Creativity in Productivity in Creativity
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I’m not sure why the new versions (post 2.5) of WordPress make it so difficult to find the numbers that are associated with your categories. In prior versions, they were right there in manage/categories.
To find them now, you still go to manage/categories, but now you have to mouse over the category title and then look for its url at the bottom of the screen.
Here’s a screengrab attempting to illustrate this.
For those artists out there who are thinking about developing their own site, rather than relying on MySpace/Facebook or paying out the wazoo to have someone do it for you, this link lists some good resources for you.
After my recent lecture on the importance of blogging, I thought I’d take a moment to illustrate how easy it is to create your own blog.
While you can certainly get a blog up and running in about 30 seconds using Blogger, it does have its limitations.
I much prefer WordPress. While it takes a little longer to set up, you have much more control in terms of naming your blog (no annoying “blogspot” in your URL), and way more control over the look and feel of your blog. It really is worth the extra time.
The other downside is expense. Blogger (and others) are free. Using WordPress with your own domain (URL) means having a host. This is (literally) a small price to pay for the security and customer service that working with a good host provides.
I’ve been using TextDrive for several years, and love them. My blog has never been down, and whenever I have any question, it’s answered almost immediately. For $15/month, I get more storage space than I’ll likely ever use, and the ability to host up to 5 different websites/blogs.
This tutorial assumes you are using TextDrive to host your WordPress blog. I don’t know how to get a WordPress blog up any other way.
OK, here are the ten steps to set up a WP blog using TextDrive hosting:
1. Find a url and register with GoDaddy. This will cost you about $8.
2. Create an account with TextDrive. $15/month gets you 5 websites, and excellent customer service and reliability
3. Go to the domains tab on godaddy and click on the “Nameservers†tab in the middle and enter into the first four boxes: DNS#.TEXTDRIVE.COM (replace the # with 1, 2, 3, and 4)
4. Create your blog’s database:
5. Download the most recent version of WordPress
6. Change the wp-config-sample.php file that’s in the WP folder.
•Change the text between the quotes with your information. That is, where it says ‘yourdatabasename’ you’ll replace it with ‘funkyblog’. Important note: you leave the quotes, but here you DON’T add the .com
•Do the same for ‘yourusername’ and ‘password’, replacing those with the user name and password you got from TextDrive. Again, keep this information inside the quotations.
•Don’t worry about the ‘localhost’ – leave it as is.
•Save this file as wp.config.php back into the wordpress folder.
•Trash the wp-config-sample.php file
7. Upload the contents of your WordPress file to TextDrive
9. Open a web browser and enter this URL: http://www.yourblogname.com/wp-admin/install.php Obviously, replace the words “yourblogname†with … uh … your blog name, so it would be http://www.funkyblog.com/wp-admin/install.php
10. Follow the 2 steps that greet you when this page loads (making sure to write down your WP user name (Admin, by default) and password.
You’re done. Start blogging.
Please feel free to shoot me corrections, tips, and—most importantly—links to the blogs you set up!
For more information, check out the community forum at the TextDrive site.
I’m working on a project right now where we’re putting together what we feel will be a revolutionary new type of record label. Of course, this means creating a revolutionary web site as well. In speaking with our designers we’ve laid out a set of capabilities that we’ll need; one of which is search for the site.
This is, of course, not a significant implementation. However, it is yet another thing that one has to worry about (and pay for) when having a site built.
I did a little poking around today to try and determine how WP users might address this specific issue, and, lo and behold, I found a solution that I installed here on the 9GS blog in about 8 seconds.
As you can see on the sidebar, it incorporates some nice AJAX, and includes searches of the blog and Web. You can also configure it to search other things; such as a Flickr set.
It’s a good example, I believe, of the giant strides we are taking towards the day when building useful, efficient sites that can truly help your artistic career is a reality.
As a side note, WP has now set up an official Plugins page.
Here’s a quick and easy technique to add streaming music to the sidebar of your WordPress blog.
1. Set up a Finetune account and create a playlist.
2. Under your playlist options, click on “embed playlist.” This will generate code. Copy this code.
3. If you haven’t already, download and install the WordPress Widget application.
4. Go to your Presentation page in your WP admin, and then click on the Sidebar Widget tab. Pull in a “text” widget from the pool of widgets in the bottom up to the Main Sidebar area.
5. Click on the lines on the right side of the text Widget bar. This opens up an edit window. In the “title” area, type in whatever you want to appear above your playlist. In the larger blank space below, paste in the code from Finetune that you copied in step two. Close and save the changes.
View your site, and you should now see (and hear) your Finetune playlist in your sidebar.
When you’re ready to change the streaming music, just create a new Finetune playlist, and grab the new code, and change it out in your sidebar widget.
You can an example of this in the sidebar on this blog.
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