If you have a WordPress blog or web site, when you go to Settings > General in your admin panel, you’ll see two fields. The WordPress Address and the Blog Address. Ever wonder what they are for and why have two fields pointing to the same place? I love changing these two fields around. Here’s how. The WordPress script has many files and folders. Maybe you’re the type who likes to keep things all neatly organized in the back end of your web site. Sure, nobody sees it except you when you view your site via FTP but still, you can’t stand all the different files and folders all over the place. Using the WordPress Blog field, you can install WordPress in a folder and have the blog ‘appear’ somewhere else. For example, you install WordPress here http://yoursite.com/wp – in the ‘wp’ folder. But when people visit your site, the blog shows up here http://yoursite.com How neat is that? All you need to do is, change the Blog Address field to http://yoursite.com instead of http://yoursite.com/wp and save your settings. There’s one more step. You copy the index.php from the original WordPress installation into public_html. Then open up index.php and edit

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For the last few days I’ve been talking about making my WordPress powered site (this one) mobile friendly. It started when two days ago, I decided to give the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin a 2nd chance since it’s updated. At that time, I made a quick note about theme-ing the mobile interface. Well, it’s almost midnight here and I’m still trying to understand this theme. Ugh. Maybe it’s too late and I’ve been fixing OPS (other people’s stuff) all day that I’m not seeing things right. But dang! The theme is like learning a brand new version of WordPress. Not what I expected or wanted. I’m close to switching plugins but got to admit this one works best so far and the mobile theme does look pretty sharp. On anothet note, I finally fixed up my Tweetbacks so they look better and added Twitter avatars to the list of tweetbacks. I’ll blog how I did that next week.

By default, WordPress displays the full post in your archive or category pages. I’ve been advised by SEO experts that this may not be a good thing because the content is duplicated on archives, category and the post pages itself. So, I’ve resorted to using excerpts. But problem is, the default WordPress excerpt is… well, boring. When viewing full posts, I get to see the pictures I’ve carefully chosen to go with the post. It breaks up the sea of text and maybe entices people to click on certain posts. One way to spruce this up is to display a thumbnail of the images in the post. Many premium themes use this method but they use WordPress’s custom fields which is not a bad thing if you are the only blogger. But when you have guests and multiple authors, this can get confusing for them. It is rather technical after all. The solution, use a plugin to automatically pull thumbnails of images already in each post. I’m currently using Thumbnail For Excerpt on several blogs which is simple and straight forward. But I’m noticing things about it I’m not quite happy about. For example some screen shots turn out horrible

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Since WordPress started becoming more popular as a content management system, more people are asking questions how to make it behave and display information like a simple content management system would. A question I was asked recently was if it’s possible to make the author’s page display information. The answer, absolutely. Here’s some code you can use. Put them where you want the information to appear in your author.php file in your theme, inside the loop. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 <div id="authimg"> <?php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_email(), ’80′, ” ); ?> </div> <div id="authdetails"> <h2><?php the_author(); ?></h2> <p><?php the_author(); ?>’s Web Site: <a href="<?php the_author_url(); ?>"><?php the_author_url(); ?></a></p> <?php the_author_description(); ?> <p>Below, you’ll find all posts made by <?php the_author(); ?></p> </div> The above will pull an image from Gravatar.com if the author has an image linked to their email address there. It’ll also pull the web site information and description from the web site and bio fields in their account/profile. After that, don’t forget to style it. Here’s what I use to style the information that would put the author’s image on the left, bio, links and other stuff on the right. 1 2 3

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