Posts tagged ‘Wordpress’
Welcome to the shiny new Teach42
Welcome to the new theme for Teach42.com! This is something that’s been in the works for quite a while now (far too long), but I’m thrilled to finally switch over to it today. I’d been thinking about getting myself a new theme since I started seeing other blogs using the same one I’d be using. I’ve always wanted to have something completely original, but in the past must of the custom ones I’ve used have had issues on the backend. I finally decided to take the plunge when I saw the EFL Geek’s new theme which completely blew me away. So I emailed Sean and asked him if he’d be interested in creating a custom theme for me and he mentioned that he was creating his own design company and would love to work together.
Heh, I have to give him major credit. Between conferences and family and this that and the other thing, I haven’t been the easiest person to work with. But he’s always been a true professional and fit the development around my crazy schedule. From brainstorming ideas out, to graphic design to creating a complete custom wordpress theme with all the features I wanted, he did an absolutely phenomenal job.
I have to admit, at first I balked a little bit about paying someone to create a theme for me. After all, it’s just a blog… But then again, it’s also something I’ve invested five years of my life on. It’s gotten me my current job, and introduced me to thousands of educators world wide. It’s my identify online, my resume, my cv and my permanent record. And once I started thinking along these lines it seemed almost odd to me that I hadn’t invested more in it already. So I took some of the money this blog generates from Google Ads and I set it aside to have the new theme created. I wanted something somewhat whimsical, and yet geeky. I love the computer cables strewn about everywhere in the sidebar widgets and such. Usual web 2.0 tools are integrated in as well. Gravatar user images are thrown in for commentors and so on. I also have a few plans that we didn’t stick in yet but may be added in the future.
I hope you like it! It’s funny but this theme has been ready to switch over to for a few weeks now, but I kept putting off making hte change because I wanted to do a proper introduction for it. However, in the meantime, I kept putting off blog posts because I wanted to wait to post them until the new theme was ready! And while waiting for that to happen, I just didn’t post anything. I should have taken the advice I always give to other new bloggers. JUST DO IT. Don’t wait for bigger and better, don’t waste time with things to come. Do it now, as you can always add more and improve later.
So with that, I hope you like the new digs! Leave a comment and let me know what you think. And if you decide to do something along these lines yourself, I personally recommend you reach out to Sean. He was a true professional and great to work with.
Day 16: Your Greatest Hits
On Teach42.com right now, I have 764 blog posts. I’ve written a few more, but they got lost between transitions before I settled on WordPress. Of those 764, 10 appear on the landing page. So when someone comes to visit my blog, those are the posts they see. If they have some time, maybe they’ll scroll back a few pages, but there may be some visitors that have no idea that I used to be an active podcaster. Or that I aggregated the top free WordPress themes for education. Or that I wrote up a summary of the things I learned from Twitter in a 24 hour period. Or that I built an iPod battery pack… out of an Atari 2600 cartridge!
The point is, as wonderful as a blog is for sharing your thoughts and ideas, information does tend to get buried rather quickly. Some of those posts, like the ones I mentioned above, are just as valid now as they were a 12, 24 or even 36 months ago. So today’s challenge is going to be adding a spot on your blog for your greatest hits, the posts that you think are your best, your most significant, and the ones that you think visitors to your blog should check out. Idea being, if they’re only going to be on your blog for a few minutes, what are the things that you’d like to show them?
So what posts should you provide links to?
- Posts of yours that have received the most comments
- A post where you describe your ‘blog’ mission statement, or why you got into blogging in the first place.
- A blog post that you’re extremely proud of, whether it got comments or not (some of my favorites have gotten zero comments)
- Any posts that you think would be worthwhile for people new to the blogosphere to read
- In a nutshell, your favorites.
I want to re-emphasize, number of comments does not equal quality of post. There are a few posts I’ve written that have received a decent number of comments, but frankly I’m rather ashamed of. Others generated a lot of conversation, but I don’t necessary feel are all that significant or worth pointing out to people. Perhaps the information is dated and not relevant anymore.
Take some time to scroll through your archives and try to figure out which posts you think are worth sharing with people. There’s no magic number here, but I’d say between 5-10 are a good number. As to where you put them, you really have three options. You could just post it on your blog, which is great to remind current readers of your greatest hits, but doesn’t help future readers. Once again, in 10 posts, it’ll have scrolled off the front page. The second place is to put it in it’s own page. If you do so, you can link up the post as well as write a brief description of why people might be interested in it. Then you add a link to that page in your blogs navigation bar (many blog engines do this automatically).
The third option, which is the one I’ll be doing tonight, is to add it in to your sidebar. If you do that, then those links will appear on every page throughout your blog, so regardless of how people arrive, visitors will still be able to see them. This gets those posts the most exposure, but it also takes up real estate in your sidebar, something we’re trying to keep concise. So long as you don’t let it get out of control though, it shouldn’t take up too much space.
If you’re a new blogger, then maybe this is something that you may want to create space for, and update as you go along. Veteran bloggers, this may take some time to dig through.
Either way, once you’ve done the groundwork, share a comment here with what you think was your most significant blog post to date and why. And don’t forget to share a link to it!
30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
Day 13: Declutter Your Sidebar Part 2
Well, you knew this was coming. Part one of the challenge was zooming in on the blogroll, assuming that your blogroll was even IN your sidebar of course. Part 2, today’s challenge, is to go through the rest of sidebar with a fine toothed comb and de-clutter it. This is one of the ideas based on ProBlogger’s tips that I knew was going to be included the moment I saw it. One thing to remember here is that de-cluttering does not necessarily mean removing things. It’s a matter of looking at each item you have there, considering whether it belongs in your sidebar or not, whether it is taking up more space than it deserves, whether it’s function is being duplicated elsewhere or could be consolidated, and whether there may be another way to achieve the same goal in a more efficient way.
If you’ve been following this challenge, then you’ve already added a few things to your sidebar. I think having a translate option is important and is going to stay. The Clustrmap is more of a vanity item than anything else, but it does an effective job of demonstrating the reach of your community geographically and I’m choosing to keep. Obviously, that’s a personal choice. I’m not going to preach that you should have a short sidebar or a long one, or what belongs there and what doesn’t. However, I do believe that what’s there should be deliberate and efficient in terms of space and form, especially considering how many options are out there.
For example, in my sidebar right now I have a Facebook badge, I have a ShowYourself badge, a Twitter widget, and a FriendFeed widget. The ShowYourself badge has a link to my Facebook profile and my FriendFeed widget displays my Twitter status updates, which seems kind of ridiculous now that I think about it. I’m going to eliminate them all. No, I’m not going to stop linking to those things and displaying my status, but I’m going to take advantage of a tool that Sue Waters (who is the spiritual co-author of this challenge!) recommended to me called Retaggr. It provides a nice clean badge that will give me almost all the functionality that those four items provided, but in one nice and neat package. It’ll have links to all my social sites, like the ShowYourself badge. It includes my headshot, company, and link to Facebook like the Facebook badge did. It will also display my most recent tweet, which is plenty. If people want to see my last 10 tweets, they can visit Twitter. The only thing I’m losing out on is that the FriendFeed badge displayed when I’ve uploaded photos or videos as well, which is pretty sporadic to be honest. Ideally, I’d love it if Retaggr would display my most recent post on Twitter OR Plurk, but that’s ok. I think the benefit far outweighs the few things it lacks.
There are a few widgets that I have that just don’t make the cut. I have a Now Reading plugin that shows what my ‘reading’ status is. However, it only works as well as my maintenance habits, which are poor when it comes to that. I never remember to update it so I have a choice: Change my habits, or just get rid of it. I don’t feel it’s that important, so it’s going bye-bye.
For the widgets that you’ll be keeping, bear in mind that there may be new versions of them available, or third party options that you could swap them out for. For example, check out all of these different Twitter widgets that are available. And that blog post is from a year ago! Many sites also offer you the opportunity to modify the color schemes for a widget, enabling you to try to blend it in a little closer to your chosen theme. You may find it worthwhile to give a few ‘keeper’ widgets a makeover as part of this challenge.
While we’re at it, let’s talk Archives. Typically there are only three ways somebody visiting your blog can find your posts once they’ve scrolled off the front page: 1) Search 2) Categories 3) Archives. I do think they’re important to keep around, but once you’ve been blogging for a few months, they start to take up a HUGE amount of space. However, that’s an easy one to do something about. Most blogging engines now have an option to shrink your archives down to a drop down list. So instead of it taking half the page, it’ll only take up a line or two. Unfortunately, that option is usually relatively hidden. In WordPress (and EduBlogs), you have to find the archive Widget and click Edit and the option will pop right up. In Blogger, it’s pretty similar. Go to Layout -> Page Elements and choose to edit the Blog Archive gadget. Lots of options there, including changing it to a drop down box. Very very easy thing to do in order to save a lot of real estate in your sidebar.
Finally, there are three things that I think you need to make sure are somewhat obvious in your sidebar: A search bar, a way to contact you and a way to subscribe to your blog. I never understand why some bloggers don’t have a search bar on their blog. It makes me leave their blog and jump through some Google hoops just to find information they’ve written that I know is there! As I mentioned above, there are precious few ways to find your content once it has scrolled off the front page. Don’t make it more difficult for your readers.
Contact information seems like a no-brainer, but I’m always stunned by how many blogs I visit don’t provide any way to make direct contact besides leaving a comment and hoping they see it. Some of you put your contact information in your About Me page. That’s fine, but if you did so, you should also have SOMETHING in your sidebar that clearly states, “This is where you can go to contact me” and then points to the About page. Once again, if somebody reads your blog and wants to communicate with you, you want it to be easy for them to do so.
Same thing goes for subscribing. Now, if you did the Feedburner challenge, then this should be a non-issue. But step back and verify that in your sidebar there is an obvious way for people to subscribe to your blog. Your RSS or Feedburner icon should not be so subtle that people can’t find it. I recently visited a very prominent blogger and was flabbergasted that there was no RSS link available. I had to view his source code in order to find out what his RSS feed. That’s inexcusable on a blog. So double, triple check to make sure that your RSS feed is represented in your sidebar and that it points to the right one if you signed up for Feedburner.
Just for the sake of an example, I’m going to leave my blog’s sidebar as-is for the rest of the day, and then will fix it up as I’ve outlined here tonight. Enjoy the mess for now, it’ll be a leaner, meaner sidebar soon 
I have to admit, the comments on these posts have been phenomenal. So don’t be shy here, did I miss anything? Is there anything you consider a ‘must-have’ for your sidebar, or that you think is a faux pas that bloggers often commit? Got a great widget that you think would add value or make people’s sidebar content more efficient? Share some of your favorites as well as the ones you hope to never see again! Also, if you’d like to get some feedback on your sidebar, share a link to your blog and I”m sure people would be willing to take a look.
Day 12: Declutter Your Sidebar Part I – Blogroll Audit
Well, today’s challenge is the first of a two-parter. The longer you have a blog, the more cluttered your sidebar winds up. New social site? New widget! And it all adds up. Pretty soon your sidebar is a veritable circus of colors, banners and links. It’s time to reign it in, but if we’re going to do it we should do it right. And that means taking a thorough look at what we have there, determining what can be eliminated, what can be consolidated, and what should be… pruned. Which leads us to your blogroll.
The blogroll is one of the most popular sidebar items with good reason. It let’s people know who you read, where you get your information from and who you recommend to other people. There are many tools that make it easy to keep up… But therein lies the problem. For example, I use Bloglines for my blogroll. Anytime I add an EdTech blog to my aggregator, *bam* it appears in my blogroll. Delicious, Google Reader, and many others allow you to do the same thing. Trouble is, that means it’s just a little too easy to keep adding blogs to it, and after a while it sorta of loses it’s value. Looking at my blogroll as it stands right now, it’s just a series of links to a bazillion EdTech blogs. Unless it’s deliberate, it’s meaningless. So it’s time to do some trimming.
There are several ways to do a blogroll. WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and Edublogs all support blogrolls natively. Or you can use third party tools like Google Reader, Bloglines, Delicious, or any number of others. To be honest, the tool that use doesn’t matter so much. The important thing is selecting what you want to list there, and how you want to organize it. Do you want to list a few of your favorite blogs to read? Do you want to list bloggers that you admire? Perhaps you just want to share your favorites in a specific niche, like Special Ed or ESL. Really, it’s entirely up to you and there’s no wrong way to do. So long as you do it deliberately and maintain it.
Maintain it? Absolutely. Sometimes good blogs go stale. And if the blogger hasn’t posted since 2006, does it really still deserve a spot on your blogroll? Most likely not. While your pruning, you just might find yourself feeling a little guilt. You really like ‘John’, but you haven’t read his blog in who knows how long. Should he still be in your blogroll? In my opinion, if you even have to wonder, go ahead and take it out. If you share a sprawling list of 50 blogs there, it’s overwhelming and deters people from exploring them. If you have a concise list of 10 blogs, people see that these are personal recommendations from you and will be more prone to clicking through. It’s more meaningful that way. So don’t feel guilty. It’s your blog darnit! Do what you need to do. And if you’re going to have more than 10-15 of them, consider breaking them up into multiple categories so they’re more manageable.
If you don’t have any you want to remove any, at least do a ‘freshness’ check to make sure all of the blogs you’re linking to are still up and are active!
Good luck! And don’t forget, if you haven’t joined the wiki yet, stop by and list yourself there. And get ready for tomorrow, when we give the rest of your sidebar the royal treatment!
And now I’m off to do some trimming myself!
Day 9: Burn Baby Burn! Your Feed, That Is
One of the more confusing aspects of blogging is RSS, but that’s truly the heart and soul of a blog. Without the RSS feed, you just have a web page. Your RSS feed allows people to subscribe to your content via aggregator or email, or allows you to take your content and republish it in a variety of ways. For example, it’s what allows you to announce your blog posts on Facebook or on FriendFeed and so on. Your feed is an absolutely critical piece of your blog and you always want to make sure it’s functioning, happy and standards compliant.
While just about every blog engine out there supports RSS, most are fairly basic feeds. They do the job, but not much more than that. Of course, that begs the question, what else would you like your RSS feed to do? Wel, for one thing you might want to engage in podcasting. Most people don’t know it, but it’s your RSS feed that takes a link to an MP3 file and turns it into an actual podcast. It realizes that you’ve linked to an MP3 file and then adds in some special code that let’s podcatchers like iTunes know how to get access to the audio file. Interestingly, it doesn’t just do it for audio files. PDF’s, Video files, and documents of all sorts caqn be sent out via a podcast. That is, if your RSS feed handles the data right. And that’s barely the tip of the iceberg.
While most RSS feeds are just adequate, Feedburner is a free service that can take an adequate feed and make it superior. I’ve been using Feedburner to remix my feed for about 4 years now and can’t recommend it more highly. There’s a few reasons that I suggest using Feedburner to upgrade your feed, but the biggest is a very simple practical one. Bloggers move around sometimes. You may start on Blogger, then move to EduBlogs.org and then wind up hosting your own someday. Who knows? Maybe you’ll start off on your own and then move to a school server. You never know what the future is going to bring. Typically, every time you move your blog you’d need to alert all of your readers that your RSS feed is changing. They need to unsubscribe from your old feed, and then subscribe to your new feed. While some people will do so, more than likely you’ll lose readers that way. If you have people subscribing to a Feedburner feed instead, you just change were Feedburner gets it’s information from and your readers are unaffected.
Let me step back just a little bit and ensure you understand what I mean on this one. Typically your blog engine (Blogger, EduBlogs, WordPress, Blogmeister) creates your RSS feed. When you sign up for Feedburner, you supply them the link to your RSS feed and then they give you a shiny new Feedburner feed. Then you hide all instances of the original feed and make sure that everybody is subscribing to your Feedburner feed. The feedburner feed passes along the EXACT same information, but it mixes it and mashes it up to make it more standards compliant, enables all sorts of additional features, allows you to keep a closer eye on your subscriber data and more. So it’s just a shiny new version of your original feed, but with a new address.
I’m not going to take you step by step how you sign up for feedburner, because they already have some great walk thru’s for it, depending on your blog engine. This page has quick start guides for Blogger, WordPress, Typepad and MySpace. Sue Waters has a phenomenal write up of how to add Feedburner to your EduBlogs blog. And for the record, most of her steps will work just fine on other WordPress blogs.
Once you’ve signed up for Feedburner and have your shiny new Feedburner link, there’s two things that you need to do in order to make sure that people find that instead of your old feed. The first is add a Feedburner chicklet to your sidebar. Log into your Feedburner account and go to the Publicize tab. One of your choices is the Chicklet Chooser. Follow the steps there to create a chicklet that appeals to you. Grab the code and paste it somewhere in your sidebar so that people can find it. Then glance through your sidebar to make sure that you don’t see any other references to your old RSS feed. At this point, I would also suggest that you alert your current subscribers to switch over to your new and improved feed. If they don’t, no worries for now. They’ll still receive content via your old feed. It isn’t turned off or anything. But you do want to encourage them to move over to the new one.
The second thing you need to do is fix your auto-discovery options. If you use Firefox 
, Flock, Opera, IE7 or Safari 
, you may notice certain notifications when you’re visiting web pages that have RSS feeds. When that icon appears, that means that there’s subscribable content on that page. Clicking on the RSS icon takes you to a page that gives you a variety of ways to subscribe. However, we want to make sure that it’s providing ways to subscribe to the NEW Feedburner feed. If you use an official redirection service like a WordPress Plugin (same goes for Edublogs) or Blogger’s Feedburner redirection service, then no worries, it should handle it for you. In Typepad, you can connect your Typepad blog to Feedburner and then it’ll handle it for you. If you use anything else, you may need to edit your template yourself to do this part. While it may seem intimidating to do so, it’s not that complicated. Just a matter of tweaking a few lines of code. This blog post will show you how.
So today’s challenge is to upgrade your RSS feed to Feedburner today. It’s one of those things that may seem like a pain the first time you do it, but trust me when I say that you will never regret it. It’s well worth the effort in the long haul. If you’ve already upgraded your blog to Feedburner, then use this as an excuse to browse through the site and see what options have popped up since the last time you visited. Most people set up Feedburner and then promptly forget all about it. Did you know that you can mix in events from your Google Calendar? Or add icons allowing people to forward on your articles, promote them on Digg, or GeoTag them for you? Is your Creative Commons license in your feed on and up to date (not everyone actually VISITS your blog)? Are you allowing readers to subscribe via email? Feedburner is adding features all the time, take a few minutes to flip through the features you may not have seen recently.
If you have any problems with this challenge, let us know via comments below. I’ll do my best to try to point you in the right direction. Also, don’t forget to add yourself to the 30D2BBB Wiki, so people know who you are and where your blog is. That way we can all try to support each other!
30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
I have unlimited love for Bluehost
I’m not shy about how much I love my hosting company, Bluehost. In fact, I seem to blog about it once a year, it seems as thought it’s about that time again. Reason I’m mentioning it now is because they recently upped the ante once again and I couldn’t be happier.
So a friend of mine asked me how much space you get for $6.95 a month on Bluehost, because she was always filling up her hosting account and running out of space. I knew it was alot, but I couldn’t remember the exact amount so I went and looked it up. Low and behold, they’ve changed how much space you get. To infinity. Yes, that’s right, you now get an UNLIMITED amount of space with your Bluehost account.
Of course, let’s say you create a wildly successful video podcast. Each of those videos can be upwards of 100mb. With thousands of people downloading them, you’ll probably run out of bandwidth pretty quick. That’s why hosting companies like LibSyn have made a splash, because they give you unlimited bandwidth. So I looked up how much bandwidth you get right now at Bluehost. Guess what? That’s unlimited too!
How many domains can you host there? Unlimited. Subdomains? Unlimited. Email forwards? Unlimited. FTP Accounts? Only 1000. But if you need more than 1000 separate FTP accounts, we gotta talk 
What else do I like about Bluehost? For $6.95 a month, you get a free domain name that you can set up a blog on with a single Click. Or a Drupal. Or Moodle. Or Joomla, or just about anything else. You get FTP, Email accounts (with 3 different webmail choices), wikis, SFTP, full stats, SSH, PHP, MySql, Ruby and the complete works. I have yet to want to do something with my Bluehost account that I couldn’t find a way to make it work.
In fact, it’s so easy to set things up and take them down that I do it for friends all the time. They want to try out a blog? I install one with a single click, let them play around, and then remove it. They want to try out Moodle? Install, play, remove. Couldn’t be easier.
Customer support is phenomenal as well. I’ve had about 4 or 5 problems over the last few years so they aren’t perfect, but the good thing is that every time I’ve ever called in I’ve gotten a person on the phone within a few minutes, and that first person I’ve spoken to has been able to find a solution. The service is exemplary.
In all honesty, in hindsight, had I known about them when I was a Tech Coordinator, I would never have hosted our school site on the XServes we bought with a grant. I’d have saved a bundle of money and just put it on Bluehost. No worries about backing things up, no worries about up time, power outages, server racks, or anything. Just let them take care of all that so you can focus on doing the good stuff.
Now, for the full disclosure part. The links to Bluehost so far have all contained my affiliate link. Whenever someone registers for Bluehost, I get a small kickback. However, I’m a big enough fan for them that I’d recommend that you use them even if you don’t use my affiliate link. So if you click here you can go check out Bluehost and sign up WITHOUT giving a cent to me. Pure and simple, I use them because I love them and I think you will too.
If you have any questions about them or want to play around with any of it, just let me know!