Tag Archives: Lisa Sabin-Wilson

WordPress For Dummies – Review

Posted on February 3, 2008 | Leave a comment

I waited so long for WordPress For Dummies, by Lisa Sabin-Wilson, and it was well worth the wait. I had been wanting to learn WordPress and had been a fan of Lisa’s blog so it was just what I needed as a motivator.

It’s a “Dummies” book so it’s got that easy to use format. And it’s a reference book so most of it is not meant to be read linearly. If you’ve always wanted to set up a blog or switch to WordPress this is the way to go. It explains it from the basics up to the advanced. It’s step by step and it’ll get you running on your own host or at WordPress.com with ease.

It covers Migrating to WP, 10 Great Free Themes, Ten Great Plugins, Using WP as a Content Management System, Understanding Templates and Plug-ins. It covers pretty much everything you need to know but those are the chapters I’ve read the most and use for reference. If you don’t know anything about PHP you’ll painlessly learn the bits that you do need to know for modifying templates (this is optional) and you’ll have picked up enough for when you want to use PHP for other “web stuff”.

As I’m writing this post, I’m flipping through the book seeing if there is anything I’ve missed mentioning. There are so many areas of WP that I haven’t explored yet, I’ve read about them in the book and I can’t wait to try out some of the other features! Continue reading →

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Why I want to use WordPress…

Posted on November 5, 2007 | 2 comments

So I’ve really been wanting to try WordPress for my blogging. It’s been growing in use (at least the people I’m reading are using it) and more and more internet providers seem to be including it with packages. So it really seems to be a product to use, I’ve been a devoted MovableType user for just under 4 years and I’m willing to try something new…

A few reasons besides jumping on the bandwangon with everyone else (a lemming, I am not): I like the default templates more than MT’s, I think it looks easier to use and set up for beginners (this would be for me helping other people, I like complicated) and they’re not lacking any plugins (1,198 and counting). Also, it’s time to learn something new and this like it’s well worth learning…

My copy of WordPress For Dummies still hasn’t shipped and I’ve bugged Lisa (the author) a few times about buying an autographed copy and now she’s having a contest to give away a few autographed copies for her anniversary! So this is my post/entry to count as my entry for that…

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WordPress for Dummies

Posted on October 27, 2007 | 1 comment

WordPress For Dummies, 3rd Edition Lisa Sabin-WilsonWordPress For Dummies is coming out on Monday (a few weeks early), and it looks like it covers most of the new features that are in WordPress. I’ve been reading Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s blog (JustAGirlInTheWorld.com) for a few years, but generally the tech info doesn’t help me since I’m not a WP user. Since I’ve been wanting to try WP for a while now (I’ve just played with it a little bit recently) this will help me on my way. So keep an eye out and pick up a copy (or order it on-line) when you get a chance…

I just ran up to Border’s to make sure it wasn’t on the shelves already and it wasn’t out, so I’ll leave my pre-order with Amazon (and save 5% since it’s a pre-order and the price is guaranteed if it drops). Continue reading →

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A Plethora of Things.

Posted on September 23, 2007 | 1 comment

So I normally don’t put too many topics per post, actually I generally only put one topic per post. But I’ve been sick and all my little post-its on things to blog about are getting too long. So I’ll steal the Bullet Sunday idea from Dave for this week.

  • Sick – I’ve been lousy with a few different things for the last few weeks, I’ve been so fuzzy I pretty much need to wear my reading glasses all the time it’s usually just late at night (and sometimes early mornings). I’m actually think the few different things are fighting it out in my body, or the drugs are now what’s causing a problem. I couldn’t get into the doctor on Saturday (actually she didn’t think another visit would do any good). I’ll have someone look up the drugs and see if I’m having any problems between them it’s the dry mouth and bad taste that popped up in the last 36 hours that’s making me think drug interactions.
  • WordPress – WordPress is one of the larger blogging platforms, lots of plug-ins and looks well supported. For example, on Wednesday Matt (a WP developer) is having a WordPress 2.3 upgrade party in San Francisco

    WordPress 2.3 is coming out on Monday, so come out Wednesday evening and upgrade your blog with the pros. How badly can you screw it up when the developers are right there? If you upgrade your blog before Wednesday come and help out others and make feature requests.

    I think it’s kind of a cool idea I’d go if I were in the area and I don’t even really use it. I’m hoping I can hold off to really using it until after Lisa Sabin-Wilson’s WordPress for Dummies book is published. What I don’t like about WP is that it’s all dynamic (but that’s part of what I do like about it too). The dynamic-ness is just going to slow things down; I liked that in MT you can make some pages static and some dynamic but the cool part is MT will cache the pages once it generates them until the next post so it’s semi-static. Keep in mind you break some important dynamic function, everything is probably going to break. I think my next blog experiments will be with WP….

  • Jott – Way cool I’ll post more on this soon.
  • Legion of Super Heroes – Season one was great but season two (started yesterday) has the Superman from the 41st century (actually a clone of the 21st century Superman) who has traveled back to the 31st(?) to work with Legion and (I’m assuming) the SuperBoy/Man of the 21st century. It seems like it’s going to be a little two complicated. They characters seem liked the characters have gotten a little bit older too (Duo Damsel is so cute).

  • Snakehead – A new Alex Rider novel is coming out. They’ve definitely gotten better as the books went along, I recently re-read the first one and it’s no where near as good as the later ones.
  • Twitter – Mini blog posts that you can read on-line or receive as text messages all day long. I don’t get it but then again, I didn’t get blogging at first either. But personal blogging at that level is too much, IMHO. News might be interesting, weather(?), local bands as to when they are performing (sometimes I just want to know what time they are performing). I did set up a page and grabbed a dozen people to listen too (but I don’t get paged, I actually have to go and look); if I find anything super (probably news/weather or something like that) I might have them go to my cell phone…
  • Season Premiers – I re-watched the season premiers of a few shows, I had a chance to see some early promos of some and they changed them a bit. The Big Bang Theory got edited in a few spots, I actually think it’s less funny for those scenes. Bionic Woman also got changed and I think it flows a little better, I certainly enjoyed it better. The odd part was that they switch out her sister (who lives with her) from a punky deaf girl to a regular rebellious teen; that seemed like a huge strange switch.

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