Archive for the ‘Widgets’ Category

There are many WordPress plugins that enable you to harness the power of Twitter; the following are a few that you may find useful: 

TweetMeme Button
Used here on blogmistress.com – the retweet button up in the right hand corner of posts! It’s really simple to use and let’s anyone retweet your post. So if you’re reading this – click it to try it out

TweetMeme Twitter Follow Button
Places a follow me button on your site. Nice and simple – install this plugin, go to widgets and place in your sidebar then add your twitter username.

WP to Twitter
We mentioned this in a previous post – What, Why, How – WordPress Plugins and having had a look at the settings and trying it out it’s very handy for automatically tweeting your published posts.

This plugin can send a default message when new and edited posts/pages are published but also you have the option of writing a custom tweet for a post.

It’s all pretty simple to setup, there are advanced options but to test this out I was happy with the default settings and just popped in my twitter account username and password.

And if you want to show your Twitter stream in your sidebar, there are a number of plugins available, but we like the look of Twitter Widget Pro – partly because it has been tested on the latest version of WordPress (at time of writing – some weeks into the latest release) and because it handles twitter feeds well, including the @username, #hashtag, and link parsing, amongst other things.

Of course, as with all plugins, the thing to do is search for your ideal plugin yourself, taking into account when it was last updated, how many people have downloaded it, and even popping to the WordPress.org site to view comments, etc.

Have fun!

This is a more specific post than the earlier tutorial on the “mighty text box” which outlined what we could include in the Text box widget.

Adding just a link: Go to Appearance, Widgets and drag a fresh text box into your sidebar. Within that put your link (I usually copy and paste, to be sure it’s right). Now you need to “tell” WordPress that it is a link by placing some html code around the link; the code you need is <a href=”http://yourlinkaddress.com/”>Text for your link</a>

The a tells WordPress and the Internet that a link follows, and the href says where the link is, and you do need to be sure to “close” your link with the </a>

So, for a link to the Blogmistress free healthcheck the code would be:

<a href=”http://www.blogmistress.com/wordpress-healthcheck/”>Book your free WordPress healthcheck here</a>

Of course you may want to link to an image that is already online, such as something within wikipedia – do be sure that you are allowed to use any images from elsewhere, and you simply use that image’s url instead of the one you uploaded.

And it is possible to add a link and/or image to your WordPress sidebar without using a widget, but that means rolling up our sleeves and coding into the theme’s files – we’ll cover that later.

Following on from the basic, initial foray into what WordPress widgets do (nutshell: they add things to your sidebar), now let’s take a look at what we can do with the Text Box widget.

This can be very useful! You can add several text boxes and include images, links, any kind of html (and more) in each.

Let’s start with a simple text box that can include your contact information, such as we have on the Blogmistress.

Go to Appearance, Widgets and drag across a Text Box to your sidebar.

This opens a box in which you can add anything – test it out and have a play – just add some text, then save, and have a look at the result on your blog/website to see what happens.

Click on the image to see it full size

For the contact information in the Blogmistress sidebar, we added the following:

Email: <a href=”mailto: hello@blogmistress.com“>hello@blogmistress.com</a>Call: 0845 644 0709Skype: barbarasaul<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/blogmistress”>The Blogmistress on Twitter</a><a href=”http://www.facebook.com/blogmistress”>Join the Facebook fan page</a>

This is the actual “code” so that you can copy, paste and edit to suit you, if that’s useful.

The thing to remember is that whatever you do, you can immediately delete or move out of your sidebar – so don’t be afraid to test things out.

Have fun!