Image Credit via Flickr
Websites like Posterous and Tumblr are becoming more and more popular
lately. Why? Because they are so easy to use, you can concentrate just
on your writing and let the software worry about itself. The
post-by-email feature makes it even easier, you don’t even need to log
into a website to post your articles.
I’ve been really into making my life easier and creating posts by email
has been a fun way to update a blog without having to log in to
wordpress. It comes in handy if you’re behind a firewall (read: at
work), in a coffeeshop where you don’t trust WIFI security, or you could
even write a full blog post from your mobile phone.
Post By Email
I know, it’s already built into WordPress, but the default version is
lacking in features I like (such as image attachments and specifiying
tags & categories on the fly).
As usual, another plugin comes to our rescue–Postie. If you
haven’t seen it before, it’s basically a more powerful version of the post-by-mail features.
Using Postie with the Thesis Theme
Postie is pretty nice out of the box, and it even comes with a filter that allows you to easily extend it with customized behaviors.
But as with many plugins, there are a few limitations that I discovered when I wanted to specify post images and this required a bit of
customization.
The feature I most enjoy, being a Thesis theme user, is the ability to
add the custom image fields to my posts. Thesis has several options for
post images that you can add. They are all custom (Meta) fields in the
post and can be set/read with WordPress functions.
Postie lets you specify inline images OR add them as a custom field to
the post. Well, I wanted to do both. With a little work it’s possible.
Read How It’s Done
I get a lot of visits from people looking for tutorials, if that describes you, then I’ve made it even easier to follow along: web clipping to Evernote.
If you haven’t used Evernote then, you might really like the easiest way to add and track anything.
Get The Scoop →
You may or may not know, or care, who Paul Graham is. If not, you could go read some of his stuff. He’s got a lot of interesting and useful things to say. [Yes, I will I admit I’m a fanboy of Paul Graham.
He and a couple other guys started a really early website for building sites, what we now just call eCommerce sites—places where you buy and sell things. It eventually got bought by Yahoo. But back then it was new, particularly how people used it to build sites.
Why am I telling you this?
Read the full article →
It’s been a dry month on the blog, but traffic has oddly never been higher. All good.
I’ve recently migrated fully to a new MacBook [after a dozen or so years on Windows PCs] and I couldn’t be more excited or more productive. A change which has been long overdue.
I am looking forward to getting some updates coming soon. Stay tuned…
Search traffic is great for getting traffic to a site, but most people want to keep their visitors coming back for more content, possibly to comment, possibly to buy something or just for the pleasure of communicating with others.
There are lots of theories, courses and eBooks on building site traffic, but the usual mantra is just to write great content. It sounds simple enough, but even if you do write great content wouldn’t it be nice if you could know what topics are the most popular or are in your site visitors minds when they are viewing your site?
Short of being Carnac, there are a few less mystical methods to gain awareness of this useful information and use it to your advantage.
Read the full article →
I recently found a book called The Curious Garden at our local independent book store. Once I picked it up I enjoyed the illustration so much I couldn’t leave the store without it. So, under the pretense of buying it for my daughter, I got it. (Funny how often I do that!)
The author and illustrator is Peter Brown who has done a great job both with a delightful story and great art work. I like to take my design inspirations from a variety of sources and I find his details seem to reflect a lot of the design for the web.
It was definitely a story to promote green spaces, gardens and such, but it also is a pretty straightforward metaphor for the influence each one of us has to start something bigger than ourselves.
So many people are looking away from being followers and more towards being leaders. This book is a simple and time-tested illustration of how each action we take can inspire others to follow our lead (not to become followers themselves) but to believe in something and help nurture it, be that public health, community involvement or less altruistic goals of making stuff people want.
It isn’t necessarily a must-read for everyone, but I think it could be a positive influence in someone’s life who needs encouragement to forge their own path without seeking approval first. Plus the pictures are pretty too.
I hope it inspires many children (including mine) to do likewise and I thank the author for writing, and beautifully illustrating , this inspirational book.
So for personal inspiration, beautiful illustration work, and a fun story for kids or adults, I recommend checking it out. You can get it onable on Amazon, of course, or you can probably find it at a local indie bookstore near you.
By default Thesis theme looks pretty good, but the default theme is only the starting point, a blank slate. If you’re like me, you’ll want to customize it. It’d be like buying a bicycle and just hoping it fits without adjusting the seat or handle bars—it might work, but it may not be very comfortable, or pretty, in our case.
Often, my designs remove the default interior border displays. They look nice, but might seem like overkill if you use good spatial delineation of your content. And, thanks to Thesis, with a little effort you can remove the interior border quite easily. There are many ways you could do it, but I will show you two methods I use to remove borders from Thesis.
Read the full article →
Today there was a new newsreader app released for the iPad: Times by a small Canadian company name Acrylic. Since I do almost all of my reading on the iPad these days, as do a lot of other people apparently, it was natural that I had to drop everything and get this app. It is a bit expensive at $7.99, but it looked like it might be worth the exchange.
I don’t usually feel the need to review iPad apps, but since I spend a lot of time every day (seemingly) reading news feeds on my iPad, I was excited at the prospect of a more visually appealing solution. So, let’s take a look.
Read the full article →
Thesis 1.8 is adding a bunch of new goodies including support for the entire Google Font Directory. In my OCD desire to get a catalog of font information together I created the Thesis Font Guide page which should provide a useful source of information and reference for the fonts outlined in this latest version.
Along with the table of information I’ve linked out to a custom MyFonts catalog of these same fonts for a visual reference as well as the Google directory.
Check it out and let me know if you find it useful.
For me, custom plugins are one of the funner parts of using WordPress as a blogging platform. There is a huge community of developers out there creating amazingly useful gadgets to include in your blog.
I have developed websites which used a lot of PHP, but [before I read this] I hadn’t developed anything specifically for WordPress. Plus, I didn’t really have time to slog through the Codex, even though it is well documented. I just don’t have the time to read it all to find the useful stuff. I wanted it all in one place.
That’s why I was delighted to find Vladimir Prelovac‘s book, WordPress Plugin Development – Beginner’s Guide. It seemed a perfect fit.
Read The Full Review
