I’d Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

One of the things I like about WordPress is its versatility. WordPress isn’t just blogging software. With the right theme, you can build a website that doesn’t resemble a blog at all. Essentially, writers who become familiar with WordPress become empowered as web designers as well.

A few weeks ago, I made a website for a client who was launching a green building business (see or click the image below).

It’s a predesigned theme that I purchased from ithemes.com, customized a bit and configured. I also wrote the content. I like WordPress because you don’t have to start from scratch with the theme design. If you get a system down and are familiar with the theme you’re implementing, you can create a professional site fairly quickly.

However, if you undertake such a project, triple the time you estimate for your first project, because it just works out that way. (Also, as always, the writing of the content is often more difficult than the actual site creation.)

My point is basically that WordPress doesn’t just have to look like a blog. It’s a micro-CMS that also empowers less technical users to control and manage the text on the pages without using Notepad or Dreamweaver.

I wrote a WordPress Quick Start Guide in wiki format and posted it on the WordPress Codex. Check it out here: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Quick_Start_Guide.

This guide gives you a quick introduction to the most important tasks and concepts in WordPress. It divides these tasks and concepts into five sections, outlined below: Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress, will be at a Wordpress meetup in Salt Lake City next Saturday, February 2. Details are as follows:

Saturday, February 2, 2008
12:00 PM
Taj India Restaurant
3540 South State St
Salt Lake City, Utah 84115

See the original announcement or the event page. I’m looking forward to this opportunity, as I’ve never been to a WordPress meetup.

Upgrading WordPress is a pain — backing up your database, downloading the latest zip file, deactivating plugins, deleting old files, uploading new files, running update scripts, reactivating plugins, etc. That’s why when non-major releases like 2.3.1 come around, I often look to see if upgrading is actually worthwhile.

All that has changed now. The WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin performs all of the steps automatically, allowing you to upgrade your blog in about 5 clicks. This plugin won third prize in the recent WordPress plugin contest. I highly recommend it — it will make your life easier.

If you use WordPress and want to streamline the process for responding to comments, check out the Better Comments Manager plugin. You can respond to all your comments directly from your admin console interface, rather than responding in the comments section below each post. This is one of the more useful plugins out there.

Here’s a screenshot of the Better Comments Manager interface:

I’ve been waiting for tags to come out for a while. Now that WordPress 2.3 (Dexter) is here, I’m trying to integrate them into my site to the fullest extent. The following image shows the new Tag field that appears below posts.

Tags vs. Categories

First, to get the concept of tags right, think of tags as index words, and categories more like chapter headings. Lorelle explains,

Tags are like your blog’s index. They are keywords that represent the micro-categorization of your blog’s content. To work effectively, they need to be words that people search for, called search terms.

For each post you type, index the keywords into the tag field. For an example, see the tags at the bottom of this post in contrast with the post’s category.

Read the rest of this entry »

When you begin modifying your blog’s stylesheet or designing your own blog, you may notice that some elements display differently in Internet Explorer (IE) than they do in Firefox. IE is usually the problematic browser, and it’s hard to say why there are so many CSS display quirks and bugs from Microsoft. But there is a quick, easy fix around the troubling display discrepancies.

In short, you create two stylesheets, one for IE and one for Firefox and other browsers. You then add a piece of code in your header that tells to the IE browser to read the IE style sheet. The other browsers will read the other stylesheet.

To create separate stylesheets for the different browsers:
Read the rest of this entry »

Rather than having two distinct blogs — a professional blog and a personal blog — you can have one blog with a special hidden category that is separate from the home page and feed.

The special hidden category (perhaps for personal, off-topic posts) can have its own feed and template appearance. The posts from this special category also won’t appear on your home page, so your readers won’t be bothered by your randomness. Read the rest of this entry »

I stumbled across a well-designed WordPress blog yesterday. It has several qualities that make it stand out:

• Ample white space
• Simplicity of design
• Contrast between headers and paragraphs

The ample white space and openness of the design is what I like the most. The cat in the upper-left corner (is it a cat?) and the author’s picture on the right also provides a nice balance.

Ample white space is a key principle of graphic design. I think often times we tend to jam layouts with as much text and graphics as possible, using all available space. In contrast, almost every time I see something designed by a graphic artist, the text is not crowding the space. Rather, the abundant white space draws the reader’s focus to the text.

WordPress is already a micro-CMS, but if you have a site that has a lot of pages, it can get a bit cluttered. By CMS, I mean a site where you have an abundance of static pages that you want to manage, rather than just an endless number of posts. You can use a Subpages plugin in your sidebar to make it easy for your users to find the pages. The context-sensitive Subpages sidebar can give your blog more of a CMS feel.

I just finished redesigning the Suncoast chapter site into a CMS/Blog. You can view it here: http://stc-suncoast.org. When you click a button on the top navigation bar, a list of subpages appear. That’s the CMS part.

The subpages are called automatically using Rob’s List Subpages plugin. Here’s the cool part: this plugin works in your sidebar, not just in a page template.

Using this plugin, you can have about 7-8 top-level pages that each have 10+ subpages, and you won’t overwhelm your users with long page menu showing 80 pages at once. In fact, the user doesn’t even have to scroll. The user only sees pages relevant to his or her selection.

(By the way, the original design was the YGO Lonely theme, but I modified it quite a bit. You can tweak any theme into a CMS.)
Read the rest of this entry »

If you have a web host, like Blue Host, you can have different domains (called add-on domains) that point to different subdirectories within your host account. In this post I explain how to set this up. It’s a bit confusing and I’ve never seen instructions on configuring this.

Let’s say I want to have two sites, one called johndoe.com and the other janedoe.com, and I only want to have one web host. The root domain of the web host could be anything, such as www.idratherbewriting.com (my domain). To set this up, here’s the basic procedure: Read the rest of this entry »

Although I dismissed the effectiveness of newsletters in a previous post, I am rethinking my position for one main reason: readers of stc-suncoast.org aren’t feed savvy enough to be checking their feedreaders daily. And even if they do use feedreaders, it’s so easy to skip past a post in the constant barrage of information. Read the rest of this entry »

I spent a fun evening wrangling with WordPress 2.2. I attribute most of the trouble to the wp-cache plugin, because I kept receiving this exciting error:

Warning: fopen(/home/idrathe1/public_html/wp-content/cache/wp_cache_mutex.lock) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/idrathe1/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wp-cache/wp-cache-phase2.php on line 96

I’ve never had a problem with a mutex.lock!

After several more attempts to upload the 2.2 files, I decided future endeavors would be useless, so I restored back to my 2.1.2 version. Oh boy, here’s where the fun starts.
Read the rest of this entry »

I redesigned the Tech Writer Voices site with the Leia theme. I like how it looks, even though I think the code in the Leia theme isn’t the easiest to work with.

Mark Ghosh, who recently mentioned my site on Weblog Tools Collection (thanks Mark), describes the Leia theme as follows:

Well put together, two column, striking, well structured, featureful theme for Wordpress. Very goth (?) undertones and very cool and different look and feel.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you missed my presentation today, here it is online: presentation home.

Also relevant are some posts I published last week. Read my posts on themes and plugins.

If you don’t have time to read those posts, at least check out my theme viewer and plugins used page.

And don’t forget the post that increased my readership from 80 subscribers to 250: Twenty Usability Tips for your Blog: Condensed from Dozens of Blogger’s Experiences.

Where are the PowerPoint slides, you ask? I am using WordPress as my PowerPoint tool. It made more sense for my topic, and it was more fun to work with.

You can see all the plugins I’m using on my Plugins page. I used Viper’s Plugins Used plugin to automatically show the plugins I’m using in a table grid on their own page.

I’ve edited most of the plugin descriptions to be more clear and concise. I’ve also added little screenshots beside many plugins to show the plugin in action. I’d like to hear if you’re using any cool plugins that I don’t have listed here.

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WordPress plugins are scripts you install to extend the functionality of your WordPress blog. For example, one common plugin is Subscribe to Comments. When added, it allows readers to keep track of responses to their comments. When someone responds to a reader’s comment, the reader receives an e-mail. WordPress doesn’t ship with this feature already included — you must install it via a plugin.

The process of discovering new plugins — and suddenly transforming your blog into something more — can be exciting (but also sometimes unclimactic). Read the rest of this entry »

I created a theme viewer here: www.idratherbewriting.com/themes. Most of the themes are attractive and well-designed. You navigate the theme viewer by clicking the links in the Themes section of the sidebar. Each theme wraps its own formatting around the same posts. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently received an e-mail from someone who wrote, “I liked your blog extremely and was wondering if you customise one for me with the same theme and layout.” Readers often don’t realize that most WordPress blogs are free themes that you can apply in a few minutes. This post offers a little crash course on WordPress themes.

What Are WordPress Themes?

Themes refer to the skin or visual framework around your blog’s posts. In WordPress, content is separate from format. Posts are stored in a MySQL database, and are transformed by your themes files. Theme files are separate from your database content. Read the rest of this entry »

A reader asked me the following:

Hi Tom -
Can you give me a little information about the blogging section of your Web site?

I’m a member of the [...] chapter of STC - and I’d like to help add blogging to our Web site.

Can you give me some pointers on how you developed your blogging pages?

- Is this a home-grown program?
- Are you using a commercial program?

I’m just starting to learn about this - I’d appreciate any help you can give me!
I haven’t discussed this with our chapter council yet - I just wanted to do a little investigation first.

I love getting questions like this. First, I did write an article in Tieline called “Adding a Blog to Your Chapter Website.” The article appeared in April 2006, so it’s been a year since it was published. You can read that to get a feel for the general advantages and disadvantages of blogging.

A number of other chapters and SIGs now also use blogs. Check out how they’re using them.

• Hyperviews (WordPress)
• STC Global Talk SIG (WordPress)
• STC Wisconsin Four Lakes Chapter (Blogger)
• STC Chicago (Blogger)
• STC Alaska (WordPress)
• STC Eastern Ontario (WordPress)
• STC Technical Editing SIG (WordPress)
• STC Austin Chapter (Blogger)
• STC Tech Valley (Drupal)
• STC Atlanta President’s journal (Live Journal)
• Suncoast Chapter (WordPress)

Read the rest of this entry »