As of today, we’ve upgraded all our blogs to the latest and greatest version of WordPress: version 2.9.1. This new edition of the blog software features several exciting enhancements. A great video recap is here.

Here are just a few of my favorites, with notes cribbed from Weblog Tools Collection:

Image Editor

You can crop photos, resize them and more.

Post Trash Can

WordPress 2.9 introduces a much needed Trash can feature, which will allow you to undelete the posts you did not intend to.

Restoring Deleted Posts

If you deleted posts by mistake, you can always restore it by visiting the Trash menu and clicking on the restore link. You can restore multiple posts by using the Bulk options.

Embedding Videos and Images with oEmbed

You can now embed videos directly into WordPress by providing the URL of the video, instead of having to add the entire embed code into it. All you have to do is paste, say, a YouTube url, and the video embed will magically appear when you publish your post. Pretty cool, eh?

Enhanced spell, grammar, and word usage checking with “After the Deadline”

This isn’t actually a 2.9.1 addition, but I’ve used the upgrade as an opportunity to deploy this very powerful new plugin. In short, it gives you the most sophisticated spelling and grammar checking you can possibly get (better than Word or any other desktop application), built right into the WordPress “Add New Post” editor. To use it, you have two options:

1. Click on the “ABC” button when you’re done writing your post, and it’ll run the check.
2. Go to your user profile (click on your name in the top-right corner of your blog) and select the options you want the blog to review for every time you write a post. For example, you can tell it to always notify you when you’ve used a cliche or a double-negative. I highly recommend enabling this setting, as it’ll save you the trouble of having to remember to check your posts every time you compose.

More details in this “After the Deadline” video tutorial:

Hopefully this will fix some of the funkiness we’ve seen with the way the previous iPhone app worked with our install of WordPress:

WordPress 2 for iPhone is now available for downloads in the App Store. The new app is packed with lots of features which include:

A new, more efficient user interface that makes it faster to switch between comments, posts, and pages.

Various user interface refinements and bug fixes

New Comments interface, with Gravatars and the author URL shown in the comment list

Passwords are now stored in the keychain

Posts are now automatically saved and restored if network connection is lost during publishing

Added persistence, so the app re-opens in the blog you last used

Added an interface for manually entering the XMLRPC endpoint for non-standard setups

Fixed rotation-related visual glitches

Fixed errors where malformed XML prevented access to XMLRPC endpoint

Fixed edge case where local drafts were sometimes not saved

Fixed the order of photos so that they’re displayed in the order they’re uploaded/

Please note: The WordPress for iPhone 2 is a completely new application. If you are using a older version of WordPress app for iPhone, you will not be able to upgrade it, you will have to download the new application instead. You can safely remove the older version of the app, once you have installed version 2.0.

via WordPress for iPhone 2 Now Available in App Store « Weblog Tools Collection.

I’ve been getting this question more and more lately. Here’s a quick cheat sheet:

1. Write your post
2. click on the little music-note icon above the post
3. upload the mp3 file like you would an image file
4. once you’ve uploaded, make sure that the Link URL area is set to link to “File URL”
5. Click on “Insert” to insert the link into the post. Unlike an image, you won’t see anything in the post other than a hyperlink …
   
6. however, when you preview or publish the post, the flash player should load up. It may take a minute, because it needs the rest of the page to finish loading first, but once everything has loaded, the audio player will kick in

This video will walk you through the same workflow, more or less:

Setting up podcasts requires a few extra steps. Contact me directly if you want to set one of these up.

Got a good question from one of our bloggers today:

I was wondering if there’s any way to block a user from commenting on my blog. I checked WordPress, but I can’t find anything.

This is pretty easy to do. The setting in question is under SETTINGS –> DISCUSSION. You have the option to blacklist certain people using the “Comment Blacklist” window. There you can put in their email address or IP address or whetever you want to use to block them.

As a first step, take a look at their last comment (either the email you got, or on the COMMENTS menu of the blog) and then go in and add their email address to blacklist. If they start using alternate emails, then next time, grab their IP address out of the comment and use that.

Some other useful setting:

Weblog Tools Collection has a great post explaining all the in’s and out’s of the WordPress Dashboard — the first screen you see after logging into the blog. In addition to the overview below, they full post explains how you can customize the dashboard by changing the number of columns of widgets, dragging and dropping the order or widgets, and modifying the content of the widgets.

WordPress provides users with a really nice dashboard that will allow you to manage and perform several actions, however the first thing that you see when you login to WordPress is a screen as you see below (click to enlarge), lets explore that, I have marked the screen with numbers and will explain what each of it means accordingly.

When you first login to the WordPress admin, you will see a lot of information, sometimes this can be overwhelming, however we will decipher it here.

#1 – This is basically a place where you will see the name of the site and a option to visit your blog homepage.

#2 – You will see the name of the person who has logged in, and an option to logout, in addition to that you will also see quick links to perform several actions on WordPress.

#3 – The sidebar, this is a place from where you can perform several actions including writing new posts, editing them, managing plugins and users and more, all of which I will cover in future posts in this series.

#4 In this section you can change screen options and find help with problems, I will cover screen options detail in this post, to learn more about finding help read a earlier post Troubleshooting problems with WordPress.

#5 This section provides information about statistics about your blog with information such as number of posts, number of drafts, number of comments and so on.

#6 QuickPress is a easy and quick way to publish posts and images to your blog, again will be covered in detail in future posts.

#7 A easy way to keep an eye on comments, moderate them and reply to them.

#8 If you have posted drafts it will show up here, drafts are basically posts, however they have not been published to the blog, we will explore them in detail later.

#9 On this section you will see the latest news from the WordPress development blog.

#10 When someone links to you it is a really good thing, however you don’t have to visit each and every site on the internet to find out who linked to you, this section will query Google and display the latest incoming links to your blog, you can change it to query some other blog tracking source, we will see how to do that in this post.

#11 Information about plugins that add to the features provided by WordPress, includes most popular, newest and latest updated plugins. I will do a dedicated post on plugins later in this series.

#12 In this section you will see news from the WordPress community, you can directly subscribe to it too in your RSS reader, the website to subscribe is Planet WordPress.

#13 This is the footer area and has links to main WordPress site and also tells you which version of WordPress you are using.

via Touring and Understanding the WordPress Dashboard | Weblog Tools Collection.

A few people recently have asked if there are any instructions on how to schedule posts to publish at a later date — a very useful practice if you’re writing a whole bunch of posts in one sitting and want to space them out, or equally good if you’re going on vacation and don’t want your blog to go fallow in your absence.

While I’ve never actually written instructions for post-scheduling down before, they’re pretty short and sweet:
1. Click on the “edit” link next to “Publish immediately.”
2. Enter in the date that you’d like to publish on in the future
3. Click “OK,” then “Publish”

Your post should now say that it’s scheduled to go live on that date. Easy as that.

This same process works for back-dating posts too.
Here’s a great video demo’ing how publishing at a later date works.

Publishing your post at a later date « WordPress.tv.

I’ve been a huge fan of the WordPress for iPhone app ever since it debuted many months back. While the old webapps — for iPhone and other phones — made mobile blogging feasible, if a bit of a chore, the native iPhone app made it incredibly easy to post photos and other contents quick and easy.

The latest update to the app, v 1.2 includes a ton of new features, which make it even more user friendly. Here’s a quick overview, via WordPress.tv

As the video explains, here are some of the great new features:

• Landscape mode with extra wide keyboard

• Link creation help (as soon as you start typing www or http, the app will help you create a hyperlink on the fly)

• Comment moderation

• Photo resizing options

In order to enable mobile blogging from your iPhone, you’ll need to enable “Remote Publishing” on your blog. To do this, go to SETTINGS –> WRITING and check off the options under Remote Publishing, then click “Save Changes.”

And, of course, you’ll need to go to the iPhone App Store to download the application. It’s completely free.

You may have heard me mention before how you can speed up your blog with a nifty little addition to your browser called Google Gears. If you haven’t pulled the trigger on Gears yet, or don’t remember how, be sure to check out this little tutorial.

It will only take you a couple minutes to set up, and it’ll make your entire WordPress blogging experience infinitely faster.

Incidentally, though I grabbed the video that explains installing Gears in Internet Explorer, it works in most other browsers, too. For example, here are similar videos about setting it up for Firefox and Safari, courtesy of WordPress.tv.

I recently did a version of this presentation for the editors at the Courier-Post, and wanted to share it with anyone else who is interested in learning more about our blog strategy. For anyone who’s already blogging heavily on WordPress — most likely, everyone who is checking this site — it’ll seem like very basic stuff, but it’s important that everybody in the newspaper business understand the importance of blogs as a publishing tool.

Not a fad, not a threat, but a tool at our disposal — much like cameras, tape recorders, and even keyboards. Anyway, that’s what I set out to explain. Since I’m making this presentation public, I cut out our traffic numbers and kept this mostly to the big-picture stuff — e.g. what makes for a good newspaper blog, how to promote and reverse-publish from blogs, and what our ultimate goal for the blogs is (spoiler alert: 20% of overall traffic).

Incidentally, if you’re curious how I created this, I did the presentation in Keynote and recorded the audio and video screencast of it using Screenflow. Enjoy.

Why Blogs Matters from Ted Mann on Vimeo.

You may have heard the term before — Sticky Post — but what exactly does that mean?

In a nutshell, it’s a way for you to take an important post (be it an announcement, one that’s getting a lot of traffic, or some other kind of content you want to draw attention to) stay firmly attached to the top of your blog. That way, nobody will miss it.

Of course, this defies the blog’s usual reverse chronology structure (with the most recent content appearing first), but it’s a useful new feature of WordPress 2.7 that can and should be used (if sparingly).

Here’s how to make a post sticky:

1. When you’ve finished writing and editing your post, find the little “Publish” module. Click on “Edit” next to “Visibility”

2. Check off the box to “Stick this post to the front page.”

3. Click Publish (or Update, if it’s a post you previously published)

One other quick tip: I suggest adding “STICKY:” to the start of your post’s title whenever doing this. That way, your readers won’t get confused as to why an older post is appearing at the top of the blog.

And of course, don’t forget that eventually, all posts should become un-sticky. Eventually, go back, edit that post, and uncheck the sticky box when the post no longer needs to stick to the top of your blog.