Blog Lafayette

I finally got my wife’s blog website, www.seasonedwithtime.com finished and converted over to become the main website of Seasoned With Time. Working with all of the little things I had to do to get the javascript, php, iframes and the rest all working within the framework of a WordPress blog was quite interesting. The main reason that we switched our site to a WordPress.org self hosted platform was that we wanted to be able to allow easier manipulation of the content on the site. WordPress makes a great content management system.

For those of you who may be thinking of switching to WordPress and aren’t sure of all the steps to take, don’t be shy about sending me a message and asking questions. I will be glad to offer any help with the process that I can. Certainly no reason for you to have to re-invent the wheel so to speak when I and others have been down that road already.

Live well everyone!

For the last couple of weeks I have been working on my wife’s blog, trying to give it more functionality and ability to present more in the sidebars and such. It has been a learning process. In an earlier post I said that I would be bringing out the details of some of the knowledge I gained in this process. Here is a little bit of that knowledge.

One of the problems I was trying to solve was how to make different widgets and content show up on different pages. I didn’t want a cookie cutter approach where all my sidebar content looked exactly the same on every page. My solution? Two very useful WordPress plugins. They were “Custom Post Widget” and “Widget Logic”.

The “Custom Post Widget” is a great tool that allows the webmaster or author to create individually saved bits of content that can each be moved over to the sidebar area in admin as needed. The best part about the widget is that it allows the content to be authored using the Visual editor in WordPress. This allows formatting of the fonts, uploading images and everything else you can do with the visual editor. This is a much better solution than using the standard “Text” widget which does not allow easy formatting of the content.

That is great, but what about the ability to make these content blocks appear on different pages and posts and in different locations on those pages and posts? This is where “Widget Logic” comes in. “Widget Logic” puts an extra field in the bottom of each widget that you put in the sidebar area of your blog that allows you to tell the widget with a little piece of code which pages it can show up on. The bits of code are called, “Conditional Tags”. Conditional tags allow me to point the widget to only the pages or posts that meet the conditions of the tag. For instance, say I want a block of text to only show up on my Home page and my About Me page but nowhere else. I would drag the content block over to the sidebar area in my admin that contains that text content. I would enter the code, is_home() in the widget logic field in the bottom of that widget, and then click save. I would add another content block with the same text to the sidebar, and enter the code, is_page('about-me'), where “about-me” is the title slug for my About Me page, and click save.

Viola! I’m done. Took me about 30 seconds, and the text in that widget is only showing up on my Home page and my About Me page.

For further information about Conditional Tags go to the link, http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags. To get the two plugins mentioned, just go to your plugins page, go to “Add New”, type in the names of the plugins into the search field, and install each when it comes up.

Hope this was a help. Happy blogging Lafayette and all!

As a fairly new blogger, I have been going through the process of submitting my blog to different websites such as Google and various blog directories. It’s been an interestingand time consuming endeavor. This time I am submitting to Technorati. The Technorati blog directory has been around for several years. As part of the submission process I have to prove to Technorati that I am the author of this blog. To do so I have to include the following random code, N2EXM5J738WA for their web crawler to identify. If you are new blogger and you want to make your blog show up in more places, then I would suggest that you follow down this road I find myself on.

Let’s face it. We are blogging because we want readers. If I were only wanting to put my thoughts down in writing without wanting to publish them to the world, I would buy a diary and leave it on the bookshelf for only my eyes. My vanity says, “More readers!” Here’s to blogging and my hope is that you are successful with yours too. It is truly fun and interesting to be able to write. Have a great Lafayette Indiana day!

So far in this ongoing series of blogging tips, I have looked mainly at the mechanical side of blogs. The platform setup and so forth. But frankly, that stuff is the easy part. The hard part? Writing your blog.

Did I say hard part? Yes, I guess I did, but that really that shouldn’t be the case. It all depends on what you are blogging about. If you have a blog dedicated to “How to clean your carpet”. You may run into a problem finding content. You can only write so many blog articles about how to clean your carpet because there are only so many ways to do it. But, if you have a blog about life in general, you have a much larger subject area to write about! Sometimes people have a hard time coming up with a subject to write about because they are not looking at all of the sources of writing ideas that exist in their day to day life and in the world around them. What did you do today? How did you feel about your day?

I am a member of Virtual Online Learning, a group dedicated to teaching how to do many assorted Internet related things. Among those topics is blogging. In a recent Go To Meeting session, Danna Crawford, the founder of the group gave a great presentation on all of the different sources of content we have available as bloggers. Following is a shortened list of the areas she spoke about.

• Childhood
• Teen Years
• School
• Family
• Towns/City
• Vacations
• Concerts
• Deaths
• Births
• Neighbors
• Events
• Celebrations
• Parties
• Styles
• Weddings
• Divorce
• World and Local News
• Politics
• TV
• Magazines
• Headlines

She also spoke about using a strategy where you finish a statement such as:

• I read …
• I did not agree with …
• I completely agreed with …
• Did you hear about …
• On this date in …

Make these into Who, What, When, Where, and Why questions. We each have the answers to these questions wrapped up in our own lives. When you look at writing a blog from this perspective then you can find much more to say than you may have first imagined. Try one or more of these ideas today. And don’t worry about writing to match James Paterson or some other author that you know of. The goal is to write. The craft of writing well comes with time. Or at least I hope it does. That is what I am counting on for my own writing. How well I write ten years from now will be entirely different than the quality of my writing today.

Have fun blogging and have a great Lafayette Week!

You have decided what your niche is going to be and what kind of blogging platform you are going to use. What comes next? Now is the time to make sure that your blog has a look and style that you can be comfortable with. That means picking a theme for your blog.

All blogging platforms come with a basic theme set to choose from. If you are going to be writing a blog about what you and your friends did last week or what you had for breakfast this morning then pick a theme that is simple but fun. My wife is a fan of books and writing. Her blog, http://www.seasonedwithtime.com/hisandherblog/ has a theme based on writing paper and chalkboards. It is fun and has a more personal feel and it reflects who she is. My blog theme is more squared off and official looking. I am trying for a professional look. If I were writing about baseball then I would possibly have a theme with some baseball imagery incorporated into it.

The point I am making is this, your theme should match your niche and your goals for the blog. If you want to make money or be taken seriously when you offer information and opinions then choose a professional theme. If all you want to do is vent or have fun then choose a fun theme.

Depending upon which platform you decide to use to set up your blog, you can have quite a selection of themes to choose from. If your blog is a WordPress blog, go into the Dashboard, then Appearance, and then Themes. Once in the Themes section if you want to find more themes to use then go to the Install Themes area and perform a search. WordPress has many free themes available for use, and many themes that can be purchased as well. Purchasing a theme gives you more options and more tech support for the theme. Each blog platform has its own method of navigating and changing themes.

Whatever your platform, it is important to take the time to look at the themes available. Now is the time to make sure you like the way your blog looks to the world. This is where you start to make it YOUR blog.