Customizing WordPress After Install

Here’s a tutorial on what I suggest you do immediately after installing WordPress. My tutorials are based on fansites so keep that in mind.

First of all, you should always be using the latest version of WordPress. So if you see a message like this after you install, be sure to click Please update now link.

Click Update Automatically. Since you just installed WordPress, you don’t have to worry about the message that says “Important: before upgrading, please backup your database and files.” You really only have to worry about that if you have started using WordPress.  Once it’s upgraded (it only takes a minute) you will see a message like this: Read the rest of this entry »

Installing WordPress From CPanel

Here’s a little tutorial to explain how to install WordPress if your host uses CPanel.

Log into your cpanel & go to the Software section:

Click on Fantastico & you should see something like this on the left hand side:

Click on WordPress Read the rest of this entry »

Add Your Favorite Tweets To WordPress

I was looking for a way to display my favorite tweets in my sidebar through wordpress here on my blog. I found this solution for it, however I had to tweak it a bit.

I didn’t see an RSS feed for my favorites, so I went to my main page and got the RSS feed:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/17767025.rss

(it’s in your sidebar under the trending topics and the list of who you are following)

and got the Favorites feed that way:
http://twitter.com/favorites /17767025.rss
(replacing /statuses/user_timeline/ with /favorites/ )
17767025 is the number associated with my Twitter account, so of course yours would be different.

How To Embed a Portion of a Youtube Video

Here is a little trick to have an embedded video start at a certain point in the video, instead of at the beginning. All you do is add start=60 (where 60 is the number of seconds into the video that you want it to start) to the embed code. Make sure you change it in both places in the embed code or it will not work correctly.

<object width=”320″ height=”265″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/NN3MGN899yE&hl=en_US&fs=1&start=60“></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/NN3MGN899yE&hl=en_US&fs=1&start=60” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”320″ height=”265″></embed></object>

How to find the absolute path on your website

Here is an easy way to find out your absolute path when you need it for installing various scripts on your website.

Copy and paste the following code into your text editor. I use EditPad Lite.

Make sure there is nothing else in the file, just the code above. No extra spaces, nothing. Save it as a .php file. In this example I will save it as info.php. Upload it to your website in the root folder, so you can load it when you enter this url: www.yourdomainname.com/info.php

This will list a ton of information about your server. Scroll down towards the bottom to the section called Environment. The first entry, Document Root, is what you are looking for. Alternatively, if your host provides you with Cpanel, it may be listed there on the main page, under where it says WWW Directory