The Headway blog theme

For some time, the design of this blog has been rather boring, essentially just dark blue and white. It was running the fabulous Headway theme but only version one.

The reason for this is that I had had problems upgrading.  Indeed I had tried to upgrade one day only to have the ‘visual editor’ (which is the way you change things on the new Headways) die on me.  Leaving me no option but to go back to version one and re-do everything.  The original version 1 does not have the visual editor which is why I was forced to stay with it.

However a friend told me that the most recent version is pretty stable with most of the problems ironed out, so I thought I would give it another go.  It worked a treat.

One of the things I really wanted to do with this blog was to put a dark blue background between the main posts area and the sidebar.  This can only be done (if using Headway) via the visual editor.

That done, I had great fun trying out all the different combination’s of colours and style options.  Some of them looked pretty weird.  However I liked having the title in a paler blue band right across the screen, and then somehow putting the home and about links up the top seemed to work.

There were a few problems to resolve however.  My thumbnail for excerpts plugin did not work any more, and my excerpts were thumbnailless. Horrors! However a quick hop over to the Headway forum brought forth the information that WP 3 has the facility to put thumbnails in the excepts now itself.

An examination of the post edit page did indeed reveal a new thumbnail item at the bottom left.  However I then had to go through the whole of the blog allocating thumbnails, which was a bit of a pain.  But done now.

Then there were the next post / previous post links.  I had put these in manually, into the single post editor page, but this page was now gone!  However again the HW forum reminded me of the Headway easy hooks feature which allows you to put things into tricky places on the blog.

A bit of messing around plus a change of the code I had been using, and, bingo! The thing was done.  I think it is important to be able to move from one post to the next on a blog.

So there you are.  A new design.  It should do me for a while anyway.  What do you think of it?

Wordpress navigation

I like to be able to move around my blog easily.  And for a long time I have been really annoyed by the fact that there were no ‘next post’ or ‘previous post’ links at the bottom of my blog posts.

This is present on many sites automatically, but not on mine.  I use the Headway theme, which in many respects very good.  However, when I asked a question about this on their forum, I did not get much help (their forum help is not all it is cracked up to be).  So it was left to me to go rummaging around to see what I could find.

Searches in the plugin’s directory brought forth a few which looked promising, but none of them did what I wanted.  I liked the WP-PageNavi plugin though, so decided to keep that one (and added it to my other blogs). But how to get the previous/next post links? Time to visit the Word Press Codex.

The WP Codex is a great site which has lots and lots of technical information about using, hacking, repairing, doing anything really with a wordpress site. I am slightly hampered of course by not being a developer and not having had any training in php. However I managed to find a page (which you will find here) which gave me some code to make the links.

But where do you put them? On the files. Happily, if you need to do this yourself,  you do not have to download and upload files via ftp or (in my case) cpanel, as you can get at them via your WP administration area. In the appearance section there is a link to a page called Editor. There you will find pages with all that puzzling code. Take a look at the index on the right. The one you want is called Single Post (single.php).

Get the page up and put this code in a suitable place (you may need to mess around a bit):

<?php previous_post('&laquo; &laquo; %', '', 'yes'); ?>
| <?php next_post('% &raquo; &raquo; ', '', 'yes'); ?>

Yes I know it looks peculiar, but you don’t have to understand it, just copy and paste it.  Then go to your page and refresh.  Voila!  You can see it right at the bottom of this page (assuming you are looking at the post page).

“But”  hear you say “there is only one link”.  Thats because you are looking at the most recent post.  There is only one link – your last post.  Go back a few posts and you will see them both.  But yes, that worried me too for a while.

Needless to say I then went off to put in the links on all my other blogs.  I had a bit of a problem however with my Lodger Landlord blog, as that uses the most recent version of Headway.  The one with the visual editor.

The Headway visual editor, I have found, is brilliant, until it suddenly stops working, and you can’t get it going again (and the Headway forum are no help).  Not only, I have found, can you no longer edit much of the appearance of your blog, you also can’t edit single.php.  Because it ain’t there.

So the Lodger Landlord does not have the previous post/next post links.  But all the others do, and I am dead chuffed that I have managed to do a bit of coding all on my own (with a bit of help from the Codex of course).  But even so, I don’t think I’ll give up the day job yet …

Have you had a go at anything like this?  How did you get on?

I love favicons.  They are those tiny little icons that sit in the address bar next to the website url/web address.  I think they look really cool, and differentiate (for me) sites where attention is paid to detail from all the others.

Apart from  aesthetic values, I think it is very important to have a good favicon.  Why?  Because it helps develop your brand:

• With many browsers (such as Internet Explorer and Firefox) the favicons appear in the tabs, so you can more easily locate sites with recognisable favicons
• They also appear next to the links on booksmarks (including online books marks)
• Apparently links with recognisable favicons get clicked more often

Creating a favicon

A favicon is 16 pixels wide so its design has to be simple to stand out.  Complex logos don’t work.  There are sites where you can upload an image (such as your regular logo) and it will turn it into a favicon for you.  However these  often turn out blurry.  I think the best favicon creation sites are those which allow you to adapt the image, or to create one from scratch.

The site I used to create the S favicon for this site was www.favicon.cc.  This gives you a palette with the 16 x 16 canvas and a colour generator to paint with (see the picture above).

It took quite a bit of messing around to get the S favicon.  I initially made the whole square dark blue.  Colours have numbers when you are creating them on the web, and the number for the dark blue surround I use is #171D86.  White is #ffffff.  I then did quite a few different combinations of the letters SOLB or SOB or SB, none of which really  worked.  I finally put a white border just inside the square and put in the one S which looked much better.

I also created a suitcase favicon for my Lodger Landlord site – it is more of a gladstone bag look than the ‘proper’ case logo, but I think it looks quite nice.  It seems to stand out quite nicely too.

Putting them on your site

If you use the Headway theme, as I do, you can add it to the Headway Configuration page (load the favicon up to the media library and then use the link you will find there).  However I prefer the MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin.

Its a bit of a faff, as its not one you can upload from the wordpress plugins page. You have to download the file from the MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin page, and then upload the php file (no, I don’t really know what that means either) directly to the server. It goes in the wp-content/plugins folder. You can do this by fpt, or I use the file manager facility provided by my ISP Ecowebhosting.  Then, after you have activated it, you need to tell it where to find the favicon to display, in the special admin area. NB If you find it stops your site showing, go to the advanced options section and click the other radio button.

You have to register with MaxBlogPress which means you get put on the mailing list, but its worth it as it is a superior plugin. I like it because you get the icon on the bookmark for the admin area as well as for the site itself, which helps me (as I have quite a few blogs now, and I put them all in the same bookmarks section).

So there you are.  If you want to read more about favicons online, see the post on Blogussion here, and the links that they give.

What do you think about favicons? Have you ever noticed them? If you decide to add a favicon to your site as a result of this post, please let me know how you got on!

I spent much of last year studying and reading about social media and how it works. This year it is time to put some of this into practice.

I have therefore started an experimental new service for lodger landlords. My existing service, Landlord Law,  does cater for people renting a room to a lodger, but lodger landlords and regular landlords do not really have the same needs, and a specialist site will be better (and more affordable) for the lodger landlords.

The new site, www.logerlandlord.co.uk, (a wordpress site) was launched yesterday  by a blog post on my Landlord Law Blog, and I will be running a twitter campaign for the next month, using #lodgerlandlord.

On 1 February I will start a 21 day blog series, simultaneously in the Landlord Law Blog and on Lodger Landlord – Tessa’s 21 tips for Lodger Landlords – effectively giving away the ‘crown jewels’.  Hopefully this will encourage lodger landlords to comment and tell me what they need by way of legal services.  The Lodger Landlord site will then provide those services.

I have spent much of the Christmas and New Year period working on this.  The site design is powered by the wonderful Headway Theme (I have finally got version 1.56 and the visual editor to work, which is fabulous).  My web designer has come up with two stonking designs for the 21 tips logo and the site header.  Other than that the site has been created by me.

As regards the design, some time ago my web designer Gill gave me the numbers for five colours, which are the colours used in the Landlord Law site, and which I have subsequently used for this site.  This Lodger Landlord web site uses the same colours in a different way, plus a new paler blue, which is the colour used for the ‘wrapper’ – the bit between the sidebar, the header and the post areas and also the non active navigation areas, which are white in my other Headway blogs.  I had great fun working it all out.

The other expense (apart from Gill’s fee) is a subscription to Aweber mailing service.  Lodger Landlords are being encouraged to sign up to a new mailing list.  I use Constant Contact for my Landlord Law mailing list, but as I want to keep this service completely separate, I decided that Aweber (highly recommended by high profile bloggers such as Problogger) would be better.  You will see a banner for them in the side bar.  I have had three sign up for the new mailing list so far, which is not bad as the site was only launched yesterday afternoon.

It has been a lot of work but enjoyable work.  I have done most of it on my wonderful macbook in the sitting room, with my son (playing computer games on his laptop) and husband (reading Arthur Conan Doyle).  I am currently up to day 17 on the 21 tips and have done about 1/2 of the twitter posts.  The twitter tips are being scheduled in my twitter client program Hootsuite.

By the way, the XX days of tips idea is not wholly original.  I am following in the footsteps of Problogger and Blog for Profit who had similar campaigns.  I think I am the first person to use the technique for a law related service however.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Update – June 2011

Over a year later (June 2011), the Lodger Landlord site is still going strong. In fact bearing in mind that I did no posts at all between August 2010 and June 2011 it has done really well.

Unique visitors (at this time) average out at about 100 per day and most of the work I do on this site now is answering their question in the comments.

However it has also bought in some real money – the lodger agreement has been a steady if slow seller, and there have been a scattering of advice instructions. The site has more than covered its costs and has made me a small amount of money.

The documents and other products are now being sold via my new Your Law Store site, and we have plans to develop this further.  When I do, I will be in quite a good place as the site is well dug into the search engines now and is easily found by someone doing a search on lodger.

I’ve found another great plugin, although its got a bit of a silly name, and a soppy heart logo.  Its called ‘comment luv’ (I said it was silly), and what it does is give a link back to the most recent post on your blog commentators blogs.  I learned about it from the Blogussion site here.

“Why should I do that?”, Old School Lawyer might say. “If someone comes to my blog I want to keep them there, not send them off looking at someone else’s blog”

Well, there are a number of reasons:

• People are more likley to comment if they are going to get a plug for their own blog, and blogs with lots of comments are more interesting
• Its nice to find out a bit more about the people who are reading your blog
• If you use the comment luv plugin, you can register your blog on the comment luv web site, which may get you more visitors
• It is a nice ‘thank you’ thing to do
• He that giveth (so the social media theory goes) shall receiveth

Well thats the idea anyway.  But as someone who is interested in what other people are saying, I think its great to get a link back to their blog.

What do you think?

You can read more about the comment luv plugin here,  or if you have a WordPress blog, do a new plugin search on comment luv.

Did you know that there are plugins you can get for WordPress blogs so people can indicate that they ‘like’ your blog post?  Yes, as in the ‘like’ feature on facebook.

I started thinking yesterday that it would be a nice thing to do and went looking, and lo!  There they were!

I found three:

1. WP Likes by Aakash Bapna
2. I like this by “LeBen” Burgener (who seems to be French), and
3. Visitor like/dislike by Plugin Taylor

There were a few others that looked like possibles but they did not seem to work (or maybe it was me not doing it right).

I have installed all three (and then uninstalled two) and given them a go.  The WP likes is the most sophisticaed one, and this is the one I have used here and on my Landlord Law blog.  In its original state it is a bit big and black, but I ameliorated this by changing the colour to our standard blue and making it a bit shorter.  I think it looks pretty cool.  There is a rather neat little hand icon too.

The WP likes plugin would not work on my eco blog (www.greenblogging.co.uk) so I used the french one, which perhaps appropriately, has a little heart.  Its rather sweet but I would not want to use it for a legal blog.

The third one rather scarily allows people to say that they *don’t* like your blog as well as say that they do like it.  However it was not as attractive as the other two, so I decided to give it a miss (nothing to do with not wanting to know about people hating the blog of course…).

So there you are.  What do you think of them? Will you use them on your blog now? Do you like this post?  (If so please click below).

One of the fun things about using WordPress for your blog, is all the plugins that you can use.  I have just found and installed the cumulus tag plugin.

I first spotted this on Technolama (a legal technology blog) where I thought it looked pretty cool.  Having found it by chance this evening, flicking through the popular plugins list, I have installed it here, and given it the SOB site colours (I have them written down so I can cut and paste as necessary).

What do you think?  Does it make the site look more interesting? Or does it give you a headache!