The Path to Blogging Success

Tips From my WordPress Book

Book cover: WordPress - the missing manual
WordPress – The Missing Manual, by Matthew MacDonald

A good post title clearly announces what you are going to discuss (p. 95)

Make sure your content is worth reading (p. 105) e.g. interesting or useful

Add new content regularly –“avoid stale content.”  But an observation, what’s wrong with that? — posts are dated.  Maybe it depends on the topic.

Keep your content organized.  “A good blog is ruthlessly arranged using categories and tags,” since browsing through monthly archives or searching for keywords in a post are not that convenient.

Where are my Pages? Page Permalinks & Featured Image

The permalink of my first page is here: wp.elizahost.com/here-is-my-test-page/

Perhaps I need to create a menu bar?

And I appreciate how post and page’s “featured image” feature makes it really easy to provide an image for each page or post, but can I make the “featured image” float right near the top of the post text, rather than sitting above the post or page title?

Akeeba Backup for WordPress

I am far enough along in my WordPress training that I decided it was time to come up with SOME backup solution.  Reading through the section of my WordPress book, Backing Up a WordPress Site, I found that, as with Joomla, backup isn’t built in.  Instead your main choices are:

  • choosing an automated backup service such as VaultPress or BackupBuddy for a monthly fee;
  • backing up with a free plug-in such as Online Backup for WordPress;
  • or manually: backing up your files over FTP and backing up your database via an SQL dump from PhpMyAdmin.

I found popular backup plug-ins listed at the WordPress Plugins Directory and this comparison article.  BackUpWordPress sounded like the “Online Backup for WordPress” mentioned in the book was on one list, but Akeeba Backup was on neither list, but received a favorable comment in another backup plugins review list.

Note, I see I’m taking a long time in getting around to why I chose Akeeba Backup for WordPress, but from reading so far you have gotten an idea of how I have been researching extensions for Joomla and now, WordPress.

Anyway, I settled on BackUpWordPress as being very popular and free, installed it, looked it over, and found that you RESTORE your website from backup via FTP and PhpMyAdmin.  It seems the only benefit to this tool is it facilitates MAKING the backup.  Restoration requires about the same steps as restoring a manually made backup, as described above.  Are you kidding me?

I went over to the Akeeba Backup for WordPress website and downloaded and installed the plugin.  It looks like as with Akeeba for Joomla, there’s a Pro paid and Core free version.  I got the free version for now, installed it and was happy to see its familiar user interface at my WordPress dashboard (see this post’s featured image above, and the “manage backups” image below).

A screenshot from Akeeba Backup for WordPress
Akeeba Backup for WordPress – Manage Backups

The video tutorial showed me that websites are restored or moved using the familiar (to Joomla users) kickstart.php process:

  1. Make a new database if necessary
  2. Upload kickstart.php and the Akeeba archive file to the website’s home directory
  3. Run myWebSite.com/kickstart.php and follow the instructions to restore the website.

I don’t know why Akeeba Backup for Joomla is not listed in the WordPress plugins website, but once it’s there I predict it will become one of WordPress’ most popular plugins.

What’s your favorite backup solution for WordPress?

Formatting Shortcuts for Editing WordPress Posts

Styles My Text as a Heading

“###” that is.  The formatting shortcuts are a new feature of WordPress 4.3.

  • Starting a bullet list with “*”
  • Asterisk that is, followed by space then a character
  • To get out of the list, hit two newlines

Here comes a numbered list:

  1. Item one
  2. Start it with digit followed by )
  3. “1)” that is

End of my list.

Note, to get the link to open in a new window, I don’t see the option in the add link menu.  I added “target=’_blank'” in “text” mode.

green plastic dinosaur head
Dino the bike horn dinosaur

Since every post should have an image, I’ll provide a copy of my “sites icon” here.  Sites icon is a feature that came along in WP 4.3.

By the way, how to center the caption?  It looks like I’ll have to modify the theme’s CSS, to style figcaption or class=”wp-caption-text” to have style text-align: center.  Maybe when we get to child themes?  I’ve tagged this post with “learn” to indicate something TO learn.  Maybe I can have an additional tag “learned” to indicate posts demonstrating things I’ve learned.

Paragraph Breaks vs. Newlines

  • Enter/newline starts a new paragraph
  • Shift-Enter gives you line breaks

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Yup, one less reason to go to HTML view.  Does shift-enter work in JCE as well?

Spell Checking

Use Firefox: turn it on here: options > advanced > general > check my spelling as I tyyyype.  (It took looking in options again to start checking.)