to get my wordpress blog working the way I want it to. I have been playing around with themes and updating files to massage the look of my site. I want to get it to look more like my website home page, but it is never going to look exactly like it.
One of the things that I have done is add some plugins to my blog. I have added the Scissors plug in that allows easier image manipulation in the posting screen. I have also added the Sidebar Login plugin that allows users to login to my blog from the sidebar if they want to add a post or comment. It has also allowed me to add in a link to the Add New Post page so that my readers can easily create a new post if they want to. Note: I will be moderating all new posts since the post text will also be appearing on my website’s home page once I get the feed working (which should be in a day or two). I guess I had better create a link to edit posts, too.
I am planning on putting in more plugins and doing additional updates soon, so stay tuned!
Hello World!
Thursday, November 5th, 2009I have just installed my WordPress blog and I am now testing it out. What do you think?
I have been having all sorts of fun today downloading and uploading WordPress, getting FileZilla working, and setting up the blog. I am currently working on updating the theme of the blog and messing around with the php commands of the custom theme that I downloaded. I wanted something simple that I could update to look similar to my home pages. This is currently a work in progress.
I now am going to try to add buttons for my other website pages to the header. Wish me luck!