Moving WordPress may seem like a huge, daunting task to someone who looks at a phpMyAdmin interface and thinks "If I touch this, the world will explode." There are many, many ways to move your WordPress installation, and you'll be quite surprised to learn exactly how easy it can be. For your pleasure, I have a guinea pig for this one :) You can thank Jacqueline for allowing me to do this for her. (I'll pass the link later - because I'm literally moving WP for her - into a whole new directory, up one level from where it is now! So once I'm done, the link will be changed :) ) So I have favorite methods for moving a WordPress installation. There's the official method, and there are other standby "absolutely safe" methods (such as using the "Import/Export feature that's built in to the newer versions of WP), but me, I'm impatient, and I like things to be down and dirty, and fast. So I'm going to show you my favorite way of doing this. Warning: Be absolutely sure you have a backup before you try this. I'm not kidding. If you screw up, and you don't have a backup, you can kiss your blog goodbye. Although I can say that I have yet to seriously mess a site up by this particular method (you're not really messing with too much stuff, but still...) I'm not taking any responsibility whatsoever for you choosing to follow this method. So play it smart - get a backup before you even try any of this. So, here we go...

Yes, I said "evil". Because it is. I belong to a couple of awesome networking lists. On one of these lists, recently, someone was asking about a possible solution to what is truly a common problem for us designers/programmers who provide CMS solutions for our clients. The problem? Microsoft Word. All of you reading this...how many of you have create an awesome site design with pristine code and gorgeous formatting, and your client is all "hooray!"...and promptly starts writing their content up in Microsoft Word, and the C&P's the stuff into the CMS you've just made for them? (Come on, I know you're out there. Raise your hands.) I have two clients, currently that do this. No matter what plugins I've installed, and no matter how many different ways I instruct them on how to do it correctly (even with using their beloved Word!) they don't do it. They just keep C&P-ing from Word, and keep calling me when the site breaks because of it. Now, to why I am evil.

Hello all! yes, yes, I know I'm late on my promised date. I've actually been compiling a list of ideas on topics to write a bout - and I've finally decided to choose one and go with it. (Yeah, I know I said it would be "How to Turn Your Existing Site Into a WordPress Theme" - but that sucker is actually taking a lot more time than I'd originally thought. But I swear, I'm working on it. It's in my "drafts" right now!) So. I decided a smaller step would be to show you how to get the most out of your widgets. You can choose whatever you want - what I'll be touching on is how to make more than one "sidebar" and apply widgets to them. "Sidebar" is in quotes because - you won't believe this - you don't HAVE to put them in your sidebar. You can put those suckers anywhere you damn well please. How cool would it be to have your site's content separated by a widget that would hold - whatever you'd like it to hold? Or Widgetizing your footer? or you header? Or how about having a different set of widgetized sidebars based on what page you're on? You can do that? You bettah believe it, suckah!

Ahhh...sIFR - also know as "Scalable Inman Flash Replacement". I'm not going to go through and tell you the history and all that - there's plenty of information on it out there for you to peruse at your leisure. Me, I'm a "get to the point" kinda gal - as you all know. For a long time, people have wanted to move away from he "standard" fonts found in a particular browser, and use a nice font for headings, titles, and such on their sites. Usually, the way around this was to create said text as an image file, and plug it in on the site. But oh, how lovely would it be if this could be done dynamically, rather than creating an image for every single piece of text you wanted to replace? I've done it before, using dynamic text replacement, which creates PNG images on-the-fly. This is a popular method for people who want to have this ability, but don't have access to Flash. But I've noticed if you use it for a lot of different things (like a recent client who wanted EVERY link replaced, as well as headings and certain pieces of text) you're gonna back things up like eating a pound of cheese on constipation day. (yes, as if we all have a "constipation day". Mine's on Friday. LOL) Ahh, how I wanted to use sIFR. And now that I have my shiny new Mac with CS3, I can finally do it. So last week, I started to try it out for the first time. And I failed. Miserably.

Okay all - I know it's been a while since I've been around - and I apologize for that.  I see the spammers are bastards and are posting like crazy here, greeeeaaaat.  Thanks a lot, assholes.  I have to move hosts in the midst of probably my busiest season ever, I take a teensy shortcut and there you go.  You all suck.  (The spammers, I mean.) ANYWAY... So, I had the joy of trying to install WordPress on a Windows IIS Server.  Now, I think it's no secret that I hate Windows servers.  It's a personal preference, really.  Mainly because any time I've had to deal with a Windows hosting client, the reason the host chose Windows is because they have no idea what they're doing, and the "tech support" would disappear every time I had a question about some stupid configuration setting, and then come back three weeks later asking "Did you get it figured out yet?" Granted, there are some people out there who know what they're doing.  But in my experience, IIS sucks unless you know what you're doing - and 99% of the time, the people behind the server don't have a clue. That rant aside - I had a client who needed WordPress installed on IIS.  Two-and-a-half weeks later, I got it installed.  For those of you having this issue, I'm going to tell you what made the difference for me, so you don't have to go through what I did.

So, someone asked how to create those neat realistic-looking photographs you see around on websites. This is actually something I can do - it's one of my favorite effects on sites. So I thought it might be useful to add a little "how-to" tutorial here on the site. I use Paint Shop Pro to create my images. But you Photoshop users can also use this tutorial, as Paint Shop Pro has a lot of the same features. They might be called something different, but you'll recognize and be able to implement the effect, no problem. So here we go...

Well, I haven't caught his name yet, but I found a fellow "give something back" person who has provided me with some great information. Because if his assistance, I wanted to offer up a small amount to him via a link. So if you're looking for more WordPress and ZenCart stuff, and can't find it here (which is very possible, as I'm pretty small right now!), then feel free to look at the goodies "andrabr" has to serve up. There's a lot of goodness over there, and I'm getting ready to dive in. I found him via this conversation on integrating WordPress with ZenCart. Very nice. I also wanted to share a nice little plugin I wrote tonight. It's probably my first "official" one, and I'm sure it needs to be cleaned up. I'll probably play with it more. Anyway, someone on one of the lists I'm on is trying to get a dynamic stylesheet to work with WordPress. She has a client who needs a different background image to show up depending on what page you're on. Normally, you'd simply accomplish something like this just by using typical WP stuff: <php if(is_page('1')) { ?> do stuff for page ID #1 <?php } ?> However, the client needs to maintain themselves, and if they ever add or delete a page in the future, they would have no idea how to edit the code to get the new background to show up. (Or, if they did, they'd probably screw it up - or many other things could happen.) So she needed it to be as dynamic as possible. In a perfect world, the client would create a page, add in content, and upload an image (with the same name as the page), and it would be done. Happily enough, I figured it out!

One of the most frustrating thing with WordPress is when you are happily moving along, and you come to a comment, or an old post, or an unused category - something like that - and you want to delete it. You click the "Delete: button associated with that link, and nothing happens. You stare at the screen for a bit, maybe hit the button a couple more times to see if maybe it was a weird glitch or something, then you notice it. A little message at the bottom of the screen. "You don't have permission to do that."

Ever wonder how to see when a website was last modified? In the past, it was a BIG thing to put a little script in your page so people could know when it was last updated. But as people and businesses went on and let their content get stale, they stopped putting in that info (who wants to read content that was last checked on in 1999?) I've often found the need to see when a page was last modified, for one reason or another. I know how to do it, but the need to do so is usually few and far between, and by the time I need it again, I always forget. It's a nice ...

You sent me an email this morning, and I replied, but it immediately bounced back to me. I have no other way of responding to you - and since you sent me your email from my contact form, I'm assuming you visit every now and then. I'm also going to take this opportunity to use you as an example (hope you don't mind!) Molnya emailed me, having an issue with my Orange Crush theme. One page on her site looks odd - the footer is kind of "hanging loose" and not reaching the bottom of the browsers window like all the other pages are. To me, it looked like an unclosed div tag. Here is where I will give you ...