My “doodle a day” WordPress site  has given me the perfect platform to develop custom WordPress portfolio layouts for artists.

I am building on a theme created by Organic Themes. The theme already came with three portfolio page layouts, a one column, two column and three column layout, but I wanted to arrange the artwork in a more traditional arrangement.

This morning I figured out how to use a jquery code that I found on codrops (view code here) and adapted it to work in WordPress.

I am pulling the photos attached to posts of specific categories (passing the category parameter to the page) and ordering them randomly. When the page first loads, you get a grid of all the images in a specific post category. If you mouse over the thumbnails they highlight.

And when you click on a thumbnail, it zooms larger, and you can paginate through them.

I am very excited to have figured out how to adapt this code to work in WordPress.

Here is the example of the image grid gallery on my “doodle a day” blog.

First I had to figure out how to retrieve just the URL of the specific image size attached to a post. I used a variation on the code found here.

Now I have three different custom layouts I’ve created for artists.

This one I call the standard portfolio layout. I have the default category page displaying this way.

This standard art portfolio layout displays the number of posts you set in your reading settings in the dashboard.

And then yesterday, I figured out how to pass the category parameter to a slide show page, that loops between the images and shows the title of the image.

I modified the jquery code that I found here.

Here is how the standard artist portfolio layout pulling from wordpress posts looks on the site.

For other post categories, I need to create specific page templates that target them. For example, news, press, exhibitions. However this is fairly simple to do and can be customized for each artist depending upon their needs.

Anyway, I’m having a lot of fun combining the drawing with the programming in this site.

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The problem, as with candy, is that not everything you put in your site works together, and often a blog belly ache can result. If your blog breaks, it is often a plugin that is the culprit.

Today I had a client call me and all of their blog posts and pages had disappeared. The first thing I do when that happens is check the database and run a repair on the database tables. That usually fixes the problem. Not in this case. I could see the posts in the database, but nothing was showing up on the website.

I then upgraded their WordPress to the latest version and ran a database upgrade. Still no content.

I changed their theme from the custom one they had, to the WordPress classic theme, to make sure that it wasn’t a theme bug. Still no content.

Finally, it occurred to me to rename their plugin folder on the server, to quickly de-activate all of their plugins. Voila! All of the content came back again.

I judiciously added back the minimum of plugins, testing after the addition of each one to make sure the site worked.

The take away on this article is to only add plugins to your wordpress site that are integral to its functionality. Quality over quantity.

Whenever you run a WordPress upgrade or a plugin upgrade, test your site. If something breaks, it most likely is a plugin conflict. Try de-activating plugins and testing after each to see if the problem goes away. If you can’t get into  your admin after the upgrade, change the name of the plugin folder on the server to see if things start working again.

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One of the help questions that comes my way frequently has to do with their content showing up double spaced.

This doesn’t occur when typing a normal paragraph and hitting the return or enter key to start a new paragraph. The text in the paragraph is fine.

It happens when you need single line breaks. For example, you are writing a poem, a recipe, a resume; you need short sentences or phrases separated by single line breaks, but when you hit the enter or return key, the blog editor thinks you are preparing for a whole new paragraph.

The solution is really easy. Hold down the shift key when you hit “enter” or “return”. This will force a single line break.

If you have copied and pasted text from word or another text editor, you may need to delete the space between the lines and then go in and reapply the line break holding down the shift key.

Here is an example:

I

am

writing

this

just hitting my return button.

I
Am
Writing
This
Holding down the shift key when I hit return.

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Blogs are all about content. We use a blog platform to deliver good content to our audience, and thus promote our businesses or our brand.

How your content is presented, however, can either improve your message, or hinder your message.

Your audience, before they even read your content, is looking at how it is designed, how it looks visually on the page. If the presentation isn’t appealing, they might not read it, or they might read it, but discount it.

If I own a store, I know that in order to get my audience to walk through the door, the store front needs to be clean, the windows organized and the walkway swept. Once people enter my store, my merchandise needs to be polished and presented in such a way that highlights it and that makes it easy for customers to find what they are looking for.

If I own a salvage yard and sell bits and pieces of salvaged items and my customers expect to dig through piles of dusty stuff to find hidden treasure at a bargain price, then I might not worry about how organized or clean my warehouse is. However, if I DO sell treasures and I expect to sell them for what they are worth, I am going to be very aware of how I design my store’s interior and exterior and how my content is presented.

A blog should follow the same principles. If you want people to be able to read your content easily and to value your content, there should be some design consistency in how it is structured.

Step one is KEEP IT CONSISTENT.

The key to good design is consistency. Less is more on well designed websites. The designer chooses a select few fonts, colors and font sizes and these are used in moderation for emphasis. The more you have a variety of shapes, fonts, font sizes and colors on your site, the more cluttered and hard to read it will be.

On your blog, make sure you use consistent capitalization. This is the easiest change you can make to have your site look more professional.

Look at the image below that shows all different treatments of capitalization. It looks like a mess.

Compare it with the image below:

It is much easier to read what the words are saying, if they follow a consistent system of capitalization.

Fortunately, you can fix your blog capitalization with just a few lines of code in your blog theme style sheet. You don’t have to go back in and retype every single blog post title, tag and category name. Using CSS you can transform text to be capitalized, uppercase or lower case.

With these few lines of code in my style sheet, I was able to make all of my blog titles, category names and tags capitalized.

.sidebar_list a {text-transform:capitalize; }
.entry-title { text-transform:capitalize; }
.headline_area { text-transform:capitalize; }

Decide what capitalization you are going to use and contact your blog programmer to make the changes for you, or if you are comfortable doing so, go in and edit your themes style sheet yourself.

On websites that are designed well, things line up.

Keep the WIDTHS OF YOUR IMAGES consistent within a blog post, and even from one post to another.

In good design, things line up visually. Often, a blog will show multiple posts on one page. The width of all the images on all these posts are going to visually relate to one another. If you are using varied sizes  and proportions of images, then it it will start to look disorganized.

The easiest way to avoid this pit fall is to  choose a consistent width for ALL of your blog images.

Under your settings, in the Media section, you can set the widths of how large you want your large, medium and thumbnail images to be on the site.

(These dimensions will depend upon the blog theme that you are using and how wide your post area is.)

I recommend  filling in these settings and then sticking to them when you upload images to your blog posts.

When you click to upload an image, once you’ve selected it, at the bottom of the window you can indicate what size it is and how to align it. If you’ve filled in these values in your media setting, it is a simple step to ensure that all your images are given consistent widths.

If all of the images have a consistent width, then your blog will start to look organized, and the content will be easier to read.

If you want to re-size your images before you upload them to your blog to make sure they are all the same widths, a great free online tool for re-sizing and editing images is http://resize.it.

Step two is KEEP IT SIMPLE.

The blog text editor is not conducive to complicated design layouts. Unless you have a custom theme created with custom fields for displaying specific data, it is best if you stick to the most simple formatting. Put your content in short paragraphs. Use ordered and unordered lists. Upload images and video. But avoid any fancy formatting.

The most successful blogs visually follow a simple pattern for their blog posts. They might start with an image at the top of the page. Then put in a paragraph or two. Then another image or video, and then more text as needed.

They find a pattern that works for the type of content they are going to be blogging about, and they consistently use that pattern on all of their blog posts.

Think about how long your blog posts are typically going to be, figure out a simple  structure that would work for the majority of your blog posts, and stick with that.

This is particularly important if you have side bars in your blog. Side bar content can often be busy and varied. If your blog post content is simple and restful to the eye, the audiences’ attention will settle on it naturally. If the blog content is displayed in a disorganized and cluttered manner, it will blend with the clutter in the side bar, and the content will be harder to read.

THINK TWICE ABOUT ALIGNING IMAGES LEFT AND RIGHT

Be very careful when having the text wrap to the right and left of images. It is tricky to get images that are aligned left and/or right with text wrapping around them to look like balanced design elements in your blog post.

Your blog post is going to be viewed on all different computers, platforms and browsers and what looks great on your computer, might not look the same on another.

The illustration below shows how left and right aligned images can be problematic.

In example 1, the images have different widths, and it looks sloppy.

In example 2, 3 and 4, the images have the same width and are inserted above the paragraph, so they look much better than example 1.

However they illustrate how the same text and images can appear on different browsers depending upon browser settings. You think your blog post is aligned beautifully, but someone else might see the images in an entirely different configuration depending upon how their browser treats font sizes and line height.

Also, beware of inserting an image in the middle of a word or sentence by accident. It might look fine when you preview your blog post. Because the text is wrapping to the right or left of the image, where it is placed in the word or sentence is not noticeable. But the appearance of your blog post when translated into other platforms, like rss feeds and emails, will degrade.

The code that your blog editor adds to the image to tell the image to go right or left on your blog’s website page is not recognized by email clients (gmail, mac mail, outlook etc..), so if your blog posts are being sent to subscribers via email, for them, any image that is aligned left or right on your blog will be stuck right in the middle of the text where you inserted it.

This image below illustrates an email that I received from a blog subscription. The blog post, although it looked fine on the blog, did not look good as an email.

For this reason, I recommend inserting images in between paragraphs and not aligning them left or right..

Think about how long your blog posts are going to be generally, figure out a simple  structure that would work for the majority of your blog posts, and follow that structure on all of your posts.

In Summary

• Keep the formatting simple.
• Follow a consistent pattern for the formatting of blog posts throughout the blog.
• Stick to the same capitalization rules throughout the blog.
• Choose three image widths for large, medium and thumbnail images and make sure all of your images throughout your blog, stick to these widths.

If your content is well designed, it will be easier to read, and the audience will value it more.

Photo credit 1 -  Photo credit 2

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My colleague, Sheryl Dagostino from thispresentlife.com, told me a neat trick for composing content for your text widgets which I am going to share below. It makes it so easy to add images, links and custom coding to text widgets. You now will have one less reason to call your web designer, and more control of your blog’s appearance.

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LINKING TO A PDF FROM WITHIN A BLOG POST

To Link to a PDF from within a blog post, click on the add image icon.

Select the PDF file and upload.

Once it is uploaded, click on the “Insert into post” button to insert a link to it directly into your post.

LINKING TO A PDF FILE FROM A LINK OR FROM AN IMAGE IN A POST

If you want to create a link to it from an image, or from within your LINKS, then, instead of clicking on the “insert into post” button,  copy the LINK URL and then hit the “Save all changes” button.

You can then paste that URL into the web address of a link that you’ve created (see image below)..

Or, if you want to link to the PDF file from an image in a post, click on the image that you want to link the PDF to, and click on the insert link icon..

and add the LINK URL in the LINK URL field, clicking “Update” when you’re done.

ADDING A PDF FILE TO YOUR MEDIA LIBRARY

You can also add the PDF file directly to your media library by clicking on the “Add New” link under Media in your left hand navigation.

Select the PDF file from your computer.

Then click on the save changes.

Once a PDF file is in your library, to find out its URL so that you can link to it, click on the Library link under media.

Then click on the “View” link under the file that you want to get the URL of.

That will pull up the name of the PDF file, linked to the PDF file. Right click (if you don’t have a right click on your mouse, hold down the control key when you click) on the link and choose “Copy Link Location” from the contextual menu.

There are probably a slew of other ways to add PDF files to your blog posts. If you have your own version, please share by commenting on this post. Thanks!

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The first thing to do is to upload the image to your blog media library.

Make sure that the dimensions of the image will fit within your blog’s side bar dimensions. I would suggest keeping the image under 200 pixels wide. The image needs to be a png, jpg or gif image.
Click on the “Add New” under the Media bar in your wordpress dashboards left navigation (see image)

Once on the upload media page, click on the button to choose the files to upload, browsing for the image on your computer.

Once you’ve selected the file and upload it, copy the FILE URL. This is important. Select it, copy it, and paste it into a sticky note or a document so that you can retrieve it later. (see image below)

Now that you have the location of the image on the server, Save all changes and go to the Widgets area of your wordpress admin (under Appearance)

Then select the side bar that you want to place the image with link into – the left side bar (Sidebar 1), or the right side bar (Sidebar 2).

Find the text widget in your widget selections. click on the text widget, hold it down and drag it onto the side bar where you want the image to go.

Once you’ve dragged the widget to the side bar, click on the down arrow to open it up so that you can edit it.

Here is what you want to type:

(NOTE: When I say “image-location”, I am referring to the location of the image that you uploaded to your media library. You copied that location and saved it. When I say “link-url”, I am referring to the website address that you want to link to, be it a page on your blog or another website.)

<a href=”link-url“><img src=”image-location” border=”0″ /></a>

Tip 1: if you want the link to open in a new window, include  target=”_blank”   in the <a> tag.

For example, <a href=”link-url“  target=”_blank”><img src=”image-location” border=”0″ /></a>

Tip 2: Make sure to include the http:// at the beginning of your link-url. (see image below)

When you are done, hit the Save button.

Make sure to check it out on your blog to make sure it worked.

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Generating passive income is a must for the self employed and creative people in this world. There are only so many billable hours in the day, and it is hard to make a living if you are just billing billable hours.

I decided to experiment with a digital product and adding it to my blog to see how easy the process would be.

Creating A Digital Product

E-books: If you are going to be selling any form of e-book, it is generally delivered as a pdf file. The best software to use to generate the pdf files, in my opinion, is adobe acrobat professional. However, there are free pdf writers available for creative people on a budget. Cute Pdf is an example of a free pdf writing software.

Audio Files: If you are going to be selling mp3 or audio files there are a number of great software options available for recording and generating mp3 files. One free software that I recommend to clients who want to generate vocal audio and not professional music quality is Audacity.

My Journey – bundling audio and pdf: I happened to purchase finale print music software several weeks back and spent a euphoric couple of days experimenting with writing beginner/intermediate piano scores. I was able to save these scores as pdf files by using adobe acrobat professional. Now I have a handful of piano scores suitable for the beginner/intermediate player and so thought to myself, why not bundle a score with mp3 file to sell digitally for this blog example?

First of all, I want people to be able to hear what it sounds like when played. Finale Print Music can generate a digitally produced  audio mp3 file of the music score. I needed to insert the mp3 file in this blog post so that people can hear a sample of the song.  Supplying a sample listen is a great idea for musicians selling mp3 files, or for experts selling audio files. If you are thinking of selling an audio file, I recommend installing the plugin below so that visitors to your site can easily listen to a sample.

WORDPRESS PLUGIN TIP: I installed the following plugin into my wordpress blog so that my audio links would be playable with an audio player.

http://wpaudioplayer.com/download

It generates an audio player just like the one here. Click on it to listen to my Simple Song 1 for the piano.
Simple Song 1

If you want to play audio on your blog, I highly recommend wpaudioplayer.

3 Examples of Digital Delivery/E-commerce Options

1. Option 1: free and the least passive:
   The first option for selling digital products would be to use paypal and then manually email people the product. Setting up a business paypal account is free, and then you can sell products and services online and paypal takes a small percentage of sales. This is the least passive option as you have to manually email people the digital product, but it is free. You can use the steps that I illustrate in this tutorial on adding e-commerce to your blog: http://goffgrafix.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/adding-e-commerce-to-your-blog/ to generate the code for your buy now button and copy and paste it into your blog post. You would then have to manually email the digital product to the customer once you receive notice of the purchase.
2. Option 2: e-junkie.com
   With e-junkie.com you can sell up to 10 products for only $5/month, and it ties into paypal. Click here to view the complete list of features that e-junkie offers. With e-junkie the process is automated. When a customer clicks the buy now code that e-junkie supplies you, e-junkie will automatically send your customer to a page to download the product when the payment goes through. They will also email the customer a time sensitive link to the product download page.
3. Option 3: 1shoppingcart.com/marketerschoice.com
   1shoppingcart.com/marketerschoice.com is a robust and comprehensive shopping cart service that offers digital products options, autoresponder capabilities, recurring billing and much more. I use them for my hosting/web design business, so they were the obvious choice, for me, for selling digital products. After I upload my product, the cart generates a buy now link that I can just paste into this blog post below. Voila!

Purchase Simple Song 1 Piano Score for the beginner /intermediate piano player.
$2.75
Score comes bundled with mp3 file.

Listen to the score below:

Simple Song 1

Your Experience with selling digital products

Please share your experience with selling digital products. What e-commerce system do you use? Do you sell pdf files? audio files? Is there a software that you have found useful in generating digital products? Please comment below. I look forward to your input.

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If you found this tutorial useful, feel free to test the button below and make a donation.

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I have just discovered slide.com. With a slide.com account you can

After a slide show is created you can edit it, remove pictures and re-arrange them by dragging them into the order that you want.

After you’ve created and saved the slide show – slide.com gives you an embed code that you can copy and paste into your blog.

Make sure your text editor in your blog is set to HTML tab and not the visual tab, and paste the code in where you want the slide show.

My initial slide show looked like this:

If you don’t want all of the tabs under your slide show, you need to alter the embed code slightly.

The slide show code itself is inbetween <object></object> tags. Look at the code, highlight everything that comes after the closing </object> tag and before the final closing </p> tag, and delete it.

It won’t get rid of the review and star links at the top of the slide show, but it will remove all the black buttons under the slide show.

One thing about slide.com, is that it does not yet have a way to protect your images from having other people download them. My suggestion is to use this tool only on images that you don’t mind having people review and download. This is a social media slide show tool, and is meant for blog posts that invite discussion.

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Flickr slide shows are not the most elegant, but with the ability to add video, what a great addition this can be to your blog or website!

• on a travel site or real estate site, to show a montage of photographs and  videos of a featured location
• on a cooking site, to intersperse “how to” video and photos of the final products
• start a photo slide show with a video introduction.
• piece together a slide show of multiple videos – to create a full length tutorial or demo.

In three easy steps you can create a set of photos and videos on flickr, and then embed that set into your blog or web page.

1. Log into flickr, go to upload photos and videos (under the “You” menu in the top navigation). Upload your photos and videos. Make sure you have selected that anyone can see your photos.
2. Once your photos and videos are uploaded, click on the “Organize” link in the top navigation, and then click on “Sets and Collection”.  In the top left click on “Create a new set”, and drag your photos and videos from your photo stream at the bottom of the page onto your set. Your screen should look like this:
   

   Once you’ve dragged all the photos and videos into your set, hit the save link at the bottom of the left column to save your new set.

3. Click in the top right the link that says, “Your photostream” to return to your photos. In the right column you should see your sets. Click on the image representing the set that you want to share, and then click the “slide show” link in the top right. When the slide show loads, click the “Share” link in the top right. This will give you embed code to add it to your blog or website. Make sure you switch to the html view in your blog editor before pasting in the code.

I created a set of images of our puppy, and included a quick video that I shot this morning – just to test how it would work.

View my slide show of our miniature schnauzer, Rosco, below.

If you don’t want people to be able to download your flickr photos, when you log into flickr, in the top navigation under ‘You’, choose ‘Your account’ and then click on the ‘privacy and permissions’ tab. The first setting is “Who can download your pictures” and there is an ‘edit’ link to the far right of it. Click on that link to adjust the settings.

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If you don’t want people to be able to download your flickr photos, when you log into flickr, in the top navigation under ‘You’, choose ‘Your account’ and then click on the ‘privacy and permissions’ tab. The first setting is “Who can download your pictures” and there is an ‘edit’ link to the far right of it. Click on that link to adjust the settings.

What is your experience using flickr?

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Ever wonder why images or photographs sometimes appear next to people’s comments on blogs?  Those images are called avatars, and it is really easy to create an avatar image for yourself. You, too, can have a photograph or icon that will follow your comments around the internet.

Why would you want to do that? For branding, and to call attention to your comments. You don’t need to use a portrait. You could use your logo, for example.

Below, I am going to walk you through, step by step, how to create your custom avatar image using gravatar.com.

1. The first thing to do is to have an image on your computer that you want to use. I used a photograph taken of me by Lynn Christoffers – a Martha’s Vineyard Photographer.It doesn’t have to be square. Gravatar will let you crop it once you upload it.
   
2. Step two: Go to http://www.gravatar.com
3. Step 3: Click on the “Sign up now” link. (view image below)

4. Step 4: Enter the email address that you want your avatar image associated with. (see image below)
5. Step 5: They will send you a confirmation email.
   Click on the link in the confirmation email to activate your account. (see images below)
   

   

6. You will then be directed to a page that will ask you where the image is that you want to upload.

7. Choose where it is. Search for the image and upload it.

8. You will then be able to crop it to be the perfect avatar image.

   

9. When you’re done cropping, you will be asked to rate it based on the image content.

10. The final step is to assign the image to your email address. Just check the box next to the email address that you want to associate with the avatar, and click on the “use for selected address” button. Then you’re done. It is that easy.
    

You can log into gravatar at any time to update your avatar images or add new email addresses.

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I am always fired up when I learn about a new tool, and slideshowpro is really exciting. I immediately purchased it so that I could play with it.

I purchased the slideshowpro for flash ($39), and the CMS slideshowpro director ($39). My server will work with slideshowpro director, if any of my clients are interested, however, if you are going to be making tons of video slide shows, I recommend the slideshowpro hosting for the CMS, because you won’t have to worry about bandwidth, and it is really reasonable.

1. Step one in getting slideshowpro up and running on my wordpress blog was to install the director on my website server. This was pretty straight forward.  You ftp the files to the server, and then browse to them. The installation process through the web browser walks  you through any permissions that you need to update. It will prompt you to manually create a .xml file called crossdomain.xml, it will tell you exactly what to copy and paste into that file,  and upload that to your root directory, which I did with bbedit.
2. Step two was to create an album in the director and upload photos to it. I uploaded pictures from a walk I took on a landbank trail in Chilmark, just two days ago. I then copied the path generated to that albums .xml file to paste into the flash file parameters.
3. Step three was to install the slideshowpro extension into my flash cs3 and then create a new flash file.
4. Step four was to plug in the path to the album’s .xml file generated by the album, and also to choose that the .xml file is a director generated file, publish the .swf file and ftp it to my server.
5. Step five was to install the plug-in Kimili flash embed tag generator into my wordpress blog, and click on its icon to add the new .swf files path, size etc.   I made sure to add the base=”.” parameter to the embed tag. I found the instructions here.
6. The results of my efforts are at the top of the page.

I am pretty excited to learn more about the slideshowpro customization and parameters.

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I want  my clients to have the benefits of blogging, so I am learning everything that I can about it. I have set up my blog with the Thesis theme, and have learned how to customize the theme with “hooks”, custom functions and custom styles. I have purchased a developers license with Thesis so that I can create blogs for my clients using the Thesis theme. I have also added a small upgrade to my RS3 package (of just an additional 3.50/month) to add a blog to your site. I am ready to help you get started.

Click here to sign up for my RS3-blog hosting, just 19.50/month (exclusive for goffgrafix.com clients)

Already have an RS3 hosting account with me? click here to upgrade to RS3-blog hosting, just an additional 3.50/month.

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