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Bloggy Thursdays: Backing Up Your Blog

Welcome to this installment of Bloggy Thursdays, where I share with my fellow bloggers tips and tutorials to maximize and better your blog. While I do not consider myself an expert, I do like to think that after 10+ years of blogging — in addition to my technical knowledge — I know more than the average blogger when it comes to making your blog more appealing to readers. Do you have any comments, questions, or topics you’d like to see covered here? Please send me a message via my contact form. Enjoy! I have stated in an old WordPress Plugins post that I use WP-DBManager to backup my blog. Well, times change and so do preferences. My current backup...

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The Ultimate WordPress Cheat Sheet

I know I haven't written anything in my WordPress for the Everyday Blogger series in a while, and for that I apologize. I promise I'll get crackin' on the next post soon! To tide you over in the meantime, here's a fantastic cheat sheet I saw over at Bit Rebels today. The WordPress Codex can be daunting for some — heck, I admit I have been overwhelmed quite a few times — and this looks to be the perfect one-look solution for any WordPress theme creator, modifier, or even a blogger. Enjoy! ...

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WordPress for the Everyday Blogger:
Part 6 – Styling the Sidebar

Prelude Part 1: Setting Up Part 2: Set the Bare BonesPart 3: The HeaderPart 4: The Main MenuPart 5: The Rest of the Header Because the ET-Starter theme is set so that the user can choose between one, two, or no sidebars (in whichever relative position to the main content), there exists various CSS classes for each type of sidebar and it location. For the purposes of this theme, the CSS classes we will be working with are .primary-sidebar and .primary-sidebar.content-two-columncontent-right. WordPress sidebars are relatively simple to style provided that you do not make any crazy changes to the structure of the theme. Each sidebar heading is set to h2, and each item below that is usually listed...

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WordPress for the Everyday Blogger:
Part 5 – The Rest of the Header

Prelude Part 1: Setting Up Part 2: Set the Bare BonesPart 3: The HeaderPart 4: The Main Menu In this post I will discuss how to complete the rest of the header elements in my blog theme. First up: the searchbar. In WordPress, adding a searchbar is relatively simple. All you need to do is insert the line <?php get_search_form(); ?> into wherever you want the searchbar to be. So in this case, since I want the searchbar to be included in the header section, I opened up the header.php file and created a new div called "searchbar" like so: <div id="searchbar"> <?php get_search_form(); ?> </div> I just added that to the very end of the header.php file, then saved. Here...

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