Ninja Blog Setup » Tutorials

How To Create HTML Anchor Text Links

Shawn — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:54:50 +0000

This may seem like a very basic webmaster concept, but many of those who are new to building websites do not know how to use html anchor text links in their content and some of those who do know do not use them properly. If you don’t know what anchor text is, it’s the text on a website that you can click on and it takes you to another page or site. It’s usually a different color than the other text and may be underlined, although not always. The actual words being used to create the link is called the anchor text. This text helps tell the search engine spiders what the page being linked to is about.

For example, if you have a website about shoes and you link to another page on your site using the words “funny clown shoes”, then you are telling the search engines that particular page is about funny clown shoes. However, I see all the time where people use the words “click here” in their anchor text. This is telling the search engines that your page is about “click here” which makes no sense and won’t help your page rank for funny clown shoes. By using “funny clown shoes” instead, you are telling the search engines that your page is about funny clown shoes and when they follow that link and find actual content on your page talking about clown shoes, then the chances of your page showing up somewhere in the search results for “funny clown shoes” is much higher.

How do you create html anchor text links? If you are using a WYSIWYG editor like WordPress has, you can just highlight the desired text, click on the button in the toolbar that looks like a little chain link and insert the desired page’s url into the appropriate box. However, if you don’t have a WYSIWYG editor, you can use html instead. Just insert the following code into your content making sure to replace the text and url with your specific information. Make sure you don’t leave out any characters.

your url here">your anchor text here

So for example, this:

Google

will give you this: Google

Now you know the most basic elements of using html anchor text links to help build your rankings and drive more targeted traffic to your site.

How to Easily Add a Table to a WordPress Page or Post

Shawn — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 01:53:41 +0000

Have you ever been writing something on your blog and needed to present it in a column format? Sometimes certain types of content are just more easily understood in a chart layout but unless you know how to use html, it can be extremely difficult to pull off. Fortunately, there is a great WordPress plugin called WP-Table Reloaded that makes it super easy to insert tables into your WordPress pages.

I just spent the past two and a half months redesigning my site and came across WP-Table Reloaded when I was looking for an easy way to add a chart to one of my pages. It installs just like any other WordPress plugin. You can download it here. Once installed, adding tables to your WordPress pages is a snap. All you have to do is put in how many columns and rows you want, then start adding your content. The columns will automatically adjust to fit your content properly. If you need to add more rows or columns, you can do so at any time. If you want to move a row up or down the table, no problem. Plus, you can even add links or images to the cells inside your table. You can see two charts I’ve built using the plugin by looking at my blog installation and plugin pages.

The next time you think a table would be the best way to present your blog content, check out WP-Table Reloaded. It sure saved me a lot of time.

How To Automatically Update Your WordPress Copyright Date

Shawn — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:59:08 +0000

It’s that time of year again. No, I don’t mean time to make resolutions for the new year or to plan out your business strategy for the next twelve months. It’s time to update the copyright date on your websites. Well, if you use WordPress you can fix this issue now so you will never again have to mess with changing your copyright date.

Many WordPress themes include a copyright date in the footer. The problem is that they only list the current year. However, a proper copyright date should cover a range of years beginning with the first year your website went live. For example, if your blog started in 2005, your copyright should cover 2005 through the current year. To fix your copyright date so that it contains the proper date range and automatically updates at the beginning of each year, just place the following code in your footer.php file:

© Copyright 2005– . All rights reserved.

Replace 2005 with whatever year your website started. You may also replace with your domain name or the legal name of your company if you wish, so you may end up with something like this:

© Copyright 2005– My Company Name, Inc. All rights reserved.

If you want to see how it looks, just scroll to the bottom of this page and look at the copyright in the footer. With this code in your footer, you’ll never have to worry about updating your website copyright date again. Happy New Year!

How To Upload a WordPress Theme

Shawn — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 00:08:30 +0000

One of the most common questions that I get asked by clients is how to upload a new WordPress theme, so I’ve put together a video which demonstrates the entire process.

There are 2 things required to follow along with the video.

1) An ftp application for transferring the files of the new theme up to your blog. There are many many ftp applications. My favorite, which I demonstrate in the video is FireFTP. This is a plugin for the popular FireFox browser, which I highly recommend.

Download FireFox browser (if you don’t already have it)
Then get the FireFtp plugin here. I’ll show you how to install it in the video.

Alternatives:
FileZilla (free)
Smart FTP (free for personal use)
Cyber Duck (for MAC users)

2) The new theme that you’d like to install. The best place to start looking for new themes is the WordPress theme repository.

The rest of the information you’ll need is covered in the video, including a bonus section on copying any code changes that you may have done in your old theme over to the new one.

Click here to view the embedded video.

That’s it. Now you should have no problem uploading a new WordPress theme.

How To Edit Your WordPress Theme

Shawn — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 20:44:07 +0000

In this video I cover how to make some very basic changes to your WordPress theme.

In the first section I open up the stylesheet and change a couple formatting colors. And in the second section I open up the single.php file and show you how to add simple snippets of code that you would like to show up at the bottom of each post.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.

How To Upgrade to WordPress 2.3

Shawn — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 20:41:29 +0000

EDIT: SINCE WORDPRESS IS NOW WELL BEYOND VERSION 2.3, THIS POST IS NO LONGER RELEVANT AND I HAVE CLOSED COMMENTS ON IT. YOU SHOULD BE UPDATING TO THE NEWEST VERSION USING THE BUILT-IN UPDATER IN YOUR DASHBOARD.

This is a step by step guide to upgrading to WordPress 2.3. This guide only takes into consideration plugins installed by Ninja Blog Setup. If you have others then you may need to upgrade or disable them if you encounter any errors.

The only plugin that causes any problems when upgrading is the Add Meta Tags plugin. The plugin has been updated now, so you can just grab the latest version and install it. As of writing this post there wasn’t a update to the plugin, but it is a very useful plugin so I have provided a file that has a patch which makes it compatible with WordPress 2.3.

Download the patched plugin, by right clicking here and saving to your desktop. Unzip the file and then using an ftp program, upload the add-meta-tags.php file up to the /plugins/ folder and overwrite the one that is already on your site.

Upgrade the Google (XML) Sitemaps plugin by de-activating the current version, and deleting it and then installing the latest version from here. The new version is needed for WordPress 2.3. NOTE: pressing the “Update” button from the plugin page is not getting the latest version, you MUST do it manually as I described above.

Deactivate the Simple Tagging & Sitemap Tags plugins as they are no longer required for WordPress 2.3 and will cause errors if kept active. You will be able to import your tags, so they won’t be lost.

Backup your entire system by going to Manage / Backup and select all the tables and perform a backup.

Run Instant Upgrade to upgrade WordPress to the latest version by going to Manage / Instant Upgrade. If the upgrade needs completion manually just follow the links.

Use this plugin (Simple Tagging Import) to import your “Simple Tagging” tags into the new WordPress tagging system. Download and install the plugin and then follow the instructions on the documentation.

Go back to your WordPress backup page to include all the tables on your weekly or daily backups. This is necessary since there are new tables from the old version and you want them all to be backed up.

Add code to your template to display the new WordPress tags. Do this by going to Presentation / Theme Editor. Open the Single Post file from the right hand menu. And then add the following line:

Tags

directly after this line:

Read the rest of this entry Â»
'); ?>

If you want the tags to show up on the posts on your front page, then open the Main Index Template page, and add the same code after the same line in this file.

Other Useful Links:
List of plugins that are tested okay with 2.3

For a list of themes that are tested okay with 2.3
(note, not all of these will display tags automatically, this list is just themes that don’t break when you use them on WordPress 2.3

Update: I’ve been asked to explain the code used to insert tags into a theme using the WordPress 2.3 tagging system.

Tags

With this code the ‘ ‘ doesn’t mean the number of tags to show. They are called parameters and the first set of ‘ ‘ is the code you would like to see before each tag. Basically if you put in ‘
’ which is the code for a line break, then it will put each tag on a new line.
The middle ‘ ‘ is what you would like between each tag. So if you put this ‘ – ‘ then your tags will look like this:

Tags: one – two – three

and the last ‘ ‘ is what you want at the end of the tags. Again you could put another line break, or you could use code that would create a list of tags using ‘

’ at the beginning and ‘

’ at the end.

The results would be:

Tags:

one

two

three

How To Update WordPress

Shawn — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 20:01:24 +0000

EDIT: THIS POST IS NO LONGER RELEVANT DUE TO THE BUILT-IN UPGRADE FEATURE OF WORDPRESS. COMMENTS ARE NOW CLOSED.

This is a video about how to upgrade WordPress using the Instant Upgrade plugin. In order to follow along you will need to have this plugin installed (it comes standard with any Ninja Blog Setup WordPress Installations).

[Note: if you don't have the plugin installed, you can visit the Instant Upgrade project page to retrieve the latest version.]

WARNING: before doing any type of changes to your site, you should always perform a backup. The WordPress backup plugin also comes standard with all Ninja Installations, but if you don’t have it, then download and install the WordPress Database Backup plugin before you begin your upgrade.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Quite often the latest versions of WordPress are security updates and they should be performed as soon as possible.

Feed readers can view the video here.

How To Update Domain Name DNS Settings

Shawn — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:59:38 +0000

This video will demonstrate how to update your domain name settings so that it is pointing to your web hosting company.

This process needs to be done before you can set up your website with your hosting company. Also note that once this procedure has been completed, it can take up to 48 hours to become operational as the settings need to spread throughout the Internet.

In order to complete this operation, you will need the letter you received from your hosting company when you signed up and the login and password with the company where you registered your domain names.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you have a question, leave a comment.

Questions about Domain Name Server Settings:

Is it okay to use the same DNS settings for all my sites?

Yes, if your hosting account allows you to host multiple sites on the same account, all of your domains that you are hosting at that account will use the same DNS settings.