Category Archives: Other Stuff

Getting started with a Website using WordPress Part 3 – Plugins

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In this last part, i will give a short overview of WordPress Plugins and some General tips.

Plugins

WordPress has the possibility to be extended with several Plugins to enhance the experience.

Default Plugins

Hello Dolly!

This is a Plugin to simply delete and make you comfortable installing and removing Plugins

Akismet

Is an important plugin that prevents people spamming on your posts & pages. You have to register to fully use the plugin (free)

My Recommended Plugins:

Jetpack by WordPress.com

Jetpack is a collection of tools that are installed by default on wordpress.com. It adds basic functionality like statistics, as well as social network features, latex integration, advanced galleries etc.

Plugin Site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jetpack/

Link Indication by Michael Wöhrer

Adds small icons at the end of links to indicate the type of file.

Plugin site: http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/link-indication-plugin/

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved by Viper007Bond

Adds the possibility to display source code in WordPress

Plugin site: http://www.viper007bond.com/wordpress-plugins/syntaxhighlighter/

wp-jquery-lightbox by Ulf Benjaminsson

Adds a neat box when displaying a single image

Plugin site: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-jquery-lightbox/

General Tips

About Page

Create and maintain your about page, it is one of the most commonly visited sites on a blog.

Updates

When logging into WordPress admin area it always notifies you if new security patches are out for WordPress. Always check first if your theme and plugins work with that new version, then make a backup and then update WordPress.

Google Stuff

Google provides many different tools for WordPress. However for everything there are also alternatives (well search google you’ll find something)

Feedburner

This allows your RSS feed to be handled by google and in essence you could change the location of your blog and all subscribers to your blog automatically get the feed from your new location. In addition it provides Statistics how many people are subscribed to your blog.

http://feedburner.google.com

Analytics

This is one of the more creepy plugins from google, in essence it keeps track how much time people spent visiting your site, what they click, where they are from, what kind of computer they use etc.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Adsense

Well Adsense is one way to make money with your blog, in essence it is a banner controlled by google and whenever somebody clicks the ad you get some money like 5cents. Well you get a check when you should get 70bucks, so it could take some time.

https://www.google.com/adsense/

Personal reasons

It is always best to have your own personal reasons why you maintain a website or a blog. But always keep in mind that the site is there to enrich the internet in some way.

Be mindful that you always will receive negative comments on the internet, you can ignore them, however if they are constructive you should at least listen.

And as always remember to have fun.

Part 1 - Part 2

Getting started with a Website using WordPress Part 2 – Themes and Menus

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Now that the site is installed and configured you can take care of choosing a theme and configuring the menus. (See Part 1)

Themes

There are many free themes available, as well as themes that come as a price. Finally there is the possibility of hiring a professional WordPress Theme Designer to customize your site.

Search for new themes with WordPress

To find themes you can navigate to Appearances and then on the top “Install Themes” and then start searching for themes.If you download or purchase a theme from another site, you also have to go to Appearances > Install Themes, and then choose on the top “Upload“

Upload a custom theme

A selection of themes can be found at smashing magazine: http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/08/100-excellent-free-high-quality-wordpress-themes/

Menus

After you have selected and installed your theme you usually define a menu for your site. In most cases you would want the user to be able to browse categories. However you also can let the site navigate to Pages or custom URLs.

To allow the user to browse categories you first have to define categories, this is found under Posts > Categories. Whenever you create a new Post you should set a Category, if not it will be stored in the Category “Uncategorized“.

Here you set up your Categories

After you have set up the categories you can add them to your Menu. Important: You can set up multiple Menus, however one menu is always set to the “Primary Navigation”.

There is a Save Menu Button and a Save Primary Navigation Button

Watch out that you always use the “Save Menu” button to save any changes.

Widgets

Depending on your theme, it supports Widgets (small feature extensions). To add Widgets to your site, drag a widget from available Widgets and drop it where you want it (e.g. The Main Sidebar)

After you have dragged it you can configure it and how it looks.

Additional Widgets are available when installing Plugins see Part 3

Widgets, simply drag and drop widgets

Continue to Part 3

Getting started with a Website using WordPress Part 1 – Installation and Configuration

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In this three-part series I will be going into the basics of how to create a simple website using WordPress. WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) that allows a quick and easy way to create websites. For learning the basics practically no programming experience or code is required.

However I will not detailing every step, I’ll just point you to the right direction.

In the first part I will be covering the basics:

Why do you need a Website?
Server Requirements
WordPress installation
WordPress configuration
Difference Post and Pages

In Part 2:

Themes
Widgets
Menus

Finally in Part 3 :

Plugins
General tips

Why do you need a Website?

When creating your first website you should ask yourself, why and for what are you creating the site. *No, not because everyone has one, what is the real purpose of the site? Why does it enrich the internet? Creating a site is time-consuming and after the site is created it needs regular maintenance, so a lot of work, and it should have some payoff in the end.

The first question when creating any website what content is going to be on the site. For example a personal website maybe you need some type of gallery, a web-store needs some type of shopping cart, a forum is a completely different type of site etc. The the beauty of WordPress is that you can extend it in any way to suit your personal needs. So you really mostly have to take care of the content, the design and features are modified independently of the content.

Some of the other questions you should ask yourself:

For what purpose are you creating your site?
Who should read the site?
What do you want to name your site?
What type of Website should it be? a blog, forum, portfolio?

Server Requirements

A website is always hosted on a server. A server is basically a computer that is constantly running and connected to the internet. When choosing a web hosting service you have to make sure that it supports PHP and MySQL.

Free Web hosting

If you are just starting out and want to test things on a server there are several providers that offer free web hosting, however you usually only get a sub-domain. These offers are useful for experimenting with WordPress however a sub-domain suggests that you are an amateur.

One of the few exceptions is when you simply want to run a blog. www.wordpress.com has blog hosting services however you only get a sub-domain.

Paid Web hosting

Professional web hosting costs money. In most cases you have to pay for the domain and the available web space. The package includes email-addresses accompanying the site.

Finding a Domain name

At this point in time the most good names are already taken or people bought the domain and just wait to sell them off.

To check if your domain is still available try out:

http://instantdomainsearch.com/

Or if you want a random web 2.0 domain Name:

http://www.dotomator.com/web20.html

WordPress Installation

You got your server and are ready to go? Great.

Preparation

Download and install Filezilla on your computer www.filezilla.org
Open Filezilla and
Create a new Site, and enter your ftp-access data.

Enter your FTP Access Data
Test the connection.
Go to the Configuration website of your server
Go to the MySQL configuration site
Create a new user (e.g. wordpress_sqlusr) with a strong password

Installation

Download WordPress from www.wordpress.org
Extract the files on your computer
Open Filezilla, and open a ftp-connection to your server
Transfer all files to your server
In a Browser open your website
WordPress will state that the config-file has not been configured. Click on next
Enter the data asked by wordpress. Use a very strong Password to prevent anybody else accessing your site as administrator.

WordPress configuration

Now that WordPress is installed you can configure the site

When you go to /wp-admin you can logon and start configuring your site.
Simply Navigate on the sidebar and click on Settings.
You will find all Settings in this panel and all of it is very well described. Simply go through every different type of Settings.

Difference Post and Pages

A Page is a static website. The Webpage is always the same and never changes. (usually the About Page)

However one of the benefits of a blog is that it has an RSS Feed. Other people can subscribe to this feed with an RSS Reader and when you add new content to your blog they automatically get notified of the change. The blog is generated dynamically from all the posts available.

In most cases it is more useful to use Posts, but it depends entirely on your website. A simple website also can only use static Pages.

Continue to Part 2

Crash Course History by John Green

Free Online Computer Science Education

edX

edX offers free classes offered by MIT, Berkley, Harvard etc. They are challenging but still designed that you can take them in your spare time. The difficulty is designed for beginners as well as more advanced students.

http://www.edx.org/

courseEra

A very similar site to edX but offers more courses in various fields.

https://www.coursera.org/

Udacity

To learn about computing you can go to:

http://www.udacity.com

Note: If you are currently enrolled in a university, it is possible that the certificate can be accredited to your degree in that field. Talk to your student counselor.