WordPress for iPhone

My recent acquisition of an iPhone has simplified my digital world tremendously. I found myself using my laptop less as the iPhone has most of the capabilities I need – email, surfing, Facebook, IM, etc.

The only missing capability or app was an easy way to post to my blog, which I haven’t posted to in a very long time. Well, the search is over. The WordPress folks built an iPhone-specific tool. Check it out at:

http://iphone.wordpress.com

Enjoy and happy blogging! Oh, and Happy New Year!

WordPress adds support for Google Gears

When I logged into my WordPress-driven website, I noticed a new link called Turbo on the top left:

image

Clicking it brought this up:

image

Like Google Docs and Remember the Milk, it essentially is using Google Gears to speed up page load time of WordPress’ images, scripts, and CSS files.  So what is Google Gears?

According to text in Google Code:

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features:

  • A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
  • A database, to store and access data from within the browser
  • A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

Google Gears is currently an early-access developers’ release. It is not yet intended for use by real users in production applications at this time.

Very cool!

Creating a favicon in WordPress

You’ve probably noticed some websites having an image in the address bar, like so:

image

These are called favicons (short for “favorites icon”) and in this post I’ll show you how to add one into your website.

  1. Create an image you want to represent your website (most likely you already have a logo for your blog).
  2. If the image is not square (i.e., the width and height are not the same), convert it into a square image, either by cropping or adding whitespace (or blackspace) to the sides or top and bottom.  You can use GIMP or PhotoShop.
  3. Resize the image to 16 x 16 pixels.
  4. Save the file as favicon.ico.
  5. Copy the favicon.ico into:
    1. Your current theme’s main folder (i.e., wp-content/theme/themename)
    2. In your website’s main directory (i.e., http://sitename.com/favicon.ico).
  6. You might as well add this line into your current theme’s header.php file for older browsers to see it:
  7. <link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/favicon.ico" />

    Note: If a line already exists that ends with /favicon.ico,overwrite it with the line above.

  8. Save your changes.
  9. Reload your website and that’s it!

Enjoy!

P.S. The favicon on my website is a headshot of me.  =0)

WordPress plugin to create Google XML-Sitemaps

Here’s a WordPress plugin that will create an XML-Sitemap that can greatly enhance your website’s presence, which is supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search.

Here are also some links to help you with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ranking:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
http://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webma…
http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx

Hope you find this post helpful.

Adding whitespace in your WordPress posts

Here’s a how-to in adding whitespace in your WordPress posts, as the WordPress system currently wipes them out:

For a blank line:
<p align="none"> </p>For a double blank line:
<p align="none"> </p>For an indented beginning (or any other space formatting), format the text in a simple text editor, enclose it in the following code, then copy-paste the whole:
<pre style="font:inherit;"> TEXT </pre>

Enjoy!