KN Blogs Help

We recently installed and are able to present to you visitor statistics for your blog at Krimson News.  To view your statistics, log into your blog and click on Dashboard->SlimStat

There were a few hoops to cross technically to make this work, but nothing terrible.  If you just registered your blog I may need to activate the plugin for you.

If this is the case, or you have any other questions, of course, please let me know!  ( mrcrimson@krimson-news.com )

Do you have links that you’d like to place on your blog?  Add them to your blogroll!

The blogroll is where you’d place any links to sites you like or want to promote, such as your personal website, favorite artists, etc.

In order to add to your blogroll, click on the Blogroll section in the blue bar and you’ll see three options appear below it:

Manage Blogroll - This is where you can edit or delete items already listed in your blogroll.
Add Link - This is where you can add a new link. 

1. I’d recommend using the category tags to help section off your blogroll, IE: Make a “Record Label” category, “Musicians” category, etc.  If you don’t see the category you want to put the link in, you can add it by typing it in the field directly under the Categories header and clicking on the “Add” button.
2. Target - Choose “_blank” to have the link open in a new window, choose “_top” or “none” for it to load in the existing window.
3. Name - This is where you title your blogroll link.
4. Address - Make sure to include the http:// in the URL.
5. Description - In some themes the description will appear as either text next to the link, or as text when you hover your mouse over the link.  Not all themes can see this though.

There’s several others, all of them optional.  Feel free to play around.  Of course, if you have any questions, please let me know!  (mrcrimson@krimson-news.com)

Today I found a little plugin that was a cinch to install and is generally pretty easy to use.

What it does is give a hyperlink of an MP3 file a play/stop button that will appear next to it.  This will allow your reader to click on the play button and listen to a stream of the MP3.

Note that this may not work very well if the listener does not have broadband access, but, the link to download still exists as it normally does.

Here’s an example: Krimson News Podcast Episode 6 Part 4

Hovering over the link should make a small button appear next to it.  Click on it to play the file.

Any link to an MP3 will now have this ability, however, if you do not want this ability, please let me know so we can turn it off for your blog.

-Jeff Duke

While the default theme is sufficient and gets the job done, at least basically, we are also proud to offer several themes for use at the Blogs.Krimson-News.com website.

If you are new or unfamiliar to the Wordpress system you may have noticed that others are using different fancy looking themes.  You too can make use of these themes.  We currently have dozens of themes we are busily tweaking and fix in order to fit into the format of this site, and at this time we actually have 9 themes available.

You can change your theme by going to the Presentation option and looking down the list of available themes.  If you see one that you like better than your current one, you can click on it to install it on your blog.  Don’t worry, if you aren’t sure if you really like it, it’s easy to change back, simply by subsequently selecting the image for your current theme.

One of the latest, and my favorite so far, is Freshy 1.0.  Freshy is an excellent theme with many options for even more customization!

This applies to several, but not all themes, but on some themes, after selecting it as your theme, you might see an item under the main Options list for Theme Options.  To access those options, click on the link.  It would be difficult to list out instructions for all of the theme options, but if you have specific questions, I’m happy to help.  All you need to do is respond with a comment to this post or email me, ( jeff.duke@krimson-news.com ).

We’ve had a few people ask if it’s possible to resize the edit window.

The answer is yes!  There is actually two ways to do that.

1. Go to Options->Writing and change the number in the box next to the text “Size of the post box:“.  Once changed, click on the “Update Options” button.  This will change the number of lines that the window will show by default.  Changing it in this way will ensure that the edit box shows up that size each time you edit or write a post or page.
2. If you are using the Rich Text Editor (on by default), you can click and drag the bottom right hand corner of the edit box up or down to decrease or increase the amount of area shown in the edit pane.

One common issue can revolve around the need to disable the Rich Text Editor.  The reasons can be, but are not limited to:

• A browser incompatibility with the rich text editor
• A dislike of how the editor works

If you are experiencing any of these issues, you can disable the Rich Text Editor in Wordpress by going to Users->Your Profile and looking down the bottom left hand side of the page.

Under the heading of Personal Options, you can uncheck the option for “Use the visual rich editor when writing“, then click on the button labelled, “Update Profile”

When you go back to a screen with a page or post edit dialog box, it will now be a more basic version with fewer options, but greater compatibility.  Please let me know if you have further questions on this.