Last month I gave a webinar on WordPress to the STC CIC SIG, which is the Independent Contracting and Consulting Special Interest Group of the Society for Technical Communication. I recorded the webinar and am allowed now to make it available for free on my site. The recording plays my voice only, and the whole webinar lasts about 75 minutes. You can view the recording … more »

Wordcamp is a conference dedicated to topics on WordPress. This year WordCamp Utah will be held Saturday, August 28 at the University of Utah. The conference costs $20 and includes lunch. Here are details from Joseph Scott, the organizer: WordCamp Utah 2010 will be held August 28th at University of Utah, in the Skaggs Biology Building. This is a great opportunity to spend a day … more »

Before WordPress 3.0, one of the frustrations with WordPress was configuring the navigation menu when you wanted to combine pages, categories, and URLs. The new navigation system in WordPress 3.0 solves this problem, because it allows you to create a menu by dragging and dropping almost any type of link. But just upgrading WordPress to 3.0 won’t automatically give you the new navigation system. You … more »

Lavacon is a yearly conference Jack Molisani puts together on professional development for technical communicators. This year’s conference focuses on social media. You can’t run a conference on social media without having a cool-looking social media driven website, right? So Jack contacted me to help make the Lavacon conference site more of a web 2.0 / social-media-driven experience. Working on the Lavacon conference website has … more »

This comprehensive post by Justin Tadlock, Goodbye, headaches. Hello, menus!, covers the new menu system in WordPress 3.0 in depth. I’ve been using the new menu system on some WordPress 3.0 sites, and I have to say it looks like one of the best new features in 3.0. You can drag and drop categories, pages, and external URLs directly onto a navigation bar. As an … more »

I sent out this tip in my last WordPress newsletter. You can subscribe to my WordPress newsletter here. One of the many advantages of WordPress over other blog platforms is the number of plugins available. Plugins are scripts that you can add to WordPress to increase the functionality in some way. For example, a contact form plugin gives you an easy way to drop in … more »

I sent out this tip in my last WordPress newsletter. You can subscribe to my WordPress newsletter here. With WordPress 3.0 just around the corner, scheduled to be released before the end of the month, what should you do to prepare? When the update is available, you’ll see a notification message at the top of your WordPress administrative interface. It will prompt you to back … more »

I sent out this tip in my last WordPress newsletter. You can subscribe to my WordPress newsletter here. I decided to start up a WordPress newsletter to offer weekly tips on WordPress. I added the sign-up widget on my sidebar about a month ago. Since then, 56 people have signed up. I just sent out the first newsletter today. I’m copying the newsletter content into … more »

Lately I’ve been receiving a lot of comment spam, more than I should be getting, so I contacted Akismet to see what I could do. They shared a tip with me that turned out to be quite helpful. Here’s the key insight: spam is attracted to spam. Let’s say a spam comment sneaks by you and remains on one of your posts. That spam somehow … more »

I have a lot of events coming up, so I’ve been trying to coordinate and manage my schedule in a more efficient way. I use Google Calendar, with various calendars that I toggle on or off based on what I want to see. Lately I decided to integrate some of the event information from my Google calendar into my WordPress blog. I have two new … more »

It’s always hard to tell exactly why or how a site gets hacked. One of the WordPress sites I created for a client kept getting hacked. I took more extreme security measures, changing the database table prefix, adding an htaccess file to wp-admin that filtered IP addresses, adding a plugin to encrypt logins, adding a firewall, moving wp-config to another directory, and other measures. I thought … more »

You can add more than one sidebar section to your WordPress site. For example, with the stc-intermountain.org site, I added a whole bunch of additional sidebar sections in the Appearance > Widgets section.

Last week Will Sansbury mentioned to me that one of his ideas with the Atlanta chapter site was to provide an example or template of how WordPress could be used for chapter sites. I got to thinking, why isn’t there a standard WordPress template for chapters and SIGs to use? Further, in WordPress 3.0, WordPress MU and regular WordPress will be merged. This is huge, … more »

Date: Jan 28, 2010 Time: 1 pm EST Platform: Genysys (on the web) Cost: Free for STC members Registration required Will Sansbury and I are giving a webinar on web design and WordPress this Thursday as part of the STC Community Leaders series. In the webinar, we plan to look at about five chapter/SIG sites in depth, examining what they’re doing well and how they … more »

Google Custom Search can dramatically improve the search results for your WordPress blog or any other site. WordPress is a great blogging platform, no doubt about it. But the built-in search feature is terrible. As I’ve searched for keywords from past posts to respond to reader questions, I would continually come up empty-handed. As a solution, I incorporated Google Custom Search, which is a free … more »