There is a bit of a thrill when you open up your Manage Comments admin page in WordPress and you see a list of comments waiting for you that say “Wow, like your site and I’ll be back” and “I learned a lot here and I’m glad you made this site”, or my personal favorite, […]

I thought that I’d diary my day-to-day tasks managing my WordPress website. It’s very easy to manage, but there are a few steps that few people talk about. In the morning, after the crunch of work is done, I check the various RSS Feeds that I monitor to see what is going on. I particularly […]

In order to make any adjustments to the HTML of your new WordPress site and Theme, you have to find the references to the styles in the php code of each page section. In WordPress 1.2, this was easy because most of the information was found in the index.php page. With WordPress 1.5, everything is […]

I’ve been poking at this WordPress Theme of mine for a few days and all the little nitpicky stuff is getting me down. There are a lot of major and minor things to clean up. And I’m totally not happy with how FireFox is handling my old layout. In fact, I’m disgusted with my old […]

With the move to WordPress v1.5, things are a little more challenging for creating a CSS file. As I mentioned, the header, footer, index page, and other elements are now divided up into pages which are “included” in the main index.page. A div or class will start in one template file and finish in another, […]

Wouldn’t you know it. Here I am, working my buns off to learn how to use WordPress, importing massive old articles into the database, playing around with a test site, and I’m about ready to make it go public, and WordPress releases not only a new version, but a humdinger of a new version. It […]

I’ve been making a plan, and checking it twice, going to find out if I’m naughty or nice….you know the routine. The effort to convert my site from static HTML to interactive database, specifically into WordPress, has been extremely educational. In other words, I’m learning more than enough about things I wish I didn’t know. […]

I finally got the import-mt.php import file that comes with the default WordPress installation to work. Whew! What a long and hard ride, but I learned a lot and I hope you will find some lessons here, too. Some of the following information might be a little redundant, but if you are finding this page […]

And I think I have problems converting my site over to WordPress. This is an amazingly thorough study called Archiving Smithsonian Websites: An Evaluation and Recommendation for a Smithsonian Institution Archives Pilot Project. It looks, step-by-painful-step, at the process the Smithsonian took to convert their websites to database driven power sites. WOW! I will be […]

After treading carefully around the PHP and coding of WordPress, I have become fearless. I just installed the WP Plugin Manager and wish I had done this months ago. Today I bravely added the following plug-ins, hacks and changes, and I am thrilled with the results. StatTraq A PHP function that works with WordPress to […]

Okay, I made a lot of mistakes along the way to forcing my static HTML information into the WordPress database. In an effort to help others learn from my mistakes and compromises, I present mine to the world so you can see that a lot of hard work and screw ups went into the finished […]

Throughout this long and tedious process, I even tried manually importing my static html pages into WordPress, after they had been converted to XHTML, cleaned up and restructured to meet the manual MySQL import layout. Since I was working with material I’d already cleaned up, changing it from the import-mt format to the MySQL import […]