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The Social Media Widget adds a set of buttons to the sidebar of your WordPress site to allow visitors to connect to you through a variety of social-media sites. The latest version of the plugin (2.4.1) comes loaded with icons for more than 30 sites, including all of the most popular ones, plus icons for your site’s RSS feed and e‑mail subscription link. The developer, Brian Freytag, has maintained the plugin in very active development recently, with each update adding a few more resources. It also includes three slots in which you can insert custom links with icons that you supply yourself.
The plugin comes with three sizes of icon sets—16, 32, and 64 pixels—in four styles …[more]
 List Category Posts is a WordPress plugin that allows you to list posts from a single category into a post or page using a specially constructed [catlist] shortcode. The shortcode contains the category name or ID number, the order in which you want the posts to display, the number of posts to display, and several other optional parameters …[more]
WordPress is an open-source web application that was initially built for creating blogs. Through seven years of updates and the addition of static pages and loads of customization options, it’s grown into a small-scale content management system (CMS). It’s now the foundation for 200 million web sites.
 You can use WordPress either of two ways: have your blog hosted for free at WordPress.com, subject to some limitations on storage space, bandwidth, and the amount of customization that you’re allowed, or you can download the free, open-source software and install it on your own web server. (You can also pay for premium features at WordPress.com.) I’m going to speak specifically about custom installations, because I haven’t experimented much with WordPress-hosted sites.
Installation requires PHP Hypertext Preprocessor and MySQL, as well as administrative access to your MySQL database, but these apps are included in most web hosting packages.
The power of WordPress comes from its huge community of developers. WordPress is open-source software, and it’s been designed to be extensible. Developers are constantly working to design themes and plugins. (“Themes” are packaged site designs; plugins add more functions to WordPress.) A huge community of users regularly beta-tests the software and suggests improvements. In recent versions, WordPress is even designed to update itself, as well as any properly designed plugins you’ve installed. The administrative interface offers prompts to let you know that an upgrade is available, and you only have to click a button to install it.
Once you’ve installed WordPress, you can download and install any of thousands of free themes that are available, or if you have some expertise in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and PHP, you can design your own. There are also a few themes that have been programmed to contain their own suites of customization options. (I’ve been very pleased with one called “Atahualpa,” which offers a panel of about 30 menus from which you can customize hundreds of details of your site’s design.) You can download many themes for free and install them manually, or use the “Add New Themes” tool within recent versions of WordPress to find and add themes to your site with a one‑click installation. There are also sites that sell themes, and lots of designers you can hire to create custom themes.
Here are some sites that I’ve designed and constructed (or assisted with) on the WordPress platform:
Contact me at 713-562-1813 or by e-mail if you’d like help setting up or using a WordPress blog or web site.
Today I had the frustrating experience of sitting down to write a blog post about a web site that I’d visited recently, only to discover that I hadn’t bothered to bookmark the page. I probably assumed that I would have no trouble finding it again. I was mistaken.
I’ll track down that site again and write about it later. Meanwhile, I’ll tell you about a handy tool for WordPress blogs that can keep you from finding yourself in the predicament of wanting to write about a web page that you can’t find. It’s called Press This, and it’s part of the default installation of WordPress in at least the last few versions. Press This provides a simple mechanism for creating a draft blog post from any web page you’re visiting.
You’ll find Press This in the “Tools” section of the administrative area of your WordPress site. It’s a toolbar widget, a small snippet of code that you install by dragging the linked text (“Press This”) from the WordPress Tools page to the bookmark bar of your web browser—also called the “bookmark toolbar” or “favorites bar,” depending on which browser you’re using. You may be prompted to assign a name to the widget, or you can leave it as “Press This” or assign a name by editing it later.
 For a simple way to create a draft blog post from any web page you visit, drag the “Press This” linked text to the bookmark bar of your browser. Once the widget is installed, you can use it from any web page you visit. Click “Press This” in the bookmarks bar, and your browser will pop open a window with a draft WordPress post that contains a link to the web page you’re visiting. If you aren’t already logged into your WordPress site, you’ll be prompted to do so before you see the draft post. At this point, you have some options: write the post now, assign categories and tags, and hit publish; write a few notes to remind yourself why you plan to write about this page later; or just hit “Save draft.” The next time you visit the Dashboard of your WordPress site, you’ll find the draft article in your list of recent drafts as well as in the full list of posts.
If you like writing about things you find online, Press This is a nearly effortless way to collect ideas for blog posts. Give it a try!
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About Community & Conversation Community & Conversation is the communication strategy blog of Edward F. Gumnick, a writer, consultant, and designer based in Houston, Texas.
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