I’ve downloaded the Thesis Theme for WordPress and I’ve uploaded it into the themes folder for my WordPress Recipe Blog.

It is located in the wp-content folder.

Once you have the Thesis Theme for WordPress uploaded to your themes folder you can go to your Dashboard.

Click on Appearance

Click on Thesis

WordPress shows you what the default setting of the theme will look like. In the right corner

Click on Activate “Thesis”

Notice that there is a new link on the Themes menu that says Thesis Options. Here is a screen shot.

Click on Thesis Options

Thesis Theme for WordPress allows you to control the look and feel of your blog.

Here is a screen shot of the Thesis Theme for WordPress Options Page in it’s default form.

Click the image to see the whole image.

If you want the Thesis theme for WordPress for your own blog, you can get it by clicking here now.

My Recipe Blog now looks like this:

If you want to see My Recipe Blog in real life, here is the link.

I’ll blog about the changes I make to the Thesis Theme for WordPress Options in upcoming issues.

Click on “Settings”

Click on “Permalinks”

You can see that from here you can change from the Default permalink structure to a customized one. As you click the radio buttons for the Common Settings you will notice the Custom Structure change.

For instance when you click: Day and name

the Custom Structure shows: /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

I set up my Custom WordPress Permalink Structure to /%category%/%postname%/

I use the category and postname (or title of the post) for SEO (search engine optimization).

I just tested to see what would happen if you have two categories assigned to the post. The first category in alphabetical order will come up as the one used in the URL structure.

I’ve clicked “Install Application” and got the install page.

I’ve changed the Website path to recipe.aquanda.com as this is for my recipe blog.

I change the Database configuration for each of my blogs and I keep them in separate databases. For this one I’ve named it wp_recipe.

This is very important, I also change the Database table prefix from wp_ to something else. Like wpnew_. This makes it harder for someone who is trying to exploit WordPress sites to get mine. The exploit will look for wp_ and I always make it something else.

This part is fun, I get to give my blog it’s Blog Title: My Recipe Blog. I added my e-mail address and hit “Install WordPress.”

WordPress says “Success!” and gives me an username of admin and a password. It shows me the “Log In” button and I click it.

I’m now at the WordPress login page. http://yourdomain.com/wp-login.php

Now, the first thing I do when starting a new blog is add a new user that is NOT admin.

Click on “Users”

Under “Add New User” put in your information.

Make sure you change the role to “Administrator.”

Click on “Add User”

The “admin” user is BAD. A hacker could possibly attack your blog because of this. Now that we have ourselves as a new user, we can delete the “admin” user.

Check the box next to “admin”

Click “Delete”

Ouch, and it won’t let me delete the current user. I have to sign off then sign back on as the new user I just created.

Click “Log Out”

Enter your new user information and click “Log In”

Click “Users”

Check the box next to “admin” and click “Delete” then click “Confirm Deletion”

Excellent! My new WordPress blog is ready to go.

Let’s personalize your new blog some.

Click on “Design”

Change your Tagline to your new Tagline.

It’s time for a new blog for myself, and this one is really for myself. I’ve been cooking a lot lately and I’ve been wanting to keep track of the recipes I’ve changed. I enjoy doing blogs so I thought I would create a recipe blog for myself.

I’ll be blogging here about my steps for setting up this personal recipe blog.

I’ve done blogs in the past on subjects I thought would make money rather than what I really enjoyed. They didn’t make as much money as I thought and I did not enjoy it as much as my blogs where I was enjoying myself. And I make more money on my enjoyment blogs, not my reach for riches blogs.

Step 2: Use WordPress

The second step to starting a blog is choosing which blogging platform to use. I’ve already got this step covered for myself because I researched and even read several books on blogging a year or so ago. If you have not made up your mind trying to choose a blogging platform can make your head spin. I choose and am still pleased with the WordPress blogging platform. I like the flexibility it gives me to make a unique blog.

Step 3: Use the Theses Theme

The next step for me is having a way to control all that flexibility that WordPress uses. I’ve done coding before and know you can get into the guts of WordPress but I really don’t want to spend my time doing that. I searched, researched, tried and tested lots of WordPress themes. Themes are written so a non-coder can get to the flexibility of WordPress without having to do the coding. It is an interface with WordPress.

After lots of looking I found the Thesis Theme for WordPress. I’ve watched as this theme has matured into a fantastic interface for WordPress. In fact, I have not even used the latest release. I’ll be blogging about my experiences with the newest release here on this blog as I create my recipe blog.

When you are searching for Wordpress Theme Options, be sure to consider the Thesis theme. It might not be for everyone, if you like to tweak the Wordpress files than this theme option is not for you.

However, if you want a theme that has a control panel to handle the most common issues and one place to make your style changes than the Thesis theme might be what you are looking for.

With the Thesis Wordpress Theme Option, you get a wonderful, easy to use control panel to set up things like how to handle the header area. Do you want your own graphic? Do you want this theme option to allow you to show the title and tag lines of your blog?

The control panel also allows you to set up your blog’s feed to work the best with Wordpress. You can use the control panel to set what pages you want for your Navigation or Category pages. You can really easily set up Google Analytics or any other statistics software. The control is so easy that it makes it hard to use a Wordpress Theme option that does NOT have this awesome of control panel.

To change the styling of your blog you change a single file within the Thesis Theme if you choose this as your Wordpress theme option. You can see my .custom page for the Blue Blog by clicking on this: Yancey’s Custom Style Sheet for the Blue Blog. The Blue blog of course uses the Thesis Wordpress Theme Option.

On special assignment, Ron toured Bolivia with an eye for taking pictures to help tell the story of the land. The images show the stark hard environment that is populated by wonderful people.

His pictures of trains in their final resting place in the desert will thrill rail fans.

The portraits of the people will make you want to visit, the spirit in their eyes is inviting.

Visit Bolivia by viewing the sweeping vistas and inspired vision of Ron Dubin in Bolivia A Journey.

This is important, this is the first step I always take when working with a new blog and plugins.

Install Plugin Central for WordPress

Without Plugin Central you have to download then upload the plugin. With Plugin Central all you do is put in the name of the plugin and hit “Install Plugins” which is soooo much easier.

Step 1: Download Plugin Central to your hard drive.

Go to Wordpress plugin Directory page for Plugin Central and click on “Download.”

Step 2: Upload the Plugin Central folder to the plugins folder

Your WordPress blog files have a folder specifically for you to put new plugins in. It is in the folder “wp-content.” Here is the path with my host:
topcolorblogs.com/html/wp-content/plugins

There are already two plugins in the folder, Akismet which is in a folder and hello.php which is a single file. Most plugins will be in their own folder.

The Plugin Central folder needs to go in the plugins folder.

There are many ways to do this. One way is to use your FTP program to open your WordPress site folder on your hosted server and then to navigate to the plugin folder.

I’m using Dreamweaver and have a copy of my site on my hard drive. I copied the Plugin Central folder to my hard drive folder then used Dreamweaver to upload to the hosting server.

Activate the Plugin from WordPress Dashboard

Go to your admin area for your blog or as WordPress calls it your “Dashboard.” If you do not have a quick link to it you can just type “wp-admin” after your blog url to get there.

Click on “Plugins” which is in the upper right corner.
Click on “Activate” next to Plugin Central.

Notice that now Plugin Central is next to Plugins and Plugin Editor on the navigational bar.

Click on “Plugin Central”

Now you can just enter the name of the next plugin you want to add.

Rockie, I want you to put in “Google XML Sitemaps.” You need this next with your Rockie’s Ghost Riders! super blog. (another Thesis theme blog)

I know there are other plugins like Plugin Central for controlling your plugins for WordPress. If you are using another plugin, please leave a comment below and let me know which one you like.

Those new to plugins might also want to read the WordPress page on Managing Plugins.

If you go the Vladimir Prelovac’s page, he wrote Plugin Central, you see that he has listed “All in One SEO Pack.” If you are using the Thesis theme for WordPress, you DO NOT NEED THIS. The Thesis theme was written from the ground up with SEO in mind. In fact, author of Thesis is well known in the SEO industry. Rockie, do not add the “All in One SEO Pack.”

Hey Rockie,

You were right in asking me, I’ve been using cformsII a lot lately so I know I can help you. I wrote step by step instructions for how I put together my Contact Page but I can tell you some more tidbids here.

The biggest thing in cformsII is to keep hitting “Update Settings” if you don’t that next action could erase the last things you did. Last night I was working on the Form Settings for an Artist Interview questionnaire and I had made a lot of changes to Fields then I deleted a field that I did not need. Bad move, I should have clicked “Update Settings” first to save all my work, then hit the delete.

As for Styling, most people want to change the basic form style. This is where it can get confusing until you have played with the cformsII plugin for WordPress for a little while.

Read this to avoid a problem. I found that I could NOT simply reload a page I was previewing either published or not and have the changes I made in cformsII show up. This was while I was changing the Style of the form. I had to go to the Dashboard and “Save” my page/post again to make the changes. Even thought there were no changes to the page on the dashboard, the form needed the save to show the latest changes. So if reload does not show your change, go to the DashBoard and “Save” the page.

I had to do this dance to see the different form styles that cformsII plugin for WordPress had.

Caveat: This could have happened because I just installed the WP Super Cache plugin for WordPress.

Here is another bit a quirkiness that I experienced.

The Styling page is for the last form you were working on. You can NOT change forms from this page. If you have two or more forms, make sure you have chosen the correct one before clicking on the “Style” button.

If you go back to Form Settings, it will default back to the 1st form so if you are still working on another form you will need to select it first.

Best tip for cformsII plugin for WordPress: Pay very careful attention to the settings and do not assume.

Thesis Theme for WordPress Steps

Rockie, I know you are using the Thesis theme for WordPress. Here are the steps I take setting up the page. I will just put the cformsII tag in the body.

(Thesis Theme Users) Scroll down and choose “Page Template” and pick “Page Without Sidebars”.

Unless you want your sidebars. For me the form is the most important thing so I like the page without the sidebars. I would rather the user fill out the form than click a link.

Bonus: if you change any css you need to make a backup of it. When you update the plugin for WordPress, cformsII, it could overwrite anything you change there. Having a backup will ensure you keep your cformsII CSS safe.

If you really have to change the css I, and the author of cformsII recommend you use Firebug.

So to summarize,

1. if you need step by step instructions read this post
2. Hit “Update Settings” after you make changes.
3. If your changes are NOT showing up, click “Save” on the page from the WordPress Dashboard.
4. Always watch the settings to make sure it did what you wanted

My forms are here and so far, I have not changed any css:
(Well I did change the font size on one form but when I upgraded I had not saved my css so it was changed back)

Contact page with Fancy White form style

Contact page with the basic cforms.css form style

Directory Submission (with lots of check boxes) with the Wide Form form style

Artist Interview (with 30+ fields) with the Wide Open No Border form style

The biggest thing in cformsII is to keep hitting “Update Settings” if you don’t that next action could erase the last action.

You can use cformsII plugin for WordPress for the comments field for your blog. The latest update had a focus on that including compatibility with the plugin Comment Love. I don’t get too many comments yet so I have not researched this. If you know about using cformsII plugin for WordPress as the comments field, please use my old fashion comments field to tell me about it.

Email to me that prompted this post:

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 10:56 PM, Rockie L. Gaddie wrote:

Hey Wordpress guru!

How can I add a form for people to subscribe to a newsletter?

Thanks
Rg

————————————————————-
Yancey says:
Get the Thesis Theme for WordPress and Enjoy Outsourcing the Update Headaches

I’ve been ordered by the Queen to add another plugin.

After reading on the WordPress Blog that The official site of the British Prime Minister’s Office is using the WP Super Cache I decided it was time to act.

For you the reader, the plugin makes the site load quickly. For the blog owner it reduces the load on your server.

It was an easy installation. After installing the WP Super Cache Plugin I went to the WP Super Cache Manager.

Under “WP Super Cache Status” I clicked “ON”

UPDATE: I’ve changed to “HALF ON” so the page will reset with the default hourly rather than after 100 requests. Based on info here from Rick Beckman.

Under “Super Cache Compression” I clicked “Enabled”

I could see experimenting with the “Expiry Time” if you had over 2500 page views a day. I’m under that unless you go tell ALL your friends to drop by.

“Cache contents” shows you how many pages you have currently cached and also those expired. After turning WP Super Cache on I browsed my site then came back and saw my cached pages go up. This is one way you know it is working. This is where you can Delete Expired and Delete Cache.

REMEMBER this if you install this plugin and then want to make changes to your home page, you may have to Delete Cache with every test of new changes to your blog.

I’ve taken the advice of the British Prime Minister’s Office and loaded WP Super Cache. Thanks for pointing this out WordPress Blog.

I’ve got my head in the clouds over cloud computing. I realized how many systems I rely on fall into that category. But what is Cloud Computing?

Computerworld Magazine defined it like this:

Cloud Computing describes a system where users can connect to a vast network of computing resources, data and servers that reside somewhere “out there,” usually on the Internet, rather than on a local machine or a LAN or in a data center. Cloud computing can give on-demand access to super-computer-level power, even from a thin client or mobile device such as a smart phone or laptop.¹

I’m using Cloud Computing or hosted infrastructure services for hosting, email, documents, site statistics, bookmarking and template design.

I’m hosted on a grid cluster system² that expands and contracts as I need bandwidth. If I have a spike in traffic from everybody reading this Stumbling this then their system will handle it. If I was hosting this myself, I would never provide that kind of flexibility.

You knew I was going to mention Google sometime so I might as well do it now. I’m using Gmail and Google documents. I used Eudora for over 10 years and really enjoyed it for email. However, the computer(s) that I used to run it from home broke down. When I got a new computer, it was easy to switch to Google because of the recent pain of loosing the computer. Now a crashing computer will not take away all my emails. Gmail has a long way to go to be 1/2 as good as Eudora for the Mac. There are a hand full of features I really miss but being able to access my email from any computer connected to the internet far outweighs the disadvantages.

I’ve started using Google Documents and for me, a one person operation it is just fine. While the experts say that cloud computing for the enterprise is several years away, for small operations it is here now.³ I have over 50 documents in my Google Docs and I can search and find them so quick it seems like they are on my desktop. That is the promise of hosted infrastructure services.

I used to use Google Analytics but I have switched recently to Woopra for understanding my website statistics. I could download my raw data files on my website and crunch the numbers myself but what is the fun in that? I can now get Woopra to keep my stats for my site just by putting a bit of code on my page. Best yet, the Woopra team is working to make their statistics package better, not me. Look for a comprehensive review of Woopra from me in the future. I’m still taking notes on the program.

Once again, I lost all my bookmarks and favorites when my old Mac and PCs died. Now I keep my bookmarks and favorites on StumbleUpon. If you use StumbleUpon, PLEASE Stumble this article now. (Sorry, blatant self promotion) I keep my bookmarks on StumbleUpon, others use del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo! My Web, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Windows Live and others. Notice the “ShareThis” at the end of this and every article on my blogs. All you (a user) has to do is click that and it makes it easy to bookmark this article.

I’m using WordPress as the controlling CMS (content management system) for my blogs. They allow users to modify parts of the code to control the look and feel of the blog. If WordPress upgrades the changes could render all the changes useless. That is why I am using the Cloud Computing or external control of a special theme called Thesis. The Thesis designer created a special page for me to make my changes and any future upgrades to WordPress will not affect my design. By using the Thesis theme, I do not have to spend my time or resources trying to keep up with the evolving WordPress.

That is how I am using Cloud computing right now. But why is it named Cloud Computing? Russell Kay for Computerworld helps us out.¹

Why a Cloud? For years, in a flow diagrams and PowerPoint presentations, people have respresented the Internet as a fuzzy cloud with communications lines going in and out of it. Now that they’re actually talking about using a remote, black-box approach to computing, the old familiar cloud seems an appropriate metaphor.

Utility, grid or cluster computing has also used the cloud metaphor. My hosting at MediaTemple is on a grid computing system. The Woopra statistics program is hosted on the Layeredtech utility grid computing system. The Google hosted infrastructure services are also on a grid system.

As hosted infrastructure services mature, enterprise will slowly give up control and put their documents and systems up into the cloud.

In the cloud
HP, Intel and Yahoo are only the latest companies to look to expand their cloud computing offerings. Other vendors making news recently include:
- VMware New CEO Paul Maritz said July 24 the company will look to create virtual environments for cloud computing infrastructures
- Red Hat and Amazon Announced June 17 the beta availability of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud
- IBM and Google Launched the Academic Cluster Computing Initiative Oct. 8, 2007 to help students and researachers plant the seeds for large-scale distributed computing.⁴

1. Russell, K, Cloud Computing, Users can hook into the power of ‘out there.’ August 4, 2008 Page 25 Computerworld Magazine
2. MediaTemple is my host. https://www.mediatemple.net/
3. Ferguson, S., The Future of Cloud Computing, HP, Intel and Yahoo team up to crate large-scale infrastructures August 4, 2008 Page 24 eWeek Magazine “While analysis say that true cloud computing is anywhere from five to 10 years away, this type of infrastructure holds the promise of saving money and resources by allowing businesses and universities to offload some or all of their IT infrastructures to a third party and allow for software to be delivered through the Internet.
4. Ferguson, S., The Future of Cloud Computing, HP, Intel and Yahoo team up to crate large-scale infrastructures August 4, 2008 Page 24 eWeek Magazine

So far I have nine interviews including international interviews with artists in Germany, Indonesia, and the UK.

Here are the interviews I have so far:

Papuan Sunset by Mangiwau aka Michael Thirnbeck - Top Orange Gallery

Red Arrow Cockpit by icu202 Canon aka Alex Wilkie - Top Red Gallery

Navi’s Side Panel by Rush Nerd aka Andrew Watson - Top Blue Gallery

Spring Rain by Susan Rose - Top Green Gallery - Acrylic on Canvas 3′x2′

“I think in a little while from now…” by Helmuth - Top Green Gallery

Strange Denizens of the Forest by Promethean aka Anthony Ricchi - Top Orange Gallery

Waiting for the Buzzcocks (Latitude 2008) by Julia - Top Purple Gallery

In Your Eye, Flamingo - Los Angeles Zoo by Ron Dubin - Top Orange Gallery

yellow bporn by Sally Anne - Top Yellow Gallery

WP-Footnotes is a plugin for WordPress that I have been using a lot lately. It makes it really easy to put in Footnotes or Endnotes.

I installed it when I was doing an artist interview and the picture was of a mushroom. I found some great information on the mushroom and the mushroom website even had how he wanted his site credited. Since I am talking about one of my blog postings, I will use the footnote at the end of this paragraph. If you want to see the Orange Mushroom post, click the little 1 after the period.¹

I found a web reference to footnotes which shows some of the accepted styles if you were writing a paper for a college course, thesis, dissertation or were submitting to a journal. The sites author, Robert Radford, provides numerous examples. He also has posted the answers to questions that people have written in. I would put the link if a footnote if I was referencing it but since I am telling you about it, I will give the link here.²

How to write footnotes, endnotes and electronic references. by Robert Radfort

Here is how I use WP-Footnotes. After you have installed the plugin go to Settings on your Dashboard. Click on Footnotes.

From here, you can change how you want your identifier to appear. I keep mine simple so I do not add anything before or after it. I also leave it in the 1,2,3 style. I do change the css style, I take out his color choice and let my css control the color. I also check the box next to “Combine identical notes?“.

The best thing about this plugin is how fast it is to type in the footnote. All you have to do is put double(( at the beginning and )) at the end. I made the(( show by putting it without a space next to another word. If I put it in as a space it would not be here.³

1. Retrieved from Top Orange Blog Website: http://toporangeblog.com/archives/63
2. No footnote here, just testing.
3. but it would be down here

If you are looking for the best theme for WordPress then look no futher. This blog was designed using the Theses theme and WordPress. I run six (6) other blogs that have been easily modified that use the Thesis theme for WordPress, it is the best.

Main reasons why you want to use the best Thesis Theme:

• Thesis code is kept updated
• The layout is easy to read
• The layout is easy to change
• Very active user forum (Get Help)
• Easy WordPress Upgrades .custom CSS
• Integrated SEO techniques
• Dashboard Control Panel with a “Big Ass Save Button”

Thesis Demo Page
Check out the Thesis live demo here.

Chris Pearson leads the Thesis WordPress Theme team. Chris is well known in the theme community with thousands using his Cutline WordPress Theme. He is also well known for his knowledge of SEO or search engine optimization.

Plugins you will NOT need with the best theme for WordPress, Thesis. Thesis does this for you.

• SEO title changers
• Switch RSS to Feedburner
• Mint Analytics
• Google Analytics

Customize Your Thesis Design

One of the reasons that Thesis is the best theme for WordPress is the use of the Custom Stylesheet. Thesis is set up for you to make all your CSS changes here. CSS stands for cascading style sheets. The .custom stylesheet is the last in the cascade and thus has best design control.

I have 6 color blogs. I changed the CSS extensively but it was easy by using the User Manual and reading in the forum. This is another reason that this is the best Theme for Wordpress. Also if  you make a mistake while learning the css, you don’t mess up the theme’s core code. This makes playing with css easy and fun.

Thesis Showcase Gallery

Multimedia Box

The Multimedia Box is at the top of the page, above the two right columns. You can change this to:

• Rotating Images
• Show a Video
• Show Ads
• Use Your Own Code

Navigation Menu

Once you own Thesis go to the WordPress Dashboard and click on “Design” then “Thesis Options.” This is where you can control what users see in your Navigational Menu.

From here you can easily change:

• What Pages to Include in the Navigational Menu
• What Category Pages to Include in the Navigational Menu
• What Links to Include in the Navigational Menu

User Group Forum - Get Help - Help Others

If you are thinking about purchasing the Thesis theme for WordPress and are not quite sure yet, the knowledge of the user group could put you over the top. The people who purchase Thesis are varied from the absolute beginner to blogging experts. Some people know little about CSS, others know quite a lot.

We all get together in the Forums and share our knowledge of WordPress and Thesis. There is a post where you can announce your blog when it is ready.

Searching the Forum can provide a wealth of information on how to make Thesis just right for you.

Thesis Testimonials

I recommend Thesis

I have been working on my six color blogs and this blog for awhile now. I found that using the Thesis theme made my WordPress experience a pleasurable one. In this blog I have outlined the steps I have taken with WordPress, plugins, and Thesis. Click around and see how I have changed Thesis to make it easy for WordPress. Then click the link at the bottom of the page and purchase Thesis for yourself.

Better yet, follow one of these best links right now and purchase the Thesis them. After you have played with it and seen how powerful it is you will be giggling just like the rest of us. Get Thesis Today!

About Thesis

I recommend Thesis as the easiest and best theme for WordPress.

WordPress has the main post area that this text in is right now. The two columns, called “Sidebars,” are on the right are there because of the Thesis theme template. The information in the two columns is controlled by the use of Widgets.

Widgets can be a calendar, recent posts, categories, links, archives, plain text and several others. I used the plain “Text” Widget which is a container for text including html. In the middle column, I am using two Text Widgets and the Google Custom Search Widget.

Sidebar 1

1. “Text” - Links to other blogs
2. “Text” - Code for Google Adsense
3. “Google Custom Search” - Google search

Sidebar 2

1. “NextGEN Slideshow” - Transitions through pics in Gallery
2. “Text” - Links to Gallery and About Artists
3. “Search” - Searches the site
4. “Recent Posts” - Shows the most recent posts

There will be others in the future, these are what are there now.

Advertisements

I’m initially going to use Google Adsense because I am comfortable with it. In the future, I will be doing some comparative testing with other networks. I have assigned a Google “Channel” to each area that I put an ad. The Top Blue Blog’s header ad has a Channel called “Header Blue.” If someone clicks on an ad in the header, because I have a Channel associated with it, I will know they ad click came from the header on the Top Blue Blog. The Channel tags the ad space with an unique identifier.

Google allows three ad units as well as three link units on a page. Right now I just have one link unit and an ad unit in the header and the body.

Colored Buttons

At the top of the middle column was a great place to but links between the different colored blogs. Instead of text links, buttons would fill the space nicely. These are the pastel colored thus candy looking buttons that I made. I used the background color from each of the blogs.

There are several companion plugins, some of which I will use and others did not work for me.

NextGEN-ImageFlow

NextGEN-FlashViewer

NextGEN-Gallery Widget

Galleria WP

NextGEN Smooth Gallery

There was a NextGEN Gallery Add-ons plugin but I tried to go to the Plugin Homepage but it was 404. I do not try any plugins that are neglegted by the author.

For my uses, I’m going to use the sidebar widget with the slideshow. You can see the slideshow in action to the right on this page.

I’m going to use the tilt viewer for excitement, you can see it by clicking the “Gallery” at the top of this page. I also like the Image Browser.

I’m going to use the Image Browser because the image description appears below the image. In the description I am going to put a link to the artists blog posting.

Plugins 9, 10 and 11.

With the addition of Yellow, I now have all the Welcome pages done for the Top Color Blogs.

Yellow was fun and it went really quickly. Top Yellow Blog

Now I can start adding content as it flows in.

These Welcome pages are the start of my “pillar” pages.

I still have some changes I want to make but I know that I can get caught up in the changes and not stay on the content. For that reason, I’ll make changes along the way as we start bringing in content.

Well, almost finished, I am still tweaking the colors but the wording is in place.

I went with red graphics that I created on this one.

The Welcome page for the Top Red Blog is ready.

This is for the backend or support area of WordPress, for use in the Dashboard. Ozh’s COLOURlovers’ Admin CSS Designer allows you to change the colors of the admin area. You can choose from 12 color palettes.

I have been flipping between 8 different blogs and I’m always looking at the address to make sure I’m making the right changes on the right blog. I’ve now color coded each blog so the Top Red Blog is now red, Blue is blue, etc.

Not for the users, not for security, just for me. Plugin number 8.

If you are ever stuck on color, visit the COLOURlovers site for creative inspiration.

If you have friends or family who use different web sites then this will pull it all together.

For example if you have 3 siblings but they use Picasa, flickr, and MySpace to post their photos, then you can see when each of them updates in Plaxo.

There are many little microblogs including Twitter. With Plaxo you can watch them all.
If you decide to use Plaxo be aware that they are being acquired by Comcast so the user agreement will be with Comcast soon.

Mashup Linkup

A mashup is using two or more web sites together. If you use Facebook to show your Amazon wish list, that is a mashup.

I’m writing this in a WordPress blog. When I publish it:
the post will be sent to my Twitter account
Twitter will automatically post it
then Plaxo automatically posts it

The WordPress blog posting ends up on the Plaxo account. What if I send my Plaxo post automatically to WordPress?

If I set up my WordPress to post what my Plaxo account posts I can start an infinite blogging loop.® I don’t know, can I do that? I’m sure my friends would not be too happy with me if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did, if I did.

Lisa Firke, a fellow blogger, was the first to leave a comment. Quick short and sweet the simple “Glad you liked it!” made my day. I had mentioned how she had helped me in this blog post and she commented on the post.

Lisa is a website designer who runs the website Hit Those Keys and blogs along at Wild Keys. She uses the Thesis theme and you can see by her blog, she knows how to modify it. She often posts in the Thesis forum which not only helps the person she is responding to, but lurkers who are reading, like me.

Lisa started the biggest thread on the Thesis forum with “Introduce yourself and share your Thesis-themed URL.” This gave Thesis users a place to boast and talk about their site without feeling like they were spamming. A lot of these people have spent a lot of time working on their sites and getting to announce it here shows they are ready to face the world, or at least their fellow Thesosiums.

I did something wrong and I am not sure what it was. I did a re-install of both WordPress and Thesis and was successful the second time keeping the posts in place. This is why I like playing in my sandbox blog. I can make mistakes and learn and not mess up my other blogs.

Adding to the frustration was a problem with Thesis. By the time I got to the forums, Chris, the author of the Thesis theme, had posted a fix.

Now I will go through and slowly upgrade each blog. All this could be done in one fell swoop if I had WordPress MU but I looked in the closet and could not find my IT hat. In other words, I did not want to take the time to set it up and be responsible for the unique requirements of running the server. My host does basic WordPress just fine. So I don’t complain too much when I have to do something 7 times. If it was 20, I’d be trying to MU.

If I had waited a week to upgrade, all the fixes would have been in and I would not have had to waste time being frustrated.

I decided I wanted a green frog. I went to google and image searched on “green frog” and nothing. At least not for awhile, there were all kinds of green frogs but nothing I really liked. Then I found it. The perfect green frog. Shot from above the frog was distinctive at a glance. It even had a nice green border around it.

I have written the photographer, Electrik Monk, and I await his permission to use the frog.

Here is the Welcome page from the Top Green Blog.

Update

I was not able to get permission to use the green frog the way I wanted to. He wanted me to reverse the image to it’s original direction so the frog would be looking away from the content. Bummer.

On the bright side, I found a wonderful green parrot and a photographer who has given me permission to use it.

When we got home I started working on the blogs and checked the newest posts at the Thesis theme forum. There was a comment in reply to me about a fellow blogger’s photography. I revisited the site and saw the orange flamingo. I had run across it many days ago while surfing other blogs. I took the opportunity and contacted the photographer and asked permission to use the flamingo and he replied back quickly with permission.

Getting permission to use a picture from Ron’s photography inspired me to get the Top Orange Blog’s Welcome page ready. I added the orange color squares bar but it needed a bit more. I had fun running to the refrigerator and got out all the carrots. I made my choice then photographed it against a white background. In Photoshop, I removed the white background and replaced it with the orange colored background to match the site.

Then I modified the type to my liking then presto, bango, I hit the publish button and it became live!

Visit the Top Orange Blog!

This is a simple email that is for creating an eXtended Markup Language map specifically for the search engines. Here is the change I make.
> from Dashboard Plugin Management click “Configuration Page” in the plugin description.
1. Under Status at the top, click the “Click here” to build the first sitemap.
2. Check mark Modify or create robots.txt file…
Make any other changes you need.
3. Click “Update options” and that is it.

7th Plugin to Install - WordPress Exploit Scanner

This just makes me feel better to run this and make sure everything looks the same as the last time I ran it. After you activate the plugin, click the “Dashboard” button at the top left of the page. From here you can click into Exploit Scanner. Click “Search Files and Database” and make sure everything is safe. It picked up my iframe in the amazon link for a book review.

Google Analytics

I looked at some of the other programs for keeping stats. I liked WP Stats plugin by the makers of Akismet but when I went to load the plugin, all the blog posts were about problems. I have learned to read about other user experiences before just adding a plugin.

Thanks to the Thesis theme control panel, adding Google Analytics to the footer is just way to easy.

Posted using ShareThis
________________________________________________________________________________
I wanted to see what it was like to use ShareThis from a users point of view. I went to a fellow bloggers site and clicked on his ShareThis link. I then clicked on “Post” and chose WordPress. After putting in my site’s URL and my blog username and password I was told it had “Successfully posted to your WordPress site.” What you see above the line is what it put into the post.

All it did was copy the header, post a link to the article, then give itself credit. ha ha ha

BTW, this is a really nice post by Casper in his Life Lessons from Lyrics series.

ShareThis is the solution I am going to try for WordPress. It is a clean plugin that shows an icon and the words “ShareThis” under each post. When a user clicks on it, they can select from 3 tabs, Social Web, Post and Send/Emal. The words “ShareThis” sound more like something I would do rather than just bookmark. I like the Sharing word.

Social Web has quick links to the 20 biggest social networks including Digg, del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Slashdot, Technorati and Newsvine. Users can bookmark from this tab also using Google Bookmarks, Yahoo Bookmarks, Facebook and MySpace. You can change the sites if you need to.

Speaking of Facebook and MySpace, on the Post tab users can post to them and Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, and even Twitter. Yes, you can even post to WordPress from ShareThis.

The Send/Email tab is deceptively simple. It is great having the send email in the same button. This is one reason I like this plugin. The exciting part is when you click the dropdown field “Using:” and it shows that it is all set up to send to AIM, SMS, MySpace, as well as plain email.

With your ShareThis account you have a history window called the ShareBox that will show you who has used your ShareThis. If you use my ShareThis button, it will show up in my ShareBox.

My Steps for Using ShareThis in WordPress

The first step is to go to the ShareThis site and register yourself and your domain(s).

After activating the plugin click on “Settings”

Click “ShareThis”
This control panel has a link to customizing the code, a place to paste in code, and ways to turn on and off the ShareThis in posts or pages. If you turn them both off, you will have to put the code into your theme. If you do this, be sure to use the ShareThis template tag.

Click “sharethis.com/publisher?type=wpplugin” (customization link)

I’ll have to admit that the main reason I change the code is to get the rotating icon. I like it better than the static ShareThis icon. I’ll use the color choices to change the colors for my color blogs.

Make your choices then click the “Get ShareThis Code.”
Copy and paste into WordPress ShareThis Options box.
Click “Update ShareThis Options” and you are done.

You can now see the ShareThis icon right below this text. Help me out, please use my ShareThis button, it will show up in my ShareBox.

cformsII > cforms (form settings)

Change name to “Contact”

Install a form preset: “Reset to “default” contact form”

I remove the first field, “My Fieldset” as the template I’m using does not need this and it shows up.
You can use this if you want your title to be left aligned and bigger, put your own text in the Field Name and see.

I change the email field name to this:
Email||err:Please provide a valid email address!

I change out Message to:
Your Comment|err:You need to say something!

I add one new line.
Change “Single line of text” to “Visitor verification (Q&A)”
The I change the Field Name to:
Please verify|err:Your Q&A code is not correct!

> click “Update Settings”

Under Redirection, Messages, Text and Button Label

I change the Submit button text to: “Send”
I have a hard time “submiting” I don’t want to demand my commenters to submit. Usind “Send” sounds better to me.

Change the “(required)” to “Required” in both the required label and the email label.

Change Redirect to “Hide form after successful submission”
I might change this in the future to a dedicated “alternative success page.”

> click “Update Settings”

Under Core Form Admin / Email Options

Check “Include in last 5 entries shown on the dashboard.”

Under Auto Confirmation

Check “Activate auto confirmation”

> click “Update Settings”

> click “Global Settings”

Under WP Editor Button support
Check “Enable TinyMCA & Code editor buttons”
It didn’t show up for me once and I had to uncheck it, it “Update Settings” then check it again then hit “Update Settings.” That worked in making it appear.

Under Visitor Verification Settings (Q&A)
Change out questions to something entertaining.

Under Database Input Tracking
Check “Enable Database Tracking”

> click “Update Settings”

> click “Styling”
I’m using fancy_white.css and have been changing it. So I choose it from the drop down menu then click “Select Style.” Then I select all and paste in the one that I have been working on, see last post.

> click “Update Changes”

Now To Put It Into A Page

> click “Write”
> click “Page”
> click “Visual” to make sure you are on the visual editor. You should now see the cfII as a new icon to the right of “Kitchen Sink.” Click in the Post field and then click on the cformsII icon and boom, your form is in.

Add a title and any other text then hit publish.

> click “Design”
> click “Thesis Options”
Under Navigation Menu check the “Contact” page.

Hit the “Big Ass Save Button!”

You now have your contact form.

You might also want to study the PDF guide on cforms CSS & a web screencast I put together to give you a head start.

I followed the link and downloaded the pdf. Oliver Seidel, the author of the pdf and undoubtedly the plugin did a great job of outlining the different css areas of the form. It’s really nice but at the end he has a second section titled: “cforms Layout Development, Best Practices.”

He suggests using Firefox and Firebug. Firebug is a plugin for the Firefox browser. This is where the fun starts.

Firebug looks at the underling CSS, HTML, and Javascript structure and shows you where in the code individual elements are.

I’m modifying the fancy_white.css that comes with cformsII. I changed the font in an earlier post. Now I want to change the font size.

Open Firefox then go to “Tools” and select “Firebug” then open Firebug
This opens a Firebug window under your web page.
I browsed to the contact form I want to change.
Right Click on the field title “Your Name” and select “Inspect Element”
On the left bottom of your screen you should see the HTML with <span>Your Name</span> highlighted.
On the right bottom under Style you can see this is named .cform label

Here is the cool thing, change the font-size and the page shows you what your change would look like. EXCELLENT (rubbing hands together)

Now that I know that I want to change .cform label attribute font-size from 12 to 14, I go to the fancy_white.css and change it there.

Save it and check it. Sweet.

Here are the steps I took to quickly and simply change the font of the CformsII style sheet. It really helped my Contact page look more like my post pages.

Go to CformsII administration area on the Dashboard of WordPress.

1. Click “Styling”

2. Choose a style. Under the “Select a form style” I choose fancy_white.css

3. Click “Select Style”

4. Copy the css from the Basic CSS editor into a more advanced editor.
(You might want to make a unchanged copy at this point.)

5. Do a search and replace on monospace replacing it with Georgia, “Times New Roman”, Times, serif
This way the new font group will replace the monospace font.

6. Select all and copy the changed form and paste in into the CformsII plugin’s Basic CSS editor

7. Click Update Changes

fancy_white.css is now one step closer to using the same styles as Thesis.

Geezz I was getting tired of the small 10 line text input box for the Post in the WordPress administration dashboard area.

I took the time today to fix it.

> Settings > Writing > Size of the post box

I changed the post box to 20 lines.

It was irritating to have to keep scrolling when I was re-reading my longer than 10 line posts.

Sometimes the little things make it better.

* Will this plugin help my blog be more secure?
* How will this plugin help my users?
* How does this plugin help my blog to succeed?
* How does this plugin help me?

Using these questions I looked at 12 plugins closely then chose to use a contact form plugin.

cforms II

Why did I choose cforms II over Contact Form 7, WP Contact Form III or one of the other many forms plugins? Easy, I was following Seriocomic’s plugin list and he recommended it and Casper also uses it. It had over 100,000 downloads so that helped give weight to the decision.

After loading the the plugin, I opened it to lots of choices. Fortunately, they had a nice big “Help” button. I clicked it and was glad I did. It had a very simple step by step process where I learned what it could do. They had links in the steps which made it really nice, I clicked all the links.

I had a simple contact form created in less than 30 minutes.

I’ll add the form to the Top Color Blogs and Top Blue Blogs and test it there. Once satisfied with how I want to choose the settings, I’ll add it to the other blogs.

This update has just come over the wire:
Yancey has been blogging for 17 days and this is what has happened so far.

Read Book: Problogger: Secrets for Blogging…
Bought domain names and installed WordPress
Started studying WordPress
Learned WordPress uses Themes as templates
Researched then bought Thesis theme
1st Plugin, Plugin Central
2nd Plugin, Security Scan
3rd Plugin, BackUpWordPress
Customized Thesis
Added Feedburner
Upgraded to NEW Thesis release
Customize Thesis and WordPress more
Made my first official Color post

Blue Fish, Blue Water

I found a great blue fish to use in the creature paragraph. I searched Google for “blue fish” and I kept jumping to the last of the group of search page results. About 600 pages deep I found the picture Blue Fish, Blue Water. I contacted the photographer, Tony Chammond, and he gave me permission to use his image. Yippie! Tony is 61 and lives in Bexhill-on-Sea, east Sussex, Engliand. To see more of his pictures, click the fish on the Top Blue Blog Welcome page.

I adjusted the image for my uses including flipping the image and fading it into the background color of the Top Blue Blog.

Author and Date

The Thesis theme uses the “user name” as the “author name.” If a hacker knows your “user name” they can run a brute force attack with greater success. This was my first problem with using the “user name” as the “author name.”

The second problem is I want guest writers for my blogs. If I use the template “user name” as “author name” then each guest will have to have an account in the database. If I use 100 writers just one time, all 100 names and passwords would have to be in the database. Argggg. I don’t want to have to teach John how to sign in for just one article. I don’t want to have to sign in as John to post his one article.

I have solved this by hiding the Author and Date fields. I have added my own on the first line above the article. This way I have complete control over it. The only downside is the newsfeed grabs the Author and Date now as the first lines of the newsfeed. Only through SEO (Search Engine Optimization) testing would one be able to know if this was good or bad.

On the Welcome page for the Top Blue Blog I decided to leave the date off. The information is not time sensitive. The Welcome article is one of several “pillar” or core posts that I will have. I might leave the date off all these main articles.

Drop Caps

So, did you notice the drop cap at the beginning of the article? I don’t want to drop a hint but doing fun drop caps in the Thesis theme for WordPress is easy to do.

Conscious Bliss

Casper runs the Conscious Bliss web site and the accompanying Bliss Blog. Subscribe to his RSS feed to get blog blasts of bliss. The Bliss Blog is a great example of clean use of the Thesis theme.

I also like how Casper has an email link for subscribing to his news feed. I knew about this functionality from Feedburner but Casper shows how to use it where it blends in with the layout. Look for it in the upper right corner of the page.

Header Nirvana

Before I come down off my soapbox, I would like to thank Casper for one more thing. I was having a problem with putting my graphic into the header and have it look the way I wanted it. Casper provided me with the code that he was using and after looking closely I found I had one too many </div> and that is not a good thing. Not only did it make the tags unbalanced, it was creating an extra line of space making way too much white space. I kept trying to figure it out inspired by the graphic that Casper has on his site. It is close and tight with just enough white space around it. It also helps that Casper has a nice clean header graphic.

The Top Color Blogs are looking a little better today thanks to Casper.

I was able to use blue for blue text on the blue blog. However, I could not make even the darkest yellow text work on the yellow blog so I decided to use black text there.

I’ve got the blogs to a place where they are all colored but not all the tags that could be changed have been changed. I will slowly change them over the next few months.

Right now I would like to see a post in each blog so I will be taking off the developer hat and putting on the writting hat. When my editor hat agrees that the writting is ready, I’ll have a post each for the blogs!

1000 Syndicated Feeds

As I was setting up the blogs, I made some changes inside of WordPress. First I changed the amount of syndicated feeds shown from 10 to 1000. I then changed the type to “Summary.” I had over 20 posts when I first enabled my feedburner feed and it grabbed only 10. If I would have known where to change this I would have. Here is the path: > Settings > Reading

Hues

I also went in and made the links between blogs just the color word like Red. It was TopRedBlog.com and I felt that just having it as “Red” was a lot cleaner and pleasing to the eye. Instead of “Blogroll” I named the category “Hues.” I changed it in this blog to “My Blogs” and I titled the blogs, “Red Blog.”

Permalink Stucture to Numeric

I also went into the Permalink page and changed the permalink structure to “Numeric.” I have not read any pros or cons on this but I think it might be better having a /123 url rather than the /?p=123 ending. If you have an opinion on this, please let me know.

The Thesis Options page allows you to turn on and off the custom style sheet page. He has also included a link to the page.

You used to need to enter a feed address in the config file but no more. Now enter your feed into the Syndication/Feed box and that is all you have to do. You can also choose to turn on and off the feed information in the header. Another nice feature is the ability to change the Subscribe link text.

Pages that display in the navigational menu can now be easily selected. No more messing with the code to add or change pages. Just click the check box next to the pages you want to show in the Navigation Menu. You can also include category archive pages in the nav menu.

Multimedia Box

One of the reasons people have taken to the Thesis theme is the media box or nice pictures in the upper right of the major pages. Some people wanted to put video in that area, other wanted to put ads. The second column of the Thesis Options panel is dedicated to the Media Box. You can set it up just he way you want it and he even gave us variables to use to modify it on individual pages.

I want to use a graphic for my header. I wonder how many times Chris heard that. Now it is easy to hide the site name and tagline in the header. This makes adding a graphic header much easier. He also included author and published date options for both posts and pages.

There are warning of link blot associated with tagging so there is a nice on/off switch that is controlled at the theme template level. If you do decide to use tags, you have the choice to link or not to archive pages.

Stats Software and Scripts

We have two code boxes, Mint and Google Analytics. Chris mentions in a forum post that the Mint is for code in the header and the Google Analytics is for code in the footer. You can use any code you need.

After you make your selections and changes, be sure to click the Big Ass Save Button. If you can’t find it, just look for the green.

We don’t know what will be included but Chris, the code author, said that almost every page would have some changes.

I decided to not add my logo right now.

This is another example of spending a few minutes reading in the forum helped be understand what everyone else knew about the situation. From that information I was able to quickly make a decision and move on.

I will add the logo to the post just because I can.

I have changed the theme to Thesis on all the color blogs. I’m anxious to get started on the content but know I need to take my time to get it right. The blogs will slowly come together. If you want to see the blogs in their current state, click the links in the sidebar, the TopBlueBlog.com will see the first changes.

Burn a feed right this instant:
Just enter name of your blog, this field is not critical.
Click “Next”
Enter the Feed Title and the Feed Address
Click “Activate Feed”
Click “Next”
Put a check mark next to Clickthroughs, item enclosure, and I want more! These are free so you might as well activate them.
Click “Next”
Click “Optimize”
Click “SmartFeed”
Click “Activate”
Click “FeedFlare”
You might have different choices here but I choose:
Email This both Feed and Site
Subscribe to the feed Site

Then I add two new flares,
Get email updates and Add This!
You follow the links to the Flare Unit URL that you can paste into the Add New Flare field if you want.

I use the Add This flare that uses a lot of social media sites rather than have a button for each social site.

Click “Activate”
I have an Amazon Associate ID so I use the Amazon ID Burner.
Click on “Amazon ID Burner”
Enter your Amazon Associates ID
Click “Activate”
Click “Publicize”
Click “Email Subscriptions”
I leave it at the default FeedBurner, click “Activate”

Click on “PingShot”
check the Google Blog and Ping-o-matic services

Now you can add five additional services to ping. I just went through and put each of the names into Alexa and got their page rank. I now choose Blog Buzz Machine, Feed Blitz, Bloggrevyen, syndic8, and Alexa. Geez, I used to use Snap, I have now changed that!

19 IceRocket
26 Weblogs
59 Tailrank
39 Blogdigger
67 Syndic8
1292 Blog Buzz Machine
415 Feed Blitz
4 blogblogs
n/a Bloggarkivet
431 Bloggrevyen
n/a Feedcrier
31 Moreover
n/a Alexa
1 Snap

After you have picked your five, click “Activate.”

These are the main steps that I take when opening a new feed in Feedburner. You may want to do something else but this can give you a place to start.

I’ve tested and am now going to add to this blog:

• Thesis theme for WordPress
• Plugin Central
• WP Security Scan (another plugin)
• BackUpWordPress

I uploaded the Thesis theme for WordPress and the custom.css file. In My SandBox Blog I have everything and the kitchen sink in the custom.css file. Because this blog, the TopColorBlogs.com, needs clean lines, I do not plan on altering it very much. I will do a LOT of altering for the TopBlueBlog.com.

I will only add one line at a time to the custom.css file for this blog.

I use Plugin Central to easily upload my plugins. The WP Security Scan does what I need it to do when activated. I will need to go into BackUpWordPress to tell it my preferences.

In BackUpWordPress I have to tell it the path of where I want my backups to go on my hard drive. They offer a suggestion and so far I have always taken it. Until I know better, right now I have Full Backup Weekly scheduled to run automatically. I also have the SQL Only Backup Daily scheduled to run automatically.

Thesis Theme

I need to change the config.php file and make the RSS feed point to my Feedburner address. I did this and noticed that Feedburner only grabbed the last 10 posts initially. I’ll have to see if they get all my posts listed.

I did make one change to the custom.css file for Thesis for the TopColorBlogs.com. I changed the background color just a little using the .custom #container { background-color: #E4E4E4 } variable.

I copied all the styles from styles.css to custom.css and amended them with the .custom so I can change them. I also found someone else’s custom.css file where they have changed the coding around. See yesterday’s post for more information.

I started with it all and am subtracting out what I don’t need rather than just adding what I needed. I didn’t know what to add so I grabbed it all just to see what was there. It’s messy and confusing and I don’t like it. That being said, I can’t state how great it is to be able to control such variables.

I’ve gone through and I understand 60% of the variable tags and their permutations. I’m getting frustrated so I’m going to change tactics now and start manipulating the code specifically for a blog rather than just playing with it to see what changes.

I’m going to work on the custom.css for the TopBlueBlog.com Thesis theme. I like this idea to focus on for working with the custom.css files.

But first I’m going to add the theme to this blog.

Lisa of Hit Those Keys has the Wild Keys blog and she gave a link to her .css file, this is wonderful. I really like how she has it organized and I will follow her example.

This is set up really nice. The Thesis theme has a .style.css page but we, the users, do not change that, we change a .custom.css file. The custom file will control how the styles will look. For those of you who know css, the .custom.css file is more specific than the .style.css file.

I opened the .custom.css file but other than the instructions it is empty. I played with the examples and looked at the .style.css file to figure out what I want to change. I am going to copy everything from the .style.css into the .custom.css file and add “.custom ” in front of all the variables.

Copy variables from .style.css and paste into .custom.css then put .custom in front of each variable.

Now I can go in and change the variables to experiment on what I want to change.

I pasted the .custom in front of all the variables except the last group, “self-clearing floats from Dan Cederholm.” I cut and deleted this last group.

I really like the fact that I can show both of these. While in WordPress at Write Post on Visual, I clicked on the Add media icon of a picture. It allowed me to upload the picture from my hard drive and it will store it in a file for this blog. What was really cool was it allowed me to choose from Full Size for the picture, Medium or Thumbnail. The two above are medium pictures. The two below are thumbnails.

I left the navigation menu type to “true” allowing an auto-generated list of pages. I can change this if needed easily.

I left tags off on the recommendation of the Thesis development team.

I did add the custom stylesheet and set the variable to “true.”

I made thes changes and saved them. It was moving everything to the server that led me to finding an FTP application.

We should be ready to swich themes. I am going to take a screen shot of the Sandbox Blog for a before and after picture.

There were a couple of dozen files to upload. My ISP has a simple ftp file upload but it is one file at a time. Ouch. I tried to find another program to do ftp. I tried a plugin for Firefox but I could not get it to work right. I tried a plugin, My FTP, for WordPress but it was just good for one file at a time also.

I downloaded CuteFTP but I could not get it to work either.

I remembered I had Dreamweaver from another project and but did not have it loaded on my computer. I now have and am happy to report that I can now FTP with ease. It will be nice to use Dreamweaver for editing the php files rather than the notepad app that comes with windows.

Now that I have DreamWeaver running, I know what my problem was with those other programs. Just as well, Dreamweaver offers more than just FTP.

I like this plugin because I can schedule the backups and I do not have to do them manually. For the totally paranoid, you can even have your backups mailed to you. Nice way to keep them on a different server.

I clicked on View in the Backup Presets area to see the full backup information. Now this is on a blog I just installed 30 minutes ago.

Your Database holds 349.85kB of Data.

Your Wordpress files in this backup use 5.4 MB of disk space.

Your Backup Archive filesize saved with preset full backup will be about 3.02 MB

Wow! I will try having it emailed to me just to see if it gets through with being such a large size.

I clicked on BackUp WordPress Now button that is on the BackUpWordPress tab. It took less than a minute to run. Check it out, my full backup size was only 1.7 MB, well under the predicted.

I like this plugin because it hides the WordPress version number and it removes the wp id meta tag.

I am setting up my new sandbox blog better this time thanks to the lessons I have learned.

1. I changed the Database Table Prefix from wp_ to something else.

Changing it from wp_ makes it harder for a bad robot to find it.

2. Delete the admin account

Add a new user with full access then delete the admin account. This eliminates brute force attacks that use the username admin.

3. I add the plugin Plugin Central

The only plugin I have to upload. I can easily add all other plugins by using this one.

Thanks to the security scan of plugin WP Security Scan, I found I needed a .htaccess file.

I searched and found this page on the askApache.com web site, Password Protect your Blog with Apache .htaccess and .htpasswd. This article explains why you would want it. And links to:

AskApache Password Protect

I opened Plugin Central and simply typed “AskApache Password Protect” into the Easy Plugin Installation field and hit “Install plugins” and it was done quicker then it took me to write this.

Now when I go to Security it shows that .htaccess exists in wp-admin/

WP Security Scan

I typed just “WP Security Scan” into the Easy Plugin Installation field and it worked great.

Now that it is loaded, there is a “Security” next to the “Comments” on the top links.

Clicking it I find that I should NOT have used wp_ as my table prefix. I can see how changing this would make it harder for hackers to identify WordPress table entries.

I clicked the “Click Here” to change it. I’m told to make a backup of my database but since this is my sandbox, I’ll just go as it is. I typed in my change then hit “Start Renaming.”

Ouch, it kicked it out saying “Your User which is used to access your Wordpress Tables/Database, hasn’t enough rights( is missing ALTER-right) to alter your Tablestructure. Please visit the plugin documentation for more information. If you believe you have alter rights, please contact the plugin author for assistance.”

I think I will do it from my database control panel. Humm, not so easy to do. I’ve read the documentation but for the color blogs, it might be just a quick to re-install them where I change the prefix from the beginning.

He also suggests getting rid of the admin so brute force attacks can’t use that username. I had already moved away from admin but did not think to delete the admin.

It is also telling me that I don’t have a .htaccess file in the wp-admin. I have now read that having this is like another layer of firewall to keep bots from attacking your blog. I found the plugin AskApache Password Protect and I’m going to install this to see if it will create this extra layer of protection.

Thanks to WP Security Scan I will be reloading WordPress for my top color blogs and will be renaming the prefix!

EDIT: NEW INFO

I crashed the Sandbox!!! Good thing I had it! I activated everything in the WP Security Scan and it did NOT like it. Something caused the database to deny me access. I’m re-installing the WordPress setup and will see if I can at least get some of it to work.

I can’t get things working again. I’m going to have to go to my ISP with my tail between my legs and have them reset a few things.

I’m testing it for the features:
- Install by typing the name of plugin or URL (no downloading then uploading)
- Multiple-plugin control with moving of plugins to other blogs
- Plugin status

Being my first plugin to install I went to WordPress to read Managing Plugins.

The steps I am taking:

1. Downloaded Plugin Central to my hard drive
2. Uploaded the plugin folder to my WordPress plugin directory wp-contentMplugins
3. Opened my WordPress blog admin area
4. Clicked on “Plugins” in the upper right corner
5. asdf

When I first clicked on the Plugins link and got to the Plugin Management page, there were already two plugins there. The Akismet and Hello Dolly plugins by Matt Mullenweg. Akismet is for fighting spam and the Hello Dolly is just a fun, insider joke plugin. I have activated both. In the description of the Akismet is an ad for Matt’s WP Stats plugin. I’m sure I will be adding this one soon.

I had to sign up at WordPress.com for a user name so I could get an API for Akismet to work.

I’m now going to use Plugin Central to install a new plugin.

Before uploaded Thesis I need to change the configuration file.

————————
Step 1. Change your feed address.
————————

Changing your feed address sounds simple right? Well, let me tell you after spending hours reading about feeds I’m totally full. I’ve had feeds in the past so I’m not too much of a noobie. There were many things to consider.

- Do I go with the wp-rss2.php WordPress standard feed?

- Do I get a feed maker for images in my feeds?

- Do I use Feedburner or not?

I looked at WordPress plugins, I read FeedBurner specs, I read bloggers bloggings and now I feel all feed up. All pun intended.

In the FeedBurner Help Center I was reading about creating a feed in WordPress. They suggest using the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin.

The main reason I can see using a plugin is the ability to forward your comments feed.

This is where I will start, with installing the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin.

If you are following along the order goes like this:
download theme >
need feed address >
decide on feed feeder >
need plugin for Feedburner

This leads us into the land of plugins. Before we can install the feed plugin I need to install a plugin organizer and then some security plugins.

If a plugin is corrupted or wants to leave tables behind after it is un-installed than I would rather it happen here. I’ll install and test each plugin here before I decide to use it on the other blogs.

The database can handle it but do I want to? Each blog with it’s own database sounds more simple.

The other possible problem is security. If I have a security breach in one database, the others will not be affected.

I’m going to re-install WordPress for each color blog and put each into their own database.

I created three FaceBook applications where I ask questions and the users answer them. I did not spend any money on advertising and the applications never took off like I hoped. I have collected over 50,000 answers in less than a year. Unfortunately the type of discussions are not key word heavy enough to make money with ad systems like Google’s adsense.

I decided to create a real world blog and knew I needed to study the best practices in the field. I enjoy reading away from the computer so I went to Amazon.com to look for books on blogging. After looking through the selections, I decided on three books. The first of which is ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett.

For those wanting to know more about blogging this book is a wonderful read. It is well written and well presented. It helped me have a better understanding about the nature of blogging.

In chapter 2, Niche Blogging, the boys hit me over the head with how important it is to have a niche. I knew that but I still wanted to have the shotgun approach and have the ability to talk about anything. Well, chapter 2 changed my mind and made me probe deeper into what I could do as a niche subject.

For the rest of the book I was stoking the fire on my back burner with the question of which niche. I give 100% of the credit for my idea of my new blogging concept to this book and Darren and Chris for making me ask that hard question, which niche.

And speaking of credit, this is written on the WordPress blogging software. It was chapter 3, Setting Up Your Blog, that convinced me to use WordPress. I thought I was going to use Blogger as I had used it in the past but learning about the control that WordPress gives bloggers made it irresistible. The second book I bought from Amazon.com was a book on the program by Google, Blogger. I’ll be reselling that book back through Amazon.com. :-0

Chapter 4, Blog Writing caught me off guard. I got what I was expecting out of all the other chapters but this one was different. The ideas for blog article writing were more than I would have hoped for. I guess it was the authors ability to categorize the types of writing that came out of people forcing themselves to come up with new posts on a daily basis. There were more writing ideas presented here than I have read in entire books on writing. This chapter is now a reference source for me.

I learned in chapter 5, Blog Income and Earning Strategies, about freelance blogging. Because of this idea I have designed my blogs from day one to have guest writers. This works with the basic business plan presented of administration, editor and writers. Right now I am all three but in the future I would like an editor for each blog and have lots of writers.

I almost did not even want to read chapter 6, Buying and Selling Blogs. I don’t want someone else’s blog and at this stage other than a business plan entry, I can’t think of selling my “new” blogs. But I read it any way. I would like to give a long subtitle to the chapter, How To Create Your Blog So That If It Sells, It Is Ready to Change Hands. This is a prime reason to have other writers on your blogs.

Reading chapter 7, Blog Networks, was rather scary. Learning about the Corporate co-operative blogs that have such a huge reach and power made me flinch. I’ll be on my boat in the blog ocean and these guys will come cruising by in their yachts with bigger wakes. Yikes. Although with my multiple blogs and multiple writers, I will be starting my own mini blog network.

I enjoyed the intro to chapter on Blog Promotion and Marketing. Build “flagship content” or “pillar articles.” Create content that is easy to promote. They refer to blog postings that are above and beyond what might be regular posts, blog posts that are core information about your niche. This one page, 166, was very inspirational for me. From: ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

I learned about “link-baiting.” I had alway thought of it as growing an inbound link collection but that does not sound as exciting, or strange. Link-Baiting, come on. I guess it got this moniker from those that used attack comments in hopes to generate links back to their blog. I was glad to see the authors suggest thinking about your reputation rather than trying slash and burn attack comments.

The Blog Promotion and Marketing chapter feels like the tip of the ice burg. To continue the ideas in this chapter I will be following the blogs of the owners. Darren Rowse has ProBlogger.net and Chris Garrett runs chrisg.com.

The final chapter “Create Something Worthwhile” is to me more of a mantra. I just keep repeating it over and over. “Create Something Worthwhile” “Create Something Worthwhile” “Create Something Worthwhile”

Other quotes from this chapter:

• “brainstorm content ideas that they (readers) would absolutely love“
• “know and understand the need to be “remarkable”"
• “some cases it is the nature of the (news) story that helps it spread”
• “add value”
• “Always be thinking, “How can I make this better?”

Well, we shall see or at least I will see as I use the concepts, ideas and inspiration from this book to launch and run my new blogs. This is my third day on WordPress and I am thankful that I bought this book and learned the best practices for professional blogging. Thanks Darren and Chris!

The idea of locking me into controlling someone else’s attempt at coding is not how I want to spent my time. I don’t want to have to code this from scratch either.

I was reading about themes and WordPress had a page with themes that were compatible with version 2.5. The last thing you want to do is use a theme that was not even supporting the latest version of WordPress. So I started at the top of Themes/Theme Compatibility/2.5 and looked at every theme. I got to theme 190 and finally found something different.

Thesis Theme for WordPress

My eyes had gotten blurry from looking at all the themes, copies of themes and attempts at themes for the last few hours. Could I really believe my eyes? Here is a nice theme that I think I can use. Not only do I think I could use it, I think I could modify it to suit my needs. Looking closer I was floored to find that the developer was ACTIVELY keeping up with the theme, almost unheard of.

Let’s take a look at what else is being offered:

• A Manual
• User’s Guide
• Tutorials
• Setup Information
• Forum

In the forum I was able to see dozens of blogs that had used the Thesis Theme and had customized it in wonderful ways.

I’m going to sleep on it because it costs money and I have the 24 rule. Anything that cost $24 or more I have to wait 24 hours to buy. I’m in no hurry but you just might see this blog Thesis Themed out some day.

I did not know that blogs were considered a form of CMS or content management system. I always thought CMS was used for large companies with lots of information to control. A wiki is also a form of CMS.

If you are not familiar with posts, categories or tags this is an educational read. WordPress also has a page for static information. You can have commenting on a page but you can not categorize a page.

In the Terminology Related to Design section they briefly describe but link to more information on the loop that WordPress goes through when it processes and presents a web page. The dance goes something like this. You have template tags that are in template files that get their info from a MySQL database and a web page is shown. The contrived controlled combination of template tags and template files is called a Theme.

I’ve seen stuff like this before so I’m not too surprised until I get to the next line. “In fact, with the use of a Theme Switcher Revisited Plugin, WordPress designers can allow their visitors to select their own Theme.” Interesting, instead of finding one theme I can find several I like and let my visitors change them as they want.

If there are any theme designers out there who want to design a theme just for a specific color than please let me know. Contact me.

This is also a good page to refer to if you need information on administering the blog. Help links are also provided.

The page is summed up by a little history of the WordPress name. The press part was chosen specifically to associate with printing presses.

Seriocomic is blog by Mike Hudson and is a well designed site. In his navigation he has a tag cloud with wordpress being the largest tag. I clicked and found a great article on WordPress Plugins. After reading Mike’s list of 40 plugins I realized it would be better to install needed plugins before working on the theme or template.

The list was great and I was enjoying the possibilities that the plugins could bring and just when I thought it couldn’t get any better I got to number 40 of his list of 40. It is a plugin for a photoblog! Yet Another PhotoBlog. This is exciting as I will be able to present “Blue” photos on the Top Blue Blog so much easier.

Do you have a blue photo that you would like to share? Contact me.

I will be going though each plugin that I end up using. Mike lists a couple of other lists of plugins so we will be reviewing quite a few.

This can be the first steps you take with your new WordPress blog.

The purpose is for blogs that will have more than one author and you want your nickname to not be “admin.”

1. Log In to WordPress using the username: admin and the password that was generated by the program.

2. Click “Users” which is right now on the far right side next to “Settings” and “Plugins.”

3. I want to change the password on the admin account so click on the username “admin” next.

4. Scroll the bottom and change the password. For me, WordPress sent my original password through email so it had become unsecure. By creating a new password I’m sure that someone at my IP or an automatic email sniffer program does not have it. Make sure that your password strength is “Strong.” Click on “Update Profile.”

5. Click on “Users.” Under the Manage Users you should see “Add New User.”

6. The first prompt is “Username (required)” YES! This is what we want. Enter your desired Username.

7. I entered my first and last names as well. Then my email and website address.

8. Make sure you have a copy in a safe place and enter your Password (twice)

9. Change the Role from Subscriber to “Administrator.”

10. Click “Add User.”

The most important thing to remember now is to sign in as the new user, not the admin. When a theme uses the username field, the username you have chosen will now come up.

The second part goes behind the curtain and walks you through the WordPress administration area that they call “The Dashboard.”

Add a second user so your user name is not admin

I opened the Dashboard then clicked on “users,” then on “admin.” I tried to change my display name but it would not let me do that as admin. I added myself as a new user so I would show up as my user name rather than “admin.” In the default theme the authors name does not appear. But if you change it to the Classic theme, you can see the authors name. If you want your name to appear but you are the admin, you will need to add yourself as another admin but your nickname can then be whatever you want. I will do this for all of my blogs.

I was pleased to just learn that WordPress has pages for static content. Besides using them for “about us” and “contact us” pages, I can see using one as a link page for the most popular posts.

I need to spend more time on the template and comment sections. I read their page on Comment Spam and am excited that WordPress designed to mitigate spam.

About 3/4 down the page they talk about using plugins. These are code written most of the time by third party developers. They suggest installing the “Codex and Forum Searcher Plugin” which searches the WordPress Support Forum. I already have the forum as a link so I don’t think I need it to open inside of the dashboard. I tried to open the link anyway and guess what, it is no longer there. I guess someone else thought this was too much. I am looking forward to plugins but I want to be very careful which ones I choose. BTW, there are currently 2,426 plugins.

Start in the Write Post Subpanel and look for the bookmarklet at the bottom of the page. OK, I did this and it was not there. It is not anywhere. I went to the Support Forum and found that the Press It was on hold until WordPress 2.6.

There is some javascript on the Press It page is you need this feature now. I will wait for it. Can I have my time back?

Lesson learned: if something does not seem right, consult the Forum as it might be a known issue.

I started with http://codex.wordpress.org and clicked “Getting Started with WordPress.” This area is for installation and basic beginner information. I found that just reading about the features helped me become more knowledgeable about the product. I like that you can save your drafts, work on them and then publish them even with future dating.

I’m now reading about Template Tags. I’m glad I know some basic coding skills as the tags are very powerful. Tags include showing or using information on authors, categories, comments, date and time, links, permalinks, post tags, trackback tags, and even tags tags. In the tags tags there is wp_tag_cloud. Using this will display a grouping of tags (cloud) with the size of the tag getting bigger the more times it is assigned to posts. I like the look of these. For a blog with lots of categories, this would be a nice way of showing which categories are posted about the most.

Tags are the guts, the template is the outer skin. I would suggest reading Stepping Into Templates to learn about the WordPress page structure. I’m going to have to spend some time here but for now I’m back to the features list.

I like the control over comments and the ability to view comments that are from a specific IP address, have a specific word in them or even having a link or more. I can see how this will control the comment spammers. I don’t mind leaving comments or having others leave comments on my blogs. But they must contribute and be a “comment” and not a “link to me” or a “I like that too” passing as a comment.

The last feature I’ll mention here is the highlighted search word. When a user searches the blog the word or phrase they used will be highlighted making it stand out on the page. The kicker is the WordPress search-hilite plugin works with the search engines to highlight the words in the blog when users arriving from a search results page.

This blog is the recording of the web log of working on this blog and my new Top Color Blogs.

Today I bought this domain, TopColorBlogs.com, along with these domain names:

TopBlueBlog.com TopRedBlog.com
TopGreenBlog.com TopOrangeBlog.com
TopYellowBlog.com TopPurpleBlog.com
TopBlackBlog.com TopWhiteBlog.com

I needed advice so I called my friend Rockie Gaddie. We had a delightful conversation as always and he was able to guide me in the direction I needed to go. We discussed my concept and before I could write this post he had already submitted a guest article on the color Blue and it uses in Reiki. Rockie is a Reiki Master and runs the Reiki by Rockie blog.

I have opened WordPress 2.5.1 on all the domains and I am excited about changing the basic design. I feel like a kid in a candy store. I did have one problem that my hosting company, MediaTemple.net helped me fix. During that time, I worked on the logos for the sites. I will include this one below as it is not yet above. I know Rockie wants to see it.