blogsGUARANTEED

Passion 2 Profit Graduates

Mike — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 16:53:15 +0000

Welcome P2P graduates. At this time you probably have been overwhelmed with some very powerful, valuable and important information. In that you are now reading this, I would venture to say that you either took some good notes or have an even better memory. In either case, you are here. Joel has undoubtedly mentioned that I can help you get a “blog” website up and running, or why else would you be here. Most likely he also mentioned that I don’t charge enough. Lucky for you, he might be right. However, there is always a catch.
What he probably was not able to mention is that in order to provide you with a top-notch site and matching service, and at a reasonable rate I can only handle a few projects at a time. And usually after such an event I am flooded with requests. So, if you are serious about this, then time is of essence. Remember, the ‘Early Bird gets the Worm”. Please complete the simple questionnaire (see link below). I will review it and be in touch as soon as possible.
If after our initial consultation (Free of Course) I feel it is a project that I can handle and you are ready to proceed we can discuss schedules, options and terms.
This endeavor will require some dedicated time on your part as this is not a project where I just simply build you a custom site, give you the basics and send you on your way. What I offer is a complete web and training course. In the end, you will not only have a great custom site, you will have the necessary training and understanding to maintain and control your own site. My goal is to hear from you only on the Holidays (to say hi) and should some issue arise that you need some extra help or support.
So, if you are ready to take on the challenge with me, the click the link below and let’s get the party started.

Questionnaire

It’s A New Year

Mike — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 16:31:27 +0000

Well, I am finally going to do what I preach, and be more active in posting. It is time that I walk the talk so to say. As this site is to promote “Blogs” and Guarantee success the the task at hand is to provide great information that is helpful and useful to my readers. However, there is a problem with that, if I give away all the tips, tricks and how-to’s then why would anybody need to hire me? I will tell you because time is money and someone who wants or needs to get the job done, isn’t going to pour over my site and try to figure it on their own. And if they do, and succeed, more power to them as they probably would have driven me crazy. But the real reason that I doing this is to help those that I have taught over the years to be better at what they can do.
So, here’s the plan. I am going to start off with working with the Twentyeleven theme. Not only using it, but how to upgrade to it. Then I am going to start discussing the ‘core’ plugins that I find most beneficial from my clients sites. My guess is that at some point I may see the Twentytwelve theme pop into existence. If so, I guess that will give me more to discuss.

Twentyelven Theme

Mike — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 16:29:12 +0000

With the release of WP 3.2 came the release of twentyeleven. Heck, I was just getting twentyten under the belt. So, I figured no time like the present to try it out. I didn’t do it here however. I used it first on a clients site and then on my main bread-winner imaSupport. Whereas that required more work in that I was converting from an old ‘theme’ to twentyeleven.
Unfortunately, even the new site did not have its issues as I quickly found that moving my default core twentyten child theme to twentyelven requires some tweaking. Twentyeleven has a slightly different structure, and from a overview look, the #wrapper in twentyten is replaced with #page in twentyelven. Also, twentyeleven has adopted a new page size, 1000px (max) and a header of 1000px x 240px. Too Big. So, with a few css style changes, and some quick changes to the child functions.php file I was ready to use the new theme.
I quickly found another problem…. The default page template, does NOT include the sidebar. Simple fix, wrong! Simply adding the get_sidebar to page.php adds the sidebar, but all formatting is whacked. I spent the better part of the day trying to work through this and find a solution.
That, along with the other tweaks, I will leave for another post.

Manage your WP sites

Mike — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 01:17:32 +0000

If you have, manage or support multiple WP sites then you should look at www.managewp.com. It is a free service that provides you a clean management interface to all your sites on one page. You can view version info and daily stats. It displays available plugin updates as well as for WP itself. You can push the updates directly from the interface – totally sweet. You can view/edit/create pages/posts. You can manage users, backup and clone sites. The service requires a plugin (worker) be installed on each site you wish to manage and again, any updates can be pushed once activated. The only thing I found it didn’t do, was if you wanted to access the site, it open a new tab to the Login page for the site, but, didn’t populate the UN/PW for you. This info was necessary to bind the interface to the site so it would save time if it simply populated the un/pw and landed you at the dashboard. This would eliminate the need to remember all the logins for each site. Maybe it will happen on an upcoming update.

WordPress Plugin for Android

Mike — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 01:17:27 +0000

If being able to post on the fly, or when you have down time away from the computer, the WP plugin is great. In fact I am using for this post while I sit on the mall bench as I candy shop and the wife is shopping. Setup is a breeze, allowing XML-RPC (settings-write) inside WP site and entering blog info on the app. The app provides the basics for mobility. No plugin functionality, or update capabilities, but having the ability to view and edit post/pages and moderate make it a great tool.

Freqently Asked Questions

Mike — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 13:50:36 +0000

Once again, I have stumbled upon a great plugin. I was updating a clients site, and just happened to look at the “New Plugins” window on the Dashboard. I noticed one of them had to do with FAQ’s. Now, this client had no need for the FAQ, but, it wasn’t to long ago that I converted a Cold Fusion Webiste to WP. Now, the old site had an FAQ page which employed JS. Well, I simply ported the js code to WP and made it work. The only problem was that editing the Q and A’s required editing the external JS pages. Which rendered the modification of the Q&A’s on me. Not a real big deal as they didn’t require much modification. Never once in the conversion did I think about seeing if there was a plugin. Who knows, may back then there may not have been. But there is now. And that is the good news.
So, I installed and activated the “new” plugin. But, found it lacking in all aspects. But, that only got me thinking if there is one, maybe there are more. So, I did the customary search and found a few. Low and behold I came upon one that not only provided a means of easily adding Q&A’s, but did so using posts. This allows your Q&A Content to be search-able, tag-able and everything else that comes with posts. It even provides the ability to hide/show the answers. The only tweaking was to add a few CSS styles to make it work.
So, if you need an FAQ page, search for Q & A by Dalton Rooney.

Testimonial Plugin

Mike — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 13:44:53 +0000

So many of my clients rely on Testimonials on their site. And usually a simple page, or often posts are used for the process. However, there are major drawbacks to using either. The main one being that they are ordered according to entry, and thus when one opens the page they see the same ones in the same order until it is manually changed. Not good.
So, I figured I would see what plugins might exist. so I searched for “random testimonials” and was surprised at the number or results. That lead to the tedious task of testing each one. What I found was not a single one randomized the testimonials when placed on a page. However, in reading through the posts for one of the plugins I found someone who had kindly figured out a way to fix the problem and make it work. Now, hopefully, the author takes this into consideration and updates the plugin accordingly on his next update. Given the edits, the plugin now works great and provides great flexibility when it comes to styling as you can customize both the html and css from within.
The plugin is LTW – Testimonials by LessThanWeb.
For those wanting to give it a try, install the plugin as usual. Then Edit the following two files:

1)pages/testimonials_settings.php – This creates an “Random Order” option

- goto line 25, you should see the form options. Add the following option after the tag for option 3

- Save
2) ltw-testimonials.php This adds the code to sort by random
-goto the bottom of the page and search up for the “ltw_tes_shortcode_all() function”
- add the following code after the closing ‘}’ for option 3
else if (get_option(‘ltw_tes_sort_testimonials’) == ’4′)
{
$ltw_testimonials_order_sql = ‘ ORDER BY RAND() ‘;
}
- Save
And you are good to go.