Michael Gareth Morgan

Between the 15th of this month and the 6th of January I’ll be in Spain, woohooo!

Considering I manage quite a few different sites, most of which are highly content based (meaning they need to be updated regularly), leaving the country on holiday for three weeks doesn’t really sound like such a great idea. Thankfully I’m able to put in that extra bit of work now to keep my sites going while I’m away relaxing. By using WordPress’s post scheduling feature I have scheduled posts for many of my WordPress based sites – simple!

Another big thanks to WordPress!

Spam is a major issue for a lot of bloggers and I’m one of them. I currently run quite a few WordPress based blogs on various topics and niches and although I knew about it I never got around to setting up Akismet. For those of you who don’t know, Akismet is a service which let’s you protect yourself against spam. It is available as a plug-in (comes packed with WordPress as standard) and only needs an API key from WordPress.com to work.

Before setting it up I was getting several hundred spam comments each week – I know this isn’t anywhere near as much as some get but still it was very annoying. A few days ago I thought I’d spend a minute on each of my blogs installing Akismet and since then exactly 0 spam comments have come through.

So I have to say, for all of you who aren’t yet using Akismet on your WordPress blogs – I highly recommend it.

I just wanted to let you all know about post scheduling in WordPress. If you haven’t already given it a go I’d highly recommend you go take a look. Basically it allows you to instead of publishing a post immediately you can schedule it to be published at a specific time and date in the future. This means that if one day you manage to crunch out more posts than you normally would you could have them published in a few days or so instead.

For me this is great as I maintain quite a large amount of desktop wallpaper sites, all running on WordPress. All of these sites need to be kept up to date with regular wallpaper updates. Instead of dropping by every other day and adding a new wallpaper I just add a load of them every two weeks. Then, over the course of the next two weeks the wallpaper posts are automatically published without me doing anything.

Another great use for this is if you plan on going away for a little while. For example, over Christmas I’ll be away for about 3 weeks (Spain, wooohoooo!) but you can be sure that my sites will be kept up to date.

So go ahead, check it out! It’s on the top right hand side of the “Add New” section of WordPress.

Over the last couple of days and hopefully over the next couple of weeks I’ll be tweaking this site to make it that little bit better. This ranges from perfecting my permalink structure to dropping in some features and extras to help make browsing this site more enjoyable. One of the things which I done very early on when I was developing the theme to this site was to remove the WordPress calendar. I think you should do the same!

As long as your blog posts are not strictly tied to specific dates then ask yourself, do you actually need the WordPress calendar in your sidebar? To begin with, it usually looks terrible (it can be tricky to style) but it also serves no real purpose to your readers. Look at it from the readers perspective and ask yourself how many times have you ever used the calendar on someone else’s site to find what you’re looking for. Whilst some of you may be able to say ‘once or twice’ it really isn’t worth taking up all that space in your side bar when only a handful of people use it.

If people want something they will most likely make use of the search feature so I really don’t see why the calendar should be there. Keep your theme uncluttered and free from unnecessary bits like this.

I run quite a few WordPress sites and one of the things I needed to do lately was to get the current page number in WordPress. It can be easily done. To grab the current WordPress page number just use the following.

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$pageID = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;

And that’s all that’s to it. Then of course you can use simple if statement to do all sorts of things. For example, if you only wanted to display something on the very first page (or 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc) you can do this.

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$pageID = (get_query_var('paged')) ? get_query_var('paged') : 1;
if($pageID == 1):
	// Put your stuff here
	<h2>This is only displayed on the first page</h2>
	<p>Wooooo</p>
endif;

Page numbers are simple in WordPress!

Hello,
I would like to give away one of my WordPress themes. It is compatible with the latest version and features everything you would expect from a theme.

Live demo: http://www.michaelgarethmorgan.com/wordpress/index.php?wptheme=MGM_WP_1
Download: http://files.michaelgarethmorgan.com/MGM_WP_1.rar

Conditions of use: You must keep the link back to my site in the footer! You cannot sell this theme! You can however distribute it as you like providing it is distributed as is with no changes.

As always, comments & suggestions welcome.

UPDATE: I’ve also created a slightly darker version as requested by a lot of people… Demo + download: http://www.michaelgarethmorgan.com/wordpress/index.php?wptheme=MGM_WP_1_b