Ask WordPress Max Questions About WordPress

Hi Jeff,

I think this is a great idea, the ask a question section. I know I need some help.

My question is in my side bar area there are two sections that show up outsied the border area, this happened after I put a one of the other themes in use. How can I move these over? It just looks a little sloppy.

Thank you

Herb Davies

Herb,
It looks like you placed The BlogSkinny and Technorati widgets directly into the sidebar template in the wrong place. Or you didn’t close a tag in the code somewhere.

This can happen even if you place a script, or any type of code into the themes template or even a sidebar widget. If there is an open code tag it will mess up the look of the whole page.

With sidebar widgets there is really no need to add anything directly into your themes sidebar template. If you need more help email me your blog’s login info.

Post on this topic to come…

Hi Jeff,

Congratulations for the ASK WORDPRESS MAX area. It is a very good idea.

I would like to know, step by step, how to create a new area on my blog. I intend to make my post in English and in Portuguese.

Take care!

Wolney, Wow you came up with one here didn’t you? Some preliminary research shows it is possible and I may do a step by step guide in the future when I have time to determine what method is the easiest. Sorry but from what I have found so far this isn’t a topic that can be covered very quick. For now check out these.

I found a plugin that does what I think you are looking for. See it in action on this site: Anaconda Theme The plugin is called Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro For WordPress 2.x.y Blogs. This looks like the easiest solution but this is not a free plugin, it costs $30. I didn’t test this one.

Other language plugins can be found here: Translation and Languages plugins. And here is a link to WordPress In Your Language.

I tried the Gengo plugin and it made the whole test blog go blank, I had to login to the hosting account and delete the plugin to get the blog back, so you have been warned.

Another free plugin Polyglot, requires a good bit of coding changes to the theme to work and I haven’t tested that yet.

oK Jeff, I will wait your post.

For the moment, how do I increase the number of the TEXT at my sidebar. Is that possible? I have 9 at this moment.

Thank you.

Wolney, There is no way(that I know of) to add more text widgets, but you can place more than one item into a text widget. Consider grouping like items into one widget to free up more text widgets.

This post explains how to do this toward the end of the post:
Working With WordPress Text Widgets

Hi.again..Question ..how to get my url to be http://www.something.com and not http://www.something.com/wordpress Tanks

Chris you would need to install the blog into the root of a domain to do that. If there is a trailing name after the main domain name that is because the blog is installed in a folder or directory within a domain.

Blogs were usually used to be an addition to a main website but more and more people are using them as the main website. This site is an example of using a WordPress blog as the entire website. That is why the URL looks as it does.

Jeff

How do plugins – WordPress or otherwise – help your blog rise in search engine ranking?

Carl Hendricks

Home Based Business Prosperity

Once traffic is attracted to your blog beside having relevant ads is there another key to getting adsense ads clicked?

Carl Hendricks,
http://www.cehmagic.com/blog

Hi there Jeff! I’m having a somewhat esoteric problem and can’t seem to find a solution anywhere else.

I’ve developed a custom theme for my blog to match the look of the rest of my site. It worked fine when I tested it locally on my laptop.

When I uploaded the theme to my web server and selected it in the presentations panel, the main page looks fine. However, whenever I click on anything else–the archive pages, for example–the resulting page loses all its formatting. For some reason, nothing but the main page is calling the stylesheet. I’ve tried everything I can think of–header.php must be working fine because it works for the main page. I’ve put the stylesheet in both the theme folder and the main wordpress folder (because that seemed to fix a similar problem I had when testing on my laptop).

I’ve searched the Wordpress forums and codex to see if there is any special place the stylesheet should reside and can’t find any info; nor can I find anyone else who is having this problem. Do you have any idea why the main page would look excellent but subpages would not show formatting, only content? Any help would be most appreciated.

Amy from what you are describing, it looks fine when on your laptop but not online, maybe some of the images are not uploaded to the website. Or your theme is pointing to images that are on your laptop instead of pointing to images in the themes images folder on the web server.

If that isn’t the case make a copy of your single page template (single.php) as a backup. Then copy the main index file and paste it into single.php to see if the formatting is working when you open a single post. This would be the first step in troubleshooting I would take.

That is my best guess since you didn’t post a link to the blog I can’t look at it.

Hi, thanks for your reply. I went into the header.php and specified the full pathname for the style sheet, and it worked fine. I don’t know if that will break something else in the long run, but there you are.

My newest problem is that I had my blog, which I was hand coding in HTML, in the blog subfolder, and the wordpress blog in wpblog while I was tweaking it. Silly me, I thought I could rename “blog” to “oldblog” and “wpblog” to “blog” and voila, the new wordpress blog would show up in place of the old hand-coded HTML one. No such luck, unfortunately–main page worked fine, but all the category and archive pages wanted to find their content in “wpblog.” So I’m now working on sorting that out. I’m to embarrassed for anyone to see my mess to post a link. But thanks so much for being here.

Hi Jeff,
I came across your site and need some help with adding a category to my blog.

I have put in my blog at least but am having trouble configuring it. I can’t see how to add a category. I’ve tried so many times with no luck and it still remains uncategorized. I want to be able to add sections for beef, chicken etc but when I go into http://superrecipesecrets.com/blog/ nothing has been changed.

I dont know how much help I’ll need, but it would be handy to have it configured properly.

You could advise me the next step please

Stuart

Stuart here is a post explaining how to add and edit categories.

Adding Subcategories To Your WordPress Blog

Hi,

I’m trying to add an affiliate link in my blogroll.

WP asks for a URL but the text I’ve been given by the affiliate site is an “a href” etc.

So is there any way to put the link in the blogroll but keep it as an affiliate link?

Thanks.

Wakar

Wakar
The “a href” you are referring to is the HTML to embed the link into a website. The http://www.URL.com/AffiliateIDNumber part is what you need to place in Blogroll of your blog.

Yes, that worked! I just removed the a href tags and used just the URL that was between them and it’s fine.

Thank you. I’m so glad I found your site. Something like that could have taken forever to find/get an answer for in forums and such.

Hello,
I am just starting a wordpress site, and trying to use this theme: http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/3-columns/2479/jd-nebula-3c-10/. When I try to customize the sidebars, nothing changes! No matter how I drag and drop widgets on them, they always look the same with same default categories & archives on the left and calendar blogroll, and meta on the left. Any idea why that is? Thanks.

Nova, I just posted a fix your themes problems. read it here:

Fix WordPress Sidebar Widgets That Don’t Work

Hi,

I have a question about FeedBurner. I’m not sure I understand what it does. If I sign up with FeedBurner, do I get a box on my blog like the one you have? Do they give me the code/markup and explain how to install it? I’ve watched their video about signing up but it doesn’t explain much.

Thanks.

Wakar, FeedBurner just uses your current feed and gives different subscriber options. The one I really like is the “Updates by email” FeedBurner provides.

And yes if you sign up for a FeedBurner feed you can get the code for a few different subscriber buttons and the email updates box to place on your sidebar.

I did a video post about this on my Work At Home Business Blog a while ago here is the link:
http://www.esmartjob.com/blog/wordpress-blog/feedburner-widgets-wordpress-blog

My old blog is at http://cyanidehole.blogspot.com
My new blog is http://cyanidehole.com

If you go to the old blog, you notice the sidebar has a header: “Good Reading”.

Now I’ve bought myself a domain name (cyanidehole.com), hired a host (bluehost), and installed WordPress. I want my WordPress sidebar to show the “Good Reading” header and content, but I can’t figure out how to change the sidebar.

I’ve looked at the documentation. I’ve tried to edit my sidebar files. There’s no way I’ll ever figure it out on my own. Can you help me with that?

Jimmy, After looking at the content of your blog my first thought was to just delete your question. While I in no way believe any of what you or people like you have to say, I believe you have a right to say it.

So here is a post that may help you: Working With WordPress Text Widgets

I have no sidebar on my coments page or if I access an article directly with its full path. Not being a programmer, I can’t figure out which php file needs to be modified or how to cause the sidebar to show up in those cases.

Example of failure to show sidebar is at
http://www.qvmgroup.com/invest/archives/116

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Richard that is an easy fix. It looks like you are using a modified version of the default theme.

There are two posts on this site that walk you through this process. If you need additional help let me know and we can work something out, my fees are real cheap!

Adding The Sidebar To The WordPress Page Or Single Post Template

Add Background Color To Single Page Sidebar On Default WordPress Theme

Jeff, I am “geek impaired” and would prefer to hire you to fix my problem than try to raise my geekness to the necessary level. We all have our gifts and specialties. Yours is tech and mine is not. Please contact me and tell about what it would cost to put the sidebar on all viewed content.

No Problem Richard, I sent you an email regarding this and other possible tweaks for your blog.

Jeff

hi there , l made a banner logo for my wordpress
so that others can put it on their site.
however i need to post the link ”code” in order so they can copy and paste it onto their page.
so
my question is how do l post the link of my banner logo
without it turning into the banner logo
so it just stays text that others can copy paste?

if u could help me l would rly apreciate it
the link is

so if u could adjust it already so i could copy and paste it
and its all good , that would help alot!
but if u can tell me how to do it , its good aswel
already many thanks
cheers
johnny

Is is possible to have some blog posts require registration to be read, while others are open to anonymous visitors? — either to provide more in-depth content, or to require registration to continue reading an article?

Richard, it is possible to password protect posts or pages. I suggest you use a page to this so the password protected posts don’t appear in the “Loop” of the blog. Unless you want people to see that there are protected posts to give them an incentive to gain access. Also keep in mind that password protected posts show “Password Protected” in the description on search engine results. Whether or not this hinders page rankings, I don’t know.

The logistical issue is how to give out the password to gain access. A simple method that comes off the top of my head: You could use the same password for every protected post/page and give it out with a subscription to a newsletter that is tied to an autoresponder. Then when a visitor opts-in to your newsletter it will automatically send a welcome email with the password. You could also tie your RSS feed to the autoresponder that notifies your list of new blog posts.

There may be plugins available that does this… perhaps you gave me yet another topic to research and post about…

To protect a post or page when creating it look to the right and simply put a password in the the Page or Post Password box.

My question is how do l post the link of my banner logo without it turning into the banner logo so it just stays text that others can copy paste?

Johnny if you paste the code into a post using the visual editor then it should show as raw code on the blog.

If that doesn’t work, open an HTML editor like Frontpage or NVU and paste the code into the visual editor, switch to HTML view and copy that code and paste it into a blog post.

Hi Jeff,

I noticed your reply in DP to one of my questions and I followed your link towards here.

I wanted to post it in DP but maybe you can help me with the next problem;).

I’m hosting several blogs at Bluehost and one of these blogs has since last night an error message

Warning: Unknown: open(/tmp/sess_a7501ec91ec3a3c590fecbc4701e595e, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13) in Unknown on line 0

Warning: Unknown: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct () in Unknown on line 0

At first I thought that it had something to do with my Cache but when I looked at the server status at Bluehost cPanel than I noticed that “Disk /dev/sdd1 (/backup) 84 %” is blinking.

Here’s a screenshot

http://img376.imageshack.us/img376/2529/screenshoterrordatabaseze1.jpg

I have no idea what’s the next proper step. Maybe you can point me in the right direction.

Cheers

Vincent

Vincent, The first place to find your solution is with the hosting account. Tell them the error message. My first guess is there is a problem writing to the tmp folder on the server, based on this first warning:
Warning: Unknown: open(/tmp/sess_a7501ec91ec3a3c590fecbc4701e595e, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13) in Unknown on line 0

There is one hosting account that I need to contact for every blog I install on to allow the proper permissions on the tmp folder.

Is there a new plugin or script you installed or activated that started this? Try deactivating it or one plugin at a time to identify it if you suspect that.

But based on a a brief search of your errors it looks like a server side issue that the hosting account should know about. Please if you get a solution post it here for others to learn.

Jeff, I had several chat sessions with the support dep. of Bluehost and they first told me that it was a problem caused by the writers of WP2.3. For me an answer with no meaning at all. Then I disabled all my plugins again and tested them one by one. It seems that the WP error was caused by the plugin stattraq. Now that I disabled him the error is gone. I still think it’s strange that I missed this it first time.

Than I checked my Bluehost cPanel again and now there where 2 lights blinking yellow/red. I called them and now they told me that it was just a notification that the back-up servers are almost full. They say that this blinking can go on for months till they work on the servers. Quite unbelievable

I’m going to find out what the error is causing at the designer. Still think it’s strange do, that my other blogs don’t have this same problem. They are using the same plugins.

Anyway, thanks for your reply.

Cheers
Vincent

my other blogs don’t have this same problem. They are using the same plugins

But are they all using the same version of WordPress?
Or are you using the same list and versions of plugins?
Some plugins don’t work well together either. And some don’t work in the latest version of WP yet.

I have one this particular blog one additional plugin but I don’t think this is the cause of the error.

I upgraded the blogs to 2.3 a couple of days before but they all worked fine. I checked the developer’s site and it seems that someone else also had a problem sort of like this. He changed a php file and I’m trying it later today. Ill let you know if this worked.

All the same theme’s and version’s btw

Hi Max !

Glad I found your blog, I’ve been browing a bit and I feel like trying some of your tips.

But… but… Yeah, I have a question for you.

I have a really big problem with encoding – and I’m not the only one out there, I found a lot of people stuck where I am, looking for a solution !

The basic problem is :

A few of us have posts in English (or whatever Western European language) AND posts in other, more “complicated”, languages. In my case, it’s Chinese.

My posts showed up just fine when I was on Blogger, but all my Chinese posts are now a bunch of “?????” since I moved to Blogger.

I’ve already researched my issue quite a bit and you may not be the right person to ask since you seem to be English-only (not that there’s anything wrong with that ) but I thought I’d give it a try.

Instead of starting from the scratch, please allow me to paste this link to the WordPress forum where I talked about my problem, with no answers so far :

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/138677

If you have any idea, I’ll appreciate ! But I DO understand this is quite technical

Zhu, Sorry but this one is beyond my knowledge, but I am sure there is a plugin or solution to your problem. If you search the WordPress forum you may find it there. In fact here is a thread on the forum that might help:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/100163

That’s okay, I know it’s very technical and frankly waaaay beyond my knowledge as well !

I appreciate you had a look at it anyway.

Your blog is bookmarked and I’ll be back. Often. More than you wish

Hi Jeff!

First of all – thanks for the first answer in my search for how-to-do designing wordpress. I’ve found it here 15 minutes ago.

Here’s another which I didn’t find the answer to – yet:

I’m working on http://www.aicc.dk

I have installed Wordpress 2.something including widgets.

I have added the widget “pages”.

But now – in my sidebar – it says “Pages” on top of my list of topics. I’d rather have no title on that list.

I tried removing it or changing it in the sidebar.php, but nothing happened. My guess is, that the change has to be made in the widget – whereever that is.

How do I customize the widget Pages?

Chresten

Sorry! You’re way ahead and have allready answered me here:

http://www.wordpressmax.com/customize-wordpress/text-widgets

Thanx

Jeff,
trying to set up a widget or two in my wifes wordpress blog. Keen to put in mybloglog. When installed in sidebar it appends itself to a category header panel (which is not there until this widget is installed). This then pushes mybloglog out into a new column. Ugly look. I don’t know which piece of code needs amending. Any clues?
thanks, Geoff

Geoff, I am not sure what is wrong because I don’t know the exact steps you took. But it sounds like you placed the MyBlogLog code in the Blogroll.

There is a plugin for MyBlogLog that adds an available widget that must be dragged into your sidebar and configures.
This post is about MyBlogLog:
http://www.wordpressmax.com/wordpress-guide/mybloglog

See these for more about widgets:
http://www.wordpressmax.com/customize-wordpress/fix-widgets

http://www.wordpressmax.com/customize-wordpress/text-widgets

Jeff,

Is it possible to move an existing WP blog from a subpage to the root directory and do you think that is a good or workable solution for a blog.

I do not have anything of value on my main page at this time.

Morris

Morris, quite a coincidence you ask to move a blog from a subdirectory to the root. Someone else has just asked me to do just that. While I am pretty sure it can be done, I will outline the steps in a post as I do it. Stay tuned….

Jeff

Hey, Max..

Do you know if Google can read wordpress text widgets? Also, if I use them extensively, and they appear in the sidebar along with each page, will Google think it is seeing duplicate content?

Thanks

Kermit, I am far from a Google expert, I would think that the Google bots see/index all the text on your pages. However if the rest of your posts or pages are different than the others I don’t think you are going to get hit for duplicate content.

I just looked at a few posts on here from September and they have a page rank of 2, and these are by no means any great posts that have a bunch of outside links pointing to them.

Think about it for a minute, almost every website online has the same sidebar items on them. The title, description, keywords and the main content are what matters.

Hi Jeff,

You hav ebeen such a great help in the past I am hoping you can answer another simle question for me.

I created several pages on a blog I am setting up. I want to use these as catogories for different topics. Can I do this and if so how do I get the new posts into a specific page?

Thanks

Herb D

Jeff…

I have a website that is doing reasonably well on Google. Would there be any benefit to creating a google xml sitemap? Would I want to notify Google about it? If I sent the site link to Google would that aggravate them, ie. duplication, they think I am spamming, whatever.

Would it be enough to just add a link to to the xml sitemap in the footer if the site is already indexed by Google?

I see some sites (like Chris Pearson’s) that has both sitemaps in the footer. What do you think of that?

Kermit I am not an SEO or Google expert this site is about WordPress.
I don’t think creating a sitemap will hurt at all. All of my blogs and sites have a sitemap. If your site is indexed by Google and comes up in searches then that is all that probably really matters. But again I am not an SEO/Google expert so maybe ask your question on a forum somewhere where you will get more than one opinion.

Herb, wow you are throwing me a tough one there. I don’t think you can change the link of a category to point to a specific page. Now there may be a way to show all the posts from a specific category on a page, or any webpage using the RSS feed for that category. Your blogs categories have their own feed. Just click a category on your sidebar and then place /feed on the end of the URL to see it.

But WordPress kind of already does what you want because categories already have their own page and when you click on a category it will show the latests posts that were made in that specific category. So why do it twice?

Jeff,

I once knew which PHP page to edit for links on my sidebar, but after a long time looking I can’t find it. There is a bad link that needs to be fixed if only I could figure out what file to edit. Can you tell me which file that is?

Thanks very much.

Richard, It should be the sidebar.php file. But some themes may call it something else. But before you edit the file most items on the sidebar can be edited in the sidebar widget.

Check out this post about widgets: http://www.wordpressmax.com/customize-wordpress/text-widgets

Or if it is a blogroll link that can be edited right from the dashboard.

Hi
I have a wordpress blog that i’ve had now for two weeks, and I am hopeless at figuring out how to get the actual wordpress loaded onto my computer

i don’t know if i need it, to install plugins or if I am able to install plugins without signing up for additional wordpress services.

i would like to have a paypal “buy me a beer” donation button, and a google adsense that is appropriate for my site installed.

i would also like to be able to have the links that I put into my articles on wordpress to be clickable, and I don’t know how to do that, right now, some you have to highlight and cut and past.

i would like part of the background color of my outer website page to be changed from black to silvery darkish green high tech looking color, like a tinsel type foil color.

i can’t see the graphics on my site, so I don’t know what I need to download to get the graphics.

I would also like the best statistics counter that you could put on my site as a plug in.

I do not know if my site’s statistics are working or not properly. I think I have far more readers than it is showing.

Could you tell me if my statistics are working, and how to optimize them so I can make money off of my site?

my site is at

conservativedispatch.wordpress.com

Best Wishes
Titania Jones

bubbamail@operamail.cm

Titania, Your blog is hosted on WordPress.com not your own domain so commercializing or making money with it is very limited.

I do not do any work on free hosted blogs because the customization and plugin availability/usage is limited. You may want to look into getting your own domain name and hosting before you get too much on your blog to move.

I recommend BlueHost for hosting and I believe you can get a domain name with the purchase of some hosting packages. There is a small banner for BlueHost on the sidebar here on my site.

Jeff

Hi Jeff

I have a wordpress blog ( http://blog.xvzx.net ) setup as a subdomain of my main site ( http://xvzx.net ). I’ve grown so fond of wordpress and its ease of use (esp editing pages and posts) that I’ve neglected my main domain since long – because it has static template based php pages.

I now want to convert my main site into a wordpress blog with static pages (which I can edit/modify later on) but want each page to have its own custom header image. Is that possible using wordpress?

vishwas, Yes it is possible to have a different header fpr each static page. The only way I know how is to create a different page template for each page, specifying the header information for each. To start here is a post to create a custom page template, but doesn’t get into using different headers.: http://www.wordpressmax.com/customize-wordpress/custom-page

There may be a different way to do it if you search the WordPress forums here:

http://wordpress.org/support/

Hello,

I have a question about blogging by email. I have it setup so that when I send an email, it properly posts it to my WP blog (from wordpress.org). Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get it to include any pictures that may be attached. Also, I can’t find any real solutions out there and wondered if you had any suggestions.

Thanks,
Norman

Norman, Sorry but that is one I haven’t much experience with. I do all my post right from the dashboard and often wonder why if one had email access why not just login to the dashboard and post?

Anyway best I can offer is the WordPress Codex:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Blog_by_Email

Jeff

Jeff,

Thanks for the response. You are correct, initially, in thinking that if one has access to email, why not use the dashboard… However, I have an iPhone and would like to snap (crap cam) photos and post them with commentary using the iPhone email client in one fell swoop… This would, in theory, allow me to upload photos and posts without having to FTP it from my phone…

Well, maybe someone will come up with something.

Thanks,
Norman

Well Norman that explains why one would post without logging on to the WP dashboard, using an iPhone.

Hi

I have 2 static pages set in my wordpress.

My question here is:

Is there anyway I can set a subdomain for each static page?

I tried to go to my cpanel to do redirects for the subdomains.. but it doesn’t work.. since the subdomains are linked to a folder in the home folder on the webserver.

Appreciate your help.

Geekz, Subdomains will always appear as a folder in your hosting account, that is normal.

But you should be able to redirect any URL on your domain to a subdomain or any other URL of your choosing. Have you contacted your hosting account regarding this? It may be a MySQL or PHP permission restriction .

There is a plugin to turn categories into subdomains, it may be modified for pages: http://www.gregboser.com/wordpress-subdomain-plugin/

Sorry I can’t give direct help.
I did a quick search on the WordPress.org forum and found some other asking the same here: http://wordpress.org/support/

I’m new to blogging. I had wordpress do the free install for me. I recently learned to use FTP (Fubu for my Mac). I have tried uploading both plugins and themes, but after i upload I do not see any type of change on my dashboard. They simply don’t show up. I believe I’m doing everything wrong and cannot discover the problem. If you think there is something simple I may be doing wrong I’d love the feedback.

Adam, Plugins get uploaded into the plugins folder within the wp-content folder: wp-content/plugins. Themes go in the themes folder: wp-content/themes.

In the WordPress dashboard go to Presentation and activate the new theme by clicking on it. For plugins click plugins and scroll down to find the new plugin to activate it.

Hey Max – My issue has to do with the DiggIt plugin. I downloaded it and installed it, etc., and it works; the only thing is I’m getting a runtime error for an unterminated string constant. It’s definitely the DiggIt code (copied from the instructions here http://tuggo.org/projects/diggit/#integrate) ’cause it goes away when I remove it. The only argument I’m passing is ‘compact’ in the second set of quotes. Here’s what I’ve got in there: Any idea what it is?

Thanks!
Patty

Sorry Patty, That is one for the plugins author. I suggest you try a different plugin like Gregarious:http://lipidity.com/web/wordpress/wp-plugin-gregarious/

Hi Jeff,

How do I put Adsense to the side of the post and after comments?

My Adsense-Deluxe+ Widget is not activated. What is it?

If you look at my site http://www.tikidum.com you will see “Work At Home Online” above and “Work At Home Online|Opening A Small Business” as Weblog title. How do I fix it to be the same?

Take care,

Wolney

Wolney, Login to the dashboard, click options and change the Weblog title.

To learn how to use AdSense Deluxe read this: How To Use AdSense Deluxe Plugin
Which is on this page with all the instructions. WordPress Optimization Guide

To place AdSense after comments you need to place the code into the themes template files.
Placing it into the wrong place can render your blog useless.

I may do a post on it later and it is too long to explain now.

Jeff

Jeff,

Thanks for this great resource. I’ve just put together http://davisdentalgroup.com, and it is showing up fine in all browsers except MSIE 6 & 7. Problem screenshots: http://davisdentalgroup.com/screenshots.

Any ideas for how to fix either of these issues?

Thank you,
Jonathan Stotts

Jonathon, in my IE7 browser it looks like the “Request An Appointment” box is the first place to look. Because it is wider than the sidebar and is into the content area. It is either too big for the sidebar or you have an open tag in it.

Try removing it and see if that fixes your problem. If so resize it or check for open HTML or script tags.

Here is a post explaining more: My WordPress Blog is Broken and I Don’t Know What to Do

Jeff,
This is not exactly a wordpress issue, but after I publish a post who do I submit it to?
Sorry if this sounds really naive.

Barb there are numerous sites to submit to. The first place to start is onlywire.com. Which is actually one site that submits to a group all at once. There are links to others at the bottom of your blog posts too.

If you read the Authority Black Book you will understand much more about it. I encourage all my clients at least twice to download and read this great free resource. I have a link to it here: http://www.wordpressmax.com/thanks

Hello Jeff,
I have a new WP and get an error message just below the html editor reading: “Not Acceptable
An appropriate representation of the requested resource /businessblog/wp-admin/upload.php could not be found on this server”.
Can you help? Many thanks.
Gerda

Gerda, you need to add the following to your .htaccess file:

<p># BEGIN WordPress<br>

&lt;IfModule mod_rewrite.c><br>

RewriteEngine On<br>

RewriteBase /blog/<br>

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f<br>

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d<br>

RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]<br>

&lt;/IfModule><br>

<br>

# END WordPress</p>

You may still have issues uploading after that due to restrictions on the account by Host4Profit. I have done enough blogs for PIPS members to know how to get it all fixed but it is a little more complex than I can explain in a comment.

Hello Jeff, thanks a lot for your immediate reply. I appreciate your help.
Kindest regards
Gerda

Jeff, the htaccess file already has this text in. What do i next, since i understand this problem is too complex to be handled here.
Thanks again and have a nice evening.
Gerda

Gerda try this in the .htaccess file too:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>

Gerda, contact your hosting provider, I assume is Host4Profit, and tell them you need access to the tmp folder to run WordPress. Then test it again, if it still isn’t working contact them again.

Hello jeff,

Could you please tell me why the visual editor on my blog is black?
Also I activated simple tags, added the tags in the relevant place beneath a post but, the tags do not appear when published?

Thankyou,
Barb

When asking a question about problem with your blog please leave a link to the blog in the comment.

Barb the theme you are using is bleeding into the Visual editor. Try switching themes and I bet you will get a white visual editor. If so try the themes authors website for a solution or a different theme. Sorry I can’t fix a theme I didn’t create.

The simple tags are to be placed at the bottom of the actual write post box or within the post itself, not in the tag area below it. The tag area below the write post box is the WordPress built-in tagging system you should add the same tags in it as you do within the post. Do not use the brackets in this area like you do with simple tags within the post.

I added Simple tags but didn’t activate it because I don’t have a guide for it so can’t offer much help at this time.

The Simple tags site has instructions here: http://www.broobles.com/scripts/simpletags/

Jeff,

Changed my link to my blog as requested.
Many thanks for your answers.

Reagrds
Barb.

Jeff,
Never having done this before, can you please tell me how to upload images “.gif” files from a folder to my website?
I haven’t got a clue, or perhaps you can point me to some instructions.
Thanks in advance.
Barb

Barb, to add an image to a WordPress post scroll down under the write post box and click the browse button in the upload area.

If you are asking how to upload files to your hosting account you can do so with an FTP client or the file manager in your hosting accounts control panel.

Hi, Jeff, after you were of great help with solving my first problem with my WP blog i wrote my first post and already have a new problem. When i click on my links “category” , “recent posts” or “archive” it always shows my PIPS site instead of the post. What am i missing? Many thanks.
Gerda

Gerda you may be sharing the data base with another blog or your Permalinks are not set correctly. I couldn’t tell unless I login to the blog and hosting account to look.

Jeff,

Can you tell me how I can tag my main keywords in my post to the same post. I have seen many experienced bloggers (e.g. Jeff Schuman) put such tags at the end of the blog posts. I heard it’s good for SEO.

How do I tag keywords in my blog post to Technorati and displaying the tags at the end of my blog post. At the moment, I do individual tagging [tag-tec] on each and every keyword phrase at the end of my post and it works. But is there a better way of doing this?

Peter Lee
Work From Home Business Blog

Peter, your blog has two tagging plugins in place and Ultimate Tag Warrior shows your tags at the bottom of each post.

You don’t need to add the Technorati tags at the end of each post by hand. You can [tag-tec] and [tag-ice] throughout the post to make it look natural.

Besides any tags you add in the Tags area below will automatically ping Technorati and IceRocket.

So to answer your question, yes there is an easier way to add the tags at the bottom of the post [tag-tec] just don’t bother. Put them in the Tags area below the post box.

Jeff…

I have a Minneapolis real estate website at http://realestatetwincities.net. The site ranks well for “minneapolis real estate” in Google. I also have 50 other pages for 50 other cities surrounding Minneapolis. I would like to rank well for them also. They are listed at http://realestatetwincities.net/featured-communites. I don’t want to add too many city links in the sidebar. I don’t want to clutter up the site.

I tried adding a few city links in the footer. Is there a maximum number of links I could add here without hurting my ranking for “minneapolis real estate?”

Kermit, I am not an SEO expert and your question is really not WordPress related but about SEO in general. I do know that inbound links are better than outbound links, but at what point do they diminish your rankings I have no idea and only the geeks at Google could answer that for you.

But my guess is that your ranking for Minneapolis real estate has nothing to do with the number of outbound links you have, and ranking for others depends on how many posts about those terms you have and the number of links you have on other sites with those terms as the anchor text point back to your site.

Jeff,

I have 2 questions:

1. How can I find out how many RSS(Feedburner) subscribers I have.

2, I read that some wordpress blogs are set to auto ping with each blog post that is “published” and if not setup correctly, any subsequent edits (and “saved”) on the same blog post provides another ping which can get you into trouble with Google. I know my blog has auto pinging whenever I publish a post. But I like to find out if the auto pinging is only for the very first publishing and that it won’t hurt me whenever I make changes to my blog posts.

Thanks

Peter Lee
Work From Home Business Blog

Peter, login to your FeedBurner account to see your subscribers.

The plugin that automatically pings for you will not ping when you edit a post, just when a new post is published.

Peter after this I will delete all your questions. Its time you take control of your site and learn how to use Google.

Jeff,
Could you tell us the advantages of using the Smart Update Pinger plugin versus using the built in wordpress “update services”?
Also, is there any truth that adding too many plugins will slow down the loading of the blog?
Thanks,
Alex

Alex Smart Update Pinger can be turned off so no pings are not sent. This is an option you may want if you make a bunch of posts in one day and don’t want the sites to get all those pings that could flag your blog as spamming. Or if you are testing something. It also doesn’t ping an already published post after you edit it.

A lot of plugins can slow down a blog yes but it depends on what the plugin does. These types of plugins are generally those that depend on another site to work or to generate a visual effect on the blog, similarly like using a lot of banner ads hosted on another site. Also a lot of graphics can slow it down too.

Hi Jeff,
Hoping you can help. I recently went to a self hosted wordpress blog and had someone help with the install because it kept showing a messge that I needed to update. In any case, I thought we had it going, then one day I made a post and for some unknown reason the “front” page posts near the bottom (older posts) showed up in huge font size. I’m unable to change it and it only seems to be on the front page. Also, I was told that it displays fine in Firefox – I use IE. My blog URL is http://www.TheBuzzAboutMyBiz.com
Thanks in advance!
Always Grateul,
Andrea

Andrea , another reason to not upgrade WordPress until it is absolutely necessary! The bold text might be coming from an open tag <b> somewhere in the theme or in a post or the sidebar. If you copied and pasted a post from MS Word or another website this may the cause.

I haven’t messed with version 2.5 much yet but I had issues on a test blog with Simple Tags plugin causing strange things too. Resetting the Simple Tags plugin fixed it.

So 1st reset Simple Tags if you have it,
2nd pull off sidebar widgets one at a time to see it it is code in one of them,
3rd look for and clean up code in the latests posts,
4th look for bad code or a missing </div> in the themes index.php file.

Jeff,

Thanks for all you do for us.

I just did a new install of 2.5, so you may not be able to help btu I’d rather start with you and get an answer than go to the WP forum and either get no answer or a load of crap.
after I login, go to write, click on the add image icon and have the new image manager loaded

Jeff,

I don’t know what happened on my just submitted message, it didn’t come out what I thought I wrote. I’ll re-write it and send again.

Michael

Jeff,

Thanks for all you do for us.

I just did a new install of 2.5, so you may not be able to help but I’d rather start with you and get a “can’t help” answer than go to the wp forum and either get “no answer” or a load of crap.

I did a new install of 2.5 and all went very well. This is about my 10th install so I have that part down. My problem is when I launch the new image manager and try to upload a picture (one that I had previously uploaded on another wp blog, v2.3.3. I get a big red message “that the image didn’t pass the upload test”. I ftped into the site and the image is there in the newly created uploads folder. The image is listed on both the upload tab and the gallery tab and has the “show” link. But clicking on the link did nada. I tried this with several other images and same problem.

Not knowing what the new “normal standards” are for 2.5, I decided to upgrade a different blog, v2.3.3, on the same server but in a different domain. Using the same downloaded 2.5 zip files, the upgrade was a success although when I went to the upload manager, I found I had the exact same problem.

I then downloaded a new 2.5 zip and going back to the first site, the one I did the new install on, I deleted all the files. Then I dropped all the tables from the database and started all over again. Same exact results.

I went to the wp forums and there are lots of 2.5 issues but not this one.

Thoughts???

Michael

Michael try to change the permissions on the uploads folder and all file and folders within it to 777 (writable) .

Jeff,

They were and are set to 777. That is one of the first things I checked and I just checked again. In fact, with 2.5 on a new installation or upgrade where there was no previous “uploads” folder, if the permissions are not set or correct, it will not create the new “uploads” folder on the first upload attempt, just give a “no permissions error”. I know because that is what happened on the first new install I tried. So on the 2nd attempt, the upgrade on the 2nd site, and the 3rd attempt, the delete and new install back on the first site, I made sure the /wp-content/ and it’s parent /blog/ were both permissioned to 777. Also, after the system created the new /uploads/ folder I checked and it also was 777.

Michael

Mike I have very little experience with 2.5 so far but I did have a similar issue with my site when I originally installed WP over a year ago…

First try this code in your .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>
but don’t copy it from this comment area get it from this text link: :

htaccess.txt

If that doesn’t do it it may be a setting in the hosting account that you may need to contact them about. Tell them what is going on, they may need to set the proper permissions in the tmp folder or tell you how.

I have a hosting account that I install a lot of blog on and it will not allow any uploads until I contact them and ask for them to do it.

Don’t ask me what the tmp folder does or what is involved all I know is that they set it correctly when I tell them that WordPress needs permission to upload. It may not even be your problem but that is all I know about it. I would be interested if this fixes it or if you do find the fix.

Jeff

Jeff,

I found this article: 2.5 Image/Media Uploader problems

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/164999?replies=1

It has a list of all sorts of things to try. I did try adding the .htaccess file but it didn’t do anything by itself. The article says there is a bug in IE and there are two wp php files that can be downloaded from

http://trac.wordpress.org/changeset/7573?format=zip&new=7573

which when uploaded changed the look of my photo uploader page. Now everything works wonderful.

Oh yeah, one of the items was to upgrade my flash player which I did, but don’t know if it helped my problem or not.

Thanks again,

Michael

Max,

I went back to both of my 2.5 sites and found that in both cases the .htaccess file was gone. I uploaded it again and it disappeared again. So I guess it isn’t suppose to be there. Doesn’t matter, the upload still works fine on both sites without it. Seems it was the 2 new “IEFix files” that did the trick. BTW, the reason for upgrading to the latest flash player is that one of the files is “/swfuploads/header.php” file, so must be a connection.

Next problem: after uploading an image on one of the sites (A), it won’t let me insert the image into the post. Media page just goes white and does nothing. On the other site (B), the insert in post works fine. I’m going to copy all the files from A and replace all of B. With the templates identical, lets see what happens.

I’ll report on how it goes.

Michael

Hi Jeff
Thanks to your help my blog seems to work fine so far. However, today i generated a google sitemap for my main site and i wonder why my blog shows up with HTTP error 403. When i click that link the blog is coming up like normal. Do you have any idea? 1000 thanks.
Gerda

Gerda your blog has its own sitemap, but I don’t really understand where you see the 403 error.

Hello Jeff,
If you generate a google xml sitemap with xml-sitemaps.com for http://www.homebizground.com you will see that it says “businessblog/1page HTTP error 403. That is irritating me.

Peter sorry I do not know why it is getting this error or if it even makes a difference.

You can try another this is a more detailed generator:
http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

Hi Jeff,
Many thanks for your reply. I will try auditmypc. Have a nice weekend.
Gerda

I’ve written an email to the support address about 3 days ago and did not get an answer.

My problem is this:

“I’ve set up my new blog and things are looking ok in Firefox but not in Explorer. I also have another problem. When a person tries to comment, it won’t go through. It just freezes there.
I would be ready to hire your services to look into these problems if need be

I also want to have a category dealing with having a home business. Right now my categories are getting too big. I only want 2. One for weight loss and the other for home business . But I only want certain posts
to go on certain pages and I am getting confused.
I also have a static home page as you will see which I want to keep. I have read your information on categories
and am afraid it doesn’t compute at this moment.

Also cannot get the rss feed to work and don’t know how to add a clickable link in a text widget. am ok with the post area up to now.

I am open to any improvements you might suggest and would consider hiring your help..

Thanks.
Marie (aka The Stressbuster) who’s not doing that great of a job staying stress
free at the moment. “

Marie, I replied to your email the day I got it and it bounced back with an error message “no such host found”.

Hello Jeff,

I am just signing up to feedburner and I get this message:-
http://www.privy2profit.com/blog

FeedBurner discovered more than one feed at that address. Please select one to use as your source:

RSS 2.0: http://www.privy2profit.com/blog/feed
RSS .92: http://www.privy2profit.com/blog/feed/rss
Atom 0.3: http://www.privy2profit.com/blog/feed/atom

I don’t know which one to select, you did install my blog for me.

Thanks,
Barb.

Barb use this one:
RSS 2.0: http://www.privy2profit.com/blog/feed

Hi Jeff, I am pretty sure this will be a simple one.

I added a Digg button to all of my posts. Added the code to my index.php and my single.php.

all seemed to be working fine.

I have noticed that on the front page of the blog……if one story gets Dugg, they all now show the same badge and all go to the same story that got dugg.

If you look at a post as a single post it all looks and works correct but it is just on the main page.

any thoughts?

Cuzzy, it looks like you just pasted the code from the one specific post ‘Not for those afraid of heights’ into the theme. And honestly in my browser it doesn’t look too great in the area it is in. Either get the correct code or look for a Digg WordPress Plugin.

You already have Digg as part of the Add This plugin.

Jeff,

I don’t seem to be able to copy the code from the text widgets. Is there a reason for this or am I doing something wrong.

Thanks
Barb.

Barb I have no idea what you mean.????

Jeff,

Sorry, my question wasn’t very clear.
I need to highlight and copy the code for my newsletter on my website from the code in a text widget on my blog, but I cannot highlight it to copy it.

Barb

Barb, You need to copy it from the WordPress dashboard. Go to Presentation, Widgets, Click the little box on on the Text 1 Widget. place the mouse in the code area and press ctrl and a at the same time on the keyboard then right click and copy it.

I’ve got a WP 2.5 question that I hope you can answer. Since upgrading, when I insert HTML code into a text widget nothing appears after clicking on “Save”. Before WP 2.5, this was not a problem. I am doing something wrong, or need to tweak something?

Thanks.

Mark I have limited knowledge of issues with 2.5 but did you click the Change button on the bottom left of the widget before you click Save Changes?

I just posted a video on this very subject. WordPress Widgets Instruction Video Version 2.5

Jeff,

Excellent video – learned a lot about how to use the widgets, especially the text widget trick.

I tried your solution to the image problem but they still won’t appear even though the widget is in the sidebar. Perhaps I need to reinstall WP 2.5.

Hi Jeff,

Appears you’ve added an informative new blog. A lot has changed since I was last here. Could wordpress work for my new site?

Carl WordPress can run just about any website.

Hi Jeff,
Thank you for such a great assistance to geek impaired people for free!
Here’s my question
I upgraded from 2.0.2 to the latest 2.5.1 version “I used the WP Upgrade Plug-in from Techie-buzz”
After finishing the upgrade everything is OK except that pages take ages to load and sometimes even timed out
Any Idea!

Firas, sorry no idea why pages load slow, it could be an image or banner. If it is the link on your name above the permalinks are not redirecting properly. May want to check your Permalinks.

A suggestion is dump 2.5.x and go back to 2.3.3

Hi Jeff,

I was “trying” to activate some plugins and now have no access to my site. Can’t seem to login to undo whatever I did. I get this error message across my header. Any suggestions?http://www.TheBuzzAboutMyBiz.com and you should be able to see what I’m speaking about.

Always Grateful,
Andrea

Andrea login to your hosting account and delete the BAStats plugin. The error message on your site tells the name of the offending plugin.

Hey Jeff,

What sounds so easy to fix can be frustrating for the technically challenged. I searched in my Cpanel within the blog folder for the BAstats plugin and can not seem to find it. Could you be more specific as to where it may be located.

Thanks.
Always Grateful,
Andrea

Andrea, the location of the plugin was shown in the error message. I don’t see the error any more so perhaps you figured it out.

Some plugins are a single file and some are an entire folder or directory. I don’t know the actual name of the file or folder to delete but it should be something like BAStats.

Plugins are in your blogs plugins directory within the wp-content directory.

Hey Jeff,

I was wondering if it’s possiable to add a squeeze page to my site and if so how?

John adding an a squeeze page to your site even if it is running on WordPress is the same as if it was a static HTML site. I assume you don’t want the page to look like the WordPress theme. I suggest creating a new directory in your hosting account. And then create your new HTML squeeze page and upload it to the new directory and call the squeeze page index.html.
For example if call your new directory squeeze and place your new page in it and call the file index.hrml the URL for the new squeeze page would be http://www.homeaffilate.com/squeeze.

Its very important to make sure you don’t put a file into the main directory called index.html! If you want to put the new file in the main directory call it something different. The reason I suggest using a new directory is to keep your files organized and the file extension will not show on the URL.

I have instructions to use NVU to edit a static site here:How To Edit A Webpage With Nvu

Hi Jeff,

I looking to change the theme of my blog and was told to:

“download your theme folder and place it onto your computer somewhere where you will not touch it, just use it for a backup.”

My problem, I can’t seem to figure out how to download it.

Simple yet detailed advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
Always Grateful,
Andrea

Andrea, you need to connect to your hosting account with an FTP client. Then browse to your themes folder and download it. Your theme is in the themes folder that is in the wp-content folder. wp-content/themes/yourtheme.

If you haven’t modified the theme in any way then it really isn’t necessary as long as you have the original.

Jeff,

I have been trying to get my recent comments widget to work the way I want it, but it just keeps bundling all the names and links together. It makes it look like a paragraph in my sidebar. Your Recent Comments area looks exactly like how I want mine. How did you do it?

Thanks,
Kyle Judkins

Kyle, my recent comments is the default from the theme. I did nothing special to it. Your theme’s css for the the recent comments must need some tweaking. Look for it in the themes style.css file.

Jeff,

I’m not that great at editing the css. Do you have any tips on what I should be looking for or how I should change it?

Thanks,
Kyle

Kyle, all themes are coded differently, I couldn’t start to explain all the possibilities. You may want to take your question to a forum and be prepared to show the code of your style.css file.

Digital Point is a good place to start. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=40

Hi Jeff,

Well I was able to change my theme with the old one safe and sound on my HD. Thanks!

I wanted to change the background color of my header and it seems what ever i do it remains the same. I went into the theme editor where I cahnged the color code but nothing happens. it worked for the Post titles and Header name, but doesn’t seem to change the header background color.

Any suggestions?

Always Grateful,
Andrea

Andrea changing themes colors is very tricky and every theme is coded differently. The theme you currently have up is actually using an image for the header so you would need to edit it or use another image.

Another thing about the image header is it a repeated image and you would have to create one just like it or edit the header areas css to use a bigger image.

The current image is here: http://thebuzzaboutmybiz.com/wp-content/themes/tiga-06/images/header-bg.jpg it is barley visible on the far left of your browser.

Hi Jeff,

I feel foolish asking this question, but here goes:

How do you format a post so that text can be wrapped around images? Specifically, if the image is on the left or right of the post, how can you wrap the text around it?

Thanks for your help,

Carol
http://www.divineva.com/blog

Carol using the visual editor click the image and then the icon on the tool bar that looks like a small tree. You can then align it to the side you want, add a border and define how much vertical and horizontal space between the image and text.

I knew it had to be something really simple. Thanks so much!

Carol
http://www.divineva.com/blog

Hi Max,

I am trying to write a new post on my new blog on my new 2.5 wordpress installation. When I go to the admin screen and click on the Write tab, of course it gives me the option to write a post, page, or link. Clicking on the page and link works just fine. When I click on post to write a new post, nothing appears. No fields, only “WordPress 2.5.1 is available! Please update now.” I continue to click and click and click, and I get no option to write a new post. I’ve tried uninstalling my theme and installing it again, but to no avail.

Just to let you know, I deleted the “Hello” post that always appears with a new installation and new theme. But I didn’t think doing so would render me unable to write a new post.

Can you help me?

Thank you for the gift of your time.

Kay deactivate all plugins and see if that fixes it, if so activate one at a time to find the culprit. If still an issue try a different theme. Next to try is upgrade to 2.5.1. After that email me. ..

I’ll try that, Jeff. Although, I have no plugins activated (I just installed 2.5 a couple of days ago)! I haven’t even downloaded any new ones besides the akismet and hello dolly plugins included with the new installation, and haven’t yet even activated akismet or hello dolly. Am I really being forced to go to 2.5.1?

Hi again, Jeff.

Right now, my static page is the index.php file. In my theme, it has the title of “Home”. However, I don’t want the index.php file to be my home page. I’d actually like to create another page called “Home” and use a different page template than the one the index.php file uses.

Can you point me to how I would do this?

Thanks!

Kay search this site for static front page. Or Google for WordPress static front page and then Google custom WordPress Page template. Myself and many others have posted guides how to do it.

Your theme problem is more of a forum topic than question that I can answer here. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=40

Wow, great site! I just recently started a Wordpress 2.5 blog and have a few questions please…

1) I am unable to remove two RSS widgets in my widget sidebar. When I click the ‘Edit’ button, the part of the edit box that has the ‘change’ and ‘remove’ buttons is invisible. I can see the entire edit box if I drag it to the right a bit, but can not access those two buttons (change & remove) because the edit box will just snap back into its place under the other widgets. The same thing is happening with my ‘Text’ widget too. How can I fix this?

2) How can I modify the size of the font and the actual font used in my Header?

3) I would like ALL my comments to always be visible when someone comes to my blog page without having to click the little tiny ‘comments’ link at the bottom of my post. Is that possible?

4) I tried to add a cell with my newsletter subscription form to a Text widget box and it messed up the way my page looked, yet that cell is much narrower than my existing sidebar. Is there any method for how to do that?

5) I had a blog before when my site was hosted by SBI (SiteBuildIt) and it went away when I changed hosts. I would like to add the content from my old blog to my new Wordpress blog. Can I add those old blog posts now and back-date them?

6) When you want to add something to your blog, how do you decide whether it should be a POST…OR…a PAGE?

7) Does Wordpress have a fast and easy way to wrap text around Flickr images? I tried typing some code in (because Wordpress wouldn’t allow me to just paste the code in) I found on one site dealing with this issue but couldn’t get the text to wrap.

I know that is a lot of questions but if or when you get a chance I would really appreciate your help.

Thank you very much.

Stephen others have the same issue with text widgets and upgrading to 2.5.1 doesn’t
seem to resolve the issue either some have had luck using Firefox instead of
Internet Explorer. I haven’t used IE for years Firefox is much better. Check out
this thread on the WordPress forum it may have a fix for you or possible in the
future: WP 2.5 widgets are broken

Number 2 is tough because all themes are coded differently and I would need
to see your actual theme to tell you what code in the stylesheet to edit. Sorry
I can’t get into more details but you really need to know what to look for and a
bit of css to do it.

Number 3 again can be a complex coding issue that depends on the theme. I
would not want all comments shown on the main blog page it could get way too
long, take this page for example over 100 comments long would you want all that
cluttering up the main page of your blog? 

Number 4, check your code and make sure all script and HTML tags are closed.

Number 5, if you have access to them you would just need to copy the text and
make them all new posts manually.

Number 6, page or post? A post goes in the loop of the blog a page doesn’t.
Posts are filed into the category it is in and will eventually fall off the
front page of the blog.  Recent posts will eventually fall off the Recent
Posts sidebar widget too. This is a page and pages are usually used for more
important things that you don’t want in the blog loop and the pages sidebar
widget can be set to show all the pages, os links to them will not fall off the
sidebar like post do. I suggest using pages sparingly.   

Number 7, there may be a plugin for it but I addressed that issue for Carol a
few comments up.

Ask more than two questions next time and I’ll kill ya!

Or try this to find your answers:

Search

Hi Max, I upgraded the blog with the same Prosense theme last month to WP 2.5. I am not getting help from the creator. The single.php may be missing some text in the upgrade. I can’t figure out why the two sidebars are not showing on the right side when you click on single post to read it.

Thanks for your help.

And please email me!

P.S. Do you have any problems with the theme you have on this site. Is it hard for a non programmer to change the colors?

Lynne, I have tested both Prosense themes on a test blog running 2.5.1 and have similar issues. My sidebar showed below all the content on both the main index and single posts. I messed with the code and couldn’t find the offending or missing code. I suspect the integrated AdSense code scripts but not sure.

Interesting when I deactivate all plugins the sidebar went back to the proper location but then the background for the whole blog changed to a dark gray color.

If it were me I would dump the theme, there are other ones out there that work well with 2.5 but AdSense would need to be placed into the theme manually. I like this one http://ads.blogging-secret.com/

Hello Jeff,

I’m trying to verify my that I am the site owner with google. It needs me to add a mega tag to my sites index file. It says to ….
Copy the meta tag listed below and paste it in your site’s home page in the first section of the page, before the first section.
I have no idea what they are talking about.
thanks for your help
John

John, Look at the instructions on Google again and see exactly they tell you to put the code. I think it is somewhere near the closing body tag right? That should be in the header.php or footer.php file.

In WordPress go to Presentation or Design, click the theme editor and look for the correct area in the header.php or footer.php files. If you can’t edit the files directly from the dashboard the permissions on them will need to be changed to 777 or 666 in the hosting account. The themes are in the wp-content folder.

Jeff,
Thanks for the the quick response. I’ve added the tag
Thanks again.

John,
http://www.homeaffilate.com

Hi Jeff, I tried the theme you recommended http://ads.blogging-secret.com/ and it looked horrible for my site. I can’t get the blue colors I need, there are no instructins to implement a 3 column and it won’t display my logo or feed button when you copy it into the places needed in the template. Prosense is much easier. I just wish I could figure out why the theme is not displaying the sidebar content on post pages.

Lynne, get the theme author to fix it or find a new theme. There are thousands of themes out there.

Maybe try a few WordPress forums to see if anyone else has had the same issues as you. I am one person and I don’t know how to fix it, a forum will reach many many more…

Stumbled upon your blog while researching the above topic. Thought you can help..

I am trying to create separate RSS feeds for categories . Can you help with some instructions.

I tried this , helped from someone

when i type in http://www.example.com/category/categoryname/feed/ in the address bar.
This is the message i get

404 Not Found : The requested URL /category/categoryname/feed/ was not found on this server.

after i type in for example

http://www.recruit20.com/category/Communications/feed/

as in my site ( http://www.recruit20.com)

This is what i have been doing : I type the above into my address bar and i get 404 Not Found :

and i also need to put a small RSS icon in the categories.
Really appreciate your help.

Feroz, The category URL example above may only work with custom permalinks or depending on the theme, Sorry but I don’t know for sure. Right now you have the default permalinks and your categories are showing like this:
http://www.recruit20.com/?cat=34/

Where my permalinks are like this for a category:
http://www.wordpressmax.com/category/plugins/
and has its own feed.

I would worry about getting the feed to work on the categories before worrying about the icons on them. Then I guess you could burn each category on FeedBurner and add the links to them manually in a text widget?

Hi Jeff,

I was wondering how you can change the color of a link. When I’m making a post and want to link a word to a site, is it possible to change the color of that word. Right now, underlined words and linked words look no different unless you hoover over the word.

Thanks in advance,
Andrea

Andrea, I just made a post about this, the themes stylesheet will need edited to change them.
Here is the post:

Edit Modify Or Change WordPress Links

Hi Jeff,

I have a 2 questions.

1. I want just a summary of my article to show on my blog
that says (click here to read more) or something like that,
how can I do this?

2.How do I add banners to sidebar?

Thanks,
Ben

Ben the easiest way to cut off the post is when writing it and clicking the More button on the toolbar, It is usually next to the icon that looks like a tree. The More button or icon has two white rectangles on it. Just click in the area where you want to cut off the post and then click the More icon.

When I setup blogs for people I send them to a page on this site that has instructions to use it. Here:
http://www.wordpressmax.com/wordpress-optimization-guide

On that page are links to a few posts about Sidebar widgets that is used to add banners, links, text and just about anything else using text widgets. Go there and look for two posts:

WordPress 2.5 Sidebar Widgets Guide

WordPress 2.5 Sidebar Widgets Video

Jeff,

I have been trying to add a little picture to my post in the same position as your lazy slob picture above.

The code I use to insert adsense into a post, doesn’t seem to work for a picture.

Thanks.
Barb

Barb, this exact question (by Carol) was answered about 10 questions up. When you upload an image when creating or editing a post you can use the insert/edit image icon on the visual editor toolbar to position the image.

After uploading the image, click the image and then the little icon that looks like a tree to open the edit dialog box.

Jeff,

Sorry you had to repeat yourself.

I have managed to insert the picture, but it still shows the text right next to the picture even though there is a space there in my visual editor.

Barb

Barb, Click the image and then the edit image box and then the appearance tab. Align it and add some vertical and or horizontal space to it. Experiment with it until you get it positioned how you want it.

If that doesn’t work then you will need to use raw code and a quick search on Google for “position WordPress images in a post” found many guides online to help. Here is just one of them:

How to Position an Image and Wrap Text Around an Image Using WordPress

Hi, I am redoing our site and want to back-date the blog posts. Wordpress 2.5.1 keeps putting a time stamp with today’s date even when I enter the date manually. Everything I’ve searched online says to use Post Timestamp, but I don’t think my version of Wordpress has this feature.

To edit the post time stamp click Manage, and then the title of post to edit. Once the post is open look on the top right side under Publish Status just below the check box to make the post private is the post time stamp. The date the post was published is shown with a link to edit the date. Click the edit link to change the date.

Jeff,

I don’t want the date and time to appear on my posts.
Is there a way of turning them off.

Thankyou
Barb

The post date and time is part of the themes code. The only way to ‘turn it off’ is to edit the themes code.

Jeff,

Am I using the technorati tags correctly?
I tagged one post ’simple ways to make money’ (2nd post if you click my blog link) but when I click on the tag my post is not there.

Barb

Barb your post is on Technorati here: http://technorati.com/tag/simple+ways+to+make+money

If you don’t see it scroll down and click the next page links.

Hi,
There seems to be a display issue with my WP blog at http://www.wineracksandbars.com
When I posted a couple of articles the page border/outline split into two sections and looks broken. The About page has maintained its correct layout. Can you suggest how I might fix this?
Thanks,
Drew

It could be any number of things in your case but my first suspicion is the theme’s background image CSS settings. The about page is not very long and is showing properly. If it were longer it may also have a problem. My first guess is the background image for all pages or templates is specified at a certian height. Look at the style.css file for the main background image height setting.

It could also be a plugin that is needed for your theme and you are not using it or its not configured correctly.

My WordPress Blog is Broken and I Don’t Know What to Do

Jeff,
I need to upload a PDF to my WP blog post so it can be hot-linked and people can open it up….I went to the media section and uploaded the PDF and can see it sitting there…..how do I get it into the post??

“get it into the post” ? Do you mean a link to the PDF into the post? The Permalink for the uploaded file can be found in the Media Library menu… Click Manage then Media Library. When in there click the Permalink next to the file, that will open what looks like a post, within that post then click the link to the file to open it and copy the URL in your address bar.

It is much easier to just upload it into a directory in your hosting account. Once uploaded there click it to open it in your browser and copy the URL.

Jeff,
That did it, thank you!
I just hot-linked the words “click here” to the permalink….had no idea how that worked, thanks again for your fast response….and your install/optimization service was just as great and fast!!

Mike
http://www.totalmarketingtoolboxblog.com

Jeff,

My latest post I put into 2 categories:-
paid survey reviews and UK program reviews

The url is… /UK-program-reviews/…
but I want it to be …/paid-survey-reviews/…

No matter what I do, if I choose the 2 categories it always comes up as …/UK-program-reviews/…

I hope this makes sense.
Barb.

Barb it is using the first category only in the permalink or URL. The post was made and now I suggest not trying to change the permalink or it will break the links you have to pinged and bookmarked sites.

In the future I suggest using only one category, make the post and then try adding another category after the permalink is set.

I’m using the Kubrick theme with wp 2.5.

The problem is that I can only see a right sidebar on the main index page. No sidebar appears on all the other single post pages. Is there a way to make my sidebar (with widgets) appear on EVERY page of my blog?

Thank you very much!
Steve

—- UPDATE FOR MY ABOVE POST! —–

I did a search on your site for adding the sidebar to ALL single posts and did what you said to do here:
http://www.wordpressmax.com/wordpress/add-sidebar

The sidebar is now appearing on the single post pages, but it starts way down the page instead of starting at the top right. Can you please tell me how to fix that so it starts at the top right?

Thanks again.
Steve

Steve you might have put the code in the wrong area or need an additional closing tag.

I really can’t troubleshoot the issue without seeing your code, and honestly it’s been a long time since I made that post.

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for responding. This is what i did…

1) I went here: http://www.wordpressmax.com/wordpress/add-sidebar

2) You said:
“If the sidebar is not showing on single posts, the same process can be done on the single post template (single.php).”

So like you said, I put this in the single.php at the end:

So it now looks like this:

I swear, that is the ONLY thing I added to it and I put it in the exact same place that I was supposed to.

I have a copy of the original code so I can easily change it back to what it was if needed.

Got any idea’s how I can fix this?

Thanks again.
Steve

Hey Jeff, I fixed it thanks to your post here http://www.wordpressmax.com/wordpress/add-sidebar and a comment someone put at the very bottom of your page. I just narrowed column like the guy said.

Thanks for a great site dude!

Steve

Steve I edited the post and added this step:

First you need to change the column width from wide to narrow to make room for the sidebar. At the top of the page.php or single.php file change the following code:

<div id=”content” class=”widecolumn”>

Change it to:

<div id=”content” class=”narrowcolumn”>

That should fix your theme.

I am unable to edit variables.php, header.php and footer.php files with my Theme Editor. This statement appears at the bottom of each file window. “You need to make this file writable before you can save your changes. See the Codex for more information”. I read the information in the Codex with no success. How do I make these files writable?

Richard, login to your hosting account, browse to your blog directory, open the wp-content folder, open the themes folder, open the theme folder you want to edit . Change the permissions on the files you wish to edit to 777 or 666.

Hello Jeff,
Thanks for your help. I followed your instructions on changing the permissions on the themes files and made them writable. I will be contacting you soon to optimize my blog.

Jeff,

I read somewhere that we should use the h1 tag in our posts.

Is that right?

Barb

what is the content and use difference between EXPORT and BACKUP?

will either or both fully protect against loss of post content in the event of server failure?

The title of the post is is actually an H2 tag as well as the title of the page or URL. I have no idea why or how you would use an H1 tag on posts.

Richard Export is for exporting your posts, categories and comments. This is used to import that content from within the WordPress dashboard.

Backup is for backing up or actually exporting the database, which holds the above content as well as other settings if you choose to backup those items. The database backup will need to be imported through your hosting accounts phpMyAdmin panel.

HI Jeff

I watched the video you made on “How to create a custom wordpress template” I loved it made a rather difficult task seem very very easy! I knew it was easy Just that everyone made it sound difficult. My question is I am using wordpress 2.6 I followed everything you said in the video but still my squeeze page does not show. What could I be doing wrong?

Luis, not sure what “it doesn’t show” means. If you followed the steps you should have seen the new custom page template to choose from when creating a new, or editing an existing page (not post). You might have missed a step or something.

Nothing will show until you create a page with the custom template, even if everything you want to show is in the custom template, to show it create a blank page with at least a title.

Remember the video I made is old and references a very different version of WordPress. The steps should still be the same but some of the menu choices have changed or are renamed but are still there in the dashboard.

Jeff

Thanks for the speedy answer!
Well I followed your steps to the T.
The only thing is in wordpress 2.6 you can not choose a page template anywhere!

Luis, Scroll down it’s there between Page Parent and Page Order, Third from the bottom.

Jeff

You were right and wrong. There seems to be a problem in wordpress 2.6 with page template. I went to the forum

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/190138

Found out other people also had same problem followed instructions it is now sorted!

But thank you so much for help I really appreciate it A LOT!

Hey Jeff,

I want to create a static looking site using the WP platform, but I still want all the cool search engine friendly stuff going on like what happens with my blog.

So instead of my site’s url being:
http://www.mysite.com/blog/

I want the url to be:
http://www.mysite.com so the url looks like a regular site.

Do you know how I can do that? I already installed WP into my cpanel but haven’t added anything so it would be no big deal to remove it from the cpanel and start over. However, I don’t see anywhere in the fantastico installation where I can make the url like that.

Thanks again! Your site has been a tremendous resource!

Steve

Hi Jeff, its Steve here again…

I was wondering if you had an opinion on the program Rapid Niche Websites? I’m not affiliated with them. It is a stand alone program that creates WP themes to look like static websites. I’ve heard good things about it on the Warrior Forum, but since you’re the WP expert, have you heard anything good about it?

Thanks again.
Steve

Hey Jeff,

Sorry to keep bugging you here but its relevant to the question I asked two posts above this about making your url look like a regular static site without the /blog/ at the end.

You said to put it in the root folder to avoid the /blog/ at the end, but then all my wp files are loose and all over the place. Is there anyway to contain all the wp stuff in one folder all by itself so its more organized?

On the other hand, since I won’t be ftping everything from my html editor (like a “normal” site) with all its files, then maybe it won’t make a difference that all the wp files are in the root folder, right?

Thanks again.
Steve

Steve, you can keep the files where they are and just move the blog to the root of the domain. The link below is the second site that comes up in a Google for “move wordpress files directory” Here is the official guide from WordPress.org

Giving WordPress its Own Directory While Leaving Your Blog in the Root Directory

I know nothing about Rapid Niche Websites, but with so many free themes and the abundance of free information about WordPress available with some research on Google why pay $200 for it. Besides The only people that really care what a site or blog looks like (to a certain extent) is the person running it. I use the Internet for information not how it’s presented to me.

Hi Jeff,

Can you tell me how I create a different sidebar to show on a custom page.

Thanks,

Sharon

Sharon the detailed answer to your question is a bit too involved. Basically what you would need to do is create a new custom sidebar and replace the code in your custom page to call for the new sidebar in place of the old one. It could involve a good bit of php coding knowledge depending on what you want shown.

A quick Google search found this topic on the WordPress forum:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/175500

I suggest to ask this question on a forum like this:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=40

Hey Jeff,

Thank you for your reply. I (well my husband actually) followed the link you recommended and after a bit of digging around managed to create a hack that works for me.

I’ll get him to post his solution here.

Thanks once again,

Hi,

Since I upgraded my site to 2.6 no one can post comments. It goes to a 404 page instead. When I look at the url on the 404 page it shows two urls jammed together instead of one.

http://sizzleonthegrill.com/blog-/wp-content/themes/sizzle/http://sizzleonthegrill.com/blog/wp-comments-post.php

I turned off all the plug-ins and still doesn’t work.

Thanks,

Michael

Hi Jeff,

I have 2 questions about this site/theme please:
http://www.patriciasphotographs.com/

1) See the big grey rectangle near the top of each page to put a wide angle photo in? Can you please tell me how I can take that big rectangle out of every page?

2) I would like the text that I type in to be much brighter so its easier to read against the black background. I bolded the text but that still isn’t bright enough. Do you know how I can change the default text/font for the entire site so it is a brighter white?

Thank you.
Steve

Steve, since the theme isn’t free I couldn’t download it to investigate further. And your “theme specific” questions are not all that easy to answer. Since all themes are coded slightly different it would be hard to guess without actually seeing the themes files. Especially for the big gray rectangle.

For the text look In the themes stylesheet for the hex number that is gray, probably #666 and change it to something lighter like white FFFFFF. But be warned the change may effect other text areas as well.

Jeff

I am wanting to add a lightbox (Aweber) in my blog.
Now I am using Wordpress 2.6
I tried adding the code into the a widget as a text box.
But no luck. How else would I add this code?
Could it be theme related?

Luis… I have no idea what a lightbox is other than the clue to Aweber, so I guess it is a script for an autoresponder opt-in box? Maybe find a different way to generate the code using HTML? Or contact Aweber support or see if they have a forum.

Jeff

A lightbox is basically a pop up that fades in like a light switch.
I contacted Aweber they said I should pay them $29.99 and the will add the line of code into my website!

Does not sound fair!

Hi Max

Appreciate if you can help..

I would like the function to hyperlink into a completely new page.

Can u help with the code ( I am a novice in php)

Thanks
Feroz

Feroz, that is one I have no idea about, I suggest asking on a few forums like the WordPress.org or Digital Point

Thanks for offering to answer questions. Just installed WP to a brand new site. All the buttons in the admin panel are grayed out with no graphic. I’m talking about the bold, italics, etc. Also not getting preview pics of themes in the Design tab. Again, just a gray box with name of theme. Any help appreciated!

Clara, yours is not a cut and dry quick answer and is more of a forum question. A quick search on the WordPress Forum found a few threads that could help you. Try these threads on the forum:
Visual Editor Doesn’t Work
2.5 Visual Editor

The theme preview could be a browser issue and not a WordPress problem, WordPress uses Flash to preview themes so you may be missing the Flash add on for your browser.

Then it all could be related to the actual theme you are using.

I’ll check it out. thanks for your help.

WordPress Membership Plugin?

I’m not looking for an all – or nothing solution. What I’m interested in is how to allow everyone partial access to the site, and to allow certain designated members (not paying members, so payment processing is NOT needed) additional access – to certain posts, or to pages that may have download links on them for instance.

I’m looking into a plugin called Your Members, though Im not completely sure it does what I want it to do.

Can you offer any suggestions?

Thanks,
Kat

Kat, sorry I have no experience with any membership plugins. I suggest searching the wordpress.org forum for more info.
http://wordpress.org/support/

I have installed comment luv on my blog, but can’t seem to find how to add the widget to the sidebar.

Do you know anything about this?

Thanks!

Joel I know nothing about comment luv. I suggest you read all the information about it here:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/commentluv/

Thank you! It looks like a great plugin, I just can’t figure it out. I will have a look at the suggested website.

Jeff,
I’m now about to tax your brain.
I am a really new geek and I have questions:
1/ I have done 3 blogs and saved [not published] them so I could go back and edit them. Where, or how, do I find them? I clicked every link I could find. No joy.
2/ What are widgets and how should I use them?
Sorry for such basic/banal questions.
John Yeomans

John, 3 “blogs” or 3 posts on your blog? To manage or edit a post click Manage then Post. Just above the actual lists of published posts you will see “All Posts” Published and Drafts. You want to click Drafts.

Widgets are the items on the sidebar, put whatever you want in them. More about widgets here:

WordPress
2.5 Sidebar Widgets Guide

WordPress
2.5 Sidebar Widgets Video

Hey Jeff,

1) I want to make the title of my site (in the header) a clickable home page link. Just the title and not the entire header. Can you please tell me how and where to do that?

2) I’m using the ‘Share This’ plugin but I would like to remove it completely from my home page posts, yet I still want it on my post pages? Do you know how to do that?

Thank you very much!

Steve I have a post here about making the image clickable: http://www.wordpressmax.com/wordpress/wordpress-header-link

All themes are coded differently but the header file is what you want to edit and since you didn’t leave a link to your blog I can’t answer your question.

The Share This plugin has instructions and the code to copy to use on the single post template in its menu in the WordPress dashboard. You just choose not to show the Share This icon in its settings and then paste the code in the area of your theme where you want it to show.

Yes I saw your page http://www.wordpressmax.com/wordpress/wordpress-header-link about changing the entire header IMAGE into a clickable home page link, but I don’t have an image in my header.

In my case, I only want to make the title of my header a clickable home page link. Since my header doesn’t have an image in it, can you please tell me how to do that?

Thank again.
Steve

Steve, I said in the previous comment:

“All themes are coded differently but the header file is what you want to edit and since you didn’t leave a link to your blog I can’t answer your question.”

Since you didn’t give a link to your blog and I can’t see your WordPress theme, I can’t answer your question. If you read the instruction area above the comment section, I spell it out pretty clearly “If you have a question about your blog please leave a link to it.”

Hey Jeff,

Sorry I didn’t put the link there Jeff and I can understand why that would annoy you, but the article I had the link to was about creating a header image into one big link, and in my case, I don’t have an image in my header and I only wanted the title as a link. I did find a link elsewhere on your site for that information and was able to do that. So thanks again for a great site!

Steve

Hi Jeff,

1) How can I make the width of this site http://www.identityprotectionreports.com/ be fixed to about 8.5″ or so? Currently it stretches to fit the screen and I don’t like the positioning of the sidebar and footer links (especially on the post pages) when seen full width. My searches bring up results that tell me to change the width in the style.css but I don’t see the same code they are describing in there.

2) Same site: See that 1/8″ inch of white space on the far left edge of the page and also above the header? Well, I want to keep the white space on the left edge of the page, but I don’t like that white space above the header. Do you know how I can remove the 1/8″ of white space that is above the header?

Thank you very much.
Steve

P.S. Just letting you know here… I tried to submit this but it kept saying that I needed to add my name and email address when they were already there. I’m using Firefox 3.0.

Sorry Steve those are not just a few simple questions that I can just give a quick answer to. Every WP theme is coded differently and I would need to take the time to look at your particular theme to answer them. But time is money, and I haven’t enough of either.

I understand and thanks anyway.

Its a shame that the guy that created the theme and script doesn’t support this stuff, especially considering I paid him $200 for it.

Jeff,

This is another $10 beer question…

I’m following your instruction video for “How to create a custom wordpress page template.”

After install as shown, when I view my page in Firefox it has a bunch of little questions marks all over the page, IE7 shows little squares. Other than that the page looks fine

I decided to upload the page and it’s images to a site I own with nothing built on it yet, everything looks fine in FF and IE7.

The code for my static page shows: text/html; charset=windows-1252

Is it possible that the coding for the static page, which was loaded into the active theme folder is in “conflict” with the theme coding?

Any ideas how to resolve the issue?

FLY NAVY!

Cheers,

Mike

ps Got your emails, I’ll be paying you to look at the site in detail as soon as I get the above issue resolved and the site built out.

Mike those little weird characters are probably spaces, apostrophes, or quotation marks that were typed into a MS Word type program or the code you used was copied from a similar program or a website. Or you may have opened the original page template in a similar application and corrupted the file.

The code used for the page template needs to be created in plain text like in notepad or wordpad. Characters like ” or ‘ and even spaces sometimes from MS word will do this on any website.

Open the file in either the WordPress theme editor, Notepad, Wordpad or directly in your hosting account. Then compare the file with what is visible online and simply remove and add back in the correct characters. The characters may look right in the raw file but for example if you look at the ” (quotes) in a text editor and compare them to those typed in MS Word the Word ” (quotes) are a bit different and have a little more of a curl on one end. They will screw up a website not only WordPress.

Jeff,

I think I’m getting rummy!

I have a new Wordpress blog installed, still has the default theme. Using the catagories widget from theme editor, I have gone to catagories and added a couple new ones but I can’t see them on the blog. I’ve refreshed the page, saved my settings when the catgories added, all the usual stuff.

It’s been a long week and I feel like I’m missing something obvious and simple…can you shed a little light on this problem?

Cheers!

Mike

FLY NAVY!

Mike a category will not show anywhere on the front side of the blog until a post is made in the category.

Hi Max, How does one align a logo on the left side of a Wordpress header when it is flush against the top of the header and needs to be in the middle vertically? How does one align a banner on the right side of a header to be in the middle vertically and is currently pressed down to the right. Thanks!

Lynne, that all depends on how the particular theme is coded and since you left no link to it…

You may need to change the padding or margins or sizes in the stylesheet for the header logo and banner. If you just put these in the header without any style associated with them, then that is probably the problem.

That is about all I can tell you since all themes are coded differently. You will need to experiment with yours on your own or pay someone with the knowledge to fix it for you.

My blog is allaboutkimberly.com. I am using a theme called unbound (there’s a link at the bottom of my site). I think what i want to do is easy, but I can’t seem to figure it out. I’d like to make the font size smaller in the sidebar headings (i.e. Favorite Sites, Us Girls, Recent Posts, etc)

A more complicated question I have is the spacing above those titles. Seems like there is lots of extra space there to me making too much space between each widget. I’d love to decrease that slightly.

If you could address either or both of these issues, I would be VERY grateful.

I just wanted to comment that I THINK I just figured both of these out right after I asked…still playing, but I at least found the correct spot.

Kimberly, it is very difficult to give answers to specific theme modifications since all are coded differently.

You should be looking in the style.css file. How your theme is calling for the sidebar titles is as unique as the theme. It could be using an (h being a number) tag or a specific

Hi Jeff,

First of all. thanks for being such a very helpful resource.

I have recently tried to add AdSense to my site. However, I was wondering why, in the “first” post page (or Home in the original theme), the ad banners in certain posts that I tried dont show, and only blank space can be seen? But when I look at the same posts in their own categories, I can see them fine. This seems to happen in the first post page only. When I go to next post pages, I can see all ad banners in those posts that I tried. But again why only ad banners in the first two posts in the first post page can be seen?

Would really appreciate your advice here.
Many thanks
Mc

MC you might need to put the ad code in another file, probably the index.php file.

Hi Jeff,

Thanks. Just had a chance to try your advice and it works fine.

Thanks
Mc

Mc, glad to help! “If the girls don’t find you handsome they should at least find you handy”

And if you know who says/said that you watch too much TV!

Hi Jeff

When I login to wp-admin why direct to global dashboard? not to blog dashboard? And there was not my blog in the list? So I could not make posting, etc.

many thanks

sableng

Sableng, this site is dedicated to self-hosted WordPress blogs, not blogs hosted on WordPress.com.

I suggest you check out the WordPress.com forum here:
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/

1) I would like to change BOTH my current WP username AND password. I’ve seen information http://eventurebiz.com/blog/securing-your-wordpress-blog-post-3-how-to-change-your-username/ where they say you can change the default WP username ‘Admin’ to whatever you want, but I was wondering if I can do the same thing for a username I created (which was different than ‘Admin’) to another username?

2) When I look directly below your ‘Submit Comment’ button here, I see a little ‘Notify me of followup comments via email’ with the check box. Can you please tell me what plugin you used that puts that there?

3) Can you recommend a good reliable Adsense plugin please?

Thanks very much.

Steve

Well if you can change the username as the post says I don’t think it matters if the name is Admin or George…

That is a lot of work to change the username and password. you could just create a new user as an administrator. Then login as that user. Then delete the other user BUT, BUT, MAKE sure NOT to delete the users posts but choose the option: “Attribute all posts and links to” I suggest backing up the blog first if you have a lot of posts to lose!

The box on comments is a plugin called Subscribe to Comments:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments/

AdSense Deluxe:
http://www.acmetech.com/blog/adsense-deluxe/

Max… so happy to find you.

There is a top bar across my blog that hold my static “pages” I have an about page, products page etc.

I have prepared an Articles page. It will be the parent page to all of my articles. (These will be static articles not posts)

I completed my page and published it… but the page does not come up… only a page that says Index.

I had no trouble putting up the rest of my pages. I can’t figure out how to make this Article page work.

Any suggestions?

Kathy – Insightful Nana

Kathy, I don’t think you are giving me all the information like how you made this page, if it is a regular page you published in the dashboard then it should show on the navigation bar. Sounds like you did something different with this one and your question is not really a general “How To” question. Please look at what is stated in the content area of this page:

This is intended to help with general
“how-to” questions and not a troubleshooting forum for highly technical
issues. I try to help with all questions or point you in the right direction to find your answers. If you want help with a very specific issue you want me to try to fix or want your blog optimized or theme customized email me. I can do that for a small fee.

Thanks Jeff for Answering.

I made the page as I have all other pages. I went to Write – Pages.
Put in my information and published.

The Word “Article” shows up on the navigation bar but when you click on it says index. Go take a look. http:insightfulnana.com.

On that page should be the Titles of two articles that if you click on them.. would take you to the articles. The two articles are sub
pages to the parent page “Articles.”

Hey… I might have some insight here. I think I screwed my blog up.

I’ve been reading your “how to screw up a blog” and I did just what you said would screw it up. I copies from another source into the visual editor. I copies my articles from Neo Office where I had composed them.

On the article page… I have these two article (which I put on sub pages) links on the parent article page.

How do I get out of this mess? Can I just delete everything and start again or have I really messed things up?

Kathy

Just edit the pages and paste the text into the HTML editor, not the Visual editor. Then switch over to the visual editor and add in any links or formatting using the visual editor.

Oh my gosh! What a great find! some on that will directly answer my questions about WordPress. Yeah! I think I have died and gone to Heaven.

I just read “Why Have A WordPress Blog On Your Own Domain” you talk about changing the URL of the post so that it is SEO friendly (Permalinks). I just can’t see where I would do that. I am still on 2.6.

Sheila

I have another question. I want to shorten my posts so that only part of the post shows and you have to click to get the rest of the story. I can not see how to do that.

Sheila

Do you have some sort of a complete ebook to make a wp theme?

very nice post

Silly me, I thought I could rename “blog” to “oldblog” and “wpblog” to “blog” and voila, the new wordpress blog would show up in place of the old hand-coded HTML one.

How can I modify the size of the font and the actual font used in my Header?

Sheila, the permalink structure is changed under settings or options, if you Google WordPress permalinks you find all you need to know.

To shorten the posts on the main page insert the more tag on the post. Its an option on the toolbar of the post editor.
Google WordPress more tag.

The complete book to make a WordPress theme is online its called “Google”

Sicken, changing the size of the blog title and tagline varies widely from theme to theme. It is done in the theme editor in the style.css file. But its next to impossible to tell you exactly how without seeing your themes files. This would fall under a chargeable customization if you want me to do it or even research it for you.

Sorry due to the abundance of questions and time restraints Ask Max is now closed.