Category Archives: WordPress.com Tips

Fixing the WordPress.com Possibly Related Feature

April 27, 2008 –

WordPress Tips and Tricks

You might want to skip this post if you aren’t hosted on WordPress.com.

You may have heard talks about how “Related Posts” was going to become an integrated feature in the WordPress core. Last friday they released a feature called “Possibly Related”. They use Sphere.com’s technology to analyze what posts are related to the current post and add links to the bottom of it. Doesn’t sound bad, right? Wait for it…

For WordPress Multiuser (like WordPress.com) they’re including links to other “related” posts by other people.

By engtech | Also posted in Technology, WordPress | Tagged , , | Comments (30)

Blog Tip: Creating a Blog Maintenance Start Page with Netvibes

September 25, 2007 –

Blogging Tips and Tricks

In Blogger GTD, Leo mentioned that it was a good idea to have one inbox for all your blogging related notifications. I hate cluttering in my inbox, but I do agree that it makes sense to have a single point of reference rather to spend 5 minutes checking some information in one place and then spend 5 minutes checking information in another place. As Skelliewag says, those 5 minutes add up over the course of a day and by the end of it you’ve wasted an hour.

Directing everything to my inbox would never work for me, but it is possible to have a single start page for all your blog maintenance activities using Netvibes.

By engtech | Also posted in RSS Syndication, Technology, Technorati, Twitter | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (61)

Managing Spam Maintenance with Akismet Auntie Spam Version 2

September 13, 2007 –

WordPress Tips and Tricks

Akismet Auntie Spam is a maintenance script for WordPress administrators. One of the problems with the Akismet spam protection service is that sometimes it misidentifies a real comment as spam. WordPress has a spam recovery console that I like to call the spam inbox.

By engtech | Also posted in Building a Community, Firefox and Greasemonkey, IDT Labs Software Development, Technology, WordPress | Comments (40)

WordPress.com Command Diagrams

August 30, 2007 –

WordPress Tips and Tricks

I’ve created two useful diagrams for WordPress.com bloggers and more important for people who offer support in the WordPress.com help forums.

By engtech | Also posted in Technology | Comments (5)

Climbing Out of Category Hell

July 20, 2007 –

WordPress doesn’t (yet) let you easily differentiate between tags and categories without using extra plugins, which means those of us who are cohabiting in a WordPress Multi-user ghetto like WordPress.com are stuck with the plain vanilla categories and the ugly mess that most tag clouds turn into. I have more categories than posts on my blog because I use “WordPress categories” for both tagging and categories. And I’ve finally realized that makes it near to impossible for me to properly organize my posts and for other people to read my site and find things of interest.

This means war.

By engtech | Also posted in Technology | Comments (36)

Win Cash Prizes for your CSS Design for Sandbox

June 20, 2007 –

The whole idea behind HTML and CSS is that you use HTML to format your web page (or blog post) with things like headers, bold, lists and tables. Then you use CSS to style those elements so that they look the way you want them to. The whole idea behind it all is that you can build the structure with HTML once, and then change the look of it whenever you want to using CSS.

By engtech | Also posted in CSS and Web Design, Contests, Technology, WordPress | Comments (15)

Stumbling through //engtech at random (or any wordpress.com blog)

April 24, 2007 –

All wordpress.com bloggers can do the same thing for their blog by adding “?random” to the URL of their main site.

By engtech | Also posted in Asides, Technology | Comments (19)

For Those Who Are New to the WordPress.com Support Forums (by guest blogger Sulz)

April 06, 2007 –

This is a guest post by Sulz of Bloggerdygook

Posting support questions in the Wordpress.com support forums is an easy way to get an answer. But is it the best way?

7 Essential Things You Should Know Before Posting in WordPress.Com Forums

By Guest Blogger | Also posted in Technology | Comments (3)

Tag Cloud Generator for WordPress.com

February 22, 2007 –

A tag cloud is a list of all the tags/categories on your blog where the tags appear bigger if there are more posts in that group.

Tag Cloud Generator connects to your Wordpress.com account, downloads information about your tags/categories and generates HTML code you can cut-and-paste into a blog post or a blog page. It’s not as simple as running a plug-in, but it is the only solution available for Wordpress.com bloggers who want a tag cloud.

By engtech | Also posted in IDT Labs Software Development, Technology | Comments (23)

Getting Started With Splashcast on WordPress.com

January 30, 2007 –

Splashcast lets you create embedded multimedia that you can stick on any webpage that support embedding flash videos. It offers direct integration with Flickr and Youtube. Other people can subscribe to your splashcast and you can host this single splashcast on multiple sites.

This is how to use it with Wordpress.com, and several things they could do to improve the service.

By engtech | Also posted in Technology | Comments (11)

MyBlogLog widget for WordPress.com blogs — One of the best web widgets available

January 15, 2007 –

I was one of the people who was a little disappointed that WordPress.com supports Snap Preview Anywhere but not MyBlogLog. If you look at adoption of the Snap Preview Anywhere widget it was disabled by most major blogs after just a short trial because users hate it (problogger, johnchow, lorelle, digital inspiration, a VC, instigator, [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Building a Community, Technology | Comments (53)

Too much Spam - Akismet Auntie Spam for WordPress.com (Greasemonkey Script)

January 10, 2007 –

I don’t know about you but my Akismet spam folder on my WordPress.com is filled to the brim (56 pages deep, which is ridiculous if you consider that anything older than 15 days is automatically deleted). It’s considered good form to take a peek to make sure that no one’s comments are being accidently deleted, [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Firefox and Greasemonkey, IDT Labs Software Development, Technology, The War on Spam | Comments (4)

WordPress Theme Review: Chaotic Soul, Tarski, Unsleepable, K2-Lite

November 07, 2006 –

This is installment #5 of the WordPress theme review. My goal is to provide a clear document of the themes for the WordPress.com community. I also want to report all theme bugs to improve the experience of WordPress.com community. Support this project by linking to http://engtech.wordpress.com/tools/wordpress/wordpress-theme-reviews/ on your WordPress.com blog.
The themes released in October 2006 [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Technology | Comments (1)

WordPress.com Domain Registration - From the User’s Point of View

October 27, 2006 –

Regular readers may already have realized that I’m a WordPress.com fan boy. Anyone who has come from Blogspot will tell you how good things are over here (not that there isn’t the occasional problem – I’m the reason the Delete Post button turns red when you hover over it). I don’t post about every new [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Technology | Comments (27)

WordPress.com needs a community blog post voting system

October 11, 2006 –

What to do about the wordpress.com dashboard?
WordPress.com hosts a great community, and they have several excellent ways of self-promoting each other. They also have a VIP bloggers program that gets big name, high popularity bloggers to use this site. But as they introduce VIP bloggers the non-VIPs can get pushed to the wayside. David Gray [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Technology | Comments (13)

WordPress Theme Review: Light, Rubrick, Solipsus, Supposedly Clean

October 02, 2006 –

This is installment #4 of the WordPress theme review. My goal is to provide a clear document of the themes for the WordPress.com community. I also want to report all theme bugs to improve the experience of WordPress.com community. Support this project by linking to http://engtech.wordpress.com/tools/wordpress/wordpress-theme-reviews/ on your WordPress.com blog.

Light is a [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Technology | Comments Off

WordPress Theme Review: Pool, Cutline, Rounded, Day Dream

September 25, 2006 –

This is installment #3 of the WordPress theme review. My goal is to provide a clear document of the themes for the WordPress.com community. I also want to report all theme bugs to improve the experience of WordPress.com community. Support this project by linking to http://engtech.wordpress.com/tools/wordpress/wordpress-theme-reviews/ on your WordPress.com blog.

Three new themes were introduced on [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Technology | Comments Off

WordPress update - easy switch between compose/html

September 22, 2006 –

WordPress.com uses TinyMCE for text input. It’s great, except that it sometimes gets confused with paragraphs and line breaks. They also have a raw HTML mode. Unfortunately, it used to be a pain to switch back and forth between the two because the option was located 4 clicks away on your User Profile.
Note: This can [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Technology | Comments (6)

WordPress.com Theme Review: Pressrow, Andreas04, Andreas09, Connections

September 18, 2006 –

As I mentioned here, I’m going through all the WordPress.com themes one-by-one and evaluating them. This time the contenders are Pressrow, Andreas04, Andreas09, and Connections. All of the themes have issues with page order display. This is a bug with most of the themes on WordPress.com.

Pressrow

Pros: Custom image header support, top nav bar, page [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Technology | Comments (4)

Blog Housekeeping: Cleaning Up Dead Links on Your WordPress.com Blog

September 15, 2006 –

I haven’t checked my site for dead links yet, so I’ll do it for the first time. Here’s how:

By engtech | Also posted in Perl, Technology | Comments (2)