(Anti) Social Development

(Anti) Social Development

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Managing Your WordPress Archives with Smart Archives Reloaded

After you’ve been blogging for awhile the archive list in the sidebar becomes rather long. And I’ve often felt that unless your blog is a journal that the archives are kind of useless. Most people are looking for information on a topic, such as an article I wrote about Facebook, not a list of what I wrote in May 2009.

The only thing that the list seems to do is establish the age of the site. If there are only two months listed, the site is new. If it stretches on and on, the site has been around for awhile.

I found that at about the two year mark, the list of months was just getting too long. Even though I think the archives are kind of pointless I didn’t want to do away with them completely. And I didn’t feel like creating a custom archive page so I decided to try out the Smart Archives Reloaded Plugin.

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3 Ways to List Upcoming Posts in WordPress

If you schedule your WordPress posts and want your visitors to get excited about what’s coming soon, you can list them in your sidebar.

I always schedule my posts and frequently write 5-6 posts at a time when I have a block of time and schedule them over the next couple of weeks. I get a little stressed out if I don’t have something scheduled and have to write something the night before. Anyway …

I don’t think I would use this feature because I don’t want to spoil the surprise. This is probably why I didn’t want to know the gender of my child when I had an ultrasound ;-) But, for certain types of sites, I think this could be a really useful feature.

There are two plugin solutions and one code solution. And even though I don’t want to use this feature I went ahead and tested the plugins. Yeah, you can thank me later.

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3 Ways to Exclude Pages from the WordPress Navigation Bar

Many navigation bars in WordPress are created dynamically with this piece of code
<?php wp_list_pages();?>

Since it is created dynamically, people often wonder how to exclude certain pages from the navigation. I have a lot more pages than I want listed there and I need a way to remove them.

Here I’m going to list three ways that you can do that. One is a code solution and the other two require the use of a plugin.

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Converting a Static Website to WordPress: Mary Shelley and Frankenstein Part 2

At the beginning of April I wrote about an older website that I converted to WordPress. This site is about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein and has existed since 1996.

I intended to write this second part in the weeks following but it was only when someone asked me about it a couple of days ago that I realized almost 2 months had gone by and that I still hadn’t written it. There is no simple way to convert an html site to WordPress and if there are a lot of pages it can be a tedious process. It can be the best time to take a close look at your content and determine what needs to be updated, what is irrelevant and what needs to be removed completely.

Here are some of the logistical matters that need to be taken care of when converting an html site to a WordPress one.

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How to Not Ask For WordPress or Facebook Help

I get A LOT of requests for assistance. While I prefer that people ask for help with a topic in an article I’ve already written and leave a comment, I am not adverse to people emailing me or filling out the contact form. Calling for free help, however, is pushing it.

Some say that I shouldn’t offer any free assistance but I disagree. People have answered my questions and helped me out, especially Jeff Starr and Stratos. When I first contacted Jeff Starr, however, it was about an article he had written – I didn’t just ask him random questions and expect him to answer. I was also very grateful and thanked him repeatedly. And Stratos helps me out quite a bit and, although he doesn’t want me to, I frequently pay him. And someone that you answer a quick question for might become a paying customer.

But, here’s the deal. There needs to be limits, respect and patience. And here’s an example of what not to do.

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