Snoskred – Life in the Country

How to -

Password protect a WordPress post

Insert a poll into your WordPress post

Put Gravatar on a WordPress site

Change the address of your feedburner feed

In case you missed them – these are excellent posts Sephy!

Over at the Aussie Bloggers forum we have a thread where people can put a link to their site, and then we add them to the blogroll/links list on the Aussie Bloggers blog. I’ve learnt a nifty little trick which can save you a lot of time. Here tis. Some of the following images are thumbnails – click them for a larger view.

1. Click on Blogroll (light blue menu) and then Add Link (dark blue menu)

2. You’ll find yourself in the Add Link screen. You can manually add a link by copying and pasting the link, and then putting in the title you would like the link to have. But there is an easier way. Though it may not seem easier, it is once you have it all set up.

3. Just a little way down the Add Link screen, you will see “Add Link Bookmarklet”. This is basically a quick way to add links to your blogroll. You put it into your favourites (Internet Explorer) or bookmarks (Mozilla Firefox and other browsers). When you are at a website and you want to add a link to that website, you simply choose the “link this” favourite/bookmark and it makes the “Add Link” window pop up – already with the link and the title of the website all filled in for you.

So what you need to do is rightclick on Add Link, and then select – “Add to Favorites…” (Internet Explorer) “Bookmark This Link…” (Mozilla Firefox and others)

4. This box will pop up, asking you to choose where you would like to put the bookmark.

5. Me personally, I use a “Bookmarks Toolbar” so that I can have the bookmarks I use regularly accessible by one simple click. So if you do the same, you can put “Link This” in your Bookmarks Toolbar. More info on customising toolbars with firefox can be found here as well as in the help section within your browser.

You can also do the same thing with Internet Explorer – here are the instructions for IE7 – and by the way, if you are using anything less than Internet Explorer 7, you should upgrade. Most websites do not look as they should in Internet Explorer 6 and below. For more info on that see this thread on the Aussie Bloggers Forum.

What this all means is, when I want to add a link, I simply click on link this in my toolbar.

6. When you click on link this, you will see a new window pop up, and it will contain the link and the title of the website. Sometimes you may not want to use the full title, so you can edit that before you click on Add Link. If you are using categories within your blogroll (unusual but can sometimes be handy, see this thread for more info on how to set up a page for the categories) you can also choose what category you would like the link to be placed in.

I Don’t Have A Bookmarks Toolbar?

In case you don’t see your bookmarks toolbar – you may need to change a setting in your browser. For those using Internet Explorer – click on View –> Toolbars –> then make sure that there is a tick next to links.

To see your bookmarks toolbar in Mozilla Firefox, click on View–> Toolbars –> and make sure there is a tick next to bookmarks toolbar – if not then select bookmarks toolbar with your mouse and the toolbar will appear on your browser screen.

Questions? Comments?

I’ll try to answer any questions you may have – leave a comment with your question!

One of the bloggers I’m hosting asked me to find a top commentators plugin for wordpress. Let it be known that I do not take adding plugins lightly. I want to test them thoroughly on my test blog before they go near the blog of someone else and that can take a bit of time given how busy I am. I eventually found one that did not break the blog or any of the other plugins, and I have uploaded this plugin to all the blogs I host.

I have already installed this plugin on a couple of the blogs when I was in their Admin screen to do something else, so if you have a top commentator widget in your sidebar you don’t need to follow these instructions but it is handy to know where you can edit the options, so read it anyway.

Now you have to do a little bit of work to make it work. Here’s what you do.

1. Go to the Plugins menu in your WordPress Admin area.

2. Scroll down until you see Top Commentators Widget – when you find it, click on activate.

3. Go to Presentation – Widgets.

4. Drag and drop the top commentators widget to the spot in your sidebar where you would like to place it.

5. Click on the three lines underneath the blue line to bring up the pop up box.

6.  Enter in the settings you want. Here you see my settings as they are – you may want to copy mine if you’re not sure what to put in.

7. Finally, click on save changes in the widgets screen.

And there you have it – you’re all set up. Enjoy!

Undoubtedly this particular feature of WordPress is the thing that made me decide to switch over because I like to write things ahead of time. By the end of November I already had the first 3 weeks of the December Song For Today posts pre-published.

However I don’t just use it for that – I use publish in the future as a tool to check I got everything looking the way I want it in my post. Every post I write – including this one – will be set to publish 10 or 20 minutes after the time I hit the publish button. That means I can take a quick look at the post before it goes live and just double check it the formatting and the spelling for one last time.

So here is what I wrote down and have stuck to the side of my screen for easy reference. Write this down.

To publish in future -

• Check edit timestamp box
• Set date in future
• Post status to published
• Hit publish

And now you get a version with screenshots.

To Publish In Future -

Here’s a picture of the Write Post screen.

The bit of the screen you’re looking for is in the pink box with the arrow pointing to it. Once you have finished writing your post -

Tick the edit timestamp box and change the time to be the time you want the post to go live on your blog.

Change the post status from draft to published.

Hit the publish button.

And you’re done. Seriously!

But Just Remember -

If you forget to change the date and hit publish, everyone will see what you posted *now*. So be careful.