Beautifully crafted & user focused web design by lee munroe

I had the pleasure of attending and talking at Barcamp Belfast on Saturday (25th April) before dashing off and getting a plane to London for the marathon.

I had a great morning and going by feedback from others the whole day was a great success with some fantastic speakers and over 350 attendees. Well done to Andy Good for putting it together, along with all those who helped out. There’s a good video montage of the day here.

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I started the year looking to write a few guest posts for other blogs and not just my own so I approached Michael from Pro Blog Design with an idea for a post.

The post takes a look at what you should do after installing Wordpress and acts as a checklist that you can use to ensure you’ve changed and activated all that you should do for each of your Wordpress sites. I came up with the checklist initially for myself but thought it would be useful to share, especially for beginners.

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You like to comment on blog posts but you’re sick of having to enter the usual name, mail and website fields (even with autofill it still requires effort).

If you’re using Firefox there’s a handy solution. EasyComment is a plugin that stores this default information for you. Then, when you’re on a blog post and you want to leave a comment, click the easyComment button and it will fill in all the fields. You can even enter a default message like ‘Nice post, thanks’ if that’s all you want to say.

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New year, time to go through all your websites and blogs and update the copyright date that you placed in the footer, right?

Not if you were smart and developed your site so it updates automatically.

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I use MAMP for running Apache, MySQL and PHP on the Mac. A simple click and all 3 are up and running in 5 seconds and you can easily configure your ports and root folder.

However, I was having trouble accessing my MAMP server through Parallels. I use Parallels to test my sites on Internet Explorer and it’s pretty important that I’m able to do this in development before going live.

I found this excellent solution from Tim Fletcher and thought I’d summarize it below so you too can get testing your Wordpess, CodeIgniter, PHP sites etc. through Parallels.
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Nearly everything you’ll need to do on Wordpress someone’s been there and done it first. One of the great things about Wordpress is that there’s so many plugins available and they’re so easy to install on your theme.

Here’s 10 (+bonus) plugins that I used on my Wordpress theme that should aid both you and your readers.

1. Popular posts

Over time your most popular and useful posts will slowly fade away into your archives. Use this handy plugin so you can showoff your top posts to new readers in your sidebar.

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