Kineda had some lovely linkage on her site that’s worth checking out:

• Are You an A-List Bloglebrity? » Kineda type in your blog’s address and find out whether the world loves you via linkage or if you’re as anonymous as the wind.
• How To - Design Your Own WordPress Theme by Texto.de and includes a blank base template. Cool huh?E
• Essential Tools Every Blogger Should Have » Kineda I love these sort of lists. Granted, you need to be very rich to own everything on this list, but it’s nice to have something to aspire to.

My favourite changes:

• The ability to tab between rich text and plain html - hopefully they’ve also fixed up the bugs with the rich text editor and video embedding
• The uploads manager page… cool
• Autosave… just like gmail
• Spell checking on the visual editor
• You can set any page to be the front page of your site

I love WordPress so much, and I love it even more with these new changes. They’ve also decided on a new development cycle with more frequent releases, which means the perfect WordPress will only be sooner. I’m really looking out for an update version of WordPress mu — the multiple blog WordPress. I had a look at Movable Type because so many great blogs are based around it but it was impossible to install. And most of the good plugins are charged. Definitely staying with my 5 minute install WordPress baby.

NB Sorry for being away, I started a new job and it’s been way busy getting up to speed. Having a great time of it though!

1. Find your plugin’s download page and download it to your desktop. You can find Word Press Widgets here.

2. Read any instructions, usually they are available on the download site but sometimes they are in a “readme.txt” inside the download folder. Keep this information open or print it out. It is most important to note if you need to do any customisation or if a particular folder needs to be uploaded somewhere else. Check too whether you should upload the whole of the unzipped folder or there is another folder inside that should only be uploaded (ie discard the containing folder). I’ve sometimes uploaded the unzipped folder and the plugin hasn’t worked (it wouldn’t show up in the Plugins list on Plugins/Plugins) only to find that it worked when I only uploaded the folder inside.

3. Upload the plugin folder/s to the specified destination. With simple plugins this may just be uploading the unzipped folder to your wp-content/plugins folder. Widgets has a number of different configurations that should all work. In the “widgets” folder, you should find folders called “classic” and “default”, put the contents (but not the actual folders) into the wp-contents/themes/classic folder and wp-contents/themes/default folder respectively. Get rid of these now empty folders. Upload the rest of the whole of the “widgets” folder (without “classic” and “default” folders) into wp-contents/plugins.

It should look like this (from Widgets homepage):

- wp-content
- plugins
- widgets
| delicious.php
| gsearch.php
| rss.png
| widgets.php
- scriptaculous
| builder.js
| controls.js
| dragdrop.js
| effects.js
| MIT-LICENSE
| prototype.js
| scriptaculous.js
| slider.js
| unittest.js
- themes
- classic
| functions.php (optional)
| sidebar.php (optional)
- default
| functions.php (optional)
| sidebar.php (optional)

NOTE: Your classic and default folders should already contain functions.php and sidebar.php so doing this install will overwrite them with new Widget ones. If you have already altered these files then you shouldn’t overwrite them (unless you’re happy to lose your changes). Either don’t bother with changing the templates, Widgets should still work, or look to see how you can apply the same changes to the new widget files.

4. Activate your Widgets plugin by going to Plugin/Plugins and click on “Activate” (Activate Plugins post).

5.You’ll notice also that there is also “Google Search Widget” and “del.icio.us Widget” in your list of Plugins, these are individual widgets which also need to be activated if you want to use them in your sidebars — just click on “Activate”. You can find more widgets at WordPress Third Party Widgets. Most of the time extra widgets will just be installed by being uploaded into the wp-contents/plugins/widgets folder but always check individual instructions.

6. Play with your new plugin. For Widgets if you go to Presentation/Widgets Sidebar, you’ll find that you are presented with your sidebar/s and a group of widget blocks under “Available Widgets”, just drag and drop them to the sidebars to include them in your theme. You can change the order of the blocks by dragging and if you click on the note icon (top right hand corner) you will often be given options to customise your widget. Remember to hit “Save Changes”.

If you want to go back to your default sidebar, just drag all the widget blocks off so it looks like this (and hit “Save Changes):

For more info:

• WordPress instructions can also be found at: Managing Plugins

So the first thing I suspected was there was some unwanted markup code in my page text. The easiest way of working this out is to go to Options/Writing and make sure that “Users should use the visual rich editor by default” is UNCHECKED (ie you are using the html editor not the rich visual editor).

You might also be able to click on the “html” tag in the visual rich editor to examine the html. But I don’t really trust the popup html editor in the visual rich interface (eg when I’ve posted video embeds in the popup editor they often just disappear).

Once you’re looking at the html, see if you can find any unwanted or strange code. Especially, <div>s or </div>s because these can play havoc on your theme if they are not supposed to be there. Basically, remove anything that looks like markup (ie in <>s) to be absolutely sure (you can probably leave links, images and italic/bold/format type markups if you can recognise them, I think they’re unlikely to affect the page). Save and reload your page. If it now works then you know that was the problem.

When I went into the html editor I found about seven lots of <div></div>s littered around the page, who knows how they got there. When I removed them, my “About blogmaking.net” page went back to working perfectly.

Be aware that sometimes, even just re-editing in the visual rich editor can sometimes muck around with your page’s coding, and be especially careful about editing pages with video embeds in the video rich editor because it can handle them quite strangely. Last time I tried, not only did the video disappear it replaced them with some weird <param> tags that broke the formatting of my page. I had to switch on the html editor, remove the unwanted code and repaste the video embeds.

If you set up your blog in your main folder then ignore this step because when people go to your domain http://www.yourdomain.com they should just go straight to your blog already.

Micfo’s cpanel is really easy. You just need to click on the “redirects” icon. You are given two boxes, the first is the domain you want to map (so in my case I would leave it as htpp://www.blogmaking.net/ and then nothing as I want the homepage to redirect) and then you give the address you want to redirect it to… so I put in www.blogmaking.net/blog/ because that’s what I want to show up in the browser.

I’m still trying to work out the dreamhost redirect. I’ve put in a help ticket so hopefully they’ll get back to me soon.

Edit: They did get back to me and did the redirect for me which was really nice. It was a simple little trick that I imagine would work with other folders (eg if you have set up another content management system like drupal in a folder called “drupal”). They created a php page: index.php and stored it in the root folder (ie the main folder not the blog folder if you have them separate). To do this open a text file in something like notepad or another plain text editor and type the following code:

<? Header (”Location: http://blogmaking.net/blog”); ?>

where “http:blogmaking.net” is your domain name and “blog” is the name of your wordpress folder. Save this file as “index.php” and upload it (via FTP or your host’s web file manager) to your root/main folder for your domain.

1. Find a theme. I’m going to go with this one for now: WP- Andreas01 1.3

2. Download the theme to your desktop. It will probably be a zip folder, if so unzip/unpack it.

3. Check for any read me text files or the theme’s homepage for any additional instructions. Most of the time there won’t be any.

4. Upload the theme folder using an FTP program or your host’s web file manager to the “themes” folder inside your “wp-content” folder (you’ll find this in your main blog folder).

5. Once uploaded, go to Presentation/Themes and your new theme should be listed. Click on it and it will be applied.

6. Check for compatibility with your new theme.

Eg In WP- Andreas01 1.3 there is no Links template so the Links link doesn’t give you a Links summary, but the archives link doesn’t work but THERE is an archives template so this might be a bug. In the comments on the theme homepage there was the following suggestion:

Fixed it.

Replaced line 19 in archive.php

“Read more »’); ?>”

with

“”

But I didn’t find that it worked. And strangely enough, in my Write Page I lost the ability to apply templates to pages. Grrrr… It’s a lovely looking theme but I’m feeling too lazy to try and work out the problem. I believe version 1.5 of the theme is soon on its way, so I’ll wait for then.

So to uninstall the theme, you can just click on another theme in Presentation/Themes and that will change it to something else, but if you want it off your server, just delete that theme’s folder in your “themes” folder in “wp-content” in your blog folder.

I redid the steps with the very simple and elegant BlogTxt and while I was there I also installed the Sandbox theme, which gives you a great foundation for customisations… I’m going to be tinkering around with that one later but it doesn’t hurt to have it installed now even if no one sees it yet. (Both these building block themes are from plaintxt.org.)