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WordPress, I both love and hate you

Saturday, April 28th, 2012

I just spend two days getting my website back up, which included a full reinstall of WordPress. I will probably bore you with details later but for now… YEA!

I also am thrilled to find that my visitor stats tracking was apparently broken. It showed no visitors at all this month – I was bummed. It seems that there are people who read the blog.

Thank you!

I really appreciate it.

- Kirsten

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New Site, basically

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

The theme and database turned evil a few days ago and everything had to be reinstalled and fixed. The bright spot is I was able to change the old theme with one that is easier to navigate and less busy.

What do you think?

Please use the contact page or my twitter account to let me know your opinion.

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Adding a Twitter Feed

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

Why I put a twitter feed on my site and a brief tutorial on how (as well as making it validate xhtml strict) –

So, I did it. I created a twitter account and put the feed on the main navigation page of my site. The question of course is WHY?

I have been thinking about how I could both make my site easier for me to update and make it more likely that I will actually post real content and no just throw in links (like I’ve been doing for 98% of the time I’ve been up). I decided I would use the twitter feed to add links as much as possible and would make creating actual posts something that would be at least a paragraph or two.

That’s why I did it – here’s how. If you are using WordPress as the underlying structure for your site (like I am), AND you have widgets available in the template you are using, then adding a tweets section will take you only a few minutes.

Step One – First go to twitter.com and create a new account. Create a tweet so you can see if it works when you add it to you site.

Step Two – I did a search for add twitter to wordpress and found a useful page at quickonlinetips.com. I originally chose Twitter Tools but found it was more than I needed and more of a headache to add. I ended up with the criminally simple Wickett Twitter Widget. If you want to install the plug-in, here is the easiest possible way, do this…

Go to the plugins page on the backend/administrator side of your wordpress site
Click the Add New button
Search for what you want and click the link that says “install”
Activate the plug-in

It’s literally that easy! I picked one that had no detailed settings page so I was able to add the feed directly into a widget area.

There is a catch! I have a site that uses a valid xhtml strict template. Adding this to my site made the validation cough up two errors. It’s a longer post for another day why this matters to me, but as it does I needed to fix it.

There is a solution! The error are written in a stunningly stupid way and make it seem like the code is missing closing tags – it’s not it’s missing the type attribute in the script tags. Just add type=”text/javascript” in the opening script tag(s) and it should validate fine.

Tags: Social Media, Twitter, Website Design
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New Content

Wednesday, December 1st, 2010

I’ve added a new page to the top navigation. It’s called Tutorials and currently holds whatever videos that I’ve pulled from the main page. I sized them back to the larger original size as well. Enjoy!

Tags: New Content
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