Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category:
Adding a profile picture to WordPress comments is an easy process that will give your comments and posts more authority and credentials. The image or avatar is officially referred to as a Gravatar.
If you have a Wordpress Website
If you have a WordPress website, you probably already have an online profile but haven’t uploaded an image and email address to be associated with it.
Hosted Wordpress websites need an API key to run the spam filter. When you obtain an API key from WordPress, you also get an online profile complete with Gravatar.
1. Go to www.wordpress.com.
2. Login using your Wordpress.com username and password or click on the Signup button and get a username only account.
3. Hold your mouse over the My Account link at the top right of the screen.
4. Select Edit Profile from the drop-down list.
5. Click on the Change Your Gravatar link under the grey face and upload your image.
6. Make sure the email address is correct (if you change it you will need to confirm by email).
7. Add your website address.
8. Click Update Profile button at the bottom.
9. Logout of Wordpress.com (top right).
If you don’t have a Wordpress Website
1. Go to http://en.gravatar.com/
2. Setup a free account
3. Enter your email address and upload a photo or image.
This is ideal if you are a regular commenter on other peoples blogs or perhaps a regular commenter on a variety of blogs.
WordPress operated web sites are so common that there is a myriad of widgets, themes and plugins freely available and able to be installed at the click of a button. This in turn increases the chances that a new installation could create issues for the web site that results in the need for a backup to be installed.
There are a number of plugins that allow a live backup to synchronise with your desktop and web server. The issue with this is that you could end up with a backup of a broken web site on both your live web site and as your backup. Thus being a pointless task backing up or restoring.
Other self help pages offer extremely complex solutions to generate a backup such as using the phpMyAdmin to export individual MySql databases and an array of other complex SQL code to understand. Then once the databases have been exported out more details describing how to use a ftp client to download the sites other files.
Easy Solution
I can not over recommend using a reputable web host that offers CPanel for their hosting.
With CPanel simply click the “Back up” icon. This will backup all of your files, redirects, aliases, MySql databases etc into a compressed file. I would recommend downloading the compressed file to your computer with either the File Manager icon in CPanel or an FTP program.
Reinstalling a backup is as simple as selecting the “Restore” option from the Backup section.
By default WordPress hosted sites offer a unique wp.me url shortner service allowing you to offer shortend URL’s for those long and often hard to remember Blog URL’s. This means that if your blog is hosted at WordPress.org with a url such as http://netmaniaNZ.wordpress.com (live example at this link).
The wp.me service is by default in all of your blog postings. If you already have a large amount of Blogs that you would like to access via the wp.me URL simply follow the instructions below to find what your wp.me url is.
To access the wp.me service you will need to do the following:
1. Exisitng blog posts
(a) Edit your blog and click on the “Get Shortlink” button.
2. New Blog Posts
Upon writing your blog post click the “Get Shortlink” button.
Considering this is a built in feature of WordPress it should be available for as long as WordPress is available. Thus making it more reliable and stable than the other URL shortening services that offer no guarantees of thier exisitence such as http://tr.im announced last week that they were to stop their free services effecting millions of links.
