Art, over at Incoherent Mumbling ran into this issue with WordPress and Windows Live Writer Beta, and found a fix for it. Windows Live Writer started giving him the error “Image upload not supported by weblog”, which we all know is a blatant lie!

This is something that I should keep handy, because I use Windows Live Writer Beta, and I’m sure now that people are having this problem, my computer is going to want to follow the crowd.

Art called me and asked me about it, and my suggestion, to delete the account in Live Writer and recreate it, didn’t fix it.

Good Work Art!

Posted in Fixes, Errors, WordPress 7 Comments »

Yesterday I showed you an Easy way to Schedule a future post in WordPress, and although I’m sure that you are busily creating posts for the next 4 years, I thought I would share this with you.

The problem I have with future posts is that I want to link to them in other future posts. This is especially helpful if you are writing a series of posts and want to point your readers to the first post in the series.

Well, I figured out that doing this is almost as easy as automatically posting in the future is.

Step 1: In another browser window or tab, go into your WordPress site Administration, and click on Manage.

Step 2: Click on the “view” option next to the post you want to link to.

Step 3: Copy the URL.

Didn’t I say that it was simple?

One warning though, if you are using the “Date and Name based” option for your URLs, and you change the date of the post, then the link will be broken.

Posted in Tips, Blogging, WordPress 1 Comment »

Here is a really easy way to have completed posts get published at a future date. Also, how to check what is scheduled to be posted, and when it will be posted.

When I first started blogging, I posted like crazy for about 2 weeks, and then noting for months. Now, I try to post something every day, or almost every day, this way I can just stay in the habit.

The problem that I run into is that sometimes I might fire off 3 or 4 posts in one day, and then after that, I may work on a more involved post for several days. When I was still using Blogger, what I would do is just save the extra posts as drafts, and then publish them on the day that I didn’t have anything else.
The problem with this is that I would forget to publish them. WordPress makes it incredibly easy to automate this task.

Scheduling a post to be published on a future data and time
Note: This works a lot better if your time zone settings in WordPress are set up correctly.

Step 1: Write, edit and otherwise prepare your post. Whatever you do that makes your writing magical, do it now. Just make sure you are happy with the post, because you may not see it again until it hits the front page.

Step 2: If you are using a 3rd party editor, save the post to your blog as a draft. If you are editing it in WordPress, click “save and continue editing”.

Step 3: In the right hand column, expand “time stamp” and change it to the date that you want to post to appear. Once you have changed the time andor date, the “Edit time stamp” box should check itself (before it wrecks itself).

Step 4: Click the Publish Button.
Yea, that’s it. Now the post will show up on the front page at the time you specified.

Checking to see what is scheduled to be posted, and when
Now that you have scheduled your blogs next 3 months of posts, I’m sure that you would like to know how to see when things are going to be posted. Here are two ways to do it.

The first method: Just go into the site’s administration, and click on “Manage”. Anything with a date in the future, which is not also listed in your “drafts” section at the top of this page, is going to be posted on the date listed. In the picture below, all of the posts in the red box will be posted at the date listed.

The second method: This one is a little harder to figure out when they are being posted, but you won’t get confused with posts that are drafts.

Once you get into site administration, click on “Dashboard” if it isn’t already highlighted. In the “Latest Activity” box, there will be a section titled “Scheduled Entries”. This will list the post title, and the amount of time (roughly) before it is posted. In the picture below, you can see that I have 3 posts scheduled to be posted.

Now, the next tip is how to link to WordPress blog posts that are scheduled to be published.

Posted in Tips, Blogging, WordPress 3 Comments »

If you are looking for a Free WordPress Theme, I would like to suggest that you visit the the Official WordPress theme directory. The options for filtering are superb, and it will save you a good deal of time. Also, each theme has a test site, so you can see the theme in action, rather than look at a resized screen grab. There are a number of other sites that have themes, but the filtering just isn’t there, and most of them upload to the official directory anyway.

In trying to work through my To-Do list, I spent the better part of yesterday looking at themes, but like the U2 song, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. I don’t want anything too artistic, or anything too plain, my tastes run somewhere in the middle.

What I would like is:

- 3 Columns - One on the left, one on the right. Those are for widgets, and other knick knacks, so they should be relatively small.

- Short Image in the header, with text on top - I would like to have the blog title and description on the header image. I don’t want the header image to eat up half of the screen. The image on this current theme just eats up way too much real estate.

- Fluid size - I don’t want to penalize people because of their screen size. That means either forcing people with smaller monitors to scroll left and right, or forcing people with larger displays to scroll up and down.

- No built in ads - I know people are trying to make a buck, but I really want to be able to choose how I thank and acknowledge them.

- A color scheme that is easy on the eyes - I am particularly sensitive to this. Bright colors hurt my eyes, especially at the end of the day, but black web pages makes me think the web master thinks they are ultra cool, or part of some underground.

- Other formatting - I just didn’t find the formatting that I liked all together in one place either. I know that is probably easy to modify, but the major things above were missing too.

So, with that out of the way, I think I am going to have to do it myself. I’ll be sticking with this theme for a little while, and start working on another when I get back from vacation. Yea, I didn’t mention vacation yet, but that will all come in time.

Thanks to all the very talented people out there who have made themes available. Really, there are some terrific ones.

Posted in WordPress, Themes, BlogNewsandUpdates 3 Comments »