Using WordPress’s text widget, which allows to put any plain text or HTML in the sidebar, it’s a breeze to make such a list. The HTML code

<ul><li>
<a href="http://bibsonomy.org/user/michelw" title="papers"><img
src="http://bibsonomy.org/favicon.ico" style="vertical-align:middle"
> Bibsonomy</a>
</li><li>
<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/michelwermelinger" title="contacts"><img
src="http://www.linkedin.com/favicon.ico" style="vertical-align:middle"
> LinkedIn</a>
</li></ul>

will generate this list:

• Bibsonomy
• LinkedIn

The only problem is if the site doesn’t have a favicon file. The best is to use Google to obtain the favicon for a given domain, because  it will return a default globe icon if no favicon can be found. In the HTML code above, simply use as image source src="http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=bibsonomy.org" or similar.

Of course, if you have added lots of widgets to and customized the theme of your retired blog, all that will be lost, and you will have to decide whether and how to change the look and feel of the kept blog in order to accommodate the content of the retired blog. No automation can help you in that… However, I’d expect links and their categories to also be exported, but they aren’t. Hence, if you have lots of links and blogrolls on your sidebars, I have no clue how to easily copy them to another blog. Fortunately, that was not the case with my digital art blog to be retired; a simple transfer of posts (and their comments, categories and tags) was all I needed.

I was pleasently surprised when the import process offered to also get the files uploaded to the retired blog. Since it used some Java applets, this would be really useful. Unfortunately, I got error messages saying ‘unknown file extension’: apparently only certain file attachments can be imported. Oh well, no big problem. I logged into my web hosting service, where I keep all my blogs in separate sub-folders, and used the cPanel file manager to move all uploaded files from one blog’s folder to the other, and then delete the retired blog’s folder. Back to the main cPanel view, I used the Manage redirects functionality in the Domains sub-panel, in order to make all URLs of the form http://michel.wermelinger.ws/digitar-te (the retired blog) redirect to http://michel.wermelinger.ws/chezmichel (this blog). Since I use the same permalink format in both blogs, namely year/month/post-title, any links to my retired blog will correctly resolve to the corresponding posts or files in this blog.

To sum up, the export/import facilities of WordPress go a long way to help the merging of blogs, but be prepared to do quite some manual tweaking, especially if the two blogs are very dissimilar in the presentation of their content. Among the things to consider are the merging of different permalink structures, ‘About’ pages, and blogrolls.

The theme is very easy to use. When writing each post, add two custom fields, named lead_image and secondary_image. The value of each field is the URL of an image, which can be external to your site or have been previously uploaded. The larger lead image will appear at the top of your blog post, while the smaller secondary image will appear in the index pages. The theme automatically crops the images to the dimensions needed. This means you can use the same URL for both custom fields, which is what I do in my stamp blog: each post is about a group of stamps and I select one of them to be featured both in the post header and in the index pages. I think that using the same image is better, because it provides ‘navigational continuity’ when the blog visitors select a post from an index page. The theme demo site also uses the same images for post headers and index pages. The theme crops the images by selecting the central part and enlarging to the required ratio. This usually works fine, but occasionally the relevant part of the image is not in the middle. In those cases you have to crop your images on your computer (593 x 225 pixels for the lead image and 293 x 150 pixels for the secondary image) and then upload them.

Version 1.2.1 of the theme has some problems, and to fix them I had to find my way through the PHP and CSS files in the Appearance>Editor administration panel. Here is a list of the problems, my fixes, and the solutions I’d like to see in the next release of the theme, in the hope it’s useful for other users of this great theme.

1. Problem: Clicking the ‘About’ button at the top of each page doesn’t do anything.
   Fix: Replace /# by /about in header.php.
   Solution: This change should be part of the next version, so that at least there is an error message if the user hasn’t created the ‘About’ page.
2. Problem: Categories are shown in multiple columns at the bottom of each post. I prefer them on the sidebar, using the usual categories widget.
   Fix: In files page.php, single.php and index.php delete the line of code that includes the show_categories.php file.
   Solution: Create a theme option that allows to turn categories at the bottom on or off.
3. Problem: HTML tags like <strong>, <code> and <em> are ignored, forcing one to use the HTML editor to write posts, in order to use alternative HTML tags like <b>.
   Fix: Delete those tags in reset.css, so that their default behaviour is in effect.
   Solution: I’m not a CSS expert, so there may be a better way to do it.
4. Problem: The blog’s tagline is not shown below the blog’s name.
   Fix: Insert a PHP call to bloginfo('description'); in header_text.php.
   Solution: Do proper styling of the tagline.
5. Problem: The number of comments is superposed on the secondary images. This obscures them and doesn’t look good if most posts have no comments.
   Fix: Delete the post-comments class in index.php.
   Solution: Provide a theme option that allows this feature to be turned on or off.
6. Problem: The date format of a post is hard-wired to 'M jS Y' (e.g. ‘Aug 31st 1999′).
   Fix: Changed it to 'j F Y' (i.e. ’31 August 1999′) in single.php.
   Solution: Ideally, the theme would automatically pick up the format chosen in the Settings>General administration panel.
7. Problem: If a blog post hasn’t been tagged, the box below the post will just state ‘This post has been tagged’, because it assumes a list of tags will follow.
   Fix: In single.php, change the text within the for-tags paragraph to the following (note the punctuation and spacing):

This post is <?php if (!get_the_tag_list()) echo 'not'; ?>
tagged<?php the_tags(' ', ', ', ''); ?>.

I also did another small change to the theme, which is a matter of taste: in style.css I reduced the opacity of the title box over the stamp images from 80% to 70%.

I could have just replaced the falling leaves photo in the header by some photo of beach and sea or the like, but it wouldn’t match the foliage on the sides. Moreover,  I wasn’t complete satisfied with the greyish green or the fonts used by Maple Leaf. Installing and trying out different WordPress themes is a breeze, the problem is choosing among the thousands of freely available themes.

After spending several hours during the past days (I’m insane, I know) surfing the web and trying out various ones, I settled for the Amazing Grace theme you’re looking at. Its green-based colour scheme establishes some continuation with the previous look of my blog, while definitely improving on the typography, with a large and readable font. Other things I like about Amazing Grace:

• the compact header, avoiding wasting valuable screen estate on small laptops and netbooks;
• the RSS feed icon and its placement in the header;
• the small colourful icons to provide visual cues on a post’s date, categories and comments;
• the horizontal layout of the categories in the header;
• the rotating photos in the header, which can help keep the blog in tune with seasons.

Unfortunately, no theme is perfect and there are also some drawbacks:

• the title of the blog doesn’t appear in the browser window and tabbed windows in Firefox;
• the date and author of a post are unnecessarily repeated;
• there is no icon for tags and they aren’t separated from the post;
• the second sidebar makes the main column narrower, leading to more scrolling.

Fortunately, Amazing Graze has a dedicated forum on the author’s website, so hopefully someone will be able to help me fix some of those minor snags. Overall, it’s a good looking, clean and readable theme.

I first looked up the Codex to see how to upgrade a WordPress installation, but I didn’t like the process. It involves backing up the current installation and then overwriting it with the new installation, but making sure to handle some special cases. It sounded too fidgety to me. So, I came up with the following process, and so far I haven’t found any errors in the upgraded blogs.

1. Log into your blog’s administration panels and deactivate any plugins that might conflict with the upgrade. For example, I deactivated a plugin that improves the menu structure, because it has been completely changed in version 2.7.
2. Log out of WordPress and log into your web host’s cPanel.
3. Backup the MySQL database containing your blog’s posts, pages, categories and tags, as explained in an earlier post.
4. In cPanel’s file manager, rename the root of your current blog to some other name. Continuing the example, I renamed the public_html/michel/ludossier folder to public_html/michel/ludossier26 (to remind me it uses WordPress 2.6).
5. Install WordPress 2.7 using Fantastico, in the way described previously in this blog. Create a new blog with exactly the same parameters as you created the original blog, i.e. with the same name, in the same folder, and with the same administrator username and password as the old blog you want to upgrade. For the example, I created a blog called ludossier in the ludossier folder.
6. Go into the file manager of cPanel and copy (not move!) file wp-config.php from the old blog’s folder to the new blog’s folder, e.g. from /public_html/michel/ludossier26 to /public_html/michel/ludossier.
7. Look under the wp-content folder for any new plugins, themes and files you have uploaded to your old blog, and copy them to the corresponding place in the new blog’s folders.
8. Log into your blog as usual. WordPress will say that the database needs to be updated and ask you to press a button. Do so and you’re done!

Basically, the whole idea is to create in the same folder as the old blog a new blog that uses the latest WordPress software (steps 4-5). It has to be the same folder: otherwise all URLs used by the blog (like the permalinks of your posts) would break. We then transfer the configuration from the current blog to the new one (steps 6-7). Note that although Fantastico created a new MySQL database for the new blog in step 5, step 6 makes the new blog use the same database as the current blog. Hence we need step 3 to back the old version up, in case something nasty happens.

When you go into the sub-panel for the first time, you’ll be surprised to see that no widgets are used, in spite of your blog having a sidebar. This is because each theme shows some widgets by default, when none are selected. The Kubrick theme that comes pre-installed with WordPress shows by default these widgets, in this order:

1. Search: the search box
2. Pages: the list of pages
3. Archives: the monthly post archive
4. Categories: the list of categories used to classify posts and pages
5. Links: the list of external links, with one section per link category
6. Meta: a fixed list of miscellaneous links

To remove the Categories and Meta widgets — I will reintroduce the former when I start using categories — I simply clicked on the left side of the panel on the Search, Pages, Archive and Links widgets, in that order. This added them to the right side of the panel. If I had wished to change the order the widgets appear on the sidebar, I could simply drag up or down each of the widgets on the right side of the panel.  To finish, I clicked ‘Save changes’ on the right-hand side of the panel, below the sidebar widget list.

Note that the Links widget lists all the links marked as visible in the Manage > Links sub-panel. The widget will automatically create in the sidebar one section per link category. Since I was re-arranging the sidebar, I took the opportunity to add links to my other blogs (I know it’s crazy to start three blogs in parallel…) and put them under the new ‘Alter blegos’ (get it?) link category. Thus, the Links widget now lists both the new and the existing wordpress.org links.

One problem emerged when looking at my blog’s new sidebar: the pages were listed in the wrong order. If you remember my earlier post, I had tweaked the page order number so that pages would be listed in the order I wanted. However, the Pages widget lists them in alphabetical order by default. Fortunately this can be changed:

1. Go into the Design > Widgets sub-panel.
2. On the right-hand side, click on the ‘Edit’ link within the Pages widget. This will show the widget’s options.
3. In the ‘Sort by:’ drop-down menu, select ‘Page ID’.
4. Click ‘Change’ to hide again the widget’s options.
5. Click ‘Save changes’ below the widget list.

Now that the sidebar is done, the next thing is to install some useful plugins, besides Akismet, and to change the theme. I have nothing against the default theme, but I’m not the only one to find it slightly unexciting…

Fortunately, Automattic, the company behind WordPress, also developed Akismet, a spam filtering service, and a plugin for (i.e. an extension to) WordPress in order to use that service. The Akismet plugin, which is part of the WordPress installation but needs to be explicitly activated, automatically marks comments as spam as they are submitted to your blog, and deletes them after 15 days. The spam comments never show up on the blog, keeping it clean. Akismet is not perfect, so you should check manually (e.g. once a week) that all comments marked as spam are indeed spam. If you re-classify them as valid comments, they will be sent to the Akismet service so that it learns to improve its filtering.

These are the steps to start using Akismet on your blog:

1. Go to wordpress.com and click on ‘sign up’.
2. Choose a username and password, give a valid e-mail, and click on ‘Just a username, please’, unless you also want to host a blog on wordpress.com
3. You will receive an e-mail with a link to click, in order to activate your wordpress.com account.
4. Wait a couple of minutes more, and you’ll get a second e-mail confirming that the account was created. The most important is that the e-mail will also contain an API key. Copy it to the clipboard.
5. Log into your blog’s administration panel and go to the Plugins sub-panel. In the list of existing plugins, to the right of the Akismet entry, click ‘Activate’.
6. In the next screen, paste the API key into the text box. Save the changes.

Done! Now continue working on the blog’s content and let the spammers waste their life away…

The default WordPress installation shows on the sidebar several links to wordpress.org pages (documentation, etc.), all under the heading ‘Blogroll’. That is actually a slight misnomer, because a blogroll is a list of other blogs that the author of this blog reads. The WordPress team knows that, but nevertheless chose the term ‘blogroll’ to categorise any links (not just to blogs) that the blog author hasn’t yet classified.

So, if I want to change the ‘Blogroll’ heading into ‘WordPress.org’, I will have to create a new link category with that name and then move all links from the old to the new category. I will also take the opportunity to hide some of the links I don’t care about (like the WordPress developers’ blog).

After logging into the administration panel, I went to Manage > Link Categories subpanel and created a new category named ‘WordPress.org’. I just provided the name, leaving the other information fields empty. Then, in the Manage > Links subpanel, I went through the list of existing links, clicking on each link’s name to edit the link (note that the Codex documentation for the Manage > Links subpanel is slightly outdated). This will open a Write > Link subpanel, with all information for the existing link pre-filled. For those links I wanted to keep, I changed the category from ‘Blogroll’ to ‘WordPress.org’, whereas for those I didn’t want to keep I just made them private, to hide them. I could have removed them, but one never knows if they will become useful later on. After doing all this, the original sidebar‘s Blogroll list became the currently seen list.

My next goal is to get rid of the rather useless Meta section in the sidebar.

• a lot of PHP files that provide the funtionality,
• the files that have been uploaded to the blog,
• and a MySQL database that stores all posts, pages, and sidebar links.

All this has to be copied to the new web host. To make things easier, I chose a hosting service that also provides cPanel.  The steps are rather straightforward and take only a few minutes (depending on the size of your blog), although it took me some hours to figure them out.

1. Log into the cPanel of your old hosting service.
2. In the file manager, select the directory containing your blog (public_html/michel/chezmichel in my case) and compress it into a zip file and then download it to your local machine.
3. In the backup section of cPanel, download a backup of the database. If you created the blog with Fantastico, the database will be called OU_wrdpN, where OU is the username you were assigned by the old hosting provider and N is a number. After performing this step, you will have a file wrdpN.sql.gz on your local machine.
4. Log out from your old host provider and log into the cPanel of the new one.
5. In the backup section, restore the backup of the database. It will be called NU_wrdpN, with your new username NU which may be different from the OU username at your old provider. That’s OK.
6. In cPanel’s file manager, recreate the same parent directory for the blog, if necessary (public_html/michel in my case). In that directory, upload the zip file from your local machine and uncompress it. This will restore all WordPress files that were in the old host provider into the same path on the new provider.
7. While in the file manager, use the code editor to open the file wp_config.php that exists in the blog’s directory. You will see at the start of the file three lines similar to

   define('DB_NAME', 'OU_wrdpN');    // The name of the database
   define('DB_USER', 'OU_wrdpN');     // Your MySQL username
   define('DB_PASSWORD', 'rP9v[4AwLKxx'); // ...and password

   1. The first line tells WordPress which database is associated to the blog. Change OU to NU, if your new username is different  from the old username.
   2. The second and third lines define the username and password that WordPress will use to access and modify the database, to store new posts, pages, and links. If the blog was created by Fantastico, the username is the same as the database name, and the password is some random sequence of letters, digits and symbols. You can keep your old database username, but I preferred to also change OU to NU in the second line, to keep the username the same as the database name.
   3. Copy the password into the clipboard, i.e. select the password and press Ctrl-C.
   4. Save the changes to the file and exit the code editor.
8. Go to cPanel’s ‘MySQL Databases’ section.
9. Create a new database user with the same username and password as given in the wp_config.php file. Just press Ctrl-V to paste the password into the appropriate text field. Click ‘Create User’ to finish.
10. On the right side of the same page, add the newly created user to the database restored in step 5 above. Click the ‘Submit’ button and in the new screen give all privileges to the new user.

That’s all it takes to transfer the blog! Note that these steps assume you have your own domain name for your blog and that you want to keep it, i.e. you just want to change where your blog is stored, not the URLs of any of your pages and posts. In that case, the only thing still to be done is to go to your domain name registrar and let it know which are the name servers of your new hosting provider. This change will take up to 48 hours to propagate through the internet, but once it’s done, whenever anyone types your blog’s URL into their browser, they will be transparently redirected to the new hosting provider. And since all the URLs were kept, any external pages and search engines will still point to your blog.

However, if you don’t have your own domain name, i.e. if your blog’s URL was something like http://blogname.oldhostingcompany.co.uk and will now be http://blogname.newhostingcompany.com, then my guess (I haven’t tried it out) is that, after step 3 above, you have to uncompress the database backup on your local machine, open the wrdpN.sql text file, do a global replace of the old URL by the new one, and compress the file again. You will also have to make the old URL redirect to the new one; this can be done in cPanel’s ‘Manage Redirects’ screen (in the old provider account, of course). In that way, in time search engines and other people will pick up your new URL. However, sooner or later you’ll want to close your old provider’s account, and then there’s no guarantee that someone’s links to your blog will be broken. Nothing beats having your own domain from the start.

By default, the permalink of a WordPress post is the blog’s URL appended by ?p=N, where N is the post’s unique number, assigned by WordPress. For example, the default permalink of this page is http://michel.wermelinger.ws/chezmichel/?p=103. The URL for a page is not much better: …/?page_id=N. Having numbers in the URLs is not very informative and  doesn’t help search engines. Like almost everything else in WordPress, the permalink structure is configurable. Just go to the Settings > Permalinks administration sub-panel and choose one of the available options or compose your own structure.

I chose the year/month/slug structure, where slug is any sequence of letters you wish. By default, the slug is automatically generated from the post’s or page’s title, by replacing spaces with hyphens and dropping any punctuation. For example, if this post were titled “It’s a nice day!”, the URL would be http://michel.wermelinger.ws/chezmichel/2008/10/its-a-nice-day. When you edit a post or page, the slug is shown directly beneath the post’s or page’s title and you can edit it to make it clearer or shorter. Continuing the example, the slug might be changed to  a-nice-day, in order to make it shorter and avoid any confusion between “it’s” and “its”.

The WordPress Codex warns that not using a date-based permalink structure might break some date-dependent features, like the calendar of posts, one of the widgets that can be installed in the side bar. Moreover, starting post permalinks with the date of the post makes it very easy to access the archives: just drop the slug part. For example, all of this month’s entries can be listed by accessing the webpage http://michel.wermelinger.ws/chezmichel/2008/11.

Speaking of sidebar widgets: I should clean up all those default links to WordPress sites.