Archive for December, 2010

I THOUGHT I knew….

Posted by - Sunday, December 12th, 2010

Yep. More learning lessons. So I thought I understood RSS, but found out tonight that I didn’t. I just put my regular URL in the buttons, and of course, they didn’t work.

So I went to my favorite friend, Google, and found Tutorial: Create RSS Feeds for your Website. It took me a bit to figure out what the site was saying, but it was fairly easy. Much easier than other sites where I had to do more html programming, which I really don’t want to do. This easy way, I created RSS using Google Feedburner, and it’s much easier.

Finally, I made a RSS feed for my Website (Zhollis) and one for my Blog. Now my blog RSS feed button works. For WordPress and MovableType blogs, RSS is already in the programming. I used the “Auto-Detect RSS” button I learned how to add from Tutorial: Create RSS Feeds for your Website, then clicked the “View original RSS Feed” hyperlink that came up on the new page and copied that URL Address to the field in “Original Feed” for Feedburner.Google.com. I’m glad that the Blog sites automatically has RSS built in, but my own original website that I built with Dreamweaver doesn’t have it. The instructions tell you how to add it to Feedburner, but for each and every change to the website, you have to read the instructions to update the Google Reader for the new content. Since I can’t do the hard stuff for RSS, for my static website that doesn’t change much, this works for me. For those who need to automatically have your website update RSS all the time for you, there’s Feedity.

Whew!

I also made a favicon, thanks to fellow writer’s blog All Fired Up (who also suggest making a email subscription so that people will be notified by email that your blog or website has been updated if they don’t want to, or don’t know how to, use your RSS). Thanks to her site, I’m now in the know that such things are possible. Back to the favicon… It now displays my fangs on the tabs up top by the address. When future people bookmark me, they’ll see my fangs! 🙂

*~* I uploaded my fangs to change to my favicon here: http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/
*~* Downloaded the favicon.ico file to the root of my websites
*~* And type the html path right below the <head> in header.php for Word Press
and right above </head> on my novel website.

What I used in Word Press
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/favicon.ico” />

What I used for my regular website
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>
<link rel=”icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>

I kinda like it!

Posted in WebDesign, WordPress | 2 Comments »

Where are my buttons?

Posted by - Saturday, December 4th, 2010

So here I am, trying to show my site to someone at work and BEHOLD, I couldn’t find my Plugin Social Buttons! You know, the stuff where you can know there’s updates on the page and link to Tweeter, Facebook, or news-feed. And that song Buttons from Pussycat Dolls popped in my head. Someone loosened up my buttons!

At first, I just thought it was my company blocking stuff, but then when I checked at home. NO BUTTONS. Back to research. I went to my WordPress plugin’s website, and found out that since Word Press version 2.4.5.0, I now have to add a html line to my footer.php page. And I did that. Buttons Returned!!

I’ve been doing my updates for WordPress, and I don’t even remember when I had 2.4.5.0 or how long ago that was. So I went to find the WordPress versions timeline and the date that they came out, and it looked like that was some time ago. I just added my buttons in April 2010. So I don’t know what I did to loosen up my buttons…uh…loose my buttons. But they’re back now!!

More on Amazon DTP
So yesterday, on my day off, I did some more research on Amazon DTP and Kindle. While I was using the Preview on my book, I noticed that it just wasn’t looking quite right. Then I notice a pull-down where you can go to the Table of Contents and Go To Beginning of the book and Go To Cover. Hmmm. So what’s that?

Found out that Kindle, which I don’t have and have been eying since it came out, you can jump to these three different sections in a eBook. And how do you do that? Well…I had to research that too and put some anchors in my html coding.

So basically, you put these in:
<a name=”TOC”/> for Table of Contents right before your Table of Contents
<a name=”start”/> for Go To Beginning where you want people to go when they first open your book
<a name=”cover”/> for Go To Cover where it will display your beautiful picture/cover of your book
<mbp:pagebreak/> for Page Breaks, which I mentioned in an earlier post

I looked to see if I needed to put the cover (<a name=”cover”/>) in my book or not. I couldn’t find anywhere where people were leaning more to the “to do” or “not to do”, so I left the cover out. I can always insert the picture later on if I want. I read somewhere that I could put the cover at the end of the book.

Then the question came up about my page breaks. Should I put my page breaks in the beginning? I mean, I had them before each chapter, which is what I always hear to do, but what about the copyright section, the title section, the Table of Contents and all that stuff in the beginning? I put page breaks in there too.

And it all looked much nicer.

I also had to research how to heck to put code in my webpage without my page seeing it as a code so I can put here what I did. Well you basically have to use some weird looking stuff for the < and the > to show.
So you use these:

&lt; for < and you use &gt; for >.

Then I had to find out how to display what I just wrote on how to display code on a webpage.
You use the <xmp> in the beginning, then
you use </xmp> at the end of your sentences…uh…line code.

Man! What a day of researching!

Until Next time! I’ll go back to singing my Button song…

I’m telling you to loosen up my buttons babe
But you keep frontin’
Sayin’ what you gon’ do to me
But I ain’t seen nuttin’….

Posted in WebDesign, WordPress | Comments Off on Where are my buttons?