Nebraska Libraries on the Web

Maria Cadwallader, Director of the Valparaiso Public Library asked me the other day how to create a blog post which appears as an excerpt (i.e. shortened version) on the home page and then offered the reader a “more” link to be able to go to a Web page containing the complete post. This way, your site’s home page isn’t taken up by one or more post of longer than usual length.

At first she, and I, thought that this was theme based; some had this feature, some didn’t. While that seemed to be true at first glance I though that adding a plugin for those that wanted this feature might be a better option. It turns out, that this feature is currently available to everyone, I just didn’t realize it.

Instead of repeating all of the instructions here I’ll instead point you to the WordPress Support Page for The More Tag. There you will find instructions for just how to pull this off through a button on the Add New Post page.

One word of advice: please use this sparingly and only on longer posts. Studies have shown that when you make the use click a link to read the rest of a post, the number who do is much lower than you would expect. So, when you do use this feature, don’t bury the lead. Make sure the important bit is in the excerpt that appears on your home page.

Earlier this week I got a few notifications that sites using the Google Weather widget were receiving ugly error messages on their sites. If you were one of those sites, it wasn’t anything you did. The plugin just decided it didn’t want to work right any more. So, I’ve found a new one that I think looks good but does take a little more work to get up on your site. Here are the instructions:

From your WP Dashboard select Settings, then WP Underground. On this page you’ll see the settings available for the plugin. First time around, just keep it simple and enter you location. Be sure to click the Save button at the bottom of the page.

Next, head on over to Appearance|Widgets and insert a new “Text” widget into your sidebar where you want the weather to appear. Give that widget a title (optional) and enter [forecast] into the content field and click Save.

Head on over to your site and refresh the page. The weather should now appear. At this point feel free to head back to the Settings page and customize how the current weather and/or forecast are displayed.

Following-up on my post regarding the embedding of Flickr photos in your posts and pages here’s the post I’ve been promising for a while now on how to embed a slideshow using flickr.

Before you get started I highly recommend that you first write any textual content that will be part of your page or post. For example, let’s assume that my post is going to have some introductory text, then the slideshow, then some concluding text. I’m going to go ahead and write both those paragraphs and leave some space in between for the slideshow to be later placed. Trust me, this will make your life easier in the long run.

The key to getting this all to work is to first have a Flickr account (assumed) and to have all the photos you want as part of your slideshow in a single photo set. (You can create sets in a variety of ways one of which is via the organizr.)

Once you’ve got your photos organized into a set, open the set’s page and click the “Slideshow” link in the upper right. Once on the slideshow page, click the “Share” link in the upper right. Under “Grab the embed HTML” click the “Copy to clipbaord” button”.

Now comes the fun part. Go back to your page/post and find that space where you left room for you slideshow. Switch to the HTML view, make sure your cursor is in that space, and paste in the HTML code.

Now, here’s the kicker, if you switch back the the Visual editing mode, you will not see your slideshow. However, if you click WrodPress Preview button you will see the results. This is why I recommended you write your text first. In Visual editing mode it will be very easy to accidentally delete your slideshow.

Just don’t forget to Publish/Update your post/page once you’ve finished your editing.

Here’s my example slideshow to prove that it does work:

The bottom line: once you get the hang of it you’ll be able to avoid the potential problems. Just remember to put the slideshow in last, and then immediately publish and it should work as it should.

With more new libraries in the wings working on their new sites some have been asking me questions about using flickr in combination with WordPress. While we are more than happy to host images on our servers, if you have a lot of them, Flickr might be the better way to go. So, here are some basic tips for how you can get your Flickr photos to appear on your posts and pages.

Let’s say you’ve got a photo in Flickr that you’d like to have appear in a blog post and when they click on it, they get to a larger version of the photo. That can be done with the following steps:

Get to the photo’s page in flickr and click on the right-most down-pointing triangle above the photo. (Screenshot right) In the area for “Grab the HTML/BBCode” you’ll see the HTML you’ll need to copy and paste into your site. Choose the appropriate side of the photo (small, medium, large, etc) before copying the code. Once you’ve got the code copied switch back over to your site, make sure you’re in HTML editing mode, place your cursor pretty much where you want the image to appear, and paste in the code. This will make your image appear in your post and when a user clicks on it, they’ll be sent to the image’s page in flickr.

At this point you can switch back to the Visual editing mode and move the photo by dragging it to the new location. If you’re trying to float the image to one side of the text or another, click on the image, then click on the picture icon that appears on top of the image (picture properties). In the new windows you’ll see the alignment options. Choose the appropriate one and click Update.

On that screen you can also change when the image links to for when a user clicks on it. For example, if this photo is part of a set, you can get the URL of the flickr set page and put that in the Link URL field (above). If you wanted to link to a slideshow of a set, click on the “Slideshow” link on a set’s page (next screenshot) and use that page’s URL as the link.