Blogging Sueblimely

The website that has been taking up my time and my passion, to the extent that I have not been posting here as often as I would like, is launched. The Fragile X Association of Australia now has an interactive site built around WordPress.

From posts I have written before, you may know that I have a son with the condition and, at the time he was diagnosed. little was known about it – despite Fragile X Syndrome being the most common form of inherited intellectual disability and the own known genetic cause of Autism. I have since been on a bit of a mission to ensure as many people know about it as possible so that other kids and carriers are diagnosed and get the proper treatment. Male and female carriers may have their own distinct health issues that are quite distinct from those affected by the syndrome. Some males are being incorrectly treated as having Parkinson’s disease for example.

As well as standard WordPress pages with information relating to Fragile X Syndrome and the support and services offered by the Association, the blog section will enable them to update the site frequently with news of Fragile X and the various activities run by the Association and its State Support Groups. Pages can be easily added and edited when more information is needed. With frequent advances in research and treatment trials anyone interested can be kept up to date. Although I am going to be around to teach and help with the system, the Association’s office manager and committee members will be able to operate the site themselves.

More technical aspects:

I chose WordPress as a CMS system over Joomla and Drupal because of its easy of use and administration. Other CMS systems can be quite hard to learn and WordPress has all the features needed; either inbuilt or via plugins. Although I am very familiar with Joomla in particular adding content is still more time consuming than WP. I have found that despite all good intentions the clients I have built Joomla systems for add very little new content, or ask me to do it for them.

I did have to add some coding manually rather than use plugins to get the navigation system to do what I wanted, so that only certain pages showed in the main menu and specific menus appeared on particular groups of pages. Despite having very little practice with PHP this was not too hard because of the excellent documentation on the WordPress.org site. If anyone would like to know how I created any particular aspects of the site, please let me know.

My last addition to the site was the forums, which I did not want to configure until the site was being hosted on the proper domain. The rest of the site I had created in a subdirectory of my own server and transferred over afterwards, with a bit of editing of the database. I used SMF for the forums because of the extent of features available. I still need to redesign the template to match the rest of the site.

A request

Please visit the site and have a bit of a read – your knowledge may possibly be of great help to someone you know. If you have the time please leave a comment on a news item – it will give the site editors some practice with the comment section and encourage those who are not used to leaving messages to do so. If there is anything particular you would like to know that you cannot find within the main site, drop by the forums and ask – or leave suggestions for content or feedback on the site.

Now I will do some catching up on what is happening in the blogging world to again bring you news of new tools, software, social networking and other stuff that will hopefully be of use to you.

As promised here is the second part of my Blogosphere News post following on from Part 1 last week.

Social Networking

• FriendFeed -
  • New Feature – Rooms
  • Share web pages on your FriendFeed using the Share on Friendfeed Toolbar Button

• 20 Things I Learned Using Twitter- some good tips here on making the most of Twitter and using it efficiently. I am adding this link to my Twitter Beginners post
• The Art and Science of Retweeting for Twitteraholics- a guest post by AJ Vaynerchuk on BloggingBits.
• 50 Top Niche Social Media Sites and Their Power Accounts- I should imagine this may have changed some since it was written in December. Does anyone know of other more recent posts on the topic?
• Profilactic social media aggregator – you can now post content to 14 services from within Profilactic – currently supported are: Bebo, Blogger, Facebook, hi5, Jaiku, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter and Xanga.
• Flickr integration with Facebook – share your own Flickr photos and browse those of your Facebook Friends.
• If you work from home you may be interested in the WhyDoWork network. A new feature that has been introduced by the site is the ability to add links to your blog, website or affiiate activities to their directory. Reviewing other member’s sites is a factor in determining how high your own links are in the directory.The more reviews, the higher you get. WhyDoWork includes forums, an add friends feature, your own blog page and a work at home job search engine. I have joined up but have not signed up for the blog review feature as yet. I want to check out the others who were doing reviews before I decide on whether it is a suitable feature for this blog.

Blogger

• Blogger in Draft has introduced new features including the long awaited comments embedded in post pages rather than those annoying popusp.
• I am using my blogspot blog to answer the specific questions relating to Blogger so if you have a problem or wish to learn something please drop me a line via comments or my contact form at Sueblimely Blogspot I also keep its blogroll up to date with any good blogger template sites or blogger help sites I come across.

WordPress

• How to Format Images for Feed Readers A simple solution to ensure your images and text are well laid out in feed readers.
• WordPress.com enables the use of Google Gears, a powerful browser add in to speed up access times when your PC is communicating with your Wordpres dashboard. If you do not already have Gears installed and enabled on your PC click on the “Turbo” link at the top right of your dashboard . This will take you to the Gears download site. After you install and enable Gears most of WordPress’ images, scripts, and CSS files will be stored locally on your computer. This is not so useful if you use more than one PC or use a public computer while blogging. More info:
  • Browsers supported by Gears
  • Gears Help Center
• WordPress 6 is around the corner, hot on the heels of the much maligned version 5. Technosailer gives us a sneek preview of 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6 which includes Google Gears and what looks like a nifty post/snip from any website directly to your blog feature.

Search Engine News

• 4050 Search Engines – Phil Bradley maintains a list of Country Based Search Engines – 4000 to date. Don’t panic at the amount, they are categorized by country . If you are interested in more specific topics then Laura Milligan at College@Home provides 100 Useful Niche Search Engines You’ve Never Heard Of As I tend to concentrate on blogging and general search myself I had not heard of many of them, but bloggers on other topics may find this list very useful.

I am setting myself a target of one news post per week, otherwise I will no longer be able to call it news!

A new WordPress plugin has to be unique and useful for me to write about it. The KeywordLuv plugin by Stephen Cronin of More than Scratch the Surface is just that. It is one of those “I know I have too many plugins, but I must have this one” plugin.

What KeywordLuv does is allow for the inclusion of a name and keywords in the title field in the comments form. I see this as being useful to include your blog title alongside your name. Those who are familiar with your blog title but not your nickname can associate the two or vice versa. For those who do not know you at all your blog’s title may be an added incentive for them to visit you. The plugin has the potential to encourage more comments too.

Your keywords do not have to be your blog title and can be blog topic keywords; but care must be taken that you do not come across as being spammy. Where I can see the plugin useful is where there is something for which you want to become known for. An example that springs to mind here is Kim from Laketrees who could publicize her Top 101 Top Artists’ Blogs list, as this list is of benefit to other bloggers. I would not consider this spammy.

What do you think would constitute spam in a KeywordLuv name?

• KeywordLuv Download page
• More information from Stephen

I have installed the plug myself. Please feel free to give it a try (even if you haven’t must to say).

To use:

In the name field of the comment form add your name in this format: name@yourkeywordtext

Example:
Typing in “Stephen@More than Scratch the Surface” (without the inverted commas) will appear as:
Stephen of More than Scratch the Surface

- although I do not see why you would want to use any one else’s name

Today is the fourth course in my series on blog navigation menus – dessert. Some ‘sweet’ menus for you to copy – suitable for WordPress and Blogger.

Here is the html code you will need for all the examples:

HTML

<div id="menu">
<ul>
<li class="selected"><a href="http://www.your home page.com">Link2</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.your link.com">Link2</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.your link.com">Link3</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.your link.com">Link4</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.your link.com">Link4</a></li>
</ul>
<div class="clear"></div>
</div>

Menu Bar

CSS

<style type="text/css">
<!--
#menu, #menu li a {background-color: #8AAADF; color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.0em; font-weight: normal; height: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em; text-decoration: none; }
#menu, #menu li {padding: 0; margin: 0;} #menu ul { padding: 0; margin: 0 0 0 25px; }
#menu li { float: left; list-style-type: none; white-space: nowrap; }
#menu li a { background-color: inherit; display: block; padding: 0 10px; border-right: 1px solid; border-right-color: #ffffff; }
#menu .selected, #menu a:hover { background-color: #B9CCEC; color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none; border-right: 1px solid #537495; border-right-color: #5B80A4; }
-->
</style>

Tabbed Menu

CSS

<style type="text/css">
<!--
#menu, #menu li a { color: #000000; font-size: 1.0em; font-weight: normal; height: 1.5em;
line-height: 1.5em; text-decoration: none; }
#menu, #menu li { background-color: #FFFFFF; padding: 0; margin: 0;}
#menu {border-bottom: 1px solid; border-bottom-color:#83E292;}
#menu ul { padding: 0; margin: 0 0 0 25px; }
#menu li { float: left; list-style-type: none; white-space: nowrap; margin-left: 10px; }
#menu li a { background-color: #83E292; display: block; margin: 0; padding: 0 10px; border:0;}
#menu .selected, #menu a:hover { background-color: #A0E9AB; color: #ffffff; margin: 0; font-size: 1em; text-decoration: none; border:0;}
-->
</style>

You will of course need to change the links to your own: Copy the code for your chosen menu into a text editor such as Notepad or Wordpad and alter the links to point to where you want them to go. This means altering not only the link text – e.g. Sausage Links – but the hyperlink too. Change http://www.your link.com to the address you are pointing the link to. (remember that blogger does not use the www prefix so you homepage will be something like http://yourbloggeraddress.blogspot.com)

These menus, styled using CSS, are infinitely changeable. If you wish for a thicker menu bar change the height and line height values (currently 1.5em). Change the colors to suit the rest of your blog by changing the values for "background-color" and for text "color".

How to use them in your blog:

Blogger

You can do this by adding an "html/javascript" page element. Firstly you need to make sure you are able to add the page element in the place you want it.

Go to your layout/html section and backup your current layout. Tick the "expand widgets" box. You can alter either of the following two tags (you may not have the crosscol wrapper so will need to alter the header section.

Change:

<b:section class='"crosscol"' id='"crosscol"' showaddelement='"no"'

To:

<b:section class='"crosscol"' id='"crosscol"' showaddelement='"yes"'

Or:
Change

<b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='1' showaddelement='no'>

To:

<b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='2' showaddelement='yes'>

If you already have 2 widgets add another and so on.

Now go to your layout/add element area and add an HTML/Javascript element to the header or cross column section. Copy and paste the CSS and the html code from your chosen menu into this. Alternatively, add just the html code to your html/javascript element and put the css into the style area of your template. Because Cascading Style Sheets cascade you may find the font size of the menus too larage or small so change the "font-size" in the html.

WordPress

You can approach this in two ways. If you already have a horizontal navigation menu built into your theme then you can just style this. The default WordPress menu is already called "menu" so the only changes that are needed are to the your style.php file. From the menu examples above only add the CSS styling portion (the code between the "<style type="text/css"><!–" and "–>
</style>" tags), replacing any tags of the same name.

If you do not have a horizontal menu bar already you can add one by adding the html code to your themes header.php file – just below the header division.

If you want to get fancy then instead of your home page address you can use this line instead.

<li><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>"></a></li>

The next and final course in this menu tutorial will be made of a variety of fresh ingredients to tempt you to indulge yourselves.

News

• Join in Conversation Week 2008, March 24-30 discussing the Top 10 Questions in the World Today…
• Pop Culture Heroines is a new multi author site dedicated to the promotion of strong female characters in popular culture. Writers from all backgrounds are invited to submit a request to write articles for the site. A forum is being considered too, so if the subject interests you, you can vote in the poll currently taking place.
• Alltop, a news aggregation site that provides “all the top” stories for forty of the most popular topics on the Web. Review by Guy Kawasaki – Announcing (Formally) Alltop
• On Imaginif blog – WIN $50.00 cash. Write a blog post about Child Safety by April 3rd to coincide with:
• Blog Against Sexual Violence Day April 3rd
• Snoskred has created another set of feed icons for free download – Introducing The Green Collection- Thanks Snos, they are great.
• From Znet -In-flight Internet cleared for take-off and AOL acquires Bebo for $850 million; Social networking field narrows
• NOTCOT Inc is a growing network of design sites currently including NOTCOT.com, NOTCOT.org, TasteSpotting.com, NotCouture.com – "a visual filtration of ideas + aesthetics + amusements". Definitely a site for sore eyes

Reading

• Top 10 Personal Health Blogs
• 11 Ways To Create Your Own Traffic Jams by Blogtrepreneur
• The Sisterhood of the travelling Bra - follow the Bra’s progress as it travels around Australia courtesy of All for Women
• 16 Top Social Media Strategies for Success
• 99 Free Online Classes on Business and Entrepreneurship
  
• The Top 100 Productivity and Lifehack Blogs

Blogging Tools

• Round II – 50 Directories With Good Google Page Rank To Submit Your Website (No Reciprocal Link Required!) from Blogging Tips

Social Networking

• Trusera is the place to tap into real world experience about people and their health. Stay awhile and tell us your story.
• I have been using Friendfeed for a week or so now, since it opened up to the public. The name describes the service nicely – a kind of social networking aggregator. Add your friends/friends of friends and receive an online feed of their activity from their blog’s RSS feed, on twitter, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, flickr, picasa, vimeo, netflix, jaiku, last.fm, pownce, reddit, tumblr, zooomr, ilike, status updates from GoogleTalk. Once I am able to find more of my friends on their it will be very useful. Here is my pageif you want to find me. More info from
  SheGeeks FriendFeed is THE Next Big Thing 10 Ways to Get More Out of Friendfeed
• Kill Them With Kindness - guest post by Saphrym on CK Marketing Blog

WordPress

• How to Setup Gravatars for your Blog – Plugin Free!
• Free WordPress Icon Pack

Search Engine News

• Topicle is a new search engine community.
  Every Topicle search engine only searches handpicked URLs, instead of the whole Web.
  Members can create new Topicle search engines and maintain all existing ones.
• 10 Tips to use sitemap file for faster crawling and indexing of your site pages
• Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP