About RSS

I Was Surfing the forums today, and I found a post with an interesting line.

What is RSS? Personally, I don’t care anymore. I just want it OFF my site. It looks bad for me to have things on my site that don’t work, that I don’t understand and probably wouldn’t use anyway.

After I read it, I was like, woah – slow down buddy! So let’s have a talk about RSS. It stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, if you didn’t know.

First of all, if you really want to know if it should be on your site or not, try doing some sort of a poll in your posts – see what your readers think! Some people will always know what RSS is, but never use it. Some people live off it, it’s your choice. Myself, I’m not a big fan of RSS – yet it somehow works it’s self into all of my sites. (like this one, just check the sidebar). That’s because I know other people use it – and it makes reading my blog easier for them. If you want someone’s feed, most blogs have a link to it, sometimes with the famous orange icon.

When you have RSS, you have a Feed. For example, mine would be: wpadvanced.wordpress.com/feed/rss/. That page gives you a summary of all my latest posts. You can do the same thing with comments. It gives you info like my blog name, and the title of each post is linked. Now, you can subscribe to my feed. Up near the top of the page, on any feed, will be a yellow bar.

That bar gives you the option of subscribing to a blog using a reader, some popular ones are Google, and My Yahoo (I’ll explain more on these another day). It’ll make reading your blog a lot easier for your visitors – and if you include a link to it then it’s your choice. But at least you know what it is now!

I’ve included a poll below, why not answer?

Thank You,

wpadvanced.

Regarding Themes

I’ve seen a lot of discussion over themes over the past days and I thought I would expand on how they work with WordPress.com.

Many people call themes different things, like templates, or designs (and both of them are right!). To get to the themes page, just click on the button that says “Change Theme”, located on the homepage of your dashboard.

WordPress.com currently offers 77 different ones, and you can move between them at any time. You can edit them via the CSS Upgrade, but that’s all – unless you move to WordPress.org. You can’t use a custom theme, unless your a VIP Member.

Most themes let you have extra options, like editing colors, using a custom header, having widgets, and more. When you have a theme activated, it won’t appear at all when you look for it on the themes page – but it’ll show up again once you de-activate it. You can even preview a theme before you activate it.

When searching for a theme, you can use filters, and it’s tags. Browse through them A-Z, Randomly, or check out some popular ones. You should also take a look at this video on how to choose a theme for your blog:

http://wordpress.tv/2009/01/13/choosing-a-theme-for-your-blog/

Thank You,

wpadvanced.

Having Two Accounts, With Two Blogs

Many WordPress.com Users have more than one account. Then they sign up for another blog on a new account. Here’s something I spotted on the WordPress forums today:

Our main blog is loukia.wordpress.com. Recently I created a new blog form work with my work e-mail aiscp1.wordpress.com. I can go to either blog. But now when I try to edit loukia, I am sent to the aiscp1 dashboard. I can no longer edit loukia! How do I get around this?

What you need to do, is be logged onto the correct account. Let’s say for this blog, my username is wpadvanced. But for my second blog, my username is wpadvanced1. If I’m trying to edit my blog that I have on wpadvanced1, I need to log out of my current account, and log into wpadvanced1. You can tell which account you are logged into via the global Dashboard (dashboard.wordpress.com). In the top right corner, It’ll say “Howdy, username!”.

Thank You,

wpadvanced.

This post was made in hope to help out a loyal wordpress user, aiscp1.

Making a Post a Sticky

By making a wordpress post a Sticky, it “sticks” it to the front page. Even if you make a new post, it’ll will show up as the very first post on your blog. This feature is useful for announcements, etc.

Making a Sticky, and making an Un-Sticky

1.  Navigate to the Edit page of a post, and look for the “Publish” part where you Update Post, etc.

2.  Find where it says “Visibility: Public”, and press the “Edit” button next to it.

3.  Now, find the checkbox next to “Stick this post to the front page”. Check the box to sticky it, and simply uncheck it to un-sticky it.

You have learned how to make a sticky post!

Thank You.
wpadvanced.

This post was made in hope to help out a loyal wordpress user, 4854derrida.

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