In case you’ve been living under a rock, here’s the controversial meeting of Matt Mullenweg and Chris Pearson (creator of the Thesis theme). Would WordPress Sue The Maker Of Thesis, A Leading WordPress Theme?(sorry the embed code doesn’t work so you’ll have . . . → Read More: The Importance of Open Source to WordPress (V2)]]> Wait, haven’t I already made this post? Well, yes, but it’s a hot issue again.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, here’s the controversial meeting of Matt Mullenweg and Chris Pearson (creator of the Thesis theme).
Would WordPress Sue The Maker Of Thesis, A Leading WordPress Theme?(sorry the embed code doesn’t work so you’ll have to head over there to listen to it.

Please listen to the whole thing. It’s amazing how Chris chooses to ignore the GPL, and disrespect the whole WordPress community, simply because he doesn’t think the GPL makes business sense.

Chris – if you don’t think the GPL makes business sense, go find another project to develop your themes for. You’ll have to find a CMS that runs on Windows Server & SQL server, running IIS. Yeah, there’s a big market!

I love the part where Chris claims he is one of the most important people in the WordPress community. Before tonight i’d never heard of him. For a good counter-point, check out The 10 most important people in WordPress

The solution? According to Chris: “There’s no resolving this. Either you sue me or you don’t”

So people, please stay safe, use GPL themes, hug a WordPress developer and help make the world a better place!

Matt’s Response
Jane’s Response

Wordpress.org/extend/themes is the only place you should get WordPress themes from. Why? Googling for “free WordPress themes” is dangerous. In this episode I show how the first page results for “free WordPress themes” will return you themes full of Very Bad Stuff(tm). How can you avoid this stuff, and find out if your themes are clean? . . . → Read More: 046 – Theme Malware and the Theme Authenticity Checker]]>

Wordpress.org/extend/themes is the only place you should get WordPress themes from. Why? Googling for “free WordPress themes” is dangerous. In this episode I show how the first page results for “free WordPress themes” will return you themes full of Very Bad Stuff(tm). How can you avoid this stuff, and find out if your themes are clean? Find out in this week’s episode!
Download the episode Here

I’m going to WordCamp Savannah (GA). A WordCamp is a kind of conference where you can meet lots of other interesting people who use WordPress. I’m giving away 4 tickets to WordCamp Savannah – but you have to watch the video to find out how to get them.

Ok, so if you Google “free WordPress themes” the results are full of themes that have bad stuff in them. By bad stuff I mean encrypted code. This code could be doing anything – installing viruses on your visitor’s computers, sending spam, hacking your site (or other people’s sites). Installing random themes is a very dangerous thing to do.

WordPress Theme Authenticity Checker to the rescue. This is a WordPress plugin which will scan all of your installed themes for Bad Stuff. In the video I demonstrate how it finds encrypted code in an infected theme. You should install this plugin and run it whenever you install a new theme – before you activate the theme.

Now you’re wondering, where can I get safe themes? It’s actually very easy. Just log into your WordPress dashboard and go under Appearance/Add New Themes. The themes there come from WordPress.org/extend/themes and these themes are much less likely to have bad stuff in them. Plus they’re way easier to install – just click the install button! Also, either now or very soon, each theme in the WordPress.org theme repository will be reviewed by a group of theme reviewers, so they’ll be even better.

That’s it. Be sure to listen to the Podcast to see how you can get a free ticket to WordCamp Savannah (you still have to figure out how to get there, I’m not paying for a plane or hotel room!).

Heat Maps allow you to see what people are clicking on, and optimize your web site, advertisments, and navigation. Click Heat is a Open Source (free) Heat Map program, and I show you how to set it up on your WordPress site. Enjoy!

Download the . . . → Read More: 045 – ClickHeat Open Source Heat Map Software]]>

Heat Maps allow you to see what people are clicking on, and optimize your web site, advertisments, and navigation. Click Heat is a Open Source (free) Heat Map program, and I show you how to set it up on your WordPress site. Enjoy!

Download the episode Here

JanRain RPX/Engage is a plugin that allows users to sign into your web site using many different proviers, like twitter, facebook and openid. In this episode I show you how to install and configure JanRain RPX and conifgure it to allow twitter logins.

Download the . . . → Read More: 044 – JanRain RPX:Engage Single Signon for OpenID Twitter Facebook and Other]]>

JanRain RPX/Engage is a plugin that allows users to sign into your web site using many different proviers, like twitter, facebook and openid. In this episode I show you how to install and configure JanRain RPX and conifgure it to allow twitter logins.

Download the episode Here

How to install and configure the W3 Total Cache, and set up a CDN (content delivery network) using AWS S3 and Cloudfront. Don’t worry, it’s much easier than it sounds, and you’ll get more visitors to your site!

Download the . . . → Read More: 043 – Make Wordpress Go Faster!]]>

How to install and configure the W3 Total Cache, and set up a CDN (content delivery network) using AWS S3 and Cloudfront. Don’t worry, it’s much easier than it sounds, and you’ll get more visitors to your site!

Download the episode Here

Backing up your wordpress installation (or installations) is extremely important. For all you know, as you read this your web hosting provider could have just gone out of business. Or a hard drive just died. Or somebody just deleted the wrong folder. How will you recover? In this episode I show you how to do a . . . → Read More: 042 – Backing up Wordpress and Google Font API]]>

Backing up your wordpress installation (or installations) is extremely important. For all you know, as you read this your web hosting provider could have just gone out of business. Or a hard drive just died. Or somebody just deleted the wrong folder. How will you recover?
In this episode I show you how to do a full back up of all of your sites (even non-wordpress sites). Please, please back up your data ASAP!
Once we get that over with, I also show you the cool Google Font API, which allows you to add fonts to your web site, without your end users having to have them installed. Exciting stuff!

Download the episode Here

Download . . . → Read More: 041 – Wordpress SEO Tips]]>
This episode is chock full of SEO tips for your wordpress blog. Tips that are easy for a normal person to impliment! Meta tags suck, Google XML Sitemap, Page Rank checker and more! Visit teachmewp.com for more episodes

Download this episode

Download . . . → Read More: 040 – New Media News Roundup]]> In this episode I cover the facebook controversy (are you a quitter?), the secret history of the kubrick theme, the Wordpress state of the word video, and Inc magazine’s incubation nation. Enjoy!

Download this episode

Wordpress 3.0 is almost here – sometime this month. In this episode I give you a preview of some of the features in Wordpress 3.0 including the new twentyten theme, with customizable headers and background, bulk theme updates and the new multi user stuff. There’s alot in this episode, be sure to check it . . . → Read More: 039 – Wordpress 3.0 Preview]]>

Wordpress 3.0 is almost here – sometime this month. In this episode I give you a preview of some of the features in Wordpress 3.0 including the new twentyten theme, with customizable headers and background, bulk theme updates and the new multi user stuff. There’s alot in this episode, be sure to check it out.

Download the episode here

Setting up a podcast – without any plugins. Heck, without Wordpress. Acutally, without a web site even. I show you how to set up a podcast for $0 (free!) without having to have a web site. Pretty cool.

Download the . . . → Read More: 038 – Naked Podcasting]]>

Setting up a podcast – without any plugins. Heck, without Wordpress. Acutally, without a web site even. I show you how to set up a podcast for $0 (free!) without having to have a web site. Pretty cool.

Download the episode here

A quick look at the new image editing features with Wordpress 2.9, and I show you how to customize the 404 (Page not found) page in your Wordpress Theme.

Download the . . . → Read More: 036 – Image Editing in 2.9 and a Custom 404 page]]>

A quick look at the new image editing features with Wordpress 2.9, and I show you how to customize the 404 (Page not found) page in your Wordpress Theme.

Download the episode here

How can you get viewer stats from iTunes? You can’t but I show you how to use Podtrac to get viewer stats. I also introduce you to the Atahualpa Wordpress theme which is highly configurable. I use Podtrac to count downloads of my podcast. I use them specifically because they are free and it’s a simple . . . → Read More: 035 – Viewer stats from iTunes and the last Theme you will ever need]]>

How can you get viewer stats from iTunes? You can’t but I show you how to use Podtrac to get viewer stats. I also introduce you to the Atahualpa Wordpress theme which is highly configurable.
I use Podtrac to count downloads of my podcast. I use them specifically because they are free and it’s a simple redirect in the download link so it doesn’t affect download speed.
It’s fairly simple to use, you just modify your download link. As an example here is how I would modify a download link for my podcast:

The original file is:
http:///blip.tv/file/get/Dholowiski-034__Page_Redirection_and_Click_To_Call261.flv

To modify it to work with Podtrac (first make sure you have a podtrac account) remove the http:// and add the podtrac url:

http://www.podtrac. com/pts/redirect.flv/blip.tv/file/get/Dholowiski-034__Page_Redirection_and_Click_To_Call261.flv

The stats update daily, and are usually necessary if you are looking for an advertiser.

I also show off the great Atahualpa Wordpress theme, which is highly configurable. Some of the things you can configure:

• How many sidebars
• header graphic/behaviour
• Highly configurable widgets
• Fonts, sizes are all changeable through the theme options
• HTML and CSS can be inserted through the theme options without having to edit files

That’s all for the podacst, have a great day!

Download the episode here

First I want to . . . → Read More: 034 – Free Click to Call, Page Link Redirection and a Podcast Status Update]]>
An update on the status of the podcast, and I show you how to add a super simple click to call button to your web site. I also show you how to redirect a page to an external web site! Fun stuff. Please be sure to fill out the listener survey at teachmewp.com/survey.

First I want to thank all of the viewers from the past year. I really appreciate you sticking with the podcast, through it’s on again off again, variable video size and quality and everything. If you want to know how many people viewed the podcast, be sure to watch this week’s episode.

For the first tutorial, I walk you through adding click to call to your web site. This is basically an icon a user can click on, and they will receive a phone call – so will you, and you will be talking to the user. This is great for marketing, but I also use it on teachmewp.com and point it directly to voicemail so that users can leave feedback on the show, from their phone, just by clicking. Be sure to watch the video for the details.

In the second part of the tutorial I show you how you can make a page link to an external site using the redirection plugin. Check out the “Discussion” tab along the top of this site, which started life as a page, but now links to the discussion forums at teachmewp.ning.com.

There are now many ways to give feedback on the show.  First, you can just leave a comment on this post! That’s probably the easiest way.  You can also use the click to call button, you will receive a phone call and be able to leave a voice message that I can play on the next podcast episode.  You can also go over to the discussion forum at teachmewp.ning.com and start a discussion, or you can email podacst@teachmewp.com or you can even get ahold of me on twitter @dholowiski

I look forward to hearing from you! Enjoy the podcast!

034 – Free Click to Call, Page Link Redirection and a Podcast Status Update

I just found this cool plugin – the JanRain plugin. It basically allows users to sign into your web site using multiple authentication methods – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Open ID, Windows Live, and Yahoo! Pretty cool, and it reduces the barrier to entry, making . . . → Read More: WordPress › JanRain RPX – Authentication from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Windows Live ID and OpenID « WordPress Plugins]]> Update: There is now a Video Tutorial for installing and configuring this plugin.

I just found this cool plugin – the JanRain plugin. It basically allows users to sign into your web site using multiple authentication methods – Facebook, Twitter, Google, Open ID, Windows Live, and Yahoo!
Pretty cool, and it reduces the barrier to entry, making it much easier for users to leave comments and interact on your web site.
I might do a tutorial on this in the future, what do you think?

WordPress › JanRain RPX – Authentication from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Windows Live ID and OpenID « WordPress Plugins: “JanRain RPX – Authentication from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Windows Live ID and OpenID”

(Via Wordpress.org.)

Also, today I just recieved two books to review for the podcast. Of course it will take me some time to read them, but I will be doing book reviews on the podcast in the future. Yay!

8 Top Facebook Wordpress Plugins – WebM.ag | . . . → Read More: 8 Top Facebook Wordpress Plugins – WebM.ag | Web Design Magazine]]> Check out this great article that lists a bunch of Facebook plugins for Wordpress. I will probably do an episode of the podcast talking about these plugins, especially JanRain RPX, which allows users to sign into your Blog using one of 6 different accounts (including their facebook account).

8 Top Facebook Wordpress Plugins – WebM.ag | Web Design Magazine

Social media is probably one of the best ways to promote and drive traffic to your blog, with the numerous API’s and sharing features the social media outlets are releasing it makes your job that much easier.”

(Via WebM.ag.)

Why WordPress? | WPShout.com: “WHY WORDPRESS?

Reading this by RSS? YOU’RE MISSING OUT.. PART 2 is now online. SUBSCRIBE BY RSS to catch the rest!

That . . . → Read More: Why WordPress? | WPShout.com]]> Why use Worpres? We all have our reasons. Click on the link be low to find out why some people use Wordpress, and make sure to leave a comment explaining why you use it.

Why WordPress? | WPShout.com: “WHY WORDPRESS?

Reading this by RSS? YOU’RE MISSING OUT.. PART 2 is now online. SUBSCRIBE BY RSS to catch the rest!

That was the question I asked twenty one WordPress theme designers, developers and bloggers; I wanted to get a good balance – not just the theme developers who everyone has heard about! Their answers are very interesting, to say the least. I asked four and the answers will be published over the next couple of days. The questions are:

Why WordPress?
First question. Why WordPress? Why not Joomla! or Drupal or any of the other CMSes out there?”

(Via WPShout.com.)

To accomplish this I use the PHPURL script from: http://blondish.net/resources/scripts/phpurl/

It’s a pretty easy script to install.  First you download the file . . . → Read More: 033 – Your own URL Shortening Service]]>
URL Shortening services like bit.ly and tinyurl are very popluar right now, why not have your own? In this episode i show you how to use a PHP script to create your own URL Shortening service.

To accomplish this I use the PHPURL script from: http://blondish.net/resources/scripts/phpurl/

It’s a pretty easy script to install.  First you download the file from the above URL, then extract the files using winzip or any other file compression software

Then you can FTP the files up to your web server.

Once you’ve done that, you need to create a database, and a user, and give that user access to the database.  I do this from the MYSQL command line, using the following commands:

• create database databasename;  (I used a database name of ‘tinyurl’)
• create username@localhost identified by ‘password’;
• grant all on databasename.* to username@localhost;

Once that’s done, you edit the config.php file and enter this information, as well as entering a admin username and password (make sure to change it from the default password of password!)

Then you run the install script at yourdomain.com/install.php

That’s it!  Once that is done you have a fully functioning URL Shortening service that anybody can use.  It works great.  Enjoy!

Download the episode here

Wordpress security can be confusing and even a little bit scary. In this episode I show you some simple things that you can do to secure your wordpress blog and prevent it from being hacked.

First thing I cover is a article that talks about some great tips for securing your wordpress site: bit.ly/7sKOJE the most important . . . → Read More: 032 – Wordpress Security]]>

Wordpress security can be confusing and even a little bit scary. In this episode I show you some simple things that you can do to secure your wordpress blog and prevent it from being hacked.

First thing I cover is a article that talks about some great tips for securing your wordpress site: bit.ly/7sKOJE the most important thing from this article is choosing a secure password.

You can go to grc.com/pass to get a very secure randomly generated password, or if you choose to create your own, make sure it’s 8 characters or longer, with numbers and letters and some upper and lower case passwords.

Next up is the “Secure Wordpress” plugin which does several of the things shown in the article above, but in a convenient plugin.

Last but not least is the Login LockDown which automatically locks a IP address out if it tries to log in unsucsesfully 3 times within 5 minutes.

So that’s the end of the show, please check out the new discussion forums at teachmewp.ning.com, and be sure to fill out the listener survey if you haven’t yet, because it really helps out the podcast.

Thanks for watching!

032 – Wordpress Security

Enjoy this very ‘artsy’ video of Matt (creator of Wordpress) talking about what Wordpress is and the difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com. Matt kind of looks like he’s been beat up. Between that and the washed out lighting, soft focus and camera angles, this is definitely a . . . → Read More: Matt Mullenweg talks about Wordpress]]>

Enjoy this very ‘artsy’ video of Matt (creator of Wordpress) talking about what Wordpress is and the difference between wordpress.org and wordpress.com. Matt kind of looks like he’s been beat up. Between that and the washed out lighting, soft focus and camera angles, this is definitely a must see.

So today I was working on setting up my new office, and one thing I’m doing is putting up pictures i’ve taken of web celebrities that I saw speak. So far I have Leo Laporte . . . → Read More: Cali Lewis Shame on You]]> I’m going to warn you now, this is going to be a long meandering rant, but it is vaguely wordpress related.

So today I was working on setting up my new office, and one thing I’m doing is putting up pictures i’ve taken of web celebrities that I saw speak. So far I have Leo Laporte (saw him at Macworld 2009), Matt Mullenweg and Timothy Ferriss (saw them at Wordcamp SF 2009). Then I started thinking, it sucks that I don’t have a picture of Cali Lewis (geekbrief.tv) since I’ve seen her speak twice.

So I got to watching some episodes of Geekbrief.TV that I have had sitting in iTunes for a while. I watched episode 620, and at around 2 minutes she starts talking about a wordpress plugin. Now the plugin sounds interesting, and it’s called Pretty Link. It’s basically a link redirector, kind of like tinyurl or bit.ly, but for your own wordpress site. Now I started wondering why she didn’t mention my favorite redirection plugin (simply called ‘redirection’) or any of the other 200 redirection plugins you can get from the wordpress plugin directory.

Then came the bombshell. It’s a $97 plugin (well, actually there is a free version available too but she never mentioned that). I won’t go into a rant about how wordpress is open source and how wrong I think it is to charge for plugins (or themes for that matter) especially if they do the same thing as freely available plugins – that’s just opinion, and if Cali thinks that paid plugins are a good thing that’s hers. My problem is this: at 2:05 she shows a link: geekbrief.tv/prettylink which uses the prettylink plugin to redirect (and cloak the link) from her web site to the purchase page for the prettylink plugin.

So here’s the problem. This is clearly not a commercial, Cali makes it clear she is telling us about “one of the coolest plugins I have ever found” and gives a short review of it. But the link she gives is an Affiliate link. If people go to the link I mentioned above, somebody (presumably Cali) gets a paid $. Now I have no problem with affiliate links in general, in fact I use them in my podcast, but I make it VERY clear that if you click on the link and purchase something, I get paid!

Cali Lewis took a blatant ad for Prettylink Pro and disguised it as an unbiased review (watch the episode). One can only wonder how many people purchased the plugin, strictly because of the trust she has built with her viewers. I guess she’s cashing in some of that trust…

If you want a free alternative to Pretty Link Pro, first search the Wordpress Plugin Directory for redirect, there are many excellent plugins. I’ve also asked for alternatives on Mahalo Answers, and funded it with $10 out of my own pocket. Be sure to check out the answers.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Download the . . . → Read More: Theme Wars, Uprading Wordpress to 2.8, and Blip.TV – Episode 27 Audio Only]]> In this episode I give you my thoughts on upgrading, finally, to wordpress 2.8. I also talk about a promising but not so great site called themewars.com, and I share my experience using blip.tv for podcast distribution. This is an Audio ony podcast.

Download the episode here

Download the . . . → Read More: Registering a Domain name – Back to Basics Episode 26]]> In episode 26 we go back to basics. I walk you through the process of registering a domain name with Godaddy. It’s really much easier than it seems but you have to know what to watch for.

Download the show here

You can download the . . . → Read More: Google Analytics – Accuracy and discrepancy with other Stats (audio only)]]> How accurate is Google Analytics? How come my Google Analytics results are different from other web stats like awstats or webalizer? Which one is right? I answer these questions and more in this episode.

You can download the file here

I’m trying a new host for my files – blip.tv.  This is a big download, over 400mb. . . . → Read More: 24 – Installing Wordpress on your Computer (Mac and WIndows)]]> In this episode I show you how to install Wordpress on your computer using MAMP for Mac or XAMPP for Windows. This lets you experiment with things in a safe environment, without worrying about messing up your live web site. 

I’m trying a new host for my files – blip.tv.  This is a big download, over 400mb. Please let me know if you have any trouble.  Tomorrow sometime when the file finishes converting I’ll update this post so you can watch the video right on this site.

Download the file here

In this episode I walk you through making changes to a Wordpress theme, including editing the style.css and index.php. I show you how to edit some static content and change a header graphic, and describe how I go about hacking an unfaimilar theme. 

Download the episode here. Yay, Now you can view the video right here thanks . . . → Read More: Theme Hacking – Episode 22]]>  

In this episode I walk you through making changes to a Wordpress theme, including editing the style.css and index.php. I show you how to edit some static content and change a header graphic, and describe how I go about hacking an unfaimilar theme. 

Download the episode here. Yay, Now you can view the video right here thanks to my new best friend, Blip.TV!

Feedburner is basically a service that takes an existing RSS feed and lets you do all kinds of things with it.  A few . . . → Read More: Feedburner: The Swiss Army Knife of RSS]]> Wordpress has the ability to generate great RSS feeds, and even to automatically generate enclosures for podcasting. But I still use, and love Feedburner for all my RSS feeds. Why?  Let me tell you…

Feedburner is basically a service that takes an existing RSS feed and lets you do all kinds of things with it.  A few of the major features are: Inserting ads into your RSS feed, Stats and making your feed iTunes compatible. Those reasons aren’t specifically why I have used it.  There are a couple of other features that have saved my butt in the past. 

1.  Feed redirection.  This isn’t even advertised as a feature, but it’s great.  So here’s how I have my Podcast RSS feed set up:  Wordpress RSS —> Feedburner —> iTunes.  You may wonder, why stick Feedburner in the middle, when Wordpress can generate a feed that works just fine in iTunes?  In the past I was using Libsyn’s feature where they generate RSS for you, so it was actually set up like this:  Libsyn RSS —> Feedburner —> iTunes.  But I wanted to use Podtrac for tracking downloads, and Libsyn doesn’t support that.  They also don’t support feed redirection so I couldn’t redirect the feed to my wordpress feed.  If I had it set up like this: Libsyn —> iTunes, I’d be out of luck, I would have had to submit a new podcast to iTunes and rebuild my subscriber list. 

With feedburner, the solution was simple.  Edit Feed details, and change the Original feed url from Libsyn (Libsyn —> Feedburner —> iTunes) to Wordpress (Wordpress —> Feedburner —> iTunes.  

I also have the re-assurance that if I ever lose control of my web site (dispute with hosting provider, hacking etc) I can go into feedburner and just point the feed somewhere else. 

2. Title/Description burner.  I love this one.  If you are using some service that creates an RSS feed but doesn’t give you much control (like I did with Utterli in episode 20), and you want to pass that feed into iTunes (Utterli —> Feedburner —> iTunes) often the title or description won’t be something you want. In episode 20, the title was “Utterli” instead of something like “dave’s podcast”.   Title/Description burner simply overrides the title and description fields in the RSS feed before it is passed on. It’s just that easy. 

The only major concern, and one that you should have when you’re relying so heavily on any service, is will it be there tomorrow?  Especially in today’s economic climate it’s not a given that an internet company that was here yesterday will necessarily be here today or tomorrow.  The nice thing about Feedburner is that Google owns them now.  And let me tell you, google isn’t going away any time soon, so niether is feedburner. 

Feedburner has tons of other great features too.  When you go in to edit your feed, make sure to click on the Optimize tab, and check out all the cool options.

Still there? Great.  

I used quite a few different CMS’s before I stubmled on Wordpress.  I used Joomla for a while. I’ve been told it’s . . . → Read More: Why I love Wordpress]]> Let me get this out of the way right now – I am a wordpress Fanboy and this article is going to be a biased look at why wordpress is so great. 

Still there? Great.  

I used quite a few different CMS’s before I stubmled on Wordpress.  I used Joomla for a while. I’ve been told it’s very powerful and you can do all kinds of things.  I couldn’t ever figure it out though (and my job is figuring out things). I’ve used PHP Nuke, wow what a POS, NEXT!  Where I used to work, we used DotNetNuke. First thing it’s based on .net from microsoft. Second thing, most of the plugins you have to pay for. Third thing it looks like absolute crap! We used it as an Intranet site and it was so terrible that users wouldn’t even visit the site.  I even used Scoop for a brief time. Definetley a very interesting CMS, but ultimatley like the others – hard to use.

So on to Wordpress. Why do I love Wordpress? Let me count the ways…

1.  Wordpress is Open Source, and almost all of the plugins, and most of the Themes are free and open source.  Because of the open-ness of both Wordpress and it’s themes and plugins, it’s extremely easy to customize. It’s hard to find a user who hasn’t gone into their theme to change something.  This really is a big deal. Because it’s easy to understand, it’s easy to change and easy to maintain.  Maybe having a CMS written in Javascript is techncially better (I don’t think so) but nothing beats good old PHP, CSS and XML for being easy to understand. 

2.  Wordpress is designed for users.  Unlike those other CMS’s, wordpress is designed for users, not web developers. I’ve done a manual install of wordpress before, and it’s something I would feel comfortable walking my mom through over the phone.  Now with 2.7 it’s almost too easy to install plugins (Please Automattic, do the same with themes). And the dashboard makes it trivially easy for even the simplest of users to post new content and create pages. 

3. It just works.  Maybe I’ve been lucky but I’ve never really had problems with wordpress breaking. You can add all the plugins and themes you want and it keeps working just fine.  Sure, from time to time I have done something incredibly stupid that’s totally broken my web site but it’s always been easy to fix.

Mostly I love Wordpress because it’s so darn easy to use and customize. I have absolutely no problem setting up a wordpress site and handing it off to a family member to use, knowing that I’ll have to support it.

Still with me? Good. If you haven’t yet, download and install Wordpress today.

How to install, P2 – Prologue 2 from Automattic. Where to find it, how to install it, and most importantly how to use it. or High Quality (720P) version of the video either subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or download the . . . → Read More: Downloading and Installing P2 (Proluge 2)]]>

How to install, P2 – Prologue 2 from Automattic. Where to find it, how to install it, and most importantly how to use it.
or High Quality (720P) version of the video either subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or download the file here.

In this episode I show you how to link to a category both if you are using permalinks and not using permalinks, and I show you how to add a contact me form to your site using the contact form 7 plugin – it’s very easy. 

For High Quality (720P) version of the video either subscribe to . . . → Read More: How to add a Contact Me page, link to a Category – Episode 21]]>  

In this episode I show you how to link to a category both if you are using permalinks and not using permalinks, and I show you how to add a contact me form to your site using the contact form 7 plugin – it’s very easy. 

For High Quality (720P) version of the video either subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or download the file here.

In this episode I show you a really easy way to do a audio or video podcast, without having to install any software on your computer. Using a we siter called utterli, and feedburner we record podcasts right in your web browser and they are sent right to iTunes. It’s all free and it works great, . . . → Read More: Super Easy Podacsting for free – no Software required Episode 20]]>

In this episode I show you a really easy way to do a audio or video podcast, without having to install any software on your computer. Using a we siter called utterli, and feedburner we record podcasts right in your web browser and they are sent right to iTunes. It’s all free and it works great, enjoy!

For High Quality (720P) version of the video either subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or download the file here

In this episode I show you the new easy way of installing plugins in Wordpress 2.7. No more FTP’ing files, install plugins directly from your dashboard, super easy! I also walk you through downloading and installing the wp-postrating plugin, which allows users to rate your posts, and includes a widget that lets you display your highest rated . . . → Read More: Rate your posts, Easy plugin Installation – Episode 19]]>

In this episode I show you the new easy way of installing plugins in Wordpress 2.7. No more FTP’ing files, install plugins directly from your dashboard, super easy! I also walk you through downloading and installing the wp-postrating plugin, which allows users to rate your posts, and includes a widget that lets you display your highest rated posts. I also announce an awesome contest that you won’t want to miss.

Download the full quality episode: Rate your posts, easy plugin installation - Episode 19, or subscribe iTunes. Watching the Utube video isn’t the best way because it’s fairly low quality.

So I’m asking for help please! . . . → Read More: A plea for Help!]]> Well you’ve probably noticed there haven’t been any episodes in a while.  Quite frankly, I’m out of ideas and considering ending this podcast.  I’d like to keep doing it because it’s fun, but it’s alot of work and there is a cost to keeping the website and the Libsyn feed up. 

So I’m asking for help please! I need ideas! This is your chance to have your most pressing wordpress questions answered.  What would you like me to show you how to do?  What would you like to learn about?  Maybe you’d even like to call me on skype and we can talk about wordpress? 

Without your ideas there is no show.  Please help – email me at podcast@teachmewp.com or leave a comment on this post.  Thanks and I do look forward to many more episodes!

I’m still working on dialing in the audio quality, but it is much better in this . . . → Read More: 17 – Setting up a podcast]]> Setting up a podcast can be confusing and expensive. I walk you through the requirements for an audio or video podcast, including using feedburner and podtrac. I walk you step by step through setting up all of the required services.

I’m still working on dialing in the audio quality, but it is much better in this episode than previous episodes. Enjoy!

This also means that only the 3 most recent episodes are available in the feed. If/When . . . → Read More: Goodbye Revver, you still owe me six bucks.]]> Well, Revver is still unavailable. I’ve changed over the low resolution feed so that it no longer points to Revver.  This means regardless of which feed you are subscribed to in iTunes, you will now get the new high resolution version. 

This also means that only the 3 most recent episodes are available in the feed. If/When Revver comes back up, I’ll download all the old videos and make them available on this site. If not, then I’ll put them up when I have access to them, in about two weeks (I’m 5,000 miles away from them right now). 

Also, Revver, you still owe me $6 in advertising revenue. Thanks. 

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. I hope you all enjoy the new high resolution videos.

Full transcript after the break. Hi and welcome to teachmewp.com your best wordpress how-to resource. Today is finally the day, Today we’re going to be upgrading to wordpress 2.7. If you’ve noticed I have waited a little while since wordpress 2.7 . . . → Read More: 14 – Upgrading to Wordpress 2.7]]> In this episode I walk you through backing up your wordpress installation and upgrading to Wordpress 2.7. Enjoy!

Full transcript after the break.
Hi and welcome to teachmewp.com your best wordpress how-to resource.
Today is finally the day, Today we’re going to be upgrading to wordpress 2.7.
If you’ve noticed I have waited a little while since wordpress 2.7 came out, this is specifically because I didn’t want to upgrade right away and cause any problems. Usually with a big software release there’s always some kind of problem and it seems like most of them have been ironed out by now.
One problem I would like to mention is the podpress plugin doesn’t work with wordpress 2.7. It kind of doesn’t look like there’s going to be any update for that so at this point if you’re using the podpress plugin I would not upgrade and I would hang on and see what happens.
Ok as the first step to upgrading what we need to do is back up our web site. This is in case something goes wrong we want to make sure we have something to restore from.
When you’re backing up your web site there are two things you need to back up. You need to back up the database, this is where all of your articles and posts and comments are stored, and you also need to back up the directory structure, this is where all of your templates and CSS files and PHP code are stored.
If you only back up one or the other you’re probably not going to be very happy.
So we’re going to back up the database first, to do that we have to log into our cpanel. Once you’re logged in you want to go the phpmyadmin application.
I know that my site is this database, 12, but if you’re not sure the way that you can find out is to click on it and you’ll see the different tables, I want to look at WP_OPTIONS, I’m going to click on the browse button and you’ll see that one of the options here siteurl is teachmewp.com.
I’m going to back up, I want to click on the export tab along the top.
So you want to make sure that you have all of your tables – select all. So here they are unselected, I’m going to select.
You do want to export to SQL format and here under structure you want to have the same check-marks as I do. These aren’t the same as what the defaults would be. So make sure you have structure, add drop table, add auto_increment and enclose table and field names with backquotes.
Uncheck any of the other options.
For data the same thing goes. You want to check off data, you want to change the defaults so uncheck these, you want to only have use hexadecimal for blob selected.
And down here you select save as file because that’s what you want to do. Just leave the filename template as is, and for compression you may as well use zipped. And once you’re ready hit go. This is going to back up the database and it’s going to download a file to your desktop.
So we’ve done the first half now what we need to do is back up all of the files and all of the templates and all of that stuff.
To do that we’re going to use filezilla. Any FTP program is going to work, filezilla is just the one I use because it is both mac and windows.
I’m going to connect to my website. The ftp address is ftp dot and then your web site address, so ftp.teachmewp.com or in this case it is a shared server so ftp dot and then whatever the address of the main server is.
Again your username and password is the same one you used to log into control panel not the same as your wordpress username and password unless you’ve made it the same.
So I’m going to connect, and in here I’m going to go into my public_html folder. And them in here I’m going to go into my teachmewp folder. If this was on it’s own server not a shared folder you would just go into public_html.
So on this side I’m going to throw this just on my desktop, so I’m going to go to my desktop which is users/demo/desktop and I’m going to create a folder called backup and I’m going to drag from the right to the left and I’m going to drop the files.
This will take a couple of minutes and it’s going to transfer all of the files from the web site down to my computer.

So while the file transfer is going I’d like to take a minute to mention our sponsors. The first one I’ve got is godaddy. Godaddy is your domain name registrar and it is the one I recommend specifically because they have the total DNS control which allows you total control over your dns records.
So if you’d like to support the podcast go to teachmewp.com and click on the godaddy deal here and it will actually display whatever the current deal is.
And their current one is if you register a .com domain for 3 years you get it for $7.49. Definitely make sure to google for godaddy coupon code because you can probably get at least 10% off that if not more.
I don’t usually recommend getting hosting from godaddy. If you do that go to teachmewp.com and go to the hostgator deal.
I highly recommend hostgator. Hostagotr is the hosting provider that this web site is hosted on. I’ve also set up several friends and family on hostgator as well.
It’s pretty cheap. The $7.95 is if you sign up for a whole year in advance but if you sign up for monthly it’s only 10 dollars a month and you get a virtual dedicated server which basically means you can host unlimited web sites. It is great.
One of the nice things that hostgator has done is they’ve bought carbon credits for all of the electricity they use in their data center so now your web site is powered by wind power.
Other ways to support the podcast are donations. I’ve got two donation buttons here if you’d like to just make a one time donation of $3 or if you’d like to make a monthly recurring $2 donation you can do that right here.

So let’s see if the file transfer is done yet. It looks like it is done so I am going to quit filezilla.
So if I go into my documents folder i have backup and I’m also going to grab my sql file and I’m going to throw this in the same folder and so now here I have a complete backup of my web site so if anything goes wrong which it can and often does, I can restore from the backup.

Now that I have a full backup I’m going to upgrade to Wordpress 2.7.
As you’ll find out this is much much easier than you might think, assuming that you’ve used hostgator’s fantastico to install wordpress. This is what I show you how to do in the earlier podcast and again it’s what I highly reccomend because it’s very esay.
So I’m going to go into my cpanel and I’m going to go into fantastico deluxe and here I’ll see a list of my websites and I’ll see the current version and I’ll see a link to upgrade to 2.7.
Now I have alot of web sites and most of them arent used anymore and that’s why they haven’t been upgraded yet but I’m going to go through today and upgrade the rest of them as well.
So I’ve got teachmewp.com and upgrade to 2.7.
And it is going to backup my current installation but I always like to make my own backup anyway just incase the backup fails.
So I’m going to upgrade, and it’s upgraded.
Now you’ll see that it has made some backups so I have double backups which is good.
Now I’m going to go back to my website and see if everything went ok.
Here we are at teachmewp.com, it all looks the same, which is good it shouldn’t look any different here, and if you log in you’ll see it looks quite different.
So I’m not going to take you through a full tour or show you where everything is because over the next podcasts you’ll see me using it. And it’s really pretty self explanaatory.
I am going to show you a couple of things so you can at least get back to working.
So up here near the top right is your new post, if you click on this it’s going to do a new post, or if you click on the on the drop down arrow you can do a new page draft or comments.
Along the left here this is the bar that used to be along the top you’ve got your plugins so if you need to go manage plugins you can click on that.
You’ve got your appearance which is where you can manage themes widgets or edit files, and you really have most your other categories here as well.
One neat thing is the quickpress, you can do a post right from your dashboard if you just fill in the information and hit publish.
So that’s a really quick way to make a post.
And that’s all for the podcast today. If you have any questions comments or suggestions for future shows please go to teachmewp.com and leave a comment on the show or you can also email podcast@wordpressvideohowto.com.
Also I want to make sure that everyone knows there is a new feed for the high resolution version of this podcast.
I am now recording and broadcasting in 1024×768 so if you’re either watching this on revver or if you subscribe to the old itunes feed then please go to teachmewp.com and hit subscribe here.
This links to the new high resolution feed in itunes and if you click on it you can subscribe.
So that’s all for the podcast today have a great day.

Please note that the video opens in a pop-up window. You will need to enable popups for this . . . → Read More: 13 – Make Money with a Google Custom Search Engine]]> In this episode I show you how to create a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) and integrate it into your Wordpress blog. You can use a Google CSE to earn adsense revenue on searches performed from your site.

Please note that the video opens in a pop-up window. You will need to enable popups for this site to view this video!

Click here to play the episode

Full transcript after the break
Dave Holowiski: Welcome to TeachMeWP.com, your best Word Press “how to” resource.

Today what I’m going to do is show you how to create a Google custom search engine. Basically, what this is: is you can create a customized search engine from Google.

If you look at the Word Press search box here, this is what I’ve done here. Basically, you can create a search engine and you can set it up to search either just specific websites or to put certain websites at a higher priority. So here with the Word Press search, if you do a search, it prioritizes to WordPress.com and couple other sites.

The other nice thing about a Google search engine is when someone does a search through it, if they click on any of the ads, you actually earn some money in your Google Ad Sense account.

So the address I will put at the bottom of the screen here for a Google customer search engine. Now I will warn you: this is Beta like most of the things at Google. Actually, just today, Google shutdown a bunch of their Beta things, so there is a possibility that this could be shutdown at some point.

Once you go to the page here you want to just create a customer search engine. You do have to sign in with your Google account. If you don’t have one yet, I would definitely sign up.

OK. So once you’re in here, it will prompt you to enter some information to create a custom search engine. I’ve filled out the page here. I’m going to call this: Test Word Press. This is the name of the search engine. This is just going to be a test search engine because I’ve already created a Word Press search engine.

So for description you just say the search engine is going to do. For keywords, this is basically tags, so I’ve put a couple in here.

What do you want to search? I’m going to choose the entire web, but emphasize sites that I select. It seems like if I say, “Only sites I select, ” it doesn’t actually return any results. So I’m going to do this. This will basically put results from these websites at the top.

So you see I put a couple in here: WordPress.com, TeachMeWP.com, and WordPress.org. The forward slash star tells it to search the entire site. If you click on the “tips”, you’ll see that you can also search parts of sites which you’ll see here the syntax for doing that, so if you wanted to make a search engine that just searched Word Press plug-ins, you can make it search just the parts of websites that lists plug-ins.

I’m also going to do standard edition, this free. I don’t want the business edition, it basically, if you’re setting up a search engine for a business, you could pay and not have ads on the result pages, but I do want ads. So I’m going to say, “Yes, ” I’ve read the Terms of Service, and next.

Now I’m going to try a search query. So I’m just going to search for a plug-in. And you’ll see I’ve got some results here. You’ll see that the results are mostly from the web page’s that I specified, so it’s looking good. I’m going to finish. I’m going to let it send a confirmation email.

Now it will take you to basically, your dashboard.

You’ll see that I’ve created some other search engines here. This is the one that I just did. I’m going to go to the control panel.

I still want to set it up so that I get paid for my Ad Sense. I’m going to go to the “Make Money” tab here. What you need to do is associate this with your Google Ad Sense account. You’ll see it’s currently associated with my Ad Sense ID.

Now, this is already associated because I’ve already set it up for my other search engine, but if you hadn’t done this yet, if it’s the first time you’ve created a customer search engine, all you’ll have to do is do the association. Basically, you sign in with your Google account and allow it to be associated with your Ad Sense account.

What I want to do is I want to grab the code. This is the actual code to put a search box on your website. You do have a couple options here. I just want to host the results on a Google page, but you can also host the results in an I-Frame or an overlay on your website. This takes a little bit more work, so I’m not going to do that.

Here I’m going to grab the code, I’m going to copy, I’m going to go to my website, I’m going to go into design, I’m going to create a new widget, so I’m just going to add a text box, and I’m going to call this “Test Search”. All you have to do is paste the code in. Then save my changes. Now, if I visit the site, you see way down here is the search that I’ve setup. So if somebody came to my site and searched for: Pod Press, they’re going to get results that are prioritized to the websites that I specified.

You’ll see here the first link is a link to download the plug-in. You’ll also see here that there are some ads. These ads are linked to my Ad Sense account. So if somebody clicks on these I’ll actually earn whatever the cost-per-click is for those ads.

There you have it, a simple easy way to earn a little bit of extra money from Google Ad Sense. What we’ve done is we’ve created a custom search engine just like this one. If somebody searches on it you’ll make a little bit of money if they click on the ads.

And that’s all for the video Podcast today. Hope you’ve enjoyed it and I hope that you’ve enjoyed the higher resolution Podcast. I’m now encoding in 1024 x 768, so it should make everything a lot easier to see.

If you’d like to support the Podcast there are a couple things you can do. If you go to the website: TeachMeWP.com, you can make a donation. There is a $3.00 one time donation, or a $2.00 monthly reoccurring donation.

Also, if you need website hosting, I highly recommend using Host Gator. You’ll see over on the side here I have the Win Power and the Host Gator icon, or up at the top I have the Host Gator deal.

If you click on this, it’ll show you the deal. If you click either on this or if you click on the icon on the side here, it’ll take you right to Host Gator’s website. If you do sign up for a hosting account I do earn a small commission. Basically, this helps me buy more toys to make the Podcast better and make it easier to put new episodes out for you.

That’s it for the Podcast. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future shows, please visit the site at: TeachMeWP.com and leave a comment on the show. You could also send me an email at Podcast@ WordPressVideoHowTo.com.

Play the Episode

Please note that the video opens in a pop-up window. You will need to enable popups for this site to view this video!

I’ve been doing some upgrading. The video is now in 1024×768 resolution, with . . . → Read More: 12 – DNS Redirect]]> How to redirect one domain to another using DNS – no robots.txt or php or meta refresh required.

Play the Episode

Please note that the video opens in a pop-up window. You will need to enable popups for this site to view this video!

I’ve been doing some upgrading. The video is now in 1024×768 resolution, with no ad banners along the bottom. Quicktime is required to play this video, and it opens in a popup window so you’ll need to enable popups for this site to watch it. As soon as it’s available, I will post the link to the video in Revver, so if you really want to watch it the old, low resolution way you can.

Also, there is a new feed URL, feed://dholowiski.libsyn.com/rss to the high resolution videos. This feed will be in iTunes shortly. Enjoy!

Play . . . → Read More: 11 – Manual Wordpress Install]]> In this episode I show you how to do a manual wordpress install – downloading the code from wordpress.org and installing it on a web server.

Play the Episode

Play the Episode

Full transcript if you click on read more. Hi and welcome to TeachMeWp.com your best Wordpress howto resource, formerly known as the Wordpress video howto Podcast. Today I’m going to . . . → Read More: 10 – Moving your Blog, changing your domain name]]> In this episode I show you how to move your wordpress blog to a new server, as well as changing the domain name of your blog.

Play the Episode

Full transcript if you click on read more.

Hi and welcome to TeachMeWp.com your best Wordpress howto resource, formerly known as the Wordpress video howto Podcast.
Today I’m going to show you how to move your Wordpress blog from one server to another as well as changing the domain name.
Now you may ask why you would want to do this. You may even be asking why is the name of this podcast changed?
Well, that’s because of this:
Wordpress.org/about/domains
I should have registered this before I set up my domain name and set up the original names but what is says is that you can’t actually use Wordpress in a domain name. So they’re actually really good about this, they tell you you can use wp instead or some other variation, and they’re actually really nice about fixing it.
Basically what you can do is set up the new domain and just forward your old domain to the new one, you don’t have to actually get rid of it which is nice.
This blog is hosted on a separate Hostgator account, I also have a second one that I also host all of my normal ones on. So what I’m going to do today and what I’m going to show you how to do is move this blog on to another server, and since I’m going to have a new domain name I’m going to have to go in and make some changes so that this all works with the new domain name.
This isn’t directly Wordpress related but I’m also going to show you how to change your feed and change it in itunes.
The first step is to register a domain name, and if you don’t remember how to do that i’ll refer you all the way back to the first episode of this Podcast.
What I’ve done is I’ve registered TeachMeWp.com with Godaddy. I did that yesterday so it’s had time to propagate through all the DNS servers so I shouldn’t have any problems with it today.
So the first step is to back up your web site. This is for two reasons.
1. Basically we’re going to be restoring this backup to the new site.
2. is in case anything goes wrong I’ve got a backup to restore from.
So here I’ve got Filezilla, I’m going to connect to my website.
I’m going to go under public_html and basically what I am going to do is just take everything here and back it up.
So over here I’m just going to make a new folder.
And I’m going to take everything from here and drag it over here.
The next step is to back up the database. Because it’s a database it’s not actually a file on your server and because of this when we copied all the files over we didn’t actually get the database.
You do need to do that separately.
So I’m going to go into my cpanel, which is your domain name / cpanel (TeachMeWp.com/cpanel). And in there in Hostgator I’ve got an icon for mysql databases right here. Click on that and I’m going to go all the way to the bottom and I’m going to go to phpmyadmin.
That will launch the phpmyadmin application and in there I want to go into databases, and you may see just one database, you may see a couple. I want to choose this one, it has wrdp1, this is probably what yours will look like, just with your username here if you’ve set it up using fantasitco.
So once I’m in here, I’ll see the information in my database and what I want to do is click on export.
You’ll want to make sure that everything is selected here as it already is, you want to make sure that this is already set to SQL which it is, and then you want to go over on this side.
So you want structure selected, you want add/drop table, you don’t want add if not exists, we do want auto increment and we do want this one.
I’m going to go down to data, you want to have data selected but we don’t want any of these selected.
I’m going to go down here, save as file, I’m just going to leave the default filename, not going to change anything else, and I’m going to hit go.
And you’ll see it just downloads to your computer right away.
Now if I had a really big Wordpress site this might take a minute or two, since I really don’t have that much data it was really fast.
Now because the domain name is changing I do need to go right into the SQL file and actually make some changes to that.
I’ll open up the SQL file and I’m just opening it up in textedit, just any normal text editor will do. You don’t want to open it up in word or anything that’s going to add formatting.
And the first thing we’re going to do is a find and replace. I want to find all instances of Wordpressvideohowto.com and change them to TeachMeWp.com
I’m going to replace and find. If you have allot of entires you may actually want to do a replace all but I’m just about done here.
And there we go.
And then I’m going to save the file. I’m going to do a save as, I don’t want to change the original file. I’m going to add the word updated to the file. So I’m going to save this on my desktop.
So now that we’ve got backups made and we’ve changed the domain name inside of the backup, what I need to do is go into my web-host, set up a new web site, install Wordpress, and then we’re going to restore from our backups.
So I logged into the cpanel of the other server that I’m going to install this on and I’m going to add this as an addon domain, it’s not going to be the primary domain name like it was before.
So I’m going to go to add-on domains, and I’m going to do a new domain.
And this just takes a second to go through.
All right and that’s done.
Now I’m going to go back and install just a plain Wordpress installation.
So I’m going to go into fantastico. So I’m going to go to Wordpress. I want to do a new installation.
I’m going to select the domain name that I want to install it on. I don’t want to install it in any subdirectory.
I’m going to enter an admin username and password, admin nickname. teachmewp
And I’m going to install Wordpress. Finish installation, and that’s done.
Now what I need to do because I haven’t done it yet is to set up the DNS records.
Of course I want total DNS control.
And I’m modifying the at record, point to my new web site.
And that’s it for now.
So it’s going to take a little bit for the DNS settings to propagate, so I can’t actually get to TeachMeWp.com yet. I’m going to continue with the installation in the meantime though.
The next step is to upload some files from the backup to your web site. So now I’m going to connect not to my old server but to my new server, and I’m going to go into the folder.
Because this is a shared server I’ve got to go down into the right folder.
And I want to take these 3 folders, this is under wp_cpontent and upload them to my wp_content and I want to overwrite everything there.
This is going to bring my themes, it’s going to bring my plugins and it’s going to bring any of my uploaded files over to my new server.
And that’s done, now what we need to do is go back into myphpadmin.
And now this is on the new server, I’m going to go into databases, and you’ll see this time I have quite a few databases. Each of these is for an installation of Wordpress that I have installed on this server.
I’m going to take the last one because that’s the last one I added. I am obviously going to go in and verify that this is the right one.
The easiest way to verify this is right is to look at the wp_options table, so I’m going to click on browse here. What I’m looking for is this – the siteurl is obviously correct, TeachMeWp.com
And now that I’ve confirmed that is actually delete all of the tables. This is kind of a scary thing to do so this is why I made sure I was in the right database.
And I’m going to drop. Yes. And there we go.
And now what I’m going to do is I’m going to restore my backed up and changed database into here.
So I’m going to go to import, choose the file, and I put it on my desktop, there we go I’ve selected the file.
And make sure SQL is selected here, that should be all I need, I’m going to go.
And this will take a couple of minutes. If you have a huge database it may take a while.
Now if we have a look at my database there should be tables in it and there should actually be posts.
So once you’ve done that you should have a fully functioning web site. You’ll see here it looks just like the normal web site and now there are a couple of other changes that I need to do. One is that I need to update my Podcast logo, so I’m going to do that next.
So I’ve already changed the logo, here it is and I’ve saved this as a jpeg. Now what I’m going to do is replace the old logo with this one.
And here is the file, I’m going to transfer it over.
And that is updated. Now what I need to do is log into my feedburner account, and go into my feeds, and into this feed and I need to edit the feed details and now I’m going to change some things.
I’m going to change the name. I don’t need to change the original feed because that comes off of revver not my site and the feed address I can leave the same. I don’t want to change that because that’ll mess up all my subscribers.
So I’m going to save that. On ce I’ve done that I need to change the settings that iTunes sees. So I’m going to go under optimize and I’m going to go into smartcast and I’m going to change a couple of things here.
Change this to the new domain and I’m going to make sure that works. And it should show my new logo, looks great.
And I’m going to leave the email address as-is for now because I haven’t set up the mail accounts and that’s it. SO I’m going to save.
So what I’ve shown you today is how to move your Wordpress blog to a new server, new domain name how to make the changes and even how to change a couple of things to update your video Podcast.
That’s all for TeachMeWp.com your best resource for Wordpress video howtos.
If you have any questions or comments as always you can visit the web site. The new address is TeachMeWp.com
You can still go to the old address Wordpressvideohowto.com but it’ll just redirect you to the new page.
You can leave comments on this show or any other show, you can also send me an email.
Best address still is comments@Wordpressvideohowto.com by the next episode I should have comments@TeachMeWp.com working as well. That’s all for today, have a great day.

WARNING FOR WORDPRESS.COM USERS Although I feel the instructions in this video do not violate the wordpress.com Terms of Service, you are walking a thin line, and it . . . → Read More: 09 – How to make Money with your Wordpress Blog]]> In this episode I show you how to make money with your wordpress blog – either hosted or with wordpress.com. I explain various methods including adsense and affiliate marketing.

WARNING FOR WORDPRESS.COM USERS Although I feel the instructions in this video do not violate the wordpress.com Terms of Service, you are walking a thin line, and it is entirely possible they will shut down your blog. You have been warned! Now go set up your own domain (go back to video 1) and dump wordpress.com!

Play the Episode

Full transcript after the break.
Hi and welcome to the ninth episode of the wordpress video howto podcast.
Today I’m going to show you how do something that everyone wants to do with their wordpress blog, and that’s how to make money.
This probably one of the most asked questions about wordpress, how do I make money on my blog, so today I’m going to show you.
So the first way to make money is something that I’ve actually already shown you. That was back in episode 6 where I showed you how to host your video on revver. Rever shows ads on videos and if people click on them then I get a small amount of money back.
So I’m going to be honest with you probably on over a thousand views of my video I have made very little money if you add up the pending payment and current earnings here.
So it is definitely a way to make money, a dollar per thousand views isn’t terrible but a dollar also isn’t very much money.
So I’m going to show you some other ways.
The next most common way to earn money is google adsense, so I’m going to show you how to get google adsense and set that up on your web site.
So the address is google.com/adsense and if you do that it’ll take you to the adsense page here, and if you don’t have an account yet you just sign up now. And you’re going to put in some information here, web site url, language and just fill in the information here.
Do make sure you enter proper information for the payee name street address, town and all of that because this is where they are going send you your check and definitely read through the policies.
So I already have an account so I’m going to sign in here.
So once you’re logged in you’ll get a page similar to this. Now there is a bit of important information we want to grab right away.
So if you go to my account and scroll down to the bottom.
If you install any adsensse plugins you’re going to need one of these three pieces of information so I’m going to copy this information and save it for later.
Now the first thing I’m going to do is show you how to put in an adsense for content ad without having to install any plugins.
So if we go into adsense setup and I’m in the adsense tab, I’m going to click on Adsense for content.
When I do that I get to customize what I want it to look like. I want an ad unit with text and image ads.
And I want it just a small square so we’re going to say a 250 by 250 square.
I’m not going to change any of the defaults and lets have a look what it looks like.
So that’s what it looks like.
I like slightly rounded corners and that’s it.
So a channel is just a group where you can track your adsense performance. I’m going to add a new channel and I’m going to call it wordpressvideohowto and you’ll see it automatically selects that channel.
And here is the name, I’m going to submit and get code.
Now you’ll see that there is a bunch of code here. It’s really easy to put this on your web site you just click once in there and I’m going to copy it.
Now I’m going to go to my web site, wordpressvideohowto.com and I’m going to log into the administrative access and I’m going to go into design and widgets, and I”m going to add this right after the itunes subscription box, so that’s right between text and recent comments.
So I want to add just a text box which you’ll see here is arbitrary text or HTML. Add. And I’m going to drag it up to the appropriate place. And I’m going to edit it.
I don’t want a title, and if I paste, it’s going to paste in my script for the google ads. All looks good and change, and I’m going to save my changes.
Now I’m going to have a look at my new page.
And here we are now you’ll see the ads from google analytics down the side here.
Now if you’re a wordpress.com user you may already know you can’t actually do this.
Wordpress.com is a place where you can set up a free wordpress blog on their domain but they do have some restrictions and one of them is that you can’t use adsense.
I’m going to show you some things that you can do on your wordpress.com account.
The first thing we need to do is have a look at the terms of service for a wordpress.com account.
Now if you’re using your own hosting don’t worry you can ignore this part this only applies to people who are using wordpress.com accounts.
So you’ll see there terms of service is at wordpress.com/tos and it is quite long.
There is one really important section we’re going to focus on and you’ll see it’s important enough that they’ve highlighted it here.
So what you’ll see is the content is not spam, machine or randomly generated and that the content isn’t designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost search engine rankings of third party sites.
So the ways I’m going to show you of making money actually do drive traffic to third party sites.
You do need to be very careful about doing this. All this means though is you have to have a good useful blog with useful information that gets users coming to your blog.
The advertisment can’t be the whole point of the blog and it can’t be blatant advertising.
So if you’re writing a blog about cars and you’ve already got allot of visitors, on a post about mileage you might mention a site called watermagicfuel.com. What this is is a link to an affiliate site and I’ll show you how to get that set up.
So you already have a popular blog and you’re not really sending people away, you’re just mentioning other sites.
A good example of this is on my site in the video tutorials I mention the godaddy tutorial as a place that you can go to get domain names for 6.95.
You’ll notice that’s not the only reason for my site existing, there’s still allot of traffic to my site, but I’m telling you where you can go to get this service and every-time people click on it I make a little bit of money.
By now you’re probably wondering what is all of this affiliate stuff I’m talking about.
Well being an affiliate is kind of another way of advertising. So most internet based companies that sell something will have an affiliate program.
For example with hostgator I advertise for hostgator. I tell people about their service. Usually on a page like this, and if you look at the bottom there is a special link, so when someone clicks on this it takes them to hostgator’s site.
now if they order something from hostgator I will get a small commision from that. So if we have a look at hostgator’s affilaite site at hostgator.com/affiliates.shtml you can see their program here.
So most companies will have something like this. You go to sign up, you are going to need to enter some information here, and often you will need a tax id or ssn but if you are in a country other than the US you might not need that.
So hostgator is definetley one affiliate that you can use, especially if oyu have a blog that is oriented towards internet or hosting such as my blot.
Nowanother one that lots of people use is godaddy and again you advertise for them and if someone clicks on a link and buys something from godaddy you will earn some money from them, so that’s what you see from the godaddy deal. This again is a special link and it takes you to their site.
So there are a couple of other places that you can go. One good place is clickbank. basically you go here and set up an account and you can have a look in their marketplace. they have over 10000 different products that you can promote.
So if you go to their marketplace you’ll see here you can choose a category, let’s say computers and internet, and we want to search for spyware. And you’ll see there are quite a few products here, and you’ll see how much money you get per sale.
So if you were doing a podcast about spyware and you wanted to mention a product that removes it, you may mention this one.
Now if you want to advertise these you go to create a hotlink and if you have already set up a clickbank account then you’re going to put in your clickbank name, and it’s going to give you a special link.
If somebody clicks on this link and goes and buys the product then you actually get a commission from them.
So this is an excellent way to earn money from your wordpress blog because you’re not depeneding on adsense you’re actually refering people to buy a product.
Usually the commissions are pretty good, like here $29.43. It depends on the price of the product and the percent payout that the author has set.
There is one other place that you might want to go and that is paydotcom.com
It is basically the same as clickbank. You go, you sign up for an account, and once you’ve signed up for an account you can have a look through their marketplace and you’ll see it’s very similar. You can pick products that you want to promote.
You get a special link that allows them to track and you get paid when people buy the service.
The good thing about these is you don’t have to have your own domain, you can do them on free sites like wordpress.com or blogger.com provided that you don’t abuse it.
Now I’m going to show you one more way that you can make money from your wordpress blog. This is actually setting up a paypal donation link.
SO this is basically the link that you see on many sites asking for money. You might just be asking for minimal donations to keep your site running, or you might be asking for a certain amount of money.
So the first thing you need to do is you need to have a paypal account, that’s at paypal.com.
If you don’t you need to go through the signup process which is relatively easy.
Then if you go to their donation page, and I’ll include a link at the bottom (www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donate-intro-outside) because it’s quite a long address.
You’ll see here an example of the donation button, and if you click on the get donation button it will take you into your paypal account, you’ll need to log in if you’re not already.
So here for the donation name or service I’m just going to call this Wordpress video howto podcast. I’m not going to put in a tracking ID here but if I had many different donation buttons then I would put specific tracking ID’s for each one.
Also an amount, this is something that you can either leave blank or you can fill in. I do want to specify a minimum donation amount and I’m going to put $3. If you leave it blank people can put their own number in there.
And for currency you can pick the currency you want, I would suggest just leaving it in us dollars.
And you can also change the language but I would recommend leaving that.
Down here you can choose you donate button. So I’m going to pick this one, it shows donate and then shows little pictures of different credit cards. And button encryption I’m going to say yes.
So I’m going to go to create now, they’re going to give me a bunch of html code that makes that button and links properly.
So this might look pretty scary but as usual you can just click in here, it’s going to select it, you can right click and say copy. And then if you go to your blog and log into the admin screen, and you want to go to design/widgets.
And I’m going to put this right above the google ads.
So again if I want to insert arbitrary html I’m going to add a text box, and I’m going to hit add. You’ll see It went in at the bottom here, and I want this to be the second thing, remembering first is my podcast subscription thing and second was my google ad.
And I’m going to put this in second.
So I’m going to right click and paste, and I’m going to change, save my changes and visit the site.
And now if you look over here I have a little donate button.
And you’ll see if you click on this it takes you to paypal, you’ll se the total amount here is $3, and if I were to log in i could donate $3 to myself.
So there you go, I’ve shown you a couple of ways that you can make money from your wordpress blog, either if you have your own hosted domain which I strongly recommend or if you are using a wordpress.com account you can use the adsense way.
Now that I’ve shown you all that, I’d like to ask you to support this podcast if you like it.
If you’re looking for a domain definitely go to wordpressvideohowto.com and go to the godaddy deal. You can use the link here to get domains for 6.95 which is cheaper than any of the promo codes I’ve found and as far as I know I think you can actually use a promo code.
So if you were to use a promo code like digg or dltv it’s going to give you a discount even on this amount.
Also the hostgator deal. To be honest this is the same deal that you’ll get from their web site. If you sign up for 3 years you get it for $7.95 a month, if you sign up monthly it is $9.99 but if you do click through this link a little bit of that money goes to me to support this podcast.
Last but not least if you’re not into buying any products but want to support the podcast, go ahead and click on the donate button and donate $3 to me.
This is a non-recurring donation so it’s only going to happen one time and it will help me keep putting out these podcasts.
So that’s all for the wordpress video how-to podcast today, as always if you have any comments or questions go to the web site, wordpressvideohowto.com and comment on the show.
If you have any questions or further subjects you’d like to see you can email me at podcast@wordpressvideohowto.com.
Also if you do like the show please leave a comment in the itunes music store.
That’s all for today have a great day.

Play . . . → Read More: 08 – Installing a free Wordpress Theme]]> In this episode I walk you through downloading, installing and configuring a free wordpress theme, to change the look of your wordpress blog and add some new functionality.

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Play . . . → Read More: 07 – Installing Google Analytics – Take 2]]> In this episode I show you how to install Google Analytics in Wordpress without installing a plugin. I walk you through editing the PHP files to include the Google Analytics code.

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In this episode I show you how to set up a video podcast for free, and even make a bit of money doing it. I walk you step by step through setting up an RSS feed, and submitting your podcast to iTunes. Of course, all . . . → Read More: Wordpress Howto 06 – Free Video Podcast Hosting]]>

In this episode I show you how to set up a video podcast for free, and even make a bit of money doing it. I walk you step by step through setting up an RSS feed, and submitting your podcast to iTunes. Of course, all for free!

In this episode I show you how to sign up for and configure google apps. This allows you to have free gmail style email on your own domain name. It’s easier than you think.

Show notes after the breakWordpress Tutorial

Setting up Google Apps including Free Email

Hi and welcome to the fifth episode of the wordpress video howto . . . → Read More: Wordpress Howto 05 – Google App (free email)]]>

In this episode I show you how to sign up for and configure google apps. This allows you to have free gmail style email on your own domain name. It’s easier than you think.

Show notes after the breakWordpress Tutorial

Setting up Google Apps including Free Email

Hi and welcome to the fifth episode of the wordpress video howto podcast. Today I’m going to show you how to use google applications to get email for free.

So if you remember all the way back to episode one, I told you not to sign up for any email. The reason is we’re going to use google apps. They offer basically a domain version of gmail for free and that’s what we’re going to set up for free. The nice thing about this is your web site as you know is hosted with hostgator. If you ever switch hosting providers you don’t have to touch your email, you don’t have to worry about transferring email, any of that.

So the first thing we need to do is go to the google apps page and I will put the address at the bottom of the show notes because it’s kind of a long address. What we’re going to do is click on here and we’re going to sign up for the free edition. That will give us all the application, gives us 2.75gb of storage space and unlimited user accounts.

Ok so we want to use an existing domain and we’re the administrator. We’re going to type in the domain name and gets started.

So my number of users im going to say 5. And I have to fill in my information. And for email address it does have to be a currently valid email address so you can’t use the one you’re creating. And you do have to check off I understand. Don’t have to fill in all of this information, and click on Continue.

Now you get to pick a username. If you want to make it easy you could do it the same as your hosting account. And I’m not going to sign up for junk mail. And I’m going to accept and continue. So there we go I’ve set up my google apps account. Now what I need to do is verify that I own the domain. So I’m going to click on this and I need to verify my domain ownership. We’ve got two links, by an HTML file or by a CNAME record. I’m going to choose CNAME record because I think it’s a little bit easier.

So what we need to do now is go over to Godaddy and I’m going to log in. I’m going to go into domains, don’t click just move your mouse over it and then my domains. And I’m going to edit this domain so I’m just clicking on it. And because I didn’t give up domain control before by setting them to Hostgator I do have total DNS control.

So there’s going to be several things we are going to do here. The first thing we need to do is add a new CNAME record called this, and it has to point to google.com.

So here I am under CNAMES. I’m going to add a new CNAME record. The Alias is going to be what Google gave me. It’s going to point to google.com. And that’s it, you’ll see it here and here, I will verify. And it does say they’re checking, it doesn’t take 48 hours, it’ll take a couple of minutes.

So now that I’ve done that, while I’m waiting for that to happen I want to configure my MX records. So I’m going to go into Help, and configuring MX records. And I’m going to get them specifically for Godaddy. And here we are.

So back in in my total domain, back here, I’m going to go to MX and I’m going to delete the ones that are there. And now I’m going to start adding. So this is pretty easy, just add them exactly as it shows. Here they are set up and ready to go. The one thing you do need to be careful about is if you are copying and pasting from here, there is periods at the end – you do not want the periods. So if you copy them delete out the periods otherwise your email will Fail.

So now that that’s done, we have finished setting up Google Apps. We could actually go ahead and start using email at this point, however there are some configuration things we’re going to do to make it easier to use and to set up some custom email addresses.

The first thing I”m going to do is I want to change the address for email. Right now if I want to access my email I have to go to this address which is not easy to remember. So I’m going to change the URL, and I’m going to make it easy – I want mail.teachmewp.com. And to do that I have to set a CNAME record, mail has to point here. Since I’ve got Total DNS Control, that is easy.

I’m going to go back up here. I have mail here already so I’m going to edit this one, and I’m going to change it to that. And then I’m going to go back to Google Apps and I’m going to say I completed it.

Now you can also do the same thing for your other Google Applications – Calendar, docs, sites, chat, I’m not going to do those for now.

So there is one more thing I’m going to do. Right now I have one user, that’s me, that’s dholowiski. So right now there is only one email address – dholowiski@teachmewp.com. That’s no good because I’ve been giving out the podcast email address so I need to set up that. Rather than setting up multiple accounts which would mean multiple mailboxes that I’d have to check I’m just going to set up aliases so that everything else I set up just goes into my mailbox.

Google actually calls aliases Nicknames and to set them up you have to click on your account, and this will bring oyu to your information. And you want to click on nicknames, so I want to add a nickname and I want to add podcast. Now if anyone sends email to podcast@teachmewp.com it will show up in my mailbox. I always add a couple others, I’m going to add webmaster, I’m going to add dave, and I’m going to add david.

And now you’ll see I have all of these email aliases that go right into my mailbox.

And I’m going to go back to my dashboard, and it doesn’t say that it needs to be verified anymore and all services are running smoothly and we are ready to go.

Setting up google applications really is that easy.

If you want to see proof, I’m going to go to mail.teachmewp.com. It’s going to bring me to my login page, and there we have it, free email for my own domain. You can set up as many accounts as you want for different domains.

So that’s all for the tutorial today. As always you can go to the web site, teachmewp.com and you can leave comments on the show. if there;s anything you’d like to see done or any questions go ahead and do that. You can now also email me at podcast@teachmewp.com and it will come right into this mailbox.

Have a great day!

Read the full article for a full transcript

Wordress Tutorial Installing a Plugin Connect with FTP and Upload a Plugin Install and configure the Semiologic Google Analytics Plugin

Hi and welcome to the . . . → Read More: Wordpress Howto 04 – Installing Plugins and Google Analytics]]>
In this howto I show you how to download and install the semiologic google analytics plugin so that you can track visitors to your site and gather useful stats.

Read the full article for a full transcript

Wordress Tutorial
Installing a Plugin
Connect with FTP and Upload a Plugin
Install and configure the Semiologic Google Analytics Plugin

Hi and welcome to the fourth episode of the wordpress video how-to podcast. Today what I’m going to do is show you how to install a plugin, more specifically I’m going to show you how to install the Google Analytics plugin which I think is the first plugin you should be installing. Google analytics basically gives you stats for your web site. It gives you how many people are visiting it, how they are finding it, when they’re leaving, all that stuff. So I think it’s really important for any web site let alone any wordpress blog. So we’re going to have to have to take a sidetrack because before you can install a plugin you have to be able to ftp to your web site.

So wether you are using Mac or Windows I would definitely reccomend using the filezilla FTP program. This is free, it’s open source so they’re not going to try to hit you up for money, it works great, and that’s what I’m going to show you in this tutorial. So the address you want to go to is filezilla-project.org. I’ll put a link to that in the show-notes as well.

So what you want to do is just click download the filezilla client, and make sure to choose for mac or Windows. I’ll be showing you how to do this on the mac but it’s the same for every OS. So you’re going to go ahead and download and install Filezilla, and that will bring up the filezilla application.

So the first thing you will want to do, you can do a quick connect just by typing in your host, username, and password, but it’s easier if you set up a profile so you don’t have to do this every time.

So I clicked that button in the top left and I’m going to do a new site, and I’m going to rename this site and I’m going to call it my wordpressvideohowto. So in the host you type in ftp. and then the address of your web site. So mine is ftp.teachmewp.com. Don’t worry about the port, it’ll get filled in automatically, login type you do have to change to normal. User – now this is the same username you had entered when you signed up for your hosting account, same username you use when you log into your cpanel. So I’m going to enter that here and I’m going to enter my password.

Now if you’re security conscious you could also have it ask for a password. This does mean when I enter it here if someone stole my computer they could actually log into my website account. But I’m going to type it in and I’m going to hit OK.

So now I’ve created a profile. If I click here I”m going to see it and if I double click on it it’s going to flip though and connect. So on the left side here I have my computer, on the right side I have my web site. And you’ll seee some stuff here. Most of the stuff that we’re going to be paying attention to is going to be in the public_html folder. So I’m going to minimize this for now and we’ll come back to it later.

Now I’m going to take another quick side-trip here. Today we already know what plugin we’re installing, we’re going to install the google analytics plugin, but there are hundreds or even thousands of plugins that you can install on your blog. So I’ll show you where to find them. One thing is you can just search google, just search for wordpress plugin and what you are looking for, but you can also just go to wordpress.org and that will bring you to the official wordpress site.

If you go to extend, and go to the plugins directory you’ll see that there are 2431 plugins.

Now that I’ve shown you all of that the plugin we’re installing today the Semiologic Google Analytics plugin isn’t actually in the directory. So I’m going to go to their web site, I will show their address at the bottom of the screen. here’s all the information. And I’m going to download it, so I’m just going to click on it. So here it is, you’ll see it’s a folder and usually there is several files in it, this one is pretty simple there is just two files.

So you don’t have to do anything with these, you just have to drop this folder into your plugins directory. SO now I’m going to load up Filezilla and we’re going to connect to my site and you’ll see up here once it stops going we’re now connected. And like I showed you before we’re going to go into public_html and the information we’re looking for is in the WP-content folder, and for plugins we want plugins.

You’ll see there is just one here so far. And now what we’re going to do is we’re going to copy over the plugin that we just downloaded. And it’s as simple as just dragging and dropping. And there we go it’s finished so I’m going to close out of filezilla.

Now that we’ve closed the application we need to go activate it. You’ll need to do this for any plugin that you install. And first login to your control panel. That’s your domain name /wp-admin and we’re going to go to plugins and we’ll see all the plugins installed on our blog. So the one that I want here is google analytics and you’ll see it’s not activated here, inactive. And all I have to do is click on Activate and you’ll see now it changes here, it’s showing in a different color and it’s showing deactivate and it’ shows here it’s active. Almost never will you need to edit a plugin.

Now what you need to od is to set up a web site profile with google analytics. To get there the address is google.com/analytics. You’ll want to sign up for an account if you don’t already have one. If you have a google account already for google apps or for gmail you can actually sign in with that account. So I’ve got an account already I’m going to sign in.

And regardless if you have a lot of sites or if you have no sites yet what you need to do is go down here to add a web site profile. I want to add a profile for a new domain. I’m going to put in the full URL. teachmewp.com. And here it shows the information, and now we need to get our tracking code. So for this plugin you do have to use the legacy tracking code, the urchin.js so that’s what I’m going to get here. Make sure you’ve got that selected and click here, it should highlight all of the text here.

And I’m going to copy it and then I’m going to go over to my blog and I’m going to click on settings. We’ll see a new option here for google analytics, this comes from the plugin we just installed. And I’m going to click in here and paste in my google analytics script. I’m going to go down and update options. And that’s it – I’ve installed gogole analytics.

I’m going to visit my site and make sure it’s not broken. Everything looks good. So then what I want to do is go back to my google analytics page, go down to finish. So now it’s working, you’ll see it says waiting for data, says it’s been successfully installed and data is being gathered. Now that it’s been installed I’m just going to show you quickly the kind of reports it’s going to give you.

So I’m going to go to view reports. Of course I have no data yet, but here you’ll see a neat little bar graph of visitors, you’ll see how many visits, all kinds of information here, where your visitors are coming from, and this one here si my favorite. This actually will show you how people got to your site, if you searched what terms they searched for, what are your most popular sites, all of the kind of information a webmaster is going to need.

So there we are we installed our first plugin, you’ll see that the web site doesn’t look any different and that’s just because this isn’t a plugin that changes the look. OVer the next couple of weeks I’m going to install some more plugins and you’ll see some new functionality in the site. So as always if you have any questions go ahead and go to the web site teachmewp.com and leave a comment. After the next tutorial you’ll also finally be able to send an email to podcast@teachmewp.com but as of right now it still is not active.

That’s al for today, have a great day.

Questions?
Comments?
Topics you’d like to see?

Visit the web site teachmewp.com
or Email: podcast@teachmewp.com

In this episode I cover advanced posting options – *delaying a post *editing HTML so that you can add script (to embed video) to a post *using the more tag *tagging, and using categories *editing a post after it has been published You can see all of the episodes and leave comments on individual episodes at . . . → Read More: Wordpress Howto 03 – Advanced Posting]]>

In this episode I cover advanced posting options – *delaying a post *editing HTML so that you can add script (to embed video) to a post *using the more tag *tagging, and using categories *editing a post after it has been published You can see all of the episodes and leave comments on individual episodes at the web site: www.teachmewp.com

Read the full article for transcript

Wordpress Tutorial
Advanced Posting
Posting in HTML
Using the More tag
Delayed Posting
Tags and Categories

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Wordpress video how-to’s. Today I’m going to show you the more advanced options of posting. I’m going to show you how to embed html, how to tag and how to do a delayed post.

So here we are at the site wordpresvideohowto.com and again I’m going to log into my admin. So it’s /wp-admin and this brings us to the administration page. I’m going to click on write a new Post.

And here we are back to the post editor and the first thing I’m going to do is enter a title. This is actually the second episode of the Wordpress video how-to that I’m posting today. And I’m going to enter a description, and like I showed you yesterday I’m going to take this address and copy it, and I want to turn this into a link. And I want this to open up in the same window because it’s just the same site. That underlines it to make it a link.

Now what I have is some script because I want to embed a video, so I’ll show you the script here. Now unfortunately if I were just to post it like this (preview) it’s not going to work. You can see here it’s just totally messed up the post. So what I need to do is to take this script and I need to switch over to the the HTML view, so you’ll see that’s right here where my mouse is. I’m going to click on this, and this actually lets you edit and post in raw HTML which this script is.

So I’m going to paste it in here. Now you could use this as well to paste in code, you can use it to embed youtube videos, pretty much to do anything you want if you need to go far beyond what the editor provides.

SO we’ve got it here. I’m going to switch back over to the visual and you won’t see it here yet. The next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to add some tags. Tags are a little different than categories. Categories you probably pretty much know is just a category, a place to put your posts. Tags are a little different, there’s really no rules, it’s just a grouping of words that maybe someone might search for to find your post or maybe what the topic is. So when you put tags in you want to separate them by commas. So you’ll see here I’ve put a couple of tags that are related to the content of my video podcast.

So I’m going to click on add here and you’ll see each of the tags in the bottom here. Now if I wanted to remove tags I can just click on the x here, you’ll see it removed the blog tag, and I can re-add it just by typing it in and hitting Add and you’ll see it’s back here. So there we’ve covered HTML and tags.

Now categories. I’m going to add a new category here, so this is a little stricter. And I’m going to add a category called podcast. SO every time that I post one of my podcasts I can put it in the podcast category. Later what I’m going to do is create a page that just has this category.

So now we’re going to go up and there’s one more thing that we’re going to do. I don’t want this to post immediately because I just posted one yesterday. Now this is a really good feature, this delayed posting and it is a little bit different from previous versions of Wordpress. So again remember this is for Wordpress 2.5.1.

So let’s say that you have a blog and one day you write a whole bunch of different posts because you’re feeling creative. That’s really good but you probably don’t want to post them all at the same time. You might end up going another week where you don’t write anything. So what you really want to do is you want to space those posts out. For me I’m going on vacation starting tomorrow, but I’d like to post this on Saturday. So what I’m going to do is hit edit here, and I can actually change the day that this is going to be posted on. So what I want to do is I want to post this on June 28 and I want to post it around 9:00.

Ok so I’m going to save this, and now if we preview the post, we’ll see what this post is going to look like when we finally publish it. So we’ll se here we’ve got the title. This part is the video that I’ve embedded, this is the script that we added in HTML, and then down here is the body text including the link, and then here are the tags.

So everything looks good and I’m going to show you one more feature that I’m not actually going to use in this post but I’ll show you how to use it.

Here we are and this is a nice short post, but if you’re going to post something long and you’re going to put allot of text, (I’m just going to add a whole bunch of stuff here) you might not want all of this text to show up on your front page. What you can use is the more tag. So if we find a nice place to separate it, and I’m going to click on the more tag here, you can see that it inserts a line here. To properly show you this I’m actually going to publish this right now so that you can see what it looks like on the main page here. So All I’ve done is changed this to today, earlier than it is right now, it’s about 11:20 and I’m going to change this to published and I’m going to publish this post.

Now if we go and visit the site, we’ll see here this is a post and where we put the more tag we have a link that says read the rest of this entry. So when I click here it’s going to take us to the full post and you’ll see we have the initial and we have all the extra stuff that we did. So this is probably if you are writing articles you might not want to show everything on the first page that’s how you can do it.

Now I’m going to show you how to edit a post because I want to go back in and change that I want to remove the more tag and I want to set it again to be posted on Saturday. So if you go to Manage, you will see all of your posts, and I’m going to go into this one, this is what we just created, and here I am editing the post. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to go down here, I’m going to highlight the more tag and backspace it out. I’m going to highlight all of this extra text and delete it. And then I’m going to change the post date to June 28 and I’m going to save it.

Now I don’t need to publish it because it’s already published, and that’s it.

So now if I go to visit the site it should have disappeared. You’ll see there is just episode 01 here, and if you check back on Saturday you’ll see episode 02 as well. So that’s it for the wordpressvideohowto today, today we covered more advanced posting options. As always if you have any questions or if there are things that you would like to see in this podcast, topics that you would like covered go ahead and visit the site teachmewp.com and you can comment on the show. Shortly I’ll have an email address set up: podcast@teachmewp.com but it’s not set up yet so don’t send any email there yet. That’s all for now have a great day.

Questions?
Comments?
Topics you’d like to see?

Visit the web site teachmewp.com or
Email: podcast@teachmewp.com

In this second episode I walk you step by step through installing Wordpress, going through the initial configuration, and making your first post. By the end of the episode you will have a fully functioning wordpress blog. Visit the blog at: www.teachmewp.com

Click for the full article for the transcript.

Wordpress Tutorial 4. Installing Wordpress 5. Post install configuration 6. . . . → Read More: Wordpress Howto 02 – Installation, Configuration, and First Post]]>

In this second episode I walk you step by step through installing Wordpress, going through the initial configuration, and making your first post. By the end of the episode you will have a fully functioning wordpress blog. Visit the blog at: www.teachmewp.com

Click for the full article for the transcript.

Wordpress Tutorial
4. Installing Wordpress
5. Post install configuration
6. First Post!

Hi and welcome back to the Wordpress tutorials.

By now we’ve gotten our site all set up and we can get to the main page, so now what we need to do is log into the cpanel, install Wordpress, get some configuration done and do our first post.

When you go to your web site before you’ve installed anything it takes you right here, and i can just click on the cpanel login, but the other thing you can do, because this is going to disappear once you have installed stuff is you can just go to your address and then a forward slash cpanel.

And once I do that it’s going to prompt me for username and password, so you’ll want to enter the same username and password you used to sign up for your hosting account.

And it’s going to log you in and you’re going to see all the details of your website. So just before we get started there are a couple of important things here. Here is the IP address of your server. This is what we put in the Godddy configuration.

You can see I don’t have any sub-domains set up although I can set up as many as I want. I’ve used .26MB of disk space, no databases, I have allot of disk space, and .01 megabits, megabytes of bandwidth. SO most web hosting providers will actually provide an application called Fantastico, and it’s an application you can use to intall various applications on your web site. If you’re using some other provider they probably have the same application and installation should be very similar.

So here we have Fantastico and you can see all the different things that you can install using this. Today we are going to install Wordpress so I’m going to click on Wordpress. And I’ve got a short description, link to the support forums, and I’m going to do a new installation.

So here is the domain it’s going to install on. I only have one domain so I don’t have a hard choice. You want to leave the installation directory empty and then you’re going to want to enter a username and password.

And you also need to fill this out which is the admin nick name and your admin email address. Sitename and a short description.

And then install Wordpress.

This is literally how easy it is. I’m on step 2, I’m just going to click finish installation and I’ve installed Wordpress.

I always do this, here you can actually have it email the installation details to you.

And just like that Wordpress is installed. So I’m going to close out of here and now we’re going to go back to teachmewp.com and we get the default Wordpress page.

This is what it looks like after you’ve installed Wordpress, and the first thing that we need to do is we need to log into our account and start doing some initial configuration.

So we’re going to click on the address bar at the top and to log in you do your address and a /wp-admin and that’s going to come up and ask for your username and password. This is the username and password that you entered when you set up Wordpress just a couple of minutes ago. And I’m going to check off remember me so I don’t have to enter that every time, and I’m going to log in.

Now this is your dashboard, this is what you see when you initially log into Wordpress, and it does look a little bit different than other versions of Wordpress. So just to note, this is Wordpress version 2.5.1, and version 2.4 did look different.

So when we log in we’ll see there’s one post, one page within one category, we have no widgets set up, and here is the initial comments. Before we get posting we’re going to go through and just set some initial settings, so if you look on the right here we’ll see settings and just go through my initial settings.

So the title is what appears along the top, I usually leave it at the domain name, I’m just going to capitalize a couple of these. I’m going to change the tag line. The URL I’m going to leave the same – teachmewp.com, the same with the blog address. Email address I’m going to change to podcast. Now I haven’t set up the mail account yet but I will be doing that shortly. Membership – I do want anyone to be able to register but I Don’t want people to have to register to comment.

And I’m not going to change the subscriber. Now I am going to set the time zone, and if you have no idea what time zone you’re in relative to UTC, you can use this world clock. It’s timeanddate.com/worldclock and I know that I am in the denver time zone, so it is UTC-7 hours.

So I’m going to go back here, UTC and I’m going to say -7. You do have to update for daylight savings time, lame they know but they’ll fix it. I don’t want to change my date format and my time format, or the week start date.

So I’m going to save the changes and you’ll notice that it changes immediately, so you’ll see the capitalization that I did there.

First Post!

So this is going to be a very basic post, it’s just going to be a post welcoming you to the site. So I’m going to title it welcome and then I’m going to go down in the body here and I’m just going to welcome you.

<typing noises>

All right. So I’ve typed my text. So I do have some basic formatting here. SO I want to make this bold, I’m just going to highlight it and click on the B. I can also do italic, I can do strikeout. I don’t want either of those so I’m going to turn them off. I’m going to change the formatting a little bit here. Now there are several other things you can do. I can make this a bulleted list, I can make it a numbered list, I can make it a quote. Let me turn those off.

Now you can also change the alignment and that’s about it.

Now if you want to make a link to another site, you can put a link down here. Let’s call it link. And lets say you want to take this word and link it to my personal web site. I’m going to highlight the text and click on the little chain here, and this will let me insert a link. So if I want to link to my personal; site I’m going to type the address in here.

Target, I can choose if I want it to open up in the same window or a new window. So I’m going to open it up in a new window and I’m not going to set a title or a class, and I’m going to insert. Now we have a blue link and once this is posted if you click on it, it will open up a new window, linking to that page.

I am going to delete this because I don’t want this in the actual post.

There we go. Now other things i can do in here are to spell check, so you can see it’s found a couple spelling mistakes – I’m going to leave these as-is.

And that’s it. The other options you see here are a little more complicated and I’m going to leave them for an advanced posting video that I’m going to do. So here we go, we’ve got two choices – save or publish. Now if I didn’t want to publish it yet, to post it to my front page, I could just choose save. That’ll save this as a draft.

What I do want to do is publish it right now, so I’m going to click on publish.

And you’ll see it shows one published here and it shows it here as well. Now if I want to see what that post looks like I’m going to go to visit site, and there we go, there’s welcome, there’s what I put in bold and there’s the rest of the text. And you’ll see there are no comments yet and I didn’t categorize it yet.

And that is basic posting.

At this point you have a fully functional blog and you can go ahead and post and do whatever you’d like.

In the coming tutorials I’ll show you how to customize your web site with a theme, how to install plugins, how to install google analytics, and much much more, please stay tuned.

Questions?
Comments?
Topics you’d like to see?

Visit the web site teachmewp.com
or Email: Podcast@teachmewp.com

The first episode is out! In the first of a Wordpress how-to series, I show you how to register a domain name, sign up for a hosting service, and configure your domain name to point to your hosting service.

Links provided are: holowiski.com/gd.com (offer from Godaddy for a cheap domain name) holowiski.com/hg.com (offer from Hostgator for excellent hosting) www.wordpessvideohowto.com – This . . . → Read More: Wordpress Howto 01 – Installation – DNS and Hosting]]>

The first episode is out!
In the first of a Wordpress how-to series, I show you how to register a domain name, sign up for a hosting service, and configure your domain name to point to your hosting service.

Links provided are:
holowiski.com/gd.com (offer from Godaddy for a cheap domain name)
holowiski.com/hg.com (offer from Hostgator for excellent hosting)
www.wordpessvideohowto.com – This podcast’s web site (which you get to watch being created)

Click for the full article for full show notes.

Hi, welcome to the first in a series of Wordpress howtos. In this first how-to I’m going to show you how to register a domain name and set up your Hostgator account and install Wordpress.

The first thing that we need is a domain name, for example here you see the name is Google.ca. There are lots of different domain name registrars, but the one I’m going to be using is Godaddy. Now Godaddy normally offers domain names for 9.99 but there are many different offers to be had out there. I’ve got a link to a special offer right now, if you go to my web site: holowiski.com/gd.htm Right now you can get a domain name for 6.95. If you don’t want to use this, feel free to go directly to Godaddy.com and buy one for 9.99.

Here we are at Godaddy’s web site. The first thing you want to do is click in the little box right here and type in a domian name.

So I’m just going to choose, say wordpressvideohowto dot com, let’s see if that’s taken. And it is available! If you find that it’s not available, you need to go back and do more searches. One warning here, if your domain name is available don’t just forget about it and try to come back tomorrow, it’ll be gone.

I’m not going to take any of these options, I just want to proceed to checkout. Now they’re going to try to sell you all kinds of extra offers, no thanks, continue to checkout.

So this is where you are going to enter all of your information if you are a new customer, or if you’ve bought domains with godaddy log in with your own godaddy ID.

You probably want to change it to one year, and you don’t need any of this extra stuff. Don’t worry about setting name servers yet.

No thanks, I’m ready to check out, and continue.

So here we see… my domain, no you ‘ll see once you’re at this page the price has been updated, you’re seeing special offer price, and I’m not going to add a dot org or dot net address, but feel free to do that if you want.

So go down and you can choose whatever payment method you would like – I always use paypal. And you do have to check off “I have read the domain name registration agreement” and “universal terms of service” and now I’m going to check out.

And your screen is going to go black for a second while I log into my paypal account and enter my billing information.

And that’s it. Once you’re done it’s going to try to give you some more special offers, you are not going to want to do any of these. Especially don’t get sucked into any of the mail offers because I’m going to show you how to get mail from Google for free.

And that’s it, registering a domain.

Text: “Now is a good time for a break. It will take about 1/2 a day (or overnight) for the domain name you just picked to be active. Come back tomorrow and continue. ”

So hopefully by now you’ve registered your domain name and you have waited overnight so the internet knows about it. So the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to check and make sure the internet does know about it.

I’m just going to type my address in here. teachmewp.com. And obviously it’s not going to go to my website yet because I haven’t set it up but it is going to go to Godaddy because that’s who I’ve registered it with. So it just goes to one of their generic parking pages. If it doesn’t do this, it means you probably just haven’t waited enough, so give it a couple of hours and try again. Unfortunately, this is the one part about the Internet that is slow.

So here I have an offer from hostgator. This is definitely the hosting company I would reccomend. They offer an excellent plan, $7.95, it’s a virtual dedicated server, although they don’t call it that. Tons of disk space, tons of bandwidth, you can host multiple sites with it, and I have never had a problem with them. So the address again is my web site, holowiski.com/hg.html

When you get to their web site, we’ll find down here this is the most popular hosting plan, and you can just have a quick look over everything they have. So I’m going to go to order now, and I don’t want to register a new domain.

Just a tip here, if you’re setting up new web sites you never really want to register a new domain name with the hosting company, just use godaddy for your domain names and your hosting company for hosting.

So I’m going to use my existing domain, so it is wordpressvideohowto and then after the period com, and next.

And then I’m going to choose my package, so my package is baby. That is the one I’m using. I wouldn’t reccomend going the step up to the swamp, unless you’re doing some serious serious stuff you’re not going to need it.

I’m going to continue.

So I have my domain, I’m going to update my name servers, i have my package, this, billing cycle, if you want to get that elusive 7.95 you’re going to have to sign up for 3 years and pay up front. I always go by monthly but I have troubles with commitments. The 6 month probably is a good deal or yearly if you have that much money ahead of time.

So I’m going to calculate totals.

Here we are, 9.95. It’s going to renew on this date, and I’m going to say I’m a new customer, unless you already have an account. So let’s continue.

So I’m not going to show you my personal information, but I am going to have a look here. Most of this is pretty easy. Make sure that you put in a valid email address, user name and password. I’ll just talk quickly about these.

This is going to be your user name for your hosting account and it’s extremely important. I would pick a different user name and a different password from any of your other systems. The other thing to be careful of is there is a maximum length of 8 characters which allot of other sites aren’t limited to so if you do have a longer last name just pay attention to what user name you’re typing in.

Payment options – again you can pay by credit card or paypal, and you do have to say that yes you’ve read the terms of service, and then you verify your order.

So again your screen is going to go blank while I enter in all of my information.

And I’m paying by paypal, agreeing to the terms of service, and now I just have to confirm my information and lcick on process my order.

So now I’m going to bring your screen back and you’ll see the order confirmation and it shows all my information here, and so now it’s another waiting game, we just have to wait for the wonderful people at hostgator to set up my hosting account and then we’ll get onto the next step which is logging in getting the ip address, and configuring our dns settings with godddy.

At that point we’ll have a live web site and we can continue on installing wordpress.

OK, so I’ve got my hosting account information. As you’ll see there’s allot of information here, uh we’re going to use very little of this. What we did need is the ip address and the address to the cpanel. So what a cpanel is is basically your control panel. It’s where you go and you can install applications on your web site and do all of that stuff.

So now that we have got all this we don’t actually need to go to hostgator yet. The first thing we need to do is go to godaddy and take teachmewp.com and point it to my site’s IP address.

So we’re here at godaddy and I’m going to log in to my account. Now I’m going to tell you a little secret as I’m logging in here. Hostgator will give you instructions for setting up their dns servers, you actually saw the dns servers they recommend in the email from them. Godddy will give you instructions too.

I’m not going to use either of those instructions, I’ve found a much better way to do it. So don’t go anywhere that they tell you to. What you need to do is go under domains, don’t click just move your mouse over, and you want to go into my domains.

It’s going to bring up a list of domains and if you’re an addict like me you’ll probably have quite a few. So here we are with the domains, so I’m going to go in and change this one – my teachmewp.com

And the first thing I’m going to need to do is to unlock it. This allows me to make changes to it. Right here you’ll see it says locked, it is locked. This basically means that nobody else can go in and make changes. So I’m going to change it, and I’m going to unlock, OK.

And I’m just going to make sure to lock it again when I’m all done. All right, so now we’ll see that it’s unlocked and that’s good.

So right now these are the nameservers that it points to. Hostgator would have you go and change these to theirs, which basically sends everything to hostgaor. We don’t want to do that because I don’t want to give up control. So we’ll see here, total dns is available, because these nameservers point to godaddy.

So I’m going to click on this, and this is the reason that I use godaddy. Once I’m here I’ve got total control of the dns of my web site.

And you can see there is a heck of alot of stuff here. In later tutorials I’m going to go into some other things but for now we’re just going to change the at (@) record.

So I’m going to select this and we’re going to edit it and i’m going to put in here the IP address that Hostgator gave me of my site. TTL I usually leave at one hour, this just means that if you make a change it’s going to be effective sooner. So I’m going to hit OK here. And it’s been sucsesfully modified, so I’m going to hit OK, and there we have it, my IP address now points to my hostgator account.

So right now basically everything, that’s what the at sign is like a wildcard is being directed to hostgator. Agan most of this we want to be drected, some of this, the MX records (don’t touch them for now or you’ll break things) but we are going to go change them later when we set up Google account.

So now that i’ve done that I want to go back and I’m going to go back and edit my domain again, and lock it because i’m done.

Lock, OK, and there we go.

So now or soon enough if I go to teachmewp.com instead of getting Godaddy’s page which I’m getting right now, I should get the Hostgator page. Once you’ve got the Hostgator page you are ready to go, you can log in to cpanel and start having some fun.

And there we go, it’s ready to go.

Questions? Comments? Topics you’d like to see?

Visit the web site at teachmewp.com or Email: podcast@teachmewp.com

I hope you will find this a valuable resource for all of your wordpress needs. Please check back regularly for new videos and articles. . . . → Read More: Welcome]]> Welcome to the Wordpress Video Howto site.

I hope you will find this a valuable resource for all of your wordpress needs. Please check back regularly for new videos and articles.