Music's Place

Needed to share some basic wordpress findings with others after considering the trials & tribulations of installing 2 basic functions mentioned on title. It took a few forums to figure out how to implement their function.

For those that have visited here before you may notice a few changes to Music’s Place namely the theme along with unseen elements of Blog Stats and Akismet plug-in (after only a week and a bit it has already captured over 600 spam). As much as I don’t have time for spammers I admire their computer prowess. I mean most of us are running powerful systems with the latest defense systems engaged and have trouble deleting a file while you can get someone from a cave in Himalayas with a pedal-powered typewriter connected to some ancient morse-code device via an E.T type phone home system made from the nest of horned puffins bouncing a few satellites where they spam you from an anonymous server in the Netherlands. Wow imagine they used that skill for something productive?

Theme Change

Why change theme? As much as the old antbag theme appealed to me it proved quite frustrating to colour match advertisements from google and other affiliates which led me to understanding why so many opt for the white background on their respective sites. Along with picture borders looking quite ugly in fact as Firefox will display a grey border (not the grey frame that you see in this post) whereas explorer shows a black border when using the wordpress border function. With the help of a photo editor the need for bordering pictures is defunct as framing and bordering occurs off site leaving the desired result when uploading and posting pictures. The border in the photo editing software by default is white hence the requirement for a white background.

Some work remains to recode certain elements of the new theme to have it working the way I’d like though with average time of late that may occur sometime in early 2008. Most annoying factor of a theme update has to be recoding the sidebars don’t you think?

Akismet-Anti-Spam

This plug in acquisition was an ordeal yet a blessing once installed. As many wordpress users may know. In order to activate this plug-in you need an API key. So where is this API key if you are hosting a site on your own domain? Exactly… it does not exist. So the steps required to attain an API key :

• Register a wordpress account at wordpress.com
• Use the API key given to you from your new wordpress account for the plug-in when prompted.
• Simple as that and you are up and running with no need to filter your messages and mark each spam to delete.
• You will need to download the akismet plug-in of course before activating.

Blog Stats

Now the Akismet plug-in was a piece of cake to install compared to attempting to have the blog stats plug-in work. Found difficulty discovering clear steps in setting up the API to work for blog stats. So from what is remembered I will give the few steps which enabled blog-stats to work for me.

• Register an account with WordPress if not already done
• Download the blog-stats plug-in and have it ready for activation
• Log into your new wordpress account with administrative authority
• Add your own domain hosted wordpress as a user
• Go back and activate the blog stats plug-in and the API-key that did not work before should work now (I hope)

You should now have access to your stats.
Good luck.