One of the most useful features of blogging on the Wordpress self-hosted platform is the ability to write a post, and schedule it to appear in the future, precisely on a date and time of your choosing. I frequently use this feature to schedule advance posts on two blogs I manage - BoomerCafe.com and BahaiWords.com. In the case of BahaiWords.com, I normally have daily posts scheduled to appear each day at a precise time, weeks in advance.
Here’s how it works, and as with many things in Wordpress, it’s easy - Click Write –> Post to open a new window for a post. You will see the line for a Title and the Post text box beneath.
Over on the right side, you will see Publish Status. Below that, you will see “Publish immediately Edit.” Click on Edit to reveal month, date, year, hour and minute to schedule a post. All you do is choose when you want a post to appear in the future, and click Save. It’s always a good idea to Preview this Post to make sure everything appears correctly, and then click Publish. That’s it. Your new post is stored as Scheduled status, and will appear precisely when you specified.
The next major Wordpress software update, version 2.7, is expected about November 10.
Lots of advance news updates and discussion are already online as the Wordpress community worldwide vets builds of the software.
The Revolution series of themes for Wordpress are taking the Wordpress online platform to new heights of visual appeal and action, together with the power to create content, video and image-rich sites. All of a sudden, we see how the news, music, magazine and pro media themes, among others, from Revolution are far more sophisticated than most other blog themes, and certainly a quantum leap beyond HTML site styles, which seem more than a little old-fashioned by comparison.
My friends at Outpost Worldwide, the hot cinema HD indie film and video production studio, have used Revolution’s Media Pro theme for their company’s new site. Developed by Outpost Worldwide digital graphic artist Mara Thorpe, the site showcases the company’s vast portfolio, from indie films, network games shows and music videos to television commercial production and documentaries. It’s all there for any visitor to explore. Outpost Worldwide is using this online presentation to market its national brand and differentiate its creative style and clever approaches in a highly competitive industry.
The biggest downside to using Revolution themes is perhaps its biggest advantage - development of a Revolution theme is customized, requiring moderate to expert skills in working with CSS and flash streaming video. The results, however, are exciting.
As I have written on this blog, the Akismet anti-spam that is included with Wordpress software is quite good. But, apparently not good enough. There are invasive automated schemes now that find a way past Akismet to show up on a blog with disgusting comments.
Bad Behavior is a plugin by Michael Hampton for Wordpress that, according to the documentation, “complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.
“Bad Behavior also transcends other link spam solutions by working in a completely different, unique way. Instead of merely looking at the content of potential spam, Bad Behavior analyzes the delivery method as well as the software the spammer is using. In this way, Bad Behavior can stop spam attacks even when nobody has ever seen the particular spam before.
“Bad Behavior is designed to work alongside existing spam prevention services to increase their effectiveness and efficiency.”
I recommend it.
The latest version - 2.6.2 - of Wordpress has been released at Wordpress.org. This is a very easy update for Wordpress bloggers - simply download from Wordpress.org to your desktop, and upload using an FTP program to your blog’s main folder, overwriting current Wordpress files. Don’t worry … themes, plugins and all the essential stuff of your blog is not effected.
One of the really important features about Wordpress is Akismet anti-spam. It keeps your Wordpress blog free of spam, and is one of the best spam filters I’ve seen.
But you must get a Wordpress.com API key. Just sign up for a Wordpress blog. It will be a blank or dummy blog in the name of your real self-hosted Wordpress blog. Make sure to use a valid email, and Wordpress will email you an API key. Enter that in the Akismet configuration on your blog under Plugins, Akismet Configuration.
That’s it! Akismet works automatically behind-the-scenes to catch spam. How it works is magic.
The new WP-Vybe theme from Michael Pollock of Solostream.com is, in my opinion, the most exciting, versatile and easy to customize Wordpress theme ever. I know that’s quite a statement, given the hundreds of Wordpress themes that are available.
But, all you need to do is test drive it to see WP-Vybe’s extensive spectrum of innovative features.
After trying many Wordpress themes for several years, I have found that Michael’s Solostream themes are the best … and he supports what he sells, which is a huge plus in my book.
Wordpress has taken the blog world by storm because it’s so powerful and reliable. Even The New York Times and PEOPLE magazine are among the many news organizations using the same Wordpress platform for news blogs. They, of course, spend thousands of dollars on creating customized themes. If you are like me, and you don’t have thousands to spend on a theme, I encourage you to take a serious look at the new WP-Vybe theme for Wordpress.
By the way, you can see WP-Vybe already in action at BoomerCafé, the popular online magazine for baby boomers. We have used WP-Vybe’s light blue theme there.
Many thanks to Brian who read my post on some of the best Wordpress plugins and brings my attention to Search-Unleashed from Urban Giraffe. Search-Unleashed enhances the normal Search box on your blog to deliver deep, fast results and highlighted keywords. Best I have seen.
You can check it out - it’s already in use on BoomerCafe.com and BahaiViews.net, two sites with an extensive number of postings.
Urban Giraffe asks a modest $8 donation which is more than fair for this terrific plugin.
