0

Posted on February 28, 2010 at 7:13pm

Filed under Domains

Typically domains are thought of as being non-refundable, right? Well as it turns out, GoDaddy does have a refund policy for domain registrations and renewals. Here’s the catch: you need to contact them within five days of the domain’s registration or renewal. I found this out tonight, after GoDaddy automatically renewed two domains that 1) I didn’t think I had set up for auto-renewal and 2) I didn’t want to be renewed, since I never even used them last year.

If you want to get your money back on a domain name registration or refund, send an email to support@godaddy.com, requesting a refund. They’ll instruct you to login to your GoDaddy account, navigate to My Renewals & Upgrades > Payments and Renewing Items, and place a check mark beside the domain(s) you want to receive your refund on. In order to get your money back, you’ll need to cancel them. This accomplishes that. Then email GoDaddy back to let them know that the cancellation was done on your end, and they’ll work their magic on their end to get your refund back to you. Simple, right?

0

Posted on February 27, 2010 at 6:05pm

Filed under General

Tags:

Over a year ago I picked up a copy of Mighty Girl’s No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog. After glancing through it briefly, I put it aside, and for the longest time, forgot all about it. Then, last May, I decided to put the book to good use, and began working through the prompts, in chronological order, on jenn.nu. I even created a 100 blog ideas category for it!

I stuck with it pretty well, but geez, the last time I did an entry was in the middle of August. To say I’m slacking is an understatement, I suppose. Anyway, in the interest of blogging more often (something I don’t do now because I often can’t think of a topic to write about!), I’m going to pull the back out and display it prominently on my desk, in the hopes that it’ll kick-start the project for me once again.

2

Posted on February 27, 2010 at 2:17pm

Filed under Opinion

Tags:

One of my biggest pet peeves with other blogs is when they have a bazillion categories for just one blog entry, or — just as bad — a bunch of tags for that entry, simply because they might somehow relate to that entry. I don’t know if they’re that obsessive about organization (which is ironic, because in my eyes having THAT MANY categories and/or tags is anything but organized!), or if they do it for the potential hits/SEO benefits. But seriously, if you’re writing about insurance online, is it really necessary to tag the entry with insurance, online insurance, money, finances, shopping, and banking? Some of those tags aren’t even relevant, let alone neccessary!

In any case, a category is meant to house blogs entries that generally fall under a topic. This blog entry, for example, definitely falls under the category Opinion, since it’s an opinionated rant of mine, though it’s an opinion on a very specific thing (blogs).

A tag is meant to further describe and categorize a blog entry. This entry falls under the category opinion, but I could tag it with “blogs”, since it’s a rant about blogs.

I tend to do the same thing on jenn.nu. All product reviews, for example, fall under the category of Product Reviews, but I might use tags to further describe those reviews. The tag sex toys, for example, is added to any product reviews of mine that are about — you guessed it — sex toys.

What are your thoughts on categories and tags? How do you use them on your blog(s)?

1

Posted on February 27, 2010 at 2:08pm

Filed under General

Tags:

I’ve been designing and coding several websites non-stop since Wednesday morning. Needless to say, at this point I am SERIOUSLY coded out. The only thing I’ve done today that’s even remotely close to web design is blogging about a quick fix for the WP-Polls plugin. Other than that, pfft… I checked some email, wrote up a few entries here at Blogging Girl, did a quick article on Mopar performance parts, and that’s it.

Have you ever coded yourself out? I usually know I have when I’m running around in circles trying to fix an issue that turns out to exist only because my eyes apparently can’t tell the difference between a colon (:) and a semi-colon (;). True story, by the way. Man I was so glad I spotted that, because at that point I was about to cry in frustration!

1

Posted on February 27, 2010 at 1:09pm

Filed under General

Tags: plugins, wordpress

Now that I have run into this issue on two separate occasions, I’m going to blog a quick fix for a very common — and irritating — WP-Polls problem. Basically, if your WP-Polls plugin is installed and seemingly working properly, yet nothing happens when you click on the “Vote” button of a poll, make sure that the following piece of code is inserted into your theme somewhere (preferably footer.php):

php wp_footer();

That’s it, problem solved. Happy voting!

1

Posted on February 27, 2010 at 12:26pm

Filed under Design

Tags: wordpress

Custom fields have been a core part of WordPress for quite some time. They are designed to add extra information to your posts, or change the way that information is presented, depending on how you use them. Up until recently I never bothered to work with the custom fields, but then a client approached me with a request that I felt would best be solved by making use of them.

In a nutshell, here is how to use custom fields to display images in posts. The nice thing about this method is that the HTML source code is inserted into the post only if there is data in the custom fields. In other words, any posts that you do not bother to insert custom field data into will not display any of the source code. So you can add images only on those posts that you feel need them; you won’t have to worry about empty or incomplete HTML code being displayed in other posts.

First, create a custom field named “Image”. Its value should be the URL to the image you’d like to display in your post (for consistency and ease of remembering, I recommend uploading these images to wp-content/uploads/images.

Next, create a custom field named “Image Class”. Its value should be image-class, or whatever class element name you’ll be using in your stylesheet to create the visual effect on your images (left alignment, padding, borders, etc.).

Finally, consider creating a custom field named “Image Description”, and inserting into its value the alt description you would like to use for your image.

Now that you have your custom fields set up, open your theme’s index.php and single.php files (assuming that you’d like to have the images displayed on both posts listed on your index and on the individual post pages) in FTP, or in the Theme Editor in the WP admin area. Insert the following after if(have_posts()) : while(have_posts()) : the_post();:

// check for image
$thumb = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘Image’, $single = true);
// check for image class
$thumb_class = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘Image Class’, $single = true);
// check for image alt text
$thumb_alt = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘Image Description’, $single = true);

That code checks for the existence of the custom fields in your posts. Insert the following code before php the_content();, as this is the code that actually displays your image (please change imgsrc to image src, and add before/after php!):

php // if there’s a image
if($thumb !== ”) { ?>

”
class=””
alt=””
/>

php } // end if statement

// if there’s not a image
else { echo ”; } ?>

And that’s it! Happy posting.

1

Posted on February 21, 2010 at 5:58pm

Filed under General

Tags: wordpress

WordPress 2.9.2 was released a few days ago. This update includes a fix for a vulnerability that would allow other administrators and lower-level authors to view posts that were trashed. Other than that, there’s no crucial reason for updating, so don’t feel like you have to run around updating all of your blogs immediately!

0

Posted on February 20, 2010 at 5:27pm

Filed under General

Tags:

I don’t know what happened, but I went from having too many memory cards to not having enough of them. I have a Nikon D40x, an HP r967, a Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera (great for doing my video blogs about my no-phentermine-required weight loss), and a Garmin Nuvi 200w, and wouldn’t you know that all of them require SD cards? I have an 8GB SDHC card, a 4GB SDHC card, and one 1GB SD card. The 1GB is in the Garmin; I had to swipe it from the HP digital camera. The 4GB is in the Nikon, and the 8GB is in the Kodak. That leaves the HP out in the cold, and me out of memory cards should I need to transfer a large file. I have a few USB flash drives, but they’re rather small in size — 128MB and 1GB. Although I just remembered that I have a spiffy purple 8GB flash drive, but it only seems to work half the time. Grrr.

One of these days I need to find a sale on SD cards and then just buy three or four of them. I hate reaching for an SD card that I don’t have, and then having to come up with an alternative, or swipe one from one of my devices!

1

Posted on February 20, 2010 at 5:17pm

Filed under General

Tags:

I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz (haha, no pun intended) on SeededBuzz. The concept is simple enough. You write an interesting, useful or thought-provoking blog entry, submit it to SeededBuzz, and if it’s approved, its “seed” will be spread to members of the SeededBuzz community. There’s the potential to gain a lot of traffic through the service, but also a lot of interesting connections with other like-minded individuals!

While I’m promoting SeededBuzz, I myself haven’t used it. I’m tempted to, but I worry that my posts aren’t “worthy” of being shared with others. It’s one thing to put posts about health insurance in NC or what I had for dinner on my blog, it’s another to submit them to a third party site that’ll then turn around and promote them to critical, potentially judgmental members. Heh. Yes, I am that insecure sometimes!

So, what are your thoughts on SeededBuzz? Would you use a service like it?

3

Posted on February 20, 2010 at 4:14pm

Filed under General

Tags: twitter

I’ve had an active Twitter account (@kissmykitty) for over three years now. In that time I have racked up over 18,000 updates, or tweets. I remember celebrating my 10,000th tweet. Now I’m coming up to my 20,000th tweet. Holy crap that’s a lot of updates!

One thing I’ve definitely noticed since using Twitter more regularly is that I don’t blog as much as I used to. After all, when I’ve managed to cram a “worthy” update into a 140 character message, what’s the point in writing a blog entry about the same thing? But sometimes my tweets and blog entries overlap. I may mention a weight loss milestone on Twitter, for example, but then I’ll turn around and blog about how I got there and how much I love the “permanent” weight loss program I chose.

For those of you that use Twitter regularly, do you find that you blog less? Like I said, I know I do. Since I tweet all of the time, I save blogging for worthwhile stuff.

Page 2 of 39«123 4 5 »10 20 30...Last »

About

Categories

Tags

Archives

Search

0

0

2

1

1

1

1

0

1

3

Poll

Plugboard

Affiliates

Etc.

Link to BG?