blogging Archives - Page 9 of 24

Control Panel Basics

If you sign up for a web hosting account, you get this nice letter back from the hosting company that tells you all about how to connect to your server and where to find your control panel. If you’re a little new at the whole web hosting thing, you may wonder what in the name of cyberspace you are supposed to do with a control panel.

Control by Chicago Art Department via Flickr

It’s easy to be intimidated by a control panel your first time to log in to one, because we live in a time when tech stuff is supposed to be user friendly and intuitive and pretty. Control panels are none of that.

In spite of their clunky nature, control panels are important to you as a proud new owner of a web site because of what they do. Every hosting company doesn’t use the term control panel. A company I use calls it the “Account Control Center.” Other places call it the “cPanel.” Whatever it’s called, it’s the hosting company’s way of giving you a way to control some of the things about your account. Here’s what I see when I open my control panel.

Image by Virginia DeBolt

Ah, you say. I see, you say. You can set up your e-mail address for your account. That sounds good. You can even ask for support, change your password, or pay your bill. But what is file management or database management or domain hosting management?

E-mail Management

You probably have a least a few e-mail addresses with your domain name. Use this part of the control panel to set up what they are called and where the e-mail goes that comes in.

Image by Virginia DeBolt

You can see that I have 800 potential mailboxes with my account. Since I’m running things by myself, I only use one. But you can set up all sorts of email accounts: info@yourdomain.com, support@yourdomain.com, yourname@yourdomain.com and more. With my web host, you set up a new mail address by “creating a mailbox.” When the mailbox is set up, you may want to tell the server where to forward the mail using a “recipe.” I don’t know how this terminology came to be, but that’s what they call it. If you’re lucky, your C-panel will give it a more obvious name like “Forwarding.” Depending on the server, you may be able to get your e-mail directly from the server without having to forward it if you set up your e-mail client on your home computer properly.

Database Management

If you’re putting a blog on your web site, you need a database. Use this part of the control panel to create a new database. Usually all you have to do is click a button and the database is created. Take note of the settings they give you for it after it’s created, so you can tell your blog where the database is when you install the blog software. You can create backups of your database here, which you may want to do before you update your blog.

File Management

It’s awkward, but you can upload files to the server using this section of the control panel. FTP is easier to use, but this works if you need it. You can do other things here like set up new folders, change file permissions, and delete old log files so they don’t take up all your server space.

Domain Hosting Management

You can take care of your domain name in this part of the control panel. You can probably arrange new domain names that will be hosted under your main account too. This is cheaper than getting a new hosting account for every domain name you buy, and it keeps everything in one place so you don’t have to keep track of multiple web hosting accounts.

Just Breathe

The control panel may use some odd terminology. Just take your time and try to figure out what each part of it does and how it’s useful to you. Then take control of the control panel. You can do it.

Cross posted in slightly different form at BlogHer.

Changes in WordPress free sites

I have another blog called First 50 Words. It’s one of the free WordPress blogs, with a wordpress.com URL. I use that blog to post writing prompts for writing practice. For the past few months, there has been a constant reminder on the free blog, suggesting I upgrade to pro. This would mean I’d get a “real” URL. It isn’t expensive to do. I think the last time I looked it was $17.

But I like things the way they are. WordPress hosts thousands, perhaps millions, of free blogs. I don’t blame them for wanting some money from all the moochers like me who are using their free services. I just don’t want to change my blog or my URL.

WordPress won’t leave things alone. Now they are throwing up an annoying sidebar after each post is published.

wordpress sidebar

To get rid of the sidebar, you have to click. What you are left seeing after you do that is the newly published post. So WordPress arbitrarily decided that the next thing I want to do every time I publish a post is 1) see an intrusive sidebar, and 2) look at the new post. Since it’s dead easy to view your published post without any urging from the WordPress interface, I don’t really need this help.

I can only conclude that this is WordPress’ way of annoying me into going for the upgrade. It isn’t making me want to upgrade. It’s making me mad.

Dear WordPress, if you’re listening, I’ve used you here on Web Teacher and in other places for years. You are my favorite. You are my sunshine. You are my morning coffee. But you need to rethink the sidebar thing. Please.

Should You Have a Comment Policy?

Reading blog comments can be painful. For every insightful and well thought out post there are at least 10 spammers, trolls and illiterate shrieking banshees just looking to start a fight. This is hard enough when you are a visitor trying to shift through all the garbage to find the occasional diamond to respond to. But it is an impossibly frustrating task when you are the blog owner or writer, and you are forced to find those that actually offer you something decent to work with.

Worse is when a flame war breaks out, and there are always plenty of offensive, obscenity-filled, bigoted or otherwise negative comments you have to decide to either keep or delete. This isn’t a simple decision when you are trying to keep an open and yet friendly place for visitors to share their thoughts and opinions.

Comment Policy

Image Credit: 1

Usually when I give bloggers a rule of thumb on this issue, I tell them this: If it doesn’t contribute anything to the conversation, it isn’t necessary. If you have a bunch of posts only written by spammers to share websites, they don’t add anything to the discussion. If you are reading endless posts by a troll who is insulting the reader base or blog with no specific focus or reason, they are not giving you something to think about. These comments don’t belong there.

But sometimes deleting such things can cause even more havoc as they begin to point it out. Which is why it helps to have guidelines you can direct anyone to prior to the comments being posted. These set of rules should lay out what won’t be tolerated and what you will do in the case of such violations.

Creating a Comment Policy

What Problems Are Obvious?

To start writing this section, you should take a look through your posts and see what things you find that bother you. Make a list of what you won’t allow to continue. This will give you the baselines for the rules.

What Will You Do About It?

Next, come up with a system for mild, moderate and severe violations. For instance, say you have a spammer who is posting genuine comments, but putting keywords into their names and obviously sharing links. Maybe you decide to delete the comments. But if they come back with nothing but copy/paste and irrelevant comments, you ban the IP address.

Another example is for trolls: If you have someone who is causing trouble, you can delete the comment and give a warning for a mild infraction. If they continue give them a temporary ban, and if they still persist or step over a line, ban them permanently.

How Will You Present It?

Comment Policy
Image Credit: 2

For the actual comment policy page you have two options: professional or personable. I have seen both used to great effect. The first requires you to give a dry rundown of your general policy, just stating that you reserve the right to delete comments or bad members for certain offensive acts. The other is a lengthier page explaining why you have chosen to come up with a comment policy in the first place. I prefer the latter.

Should Comments Be Moderated?

If you want to make sure your policy is strictly enforced, you can choose to approve or deny comments prior to publication. Of course, this takes a lot of effort and time. To get around this you can apply a spam filter to aid you. Or, if you have several people working for the site, you could just have them cover the comments on their own pieces.

Conclusion

So, should you have a comment policy? Yes. People have a tendency to push social boundaries online they wouldn’t in person, due to the anonymity and the feeling of protection from behind their keyboard. Most act responsibly, but there are plenty who do not. It is best to filter them out for the sake of pleasant and productive commenting, rational feedback and criticism and lively (levelheaded) debate.

Guest Author Olivia blogs for PsPrint, an online printing company specializing in brochure and poster printing among other popular services. Follow PsPrint on Twitter and Facebook

Komen Can Kiss My Mammagram

Photo by Tim Waclawski via Flickr

As anyone who pays attention to the social blogosphere and the network news knows, the Susan G. Komen Foundation decided to stop funding Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screening and mammogram program.

I’m a woman and a liberal. It doesn’t take much more information that that for you to know that I think politicized right wing attacks on the rights of women to receive important health care is wrong. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about how social media–Twitter, Facebook–and motivated individuals with connections online can change the outcome of an event. The Komen Foundation mishandled this event in social media terms. The supporters of Planned Parenthood used social media to their advantage. The consequences include damange to Komen’s reputation, lots of discussion about what Planned Parenthood really does, and many donations rerouted from The Komen Foundation to Planned Parenthood.

Instead of retelling the story of how this happened, I’ll send you to Beth’s Blog, where she’s already recounted it. Go see what social media can do to help a cause, or to slam a social media clueless organization.

Useful links: Video, Access U, WordPress widgets

Video for Everybody! “Video for Everybody is simply a chunk of HTML code that embeds a video into a website using the HTML5 <video> element, falling back to Flash automatically without the use of JavaScript or browser-sniffing. It therefore works in RSS readers (no JavaScript), on the iPhone / iPad (don’t support Flash) and on many browsers and platforms.”

A Knowbility conference is coming up on the West Coast. It’s Access U @ CSUN, toward the end of February. Learn from accessibility experts such as Shawn Henry, Jennison Asuncion, Denis Boudreau, Molly Holzschlag, Derek Featherstone and others.

An excellent presentation from Kathy Gill on using widgets in WordPress.

If you type so damn much, why aren’t you good at it?

If you met me in person you would find me very quiet, especially in social situations. People often have a first impression of me as standoffish and unfriendly. If they stick around long enough, they find out I’m not. Unfortunately, I’m one of those people who grows on you slowly. This characteristic is my downfall as a schmoozer at conferences.

Put me in front of a keyboard and something different happens. Not counting places where I blog only sporadically, here’s what I’ve typed of late, by volume.

on Web Teacher.

on First 50 Words

on BlogHer

on Twitter

Add to that the 8 books I’ve written, the other writing I’ve done like curriculum, teacher’s editions, poetry, crappy fiction, etc., etc., you end up with a lot of typing. Well over the 10,000 hours needed to achieve expertise. So explain this: why am I such a lousy typist?

Best 5 WordPress Plugins for Managing Multiple Blogs

Running multiple web blogs of any variety takes time and attention and site owners are always on the lookout for tools to make that job easier.

While WordPress has long been the content management system of choice for multi-bloggers in the form of its WordPress MU (multi-site) offering, the latest incarnation of the world’s favorite publishing platform has taken things to a new level by integrating the same functionality into its core package, opening the possibilities of multi-site management to the masses not previously familiar with WordPress MU.

WordPress Plugins for Managing Multiple Blogs

WordPress 3 has made blog networks easier to launch but running them effectively still depends on individual needs often not covered by the base WordPress package. With multi-site usability built-in, all that’s left is narrowing down the bulk of available WordPress plugins aimed at making the lives of blog network owners easier.

1. ManageWP.com

ManageWP.com

The only plugin mentioned on our list that isn’t completely free is ManageWP, a full-featured system aimed at giving network owners full and absolute control over their WordPress sites. The ManageWP service provides a single web-based control panel for all of the sites you own, giving you the ability to manage content across unlimited sites with both a single login and a single submission.

Combined with life-changing features like one-click upgrades for multiple WordPress, plugin and theme installations along with mass publishing, automatic backups, editorial calendars the ability to clone whole sites with a single click and much more, ManageWP may be exactly what the proverbial doctor ordered for blog network owners with an eye toward extreme productivity.

2. Networks for WordPress

Networks for WordPress

Network admins managing related sites already functioning on separate WordPress installations are left with the task of making the entire network accessible to all users, often ending with messy database sharing techniques and something less than a seamless experience for network visitors.

The Networks for WordPress plugin solves this problem and a few others by allowing its users to manage blog networks based on very specific criteria, sharing resources – and users – only when and where you stipulate.

3. Shared Users Reloaded

Shared Users Reloaded

When using WordPress MU or the built in multi-site functionality in WordPress 3 isn’t an option but sharing users across sites is a necessity, the Shared Users Reloaded plugin is the quickest and easiest way to give your registered users access to content across more than one WordPress installation. Setup is simple, database changes are minimal and results are instant; there is simply no easier plugin for sharing users.

4. Multi-site Global Search

Multi-Site Global Search WP Plugin

A general question for WordPress network admins already running a multi-site environment: How many times have you forgotten exactly which blog contained which particular piece of content? If your answer is anything other than zero, you are definitely familiar with searching manually through endless posts. Luckily, there’s a plugin for that!

The Multi-site Global Search plugin for WordPress allows you to search through all posts on all sites using any search string, giving you instant access to any piece of content, anywhere on your network, at the click of a button. The plugin allows for searching within several fields, including post title, post content and post author, making this the only search-enhancing plugin you’ll ever need to install.

5. Multi-Site User Management

Multi-Site User Management

One of the things that the built-in multi-site functionality of WordPress doesn’t cover handily is the fact that not all blogs are alike. Sites based on WordPress serve both different purposes and different userbases and the functionality that you provide to users at one network site does not necessarily reflect the functionality that you want to provide at another.

The Multi-Site User Management plugin gives you the ability to control what default permissions and abilities users have on a given site or the global network, depending on your needs. Where one site may be dependant on user-created content and require default permissions to reflect this, another may be updated by a single author, requiring that default users have only basic privileges.

While the plugins listed above represent some of our favorites for blog network needs, keep in mind that developers are constantly working on new ways to get the absolute most out of WordPress and those efforts are usually made public. WordPress continues to amaze blog network owners with its fast, well-written code, ease-of-use for both end-users and admins and its new built-in ability to handle multi-site environments, but a keen eye toward plugins that suit your particular needs can easily be the facet of WordPress that makes you love it most!

Image credit: 1.

Guest Author Sonia Tracy is the content editor for PsPrint and editor of PsPrint Printing and Design Blog. PsPrint is an online printing company, which you can follow on Twitter and Facebook.