Category: Tutorials

There are 35 posts filed in Tutorials (this is page 3 of 6).

Update

Web Savvy Marketing has taken things a couple steps further, and discontinued lifetime support for individually-purchased themes, along with restricting their all-themes icense to known developers. Instead of purchasing that license through their theme store, you’ll need to fill out the contact form and make an inquiry to purchase Web Savvy Marketing’s all-themes package.

As of yesterday, StudioPress, the makers of the Genesis Framework, are now including all third-party themes sold through their website in their StudioPress Pro Plus All-Theme Package. This means that, if you’ve already purchased the package, you’ now start receiving access to the third-party themes, along with any new child theme from StudioPress plus the lifetime support. If you haven’t already purchased the package, and you’re building websites, now would be a good time to do so.

For the next week, you can get the StudioPress Pro Plus All-Theme Package, valued at north of $1,400, for $350 U.S. If you’ve purchased any StudioPress theme in the past, you’ll get a further twenty-five percent discount, which drops the price to $262.46 U.S.

As long as you buy within the next week, you’ll also receive unlimited support. StudioPress is killing that off at the end of the year, and will, after that point, be placing limits on the support they offer.

I can’t say for certain whether or not lifetime unlimited support will disappear for those who purchase the Genesis Framework and a single child theme, but I suspect it will. It wouldn’t make sense for StudioPress to kill lifetime support for just their all-themes package.

This news makes me wonder if the days of lifetime support for themes in the WordPress space is coming to an end. Themes have been a commodity for a while now, and I’d like to believe this could be changing. StudioPress tends to set trends, and I don’t think I’m off the mark in saying that other theme shops tend to follow suit.

So if you’re a smaller WordPress shop and you use Genesis, or have thought about doing so for your clients, seriously, Go get the StudioPress Pro Plus All-Theme Package.

One of the best features of WordPress for content creators is its drafts feature. Drafts gives you a way to start a post, and if you can’t finish it at the time you started writing it, you can always come back to it later. But what if you’re like me and you have a ton of drafts that have piled up?

Dust them off

If you’re participating in any kind of blogging or writing challenge, or even if you’re just trying to increase your posting frequency, those abandoned drafts are a great place to start.

You’ll find ideas you forgot about

I like to say that my draft posts are where all my better ideas live. I usually sit down, start working on something, and then save it for later, only to forget it’s even there. Some of them are almost complete, and need a conclusion, or some editing, and others are in scratch-pad form. But they all contain the nucleus of an idea or tutorial I thought would make a great resource at the time of writing. If you find yourself in the same position, before you start thinking of and drafting new posts, take a look back through your already-existing drafts and see what you’ve got there first.

Purge when necessary

While you’re in there, go through what you’ve already got and decide what’s worth keeping and reviving and what needs to be thrown away. If you move one of your drafts to the trash, and you decide later that you want to keep it, you can always restore it to your drafts, as long as it’s within the first thirty days of the move to the trash.

The deciding factor for me is whether or not the draft has some body text. Often, I’ll start writing, give the post a title, and then abandon it. So when I’m going through my drafts as I do periodically, if I find bodiless drafts, those are usually the ones that I discard. Anything else will get a closer look.

Consider your editorial calendar

You may find that you’ll have an easier time finishing your draft posts if you spend some time determining where they fit in your editorial calendar. If you don’t have an editorial calendar, and you plan on writing a lot, you should consider creating one. If you already have one, and you’re either sticking to it already or you want to start, determine where your drafts fit in that calendar, and then, based on when you publish certain kinds of content, set yourself a deadline to finish each type of draft by the next time you’re supposed to publish that particular kind of content. If you’ve got a lot of drafts that you’ve decided are worth keeping, this will make the culling less daunting.

Your draft posts can be an excellent place to find ideas when you’re dealing with writer’s block, and they can also be time savers. When it’s time to write new content for your site, look there first. You may find that you’ll save yourself some time, because you’ve already got material to work with.

For those of us who used to post to LiveJournal back in the day, a client called Semagic provided the perfect non-cluttered and accessible interface. Well, it turns out that you can also use Semagic to post to a self-hosted WordPress blog. Since the question came up again yesterday, I decided to do a little research and put together this tutorial. There are some caveats, and I’ll detail those below along with instructions for configuring the client. But overall, I think this will help those who loved this client and would like a simplified, accessible way to post to WordPress.

First, the caveats

In order to use Semagic, you’re going to have to use XMLRPC. This has risks, and you definitely need to make sure you’re staying on top of WordPress updates. You have the ability to post via SSL, so if your blog is behind an SSL cert, you’ll need to take that into account. Next, the latest version of Semagic you can get is 7.9.9, which works on Windows 7, XP and 2K. It may work under windows 8, but I can’t be certain of that. Try it, but if it breaks, you keep both pieces.

No Fetching For You

Semagic will not fetch your WordPress categories on the fly. This is because XMLRPC only supports posting, and not getting. The simplest way around this is to create a category for your Semagic posts and make it the default category. Then, log into WordPress and edit the category and tags for the post and update. While we’re on the subject of fetching, Semagic will also not allow you to fetch your draft posts.

No Post Formats For You

Finally, Semagic does not support WordPress’s Post Formats feature, which is one that I’m a fan of and use extensively on my personal blog. But if you’re not using Post Formats, (by “not using,” I mean your theme does not have support for them), using Semagic is a quick and dirty way to get posts up.

Now that we’re done with all that, time for the fun.

Download Semagic

First, you’ll need to download Semagic if you don’t already have the latest version.Once it’s downloaded, install it. Optionally, you can install other spell check dictionaries than English or Russian, so if you need to spell check in another language, get the dictionaries you need.

When you first run Semagic, you’ll get a login prompt. Go ahead and enter your WordPress username and password, but don’t log in yet. After you enter your information, press alt and then arrow down until you find “server settings.” Press enter on that. In the API box, choose “metaweblog API.” Then, enter your website’s address exactly as it appears. If it includes the www, enter that along with the domain name. If it doesn’t, don’t enter www. In either case, don’t enter the http or https.

Next, you need to set a path. Your path will be something like example.com/xmlrpc.php. If your blog is installed in a subdirectory, it will be /directory/xmlrpc.php (where directory is the name of the directory your blog is installed in).

If you haven’t already done so, make sure your username and password is correct. You’ll see these fields while editing your server settings. Then press OK, and you’ll be brought back to the login screen. Tab until you get to the login button and press that. If you want Semagic to automatically log in to your WordPress site, go ahead and check that box.

Uploading Pictures to your WordPress Media Library

To upload pictures you’ve inserted in your posts to your WordPress media library, while in the Semagic main screen, press alt and navigate to the “pictures” sub menu. Within that sub menu, choose “select server.” A new dialog will open, and in that dialog, choose “meta weblog API.” Then, press OK. This will allow Semagic to upload your pictures from your post to your WordPress Media Library, and then insert them appropriately in your post.

Semagic is not the most elegant way to add content to a WordPress blog. It does, however, provide an uncluttered interface, and will save you from having to use the built-in WordPress editor. I find the post editor easy to use, but that’s because I’ve been eating, sleeping and drinking WordPress for the last ten years. Some, however, find the editor a little too much to handle. If you’re one of those people, using Semagic to post to your WordPress blog might be a solution.

Have fun, and happy posting.

So you’ve started using the alt attribute when you add images to WordPress posts.

You’ve even made it a point to make sure your alt text is meaningful.

Very, very awesome.

But there’s something else you need to keep in mind when coding your alt attributes, and that’s making sure you don’t add line breaks when coding.

Why does it matter whether or not I add line breaks?

It matters for a couple of reasons. First, with a screen reader, the reading of alt text stops at the end of the line. When you resume reading, the object role (in this case “graphic”) is announced at the start of each new line.

If you’d like to see a textual and code representation of what this looks like to screen reader users, Steve Faulkner has written it up for you.

When adding the alt attribute to images using WordPress, as long as you’re using the media editor, adding line breaks is not easy to do unless you’re a coder and you add the HTML directly to the box for the alt attribute. Coding it manually is a completely different story.

Why add line breaks in the first place?

It’s my opinion, (and I could be completely wrong about this), that some add line breaks to their alt attributes for stylistic reasons. They want to add text that’s meaningful, but they also want to make sure that text doesn’t look out of place on the front end, assuming the image isn’t being displayed and the text is then visible. So they add line breaks to keep things tidy.

One way you can avoid having to do this is to make sure that your alt text is not only meaningful, but as short as possible. There’s no set limit on the number of characters the alt attribute can hold, but think of it as Twitter for images.

With Twitter, there’s a character limit imposed. So you have to say what you want in as few characters as possible. Treat your alt attributes the same way. Make sure the text is meaningful, but try to keep it as short as possible. The less verbose, the better.

None of this is a hard and fast rule. HTML is extremely forgiving, and it won’t warn you if your alt text is too long. But by making it a point to keep it short, meaningful and to the point, you’ll make those of us who read your sites with screen readers a lot happier.

In this post, I’ll show you how a blind person inserts media into a WordPress post while using a screen reader. In this example, I’ve inserted some audio, but this also applies to other media such as images or video.

For screen reader users, there’s a quick audio tutorial that you can use to start inserting media if you’re not doing so already.

In this scenario, I’m uploading media, not choosing from what’s already in my media library.

First, open the media panel

Below the field labeled “enter title here,” I find a link that says “add media.” I press space on that.

Next, I move down to the bottom of the screen by pressing ctrl+end. There, I find the “browse” button.

Because I want to upload media from my computer, I press enter or space on that.

A standard “choose file” dialog will open. I use standard controls/methods to find the file I want to upload from my own computer, and then tab to the “open” button and press enter or space on that.

Now, insert the media.

Next, I’ll insert the media I’ve just uploaded. To do this, I first make sure the window is maximized.

Next, I orient myself by returning to the bottom of the screen.

Then, I arrow up until I find the “insert media” link, and press space on that.

If my screen reader starts babbling at me, I know my media is inserted.

Tomorrow, I’ll show you how I work with what I like to refer to as the finer details of media.

This talk, once again from Loopconf, is required watching not only for WordPress developers, but anyone who develops for, or writes content for, the modern web. A responsive web is a responsible web, and also an accessible web. Lastly, and I think most importantly, accessibility is everyone’s responsibility.