However, what the client wanted was for the all text to be indented, in a neat column to the right of the image, like this:

Now, my first reaction was that I would need to edit the code which generates the author box, so that the image was wrapped in a block level element, which would then push the text across as required… or something like that. That is a fairly complicated thing to do requiring edits to functions.php and completely disproportionate to what is a pretty minor layout change. I braced myself for the labours ahead.

Then I came across a short article called Absolute Positioning Inside Relative Positioning at CSS Tricks. As the article says – “To some, this is obvious. To others, this may be one of those CSS “Ah-ha!” Moments.” It was for me – I didn’t know you could do that!

The point is as the article says “A page element with relative positioning gives you the control to absolutely position children elements inside of it.”

In my case, restyling the author box took just a couple of minutes and two lines of CSS:

.author-box div {position:relative;margin-left:90px}
.author-box img {position:absolute;left:-90px}


The first line moves all the box contents 90px to the right, the second moves just the image 90px to the left. All done!

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If you’re like me, you hate hanging around waiting for a page to load. So have you considered checking how speedy your own blog is? There are some simple tests you can do to check what’s going on – one resource I’ve used is called pingdom, and it highlighted a quick and easy fix I could do that improved my page load time.

I tested my lovely personal blog Making it up – it’s quite a busy site and so I think it’s important that’s it’s reactive.

First test result

Speed test result 1

Not bad, but I might be able to do better. So I check through the results and find a warning.

Take action

I’ve got a missing file – icon-dot.png. And as it’s called from my theme it’s going to affect every page on my site. Not good. Very easy to fix though – I go and look for it and put it back where it should be.

And retest.

I’ve gone up two percent against the rest of the test base. Dropped my load time from 2.51s to 2.36s. Not a huge improvement, but if you’ve more than one problem you could easily get a much more exciting result.

Just to confirm:

That’s the miscreant file, returned to its proper position. You can see its little load bar is looking much better.

Pingdom is a great tool for testing out the page load speed of your website – and often you can find little problems, easy to fix, that will make a big difference.

(To be fair, I’d already done a variety of other interesting improvements to help with load time, but I’m letting them bed down properly before I write them up. You’ll probably want to check back to see how I get on – why not subscribe to my RSS?)

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According to CloudFlare’s Prince, the distributed attacks are attempting to brute force the administrative portals of WordPress servers, employing the username “admin” and 1,000 or so common passwords.

User access to wordpress relies on knowing three things. A user id, a password, and a login location. This attack is assuming that there will be an administrator account with the user id admin, and is then firing a brute force attack trying to decode the password. Advice to change your password is not necessarily going to help – it might be that your password of choice is one of the 1000 common ones being used as mentioned above. If you go for a long password with a mixture of letters, number and characters you’re going to be much safer. But if you get rid of the account called admin, you’re going to be immune to this particular attack at least.

First thing to do, check if you’ve got an admin account. Go into your dashboard, select users> all users. You should see something a bit like this. (As ever, click to see it larger.)

As you can see, I do indeed have an admin account. It will have a strong password – we have a rule that passwords must be at least 8 characters with a mix of numbers, letters and characters. But I’ve decided we’re going to get rid of it anyway.

Step one – create a new administrator level account. If you’ve only got one email address to play with, you’re going to have to take it out of the existing admin account before you can create the new one. Make sure you give the new account a strong password that you can remember.

Step two – log in with the new account. Delete the existing admin account. You might be worrying about what will happen to posts associated with that account – don’t. You’ll get this dialog up with the choice of who to attribute them to. Pass them to your new user.

And there you go. You now have a wordpress installation without the admin account currently under attack across the internet.

Of course, that’s nowhere near the only thing you can do to protect your beloved blog/website, but it’s an excellent starting point. If you want to go into more detail, you might want to explore a security plugin like this one which will, among other things, allow you to rename the admin account without going through the process I’ve detailed here. And the other thing that’s important to do is keep your theme and plugins updated. Like I’m just about to.

If you’ve found this article helpful, please feel free to share it, and subscribe to my blog. Thanks for dropping by.

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Now, it’s fairly obvious that you put the place you want to link to in the top slot. But what’s the title all about? Well, that comes up if you mouseover a link. It’s used by some screenreaders, but absolutely shouldn’t be stuffed with SEO stuff, so don’t even go there.

Now you might notice that there’s some text in my paragraph that’s linked there. I did that by selecting the text *before* I clicked the link tool. And the text that is hyperlinked is called the anchor text – it’s information about what the link is going to be about. So, if you want to link to someone’s blog, for example, you might write about Not different but interesting, then select that text, click your link tool, insert the URL and away you go. You’ve got to admit it looks better in the flow of your post than having http://notdifferentbutinteresting.wordpress.com hyperlinked? And it tells the reader (and the search engines) what you think that link is about. Wins all round. Give it a try next time you want to put a link in. (Note blogger has a similar tool. The dialog is a bit better though:

So it’s got a place to type in the text, makes it plain what you’re putting in linkwise, and even mentions rel=nofollow. If you want to do that on wordpress, you’re going to need a plugin or the text bit of your editor. Let’s cover that, and why you might want to use it, in another post.)

The post Terminology untangled – anchor text and links, or how to make them work for you. appeared first on Technology Solved.

Don’t worry, this is still straightforward. There are plugins, such as Yoast, that will achieve this for you, or you may be able to do it with your theme, particularly if you’re using a premium theme like Genesis from Studio press, but it’s very simple to do it yourself. Basically, there are two steps.

Step 1 – each author needs to list your blog in the contributing section of their google profile.

So my profile looks like this:
(as ever, click to embiggen).

Step 2.
In your wordpress admin, find users on the left hand side. Select, then select yourself. In the biographical info section, you’re going to put your g+ profile link with the rel=”author” tag. So mine looks like this:

And I’ve got code looking like this:

in there.

(If you cut and paste this handy code, do remember to swap out my name and profile number for yours!)

If you’ve only the one author, you’re done. Otherwise, you repeat for each individual author.

You can test that you’ve got it all working fine by using the rich snippet testing tool.

If you have any problems getting this working, do let me know via the comments box, or ping me on twitter or even via g+

The post More on G+ – authorship on self hosted wordpress including multi author sites. appeared first on Technology Solved.

There’s a new social network in town, and it’s not going to go away in a hurry. If you’re getting ready to hangout on g+ (see what I did there?) one of the things you should be thinking about is claiming authorship. Don’t know what that is?

Quite simple. If you try checking out the search listings these days, you should see some articles come up with a fetching headshot of the author next to them.  Those authors have claimed authorship of that article via google. You can claim authorship across multiple sites, but for today I’m going to concentrate on wordpress.com blogs.

After some experimentation, it seems to me there are two major ways to claim authorship on your site. One is by displaying a badge on your site, which has its own difficulties, given that you can’t use javascript on wordpress.com and the nice tool Google has supplied only seems to build javascript.

Before we go any further, you do have a G+ profile don’t you? You’re going to need one. You can pop off and create one now if you like, I’ll wait.

Right, here’s how to build a nice badge that links to your G+ article. The google tool to do it is here. Even though it says it’s a static tool, it looks to me that it’s building javascript, so that’s not going to do wordpress.com authors any good at all. Fear not, I have a solution. This is the code I’m using on my wordpress.com site, Let’s raise the roof.

You will want to swap out the long number in the link for your own profile number – you don’t really want to be displaying my badge all over the place! But this code should give you a nice badge for your site. I’ve put it in a footer widget as I don’t have a sidebar, but wherever you can that displays it on every page really.

Then you need to go back to your google+ profile and make sure you’ve added the site to the contributing section.

You’ll want to test that it’s all working – google have handily supplied a rich snippet testing tool.

I also have an author tagged link in my about page although I’m not convinced this is completely necessary if you’ve got the badge all over the place. Do let me know if you find differently.

(Again, swap me out for you.)

If all that has worked, it’s probably time for a cup of tea. And maybe a biscuit. Sit back and congratulate yourself.

Now, I’ve every reason to think that this would work fine if your site is self hosted, but what if you don’t want to display a g+ profile badge on every page, or you want to show a page badge, or you have multiple authors? Don’t worry. The article that covers all of those is coming up tomorrow. Stay tuned. (Or even subscribe to the RSS feed so you never miss a thing.)

The post Getting into the g+ groove – google authorship and wordpress.com appeared first on Technology Solved.

Fear not. If you’re a teen, my daughter is working her way through it and blogging it for you at Tech for Teens. If your teen years are behind you, I’ll be explaining it here too. Between us we should get you sorted.

A blog held at blogger might be at something like http://myblog.blogspot.co.uk Each bit of that has a meaning. The http refers to the protocol used to transfer data – it’s hypertext transfer protocol. It tells a browser what type of data it’s moving about. myblog is a subdomain, blogspot.co.uk is a domain name – in this case belonging to the .co.uk which should be UK companies.

If you go to buy a domain name you’ll use a registrar, someone like Low Cost Names. (Other registrars are available.) We (human beings) use domain names because they are easy for us to remember – computers actually work in numbers called IP addresses. They are in four blocks of up to three numbers, so something like 123.123.123.123 The bit of software that links the two together is a nameserver – it tells the enquiring computer which IP address to find a domain name at. Somewhere at your registrar you should be able to edit DNS (the domain name system information) – you’ll either put in nameserver values given to you by your hosting company (and the hosting company will have set up the right links), or use the nameservers at the registrar and fill in the IP values – but you’ll need to know what values to put in what records, which is beyond this article I’m afraid.

A hosting company maintains servers (computers) and you rent space on them for your website to sit on, as well as traffic to and from them measured in bandwidth. Your website is made up of files that you put there using ftp or file transfer protocol, maybe with a program like filezilla. Or you might find that the company has a system in the control panel that allows you to push a button and install something like wordpress without having to worry about transferring files, which will make your life easier.

That’s a really quick run down of some of the basic terminology that you need to know about. If it’s raised more questions than it’s answered, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to explain it further.

The post Terminology untangled: domain names, DNS and hosting. appeared first on Technology Solved.

However, managing email addresses in lots of different places can be a bit of a headache. If you’re wanting to manage things on the go, you’ll probably want to be doing things on your phone. My Android can manage a pop email account (which is what you often have with a domain – it simply means that the email collects on the server where your hosting is, and then is collected from there by an email program) but then there’s the question of whether I also collect it on my netbook and so on.

Life can start to look a little complicated right then, and that’s what we are all about avoiding.

Why not let gmail take the strain? You can manage up to five pop email accounts via your gmail account, without wandering off into the realms of google apps for business. This also means you get the fantastic spam filtering of gmail, and you can access it from whatever desktop/netbook/phone/tablet takes your fancy.

So, how to do it.

First of all, you will need a gmail account. I’m guessing most of you already have one. At least.

Then you set up your domain email, or get your friendly hosting company to do it for you.

Next, you connect the two. In gmail, go into settings (circle icon thing in top right corner) and then Accounts and Import.

Scroll down to Check mail from other accounts (using POP3) and select add a POP3 email account you own. Put the account into the pop up box, and continue.

You get to a settings screen that looks like this.

You will need to put in the username of the account – this is usually the email address. Then the password, and the details of the server. If you’ve any confusion here, you need to check with your hosting provider.

If you’re planning on using gmail as your email handler, DON’T tick leave a copy of retrieved messages on the server. If you tick it, you need to make other arrangements to clear down the server, or eventually your mailbox will fill up and you will stop receiving mail.

The google tutorial for this set up is here and if you want to explore the wider world of google apps for managing email, there’s a tutorial over here for that.

The second part of the setup is to organise to send mail from your google interface. This is the Send Mail As setting. Don’t set it as an alias – you don’t need that. (Or read through the help and decide for yourself ) And here:

tick this one as it means the person you’re emailing with won’t ever see your gmail address.

And there you go. You’ve got your domain email all set up and handled through Gmail with no one the wiser, they’re handling your spam and you’re good to go mobile.

The post Work smarter – mobilise your domain email with Gmail. appeared first on Technology Solved.

I’m not 100% happy with the sharing buttons. It appears that you can’t customise the tweet that goes out without hacking adjusting the code yourself, and while I’m perfectly capable of getting down and dirty with php, I really don’t want to have to. Also I’m not about to be going round recommending to my lovely readers that they do that – there are all sorts of problems inherent in wading into core files, not least that whatever you have working now, might not next time you upgrade. And that’s if you don’t do anything horrid to your install in the first place

So, jury is out on the sharing options. But what I did need was a box in the sidebar that allowed people to subscribe, and in the mahoosive page of options within the jetpack configuration, there was one labelled extra sidebar widgets that promised just that.

So I clicked on that option,

went into the page and added the widget.

I also discovered while wandering around the options, that I sent out an email yesterday with the greeting howdy at the top of it. I do apologise for that, Nickie. So, further hints and tips when you are using Jetpack to offer email subscription, go into Settings>Reading and customise the email that is sent out. Unless you’re happy saying Howdy to people. Maybe you are.

And as all of that still only took about 5 minutes, rather than the 10 I’m limiting these posts too, I went for broke and added a facebook page widget. As I’m currently the only person liking the page, it’s a bit embarrassing and I may take it off. Can’t quite decide whether I want the twitter feed there. Hm.

Thoughts?

I’d be really grateful if anyone who finds these posts useful would let me know with a quick tweet or a comment. And if you don’t find them useful but there’s something else I could be helping you with, let me know about that too.

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