I saw this tweet from someone:
From tthe tweet, I surmised that this person either thinks that updating Wordpress is a pain, or perhaps they have some highly customized Wordpres installation. Although it’s not a 1 click installation, upgrading is a fairly straight forward process.
Here’s a video explaining the process:
If you have any questions or if something is nor clear, just leave your question in the comments section and I’ll do my best to help you out. Thanks!
Here’s a question:
Have you ever wanted or needed to edit a photo but you don’t have photoshop or some other image editing software program on the computer that you’re using?
Another way to look at it, is perhaps your computer is a little old or you’re using a computer that you can’t install any software on. Maybe you’re on vacation and you have your little laptop but you really want to post that cool picture of you doing that thing, but you want to cut out the idiot that walked into the frame at the last minute.
How do you edit that picture?
I suggest using an online photoeditor named picnik. It doesn’t do all the heavy lifting that something like Photoshop or GIMP can do, but it does enough to get you by. They have a free option and a couple of paid options that add more functionality, but I think that most people will do fine using the free tools.
It’s very straight forward and easy to use.
Try it out and let me know what you think.
I thought I would point out a couple of image plugins that I’ve come across and used. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but merely a list of the plugins that I have personal experience with.
There are several ways of inserting pictures into your posts, the easiest way is to use the “insert image” button at the top of the image editor, but there are times where that button is not enough. For instance, if you have a large number of photos to insert, you may want to create a slideshow, but that button won’t let you create one.
Without further ado, here are the plugins that I’d recommend:
Flickr Gallery: I’ve used this plugin on a couple of different sites. Yes, Flickr does give you an embed code snippet that you can use, but I find that the plugin loads faster and is less cumbersome. With the plugin you can insert images from one set, insert images with a specific keyword, etc. etc.
Check out the plugin page for all of the information about this plugin. It has worked great for me in the past, and I expect it will continue to do so in the future.
NextGEN Gallery: This image plugin can simply be described in one word. The word is: INSANE. I mean that in the best way possible. This plugin can handle just about all of your image needs. It has a special admin panel where you can create different users with different levels of access. You can also create different galleries that will display in different sections of your site, etc. etc.
This plugin is very flexible, in fact, it is so flexible and has so many options that it can be overwhelming in the begining. Read the description of the plugin and see if it will meet your needs, and don’t be overwhelmed by all of the options. Take the time to learn the ins and outs of it and you will be rewarded.
What are your favorite image plugins?
3 Comment Plugins for Wordpress
One of the most time intensive tasks on a wordpress site is dealing with comments. If you’re not careful enough to enable some kind of anti spam tool like the Akismet plugin, you will spend a large percentage of your day dealing with and deleting spam comments.
I think that you have better things to do with your time than deleting spam comments.
What are some plugins that you can use to help you deal with comments more effectively? How about these:
SI CAPTCHA for Wordpress
This plugin lets you add an image captcha to your comments box. The captcha is a little image that requires human intervention before the comment can even be submitted for posting. Most spam comments are auto-submitted and therefore cannot get past a captcha. This one plugin alone can save you a lot of time.
The one thing that I see that could be a problem, is that depending on your audience, the captcha may create a barrier for people to submit comments. Some legitimate commenters may not understand the concept of a captcha and/ or may not be able to read the captcha and just not leave a comment.
Thank Me Later
I’ll go on record, again, and say that I hate automatic replies. Having said that, I think that this tool has the potential to change that opinion. What I like about it, is that you can customize the time between the event occurrence (someone leaves a comment) and the time that they get an email reply.
The utility of this, is that someone can come to the site, leave a comment, and “x” number of hours/ days later they get an email from you thanking them. At your discretion, you can then invite them back to the site for a follow up comment, or invite them back to check out something else on your site.
The potential pitfalls are that the commenter may not be expecting an email from you at all, and they may flag your email as spam.
Comment Twitter
This little plugin allows your commenter to tweet their comment and a link back to your post. This could help you raise your site’s profile to the twittershpere so it has a lot of potential.
The problem that I see with this, is that it depends on your commenter caring enough about your post and their comment to send it out to their followers. So, you really have to have some very compelling content on your site to make someone tweet it.
I’ll have one more post in this series, and it deals with the image headers, “stay tuned”