Facebook Like Box WordPress Plugin

The Facebook Like Box WordPress Plugin by WPdevart and smplug-in helps you promote pages and post, same as you normally do on the Facebook site itself.

There are many WordPress Plugins for adding Facebook like boxes to a WordPress site. This one is different as it adds more than just a like box. A Facebook Like Box allows visitors to “like” your post or Page content and connect it by sharing on their Facebook site. This Plugin adds a WordPress Widget, a shortcode for embedding in the site’s content, and the ability to actually create popups for Likes and Facebook sharing.

The Plugin is also highly customizable, allowing height and width to be set, languages, and colors. You can also set it as a Sticky box, and show or hide Friend Faces, and other visual elements.

How to: Configure Milestone Widgets

It can be exciting to display the days until a big event. An online holiday retailer may want to highlight the shopping days before Christmas. To inspire urgency, a candidate website may post a countdown to election day. Both these tasked can be automated with the Milestone Widget found on WordPress.com sites or added with a WordPress Plugin.

Listed below is a process for adding a Milestone Widget to a website. In this example, the traditional user interface is used. The fields are similar in the new UI.

Adding the Milestone Widget to WordPress.com Sites

Go to Appearance Widgets and scroll down to Milestone. Expand the Milestone Widget to present the sidebar and footer options.

1. Expand the Milestone Widget
2. Select the sidebar or footer location option
3. When complete, execute the Add Widget button

Customize the Milestone Widget with text and termination date.

1. Title is a short title for the milestone.
2. Event is the text displayed in the message box along with the target date.
3. Time and Date sets the expiration date and time.
4. Message is the text presented in the display box after the target date expires.

1. Visibility Button will drop down the configuration options for Showing or Hiding the Widget.
2. Save the configurations and Close

Milestone Widget Configurations

There are a variety of ways to configure the Milestone Widget. Here are some examples:

• Title: Holiday Milestone
• Event: Days until Christmas
• Date and Time: 12-Dec, 25,2015,0,00
• Message: Merry Christmas

With only a handful of steps, a Milestone Widget can be added to a website and bring awareness to an important date.

Additional Information on Milestone Widgets

• Adding Content to WordPress Sidebars and Footers
• WordPress.com Support: Milestone Widget
• How to Add a Milestone Countdown Widget in WordPress (Video)

WordPress Words: Footer

The bottom section of a webpage is also known as a footer. This area typically contains the name of the company or organization that publishes the website, along with relevant copyright information. Some websites may also include basic navigation links, such as “About Us,” “Contact,” and “Help.” Corporate website footers often include additional links to “Terms of Use,” “Privacy Guidelines,” and “Advertising” pages as well.
The Tech Terms Dictionary

Example: Scroll down to the footer for additional information about this site.

WordPress Plugin: WP LOL Rotation

WP LOL Rotation WordPress Plugin by WordPress development legend Ozh Richards is great for anyone looking to create a League of Legends oriented site.  It allows you to display the current free champions available for a summoner (League of Legends players). This Plugin creates a widget that updates automatically with the weeks free champions.

This is a great Plugin for admins who are hoping to inform a fellow League of Legends player of who they can play free this week. Sites like mobafire use widget similar to this one to help reader stay informed on who is free or entice a reader to try a champion previous unavailable to them.

After activating it, you can go to Dashboard>Appearance>Widgets and dragging it into the Main Side Bar to have it display on your site.

This is what WP LOL Rotation looks like in the Widgets Menu.

WordPress Words: Widgets

Widget is a fancy word for tools or content that you can add, arrange, and remove from the sidebar(s) of your blog. Widgets make it easy to customize the content of your sidebar(s).
WordPress.com Support Page.

Example:

Sample of WordPress Widgets

About Widgets

You can benefit greatly by using widgets in your WordPress blog. To define them further, they are small boxes that contain a specific type of information or application for your users. You can install widgets into any area of your WordPress blog that has widget areas available. Some themes have more widget areas than others. You can add widgets to sidebars, footers, posts, and more. You can also make customized extra widget areas in your blog.

To learn how to install widgets into your WordPress sidebar, start with this video tutorial…

References

• Support-Widgets – WordPress.com
• Glossary – WordPress.org
• How To Add Dynamic Widget Ready Sidebars In WordPress – wpbeginner.com
• Watch This Video: Removing WP Widgets – youtube.com

Page Builder Plugin

Created by Greg Priday of Site Origin, Page Builder WordPress Plugin enables you to simply drag and drop Widgets and formatting options into your pages and posts using a simple and intuitive interface. This Plugin has a wide use of applications, and can be utilized by any self-hosted WordPress user.

Domain Name Services: Postman of the Internet

Domain Name Services (DNS) is a service which exist to help us humanize the addresses of networked resources. Humans remember words as a whole easier than numbers representing octal based Internet Protocol addresses of those same networked resources be them across the Wide World Web or just an arms length away on our local network.

That was a mouth full. Essentially through DNS you can type in a URL into your favorite web browser and through the process of name resolution your system contacts a server acting in your behalf to find the correct IP address that matches the human oriented address you type in.

Sounds simple but a lot of chatter between various servers near and far may happen just to pull up that favorite site that you wish to view. First your own system will see if it has the particular IP/URL pairing locally in it’s own tables. On your computer this information will be kept in a host.txt file and depending on the operating system the location varies.

WordPress 3.9 Released

The latest version of WordPress, WordPress 3.9, has been released. It is named in honor of jazz organist Jimmy Smith, continuing the tradition of naming major WordPress releases after jazz musicians.

WordPress 3.8 was released in December 2013, and this push to WordPress 3.9 is part of the new faster release schedule.

As of July 2013, Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress now powers 18.9% of the web with more than 46 million downloads in ten years. WordPress is also being used by mobile users more than ever before according to a WordPress Community survey that found 31% were using it on their iOS devices, 30% on Android, and 18% on Android tablets. A survey by WP Engine on WordPress adoption and name recognition found 30% of those surveys on the Internet have heard of WordPress.

With so many people embracing WordPress and incorporating it into their lives and businesses as a content management and web publishing system, the improvements the development teams worked on for this new version reflect the growing reliance on WordPress across multiple user types and needs.

Interview with Kate Ringland: Grad Student

Copyright Kate Ringland

WordPress can be utilized by more than just businesses and passionate bloggers. As WordPress community member Kate Ringland demonstrates, the content manager can be used as a virtual resume and a means to network with current and potential business associates. Kate says:

Overall, WordPress makes building and maintaining my website easy…WordPress is also the choice of most academics I’ve been involved with, so it’s easier for everyone if we’re all using the same system.

Kate is a Ph.D. student in Informatics at University of California, Irvine. She studies human computer interaction, Assistive Technology, and technology for people with autism.

Bucket List Plugin

Do you have goals? Do you want to achieve them? Well, of course you do! Did you know, though, that the simple act of writing them down puts you at a statistically higher chance of achieving them? Well, it does. Further, when your goals are out there for the world to see, you just never know who might see them and be able to help you on the path to achieving them, too. So, how do you organize and chronicle them from start to finish? With the Bucket List Plugin, that’s how!

Creating Clickable Images

There are many locations where clickable images are a valuable tool, such as front page images, icons, photo galleries, image information, etc. There are multiple ways of going about this process. I will be discussing how to add clickable images to your content posts and pages and also how to add them to your widgets.

Before I explain further, be sure that your image file is either your original image or is royalty and copyright free. Some copyrighted images can be used with proper citations depending on the owner’s specifications. There is also plenty of public domain photography available for your use. Also make sure that your image file has a distinct name like Purple Flowers, instead of a default title like IMG_2345, before uploading it into the media library.

Some Beginner Don’ts for WordPress

I found the article, “Beginner WordPress Bloggers: 10 Things You Shouldn’t Do” by Tom Ewer to be very helpful for a new WordPress student and I’d like to highlight a few of the suggestions in my own collection of do and don’t tips for those new to WordPress, especially students in the Clark College WordPress classes. This comes from a student who can say “been there, done that, didn’t get a t-shirt.” 😀

Don’t Moderate Comments

By setting your comments to be moderated on your site, comments are held back until you approve them.

If you check frequently or use an email or mobile app to get notifications of comments waiting to be approved, this is okay, but it takes extra time and attention.

Moderating comments doesn’t prevent comment spam, and can prevent a lot of your viewers from coming back because the experience will be lacking compared to a live conversation. Your delay in approving moderated comments can frustrate the commenters.

By default, WordPress moderates new commenters by holding their first-time comments in moderation until you approve them. Once you have approved them, you are basically telling WordPress that they are okay people and their comments will not be moderated in the future.

To manage comment moderation in WordPress:

Jennette Quigley Gives Us Her Thoughts On WordPress

I talked with Jennette Quigley, Clark College’s WordPress CTEC 160 assistant instructor and WordPress web designer about her involvement in the WordPress community.

Michelle: How long have you been using WordPress?

Jennette: Since 2010, but I took my first HTML class in 1999 and redesigned my first website in 2001 at a radio station where I used to work.

How to Protect Your Content by Inserting Copyright Notices in WordPress

We all want to keep our original ideas – just that – original. While there is little we can do to prevent copyright infringement, here are some ideas for reminding visitors of your copyright policy.

To remind visitors that you have a clear copyright policy, you may place your copyright notice where they will see it. The three I will be discussing here are:

• Copyright notice in your footer
• Copyright notice or policy in the sidebar
• A WordPress Plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites.

The format of a copyright notice is one that is wrapped in a link to the specific copyright license, the terms and conditions under which someone may link to or use your content, and your definition of Copyright Fair Use. Not all copyright policies meet the needs of every site. The copyright example in this informational tutorial is very general. You need to define your policies specifically to your needs.

Categories Versus Tags

Understanding the differences between categories and tags in WordPress is extremely important. The topic of categories vs tags often causes confusion for individuals that are new to WordPress. To get started, they are both used as a way to group content together. They also provide an easier way for visitors to navigate your site and find related posts. Now, let’s look at each one in more detail.

What is a Category?

My professor, Lorelle VanFossen, says it best, “categories are your site’s table of contents.” When creating categories, you should be thinking about how you can provide easy navigation for your visitors. Categories provide a broad grouping of post topics. A list of categories should give visitors a clear idea of what your blog is about. They should also provide readers with an easy way to find posts that are about related topics.

What is a Tag?

Once again, I’m going to have to quote Lorelle VanFossen in saying that “tags are your site’s index words.” Essentially, tags are your site’s micro-categorization. They are more specific than categories and they should give readers a clear idea of what a specific post is about. A single post will often have multiple tags, which provides insight on what specific topics are discussed in that post. Tags also make navigation easier. For example, if a visitor only wants to read about HTML, they could click on the “HTML” tag and view all posts that have been assigned an “HTML” tag. This is easier than searching through a category such as “Web Design” in order to find posts that deal with HTML.