One of the most fantastic things about WordPress (and there are a lot of them) is the ability to add plugins. For complete newbies, a plugin is a little bit of software that will add a little something more to your main software - for those of you with Firefox or Flock this is probably a familiar concept.

I have downloaded and currently use the following plugins with WordPress:

1. FeedSmith/Feedburner - allows you to keep track of your subscribers and traffic at feedburner.com.
2. Akismet - this comes automatically loaded, but you have to activate it! If you plan on having actual traffic to your site, this is essential, as it filters spam comments. Always make sure to go in and check your Akismet spam comments once a week or so, though. It will sometimes filter out real comments.
3. WordPress Stats - this allows you to keep track of all sorts of things from the Dashboard in WordPress, not in the least site visitors, where they came from, what they clicked on.. but beware, it can get addictive!
4. WordPress Backup - this backs up your database… just in case things go bye bye!
5. Google XML Sitemaps - Makes a sitemap that basically enables google to find your site and pages more easily. Great for search engine optimisation (SEO).
6. Highlight Author Comments, Post-Plugin Library, Similar Posts - All cool features to add. Post-Plugin library is needed for the others to work.
7. All in One SEO Pack - Helps to optimise your blog for search engines.

I would recommend all of these plugins, and I’ll let you know if I use or install any more that I find helpful!

I put an image in one of my blogs’ sidebar yesterday, and it came out aligned to the left - which looked a bit naff.

I tried basic html - where you enclose what you want centred in <center> </center> tags - but that didn’t work!

After a bit of research, I found two ways of overcoming my problem. The trick is to put the image inside a page element that can be aligned to the center - such as a DIV or a paragraph tag:

<div align=”center”><img src=”image.gif” alt=”description”></div>

<p align=”center”><img src=”image.gif” alt=”description”></p>

When I did that - success! Just a handy little tidbit of knowledge…

Now, pretty much the first thing you have to do once you decide to get a blog up and running is find a host. “But I can just use a free account at Blogger - why should I pay for my own hosting??”

Easy - control. And traffic.

While researching starting my first blog, I was quickly convinced that a self-hosted account was the go. I could customise it as I saw fit, there were no ownership or advertising issues, I got a stack of bandwidth, and access to the best blogging platform out there - WordPress.

One good argument that persuaded me was traffic - say you get a Blogger account, build up a nice flow of traffic, start making some money… and then decide you want to move to self-hosted. What happens? You lose all of that great search engine positioning, links on other blogs etc. The advice I followed, and that I pass on, is start right from the beginning, and avoid all these problems.

But I digress! For my hosting, I decided on Dreamhost. They are good value, have fantastic features, and they are carbon neutral, too (which, if you read Sustainable Suburbia, you’ll know is something I’m interested in).

Not to mention one of the biggest drawcards - they offer one-click installation of WordPress!! The first time I installed WordPress I decided to do it manually… uck! Mistake!

The second time, I chose the one-click install.

It took about 20 seconds.

I actually had to sit there for a moment and pull myself together so I didn’t start shouting at myself (why the %&#@ didn’t I do it this way to start with?).

In short, Dreamhost is awesome, and they’ve got my business for good. Also, if you’re interested in making money out of being an affiliate, they offer an affiliate program, which I am a member of. So, if you sign up using my links or banners, I’ll get something from it - thank you!! If you sign up somewhere else, someone else will get something for it, and they’ll thank you.

I love the fact that all of my websites are hosted with them, so to manage them it’s a one-stop shop. And, I also buy any new domains through them at about $10 US.

So, if you’re thinking of starting a website or a blog, do it! And subscribe to my feed if you’d like to hear more of what I’ve learnt/am learning.

As I mention in my About page, I have no proper IT training. Everything I’ve learned over the years has been through my own haphazard process of trial-and-error. Many hours have been spent trying to get the html code just right, get the picture in just the right place etc.

However, in the past year, I have had the pleasure of my own personal IT Guy – my partner Nick. The first thing he ended up helping me on was my first WordPress installation. Now, I’ve dealt with ftp before, no big deal – but altering config files and dealing with SQL? Hmm…

Picture the scene – sitting on the bed, me with my laptop, and Nick with a book. I would be at some stage of the process, going fine. Then, I would start to make little annoyed noises, fidget, and finally cave in and say “I can’t get this to work!! What am I doing wrong?..” Nick, being the ever-helpful man that he is, suppressed a sigh, put aside his book, and figured out my problem. This went on for… a while

Eventually, it was all up and running, and he had earned himself mega brownie points.

Mostly, I figure things out myself and bumble along. But it’s nice to know I’ve got My IT Guy there if I ever find myself completely lost…

“Nick… what am I doing wrong…???”

You know when you load a URL and there is a little image in the address bar? Have you ever wondered how that gets there, and how you could have one for your page? Wonder no more!

It’s called a favicon, and it’s actually really simple to do. You just need a little html coding nous.

1. Create an image that is 16×16 pixels. I just use Paint for mine, as it was really easy.
2. Save the file as favicon.ico (ico is a file extension).
3. Use your ftp program to upload favicon.ico to your root directory - e.g. for this site, I whacked it straight into the womanvsweb folder.
4. Go into your web page (in WordPress this is under Design/Theme Editor in your Dashboard) open the header.php file or your index file and insert the following code: <LINK REL=”SHORTCUT ICON”
   HREF=”/~your_directory/favicon.ico”>
5. This code should go immediately before the </head>  tag
6. Replace /~your_directory/ with the URL of your site, e.g. http://womanvsweb.com/ NOTE: I found that if I put the www. before my website name in the link it didn’t work - experiment to see which works for you.
7. Reload your page, and you should see your little icon pop up in the address bar!

It gives your site that little edge - wow, they know how to do that? They must be an expert…
For a more in-depth explanation, have a look here. I tried a few other methods, but this was the one that actually worked for me!

We first got internet access back in 1996, when I was in Year 10 at school. We’d had a computer since the mid-eighties, and I’d always loved playing games on there. So, when we got connected, it was a whole new playground - and one I took to with gusto!

I used it for school, but, like most people, also to learn more about my passion. “And what was that” I hear you ask? It was The X-Files. Without fail, on a Wednesday night at 8:30, you would find me in my dark room, watching the latest episode on my own little TV. I wanted to date Mulder, and I wanted to be Scully. In short - I loved it!

So, I explored around and found a lot of like-minded people. One type of site I particularly liked were the ‘member’ ones - where you could join and celebrate your fetish with others. I joined a few, and then I decided - hey, why not make my own?

So I did. It was called The Loyal Order of G-Woman and Men Devoted to the Worship of Scully and Mulder… (deep breath)…. or TLOGWMDWSM. I had hours of fun finding pictures to put up, organising the page layout, finding/writing content, and teaching myself HTML by writing everything I needed and learnt into a little purple spiral-bound notebook. I still have that book somewhere!

And, after a few weeks, something started happening. People started visiting, and even more exciting, they started joining! You see, I had a ‘join’ page where you could e-mail me and become a G-Woman or G-Man. The e-mails started trickling in, then flooding in. I ran a competition amongst my subscribers to write the motto for the site, I got complements on how cool it was, and I enjoyed myself.

After a while, the e-mails became a bit much, and I stopped adding new people - this was in the days before I knew about auto-responders and auto-lists. My interest in the show also waned, and so I left the site alone more and more often. I would check it now and again to see the visitor numbers which, from memory, got up into at least the hundreds of thousands.

I made another site at the same time, which was a homage to all my favourite TV shows. Things like The Pretender, Xena - Warrior Princess. I paid for hosting on this one, and it was great fun, too.

But then I grew up, and left them behind. I really wish now that I’d kept an copy of TLOGWMDWSM on my hard drive - but it’s now lost to the mists of time, as far as I know.

Something this early history taught me is that you should focus on the things you love - because that will motivate you and keep you going. So if you’re planning on starting a blog - start with your passions. Once you find something you want to tell the world about, half the battle is won.