The iAssistant is an AssistU trained virtual assistant who also writes instructional ebooks about WordPress plugins.
Archive for ebook
The Easiest Way To Move A Blog
Posted by: | CommentsWhen I first started thinking about moving this blog to a new domain, I was really dreading it. I’m not that tech savvy, and in the past, moving my WordPress blogs have caused my sites to be down for several days. Since I sell two ebooks about plugins, Contact Form 7 and Subscribe2, on this site, I certainly didn’t want it to go down at all!
So, I started doing all the research ahead of time to ensure a smooth move. After purchasing Thesis and realizing it had quite a learning curve, I went to the DIY forum. I thought that migrating this blog to My WP Works, a Thesis site, might be harder than I thought.
Within a few minutes, pbarron on this thread, had answered my question. It was unbelievably easy! Just a few simple steps and all my blog posts and images were in place on the new domain.
To move the plugins, I went into my cpanel’s File Manager and copied and pasted them to the new domain. Many of them needed no setup at all, a few did. And some still don’t work. More on that later. I’m not sure how many of them I’ll need because Thesis has so many gadgets built into it.
My new site was up in seconds. I’m still amazed. There were a few glitches, like the permalinks. I couldn’t get them to work, but it was my own dizziness. I had set the permalink to custom: /%post-name%/. It should have been: /%postname%/. Once I did that, everything worked exactly as it should.
Don’t forget to go into Dashboard/Settings and change the General, Writing, Reading, and anything else that would be set up with a first-time installation. Otherwise, the information for the new blog will read for the previous one.
I’ve discovered my Contact Form 7 forms don’t work, but haven’t had time to investigate why. It seems that every Thesis page is a blog page with a place for comments. Maybe that’s why. I’ll get back to you on that.
My list of email subscribers in Subscribe2 didn’t move to the new domain, but there weren’t that many so I’ll transfer them manually. Any of you want to sign up? 
Bye for now, talk with you soon!
Quiz Those Spammers Out of Business!
Posted by: | CommentsAnother great spam fighter within the Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin is the quiz option. You can require the site visitor to answer math problems (like Google does) or tell you the color of grass. Just one more obstacle for those just-don’t-get-it spammers.
Quizzes are less of a problem for the novice webdesigner because they don’t require the server support that CAPTCHAs do. And, for some of your site visitors, they will be much easier to understand than the strange combination of numbers and letters on a CAPTCHA.
Personally, I like the combination of a quiz and an acceptance checkbox. I’ll talk about that on my next blog post.
WP Podcasting Adventure
Posted by: | CommentsHi Everyone!
I know I said I would be working on an ebook entitled” The Easy, The Hard & The Impossible” about the Sociable, About Me 3000, and Share This WordPress plugins, but I got sidetracked today. Do any of you get sidetracked?
Someone asked me today if I knew how to podcast. I replied that I’d been wanting to learn. To be honest, part of me is scared. I don’t have an iPod, my husband does. I had iTunes installed on my computer but uninstalled it because I never used it. Never one to let technology beat me, I plunged right in.
First, I decided I should figure out exactly what a podcast was, yep, that’s where I was. Wikipedia had an excellent article on podcasting. Basically, podcasting is different from a plain mp3 file because it can be delivered by RSS.
A sidenote here: RSS is handy if you want to avoid email spam, but it doesn’t have the intimacy that having something delivered to your inbox does. RSS is read through a web browser, for those of you who were once like me and had no clue.
So, now I’m working with two WordPress plugins to insert podcasts into blogs. I have to say, it is one of the harder plugin functions I’ve investigated. 
First, I’ll learn podPress (Mighty Seek) and then I’ll graduate to Blubrry Power Press. Power Press is an upgrade from podPress.
I hope I’ve provided some useful information here. There will definitely be more to come!
WP Social Networking Plugins
Posted by: | Comments
Hello Everyone,
I’ve been working an hour or so every day on an ebook featuring three WordPress social networking plugins: Sociable, About Me 3000, and Share This. It’s up to nine pages now. I’m calling it “The Easy, The Hard, and The Impossible”. So far, the ebook contains support information and how the plugin displays on the page. As I dig into the functionality of these WP plugins, I’m sure there will be more.
What I’ve found so far has helped me, if no one else. I now have an “About Me” widget in my sidebar. I couldn’t get it to work before. The more time I spend with WordPress, the more I understand how things come together on my websites.
Sociable displayed a list of my social networking links at the bottom of my blog posts and worked great. Then, I saw Chris Brogan’s blog. He uses Share This, so I started using that plugin. Once the site visitor clicks the icon, she can choose from a multitude of social networking sites. If she wanted to tweet my post, she would login to her Twitter account. But, if she signs up for a Share This account, her information is saved and she wouldn’t need to type it in every time. It’s an extra step the first time, but saves one every time thereafter. Sounds like a win-win situation for the time impaired. 
Bye for now, I’ll talk with you again soon.
WP Plugins-How to Choose?
Posted by: | Comments
WordPress is a great CMS and enables newbies to have their own website with a few simple clicks. Then it gets complicated, because we always want to change and tweak and put our own unique style to our very own website. We change the theme and lose all our content. Or maybe it’s not lost, just misplaced, so we have to find it and put it where it’s supposed to be.
Anyone ever been there? That’s why I use WP themes from iThemes, their great tech support! I haven’t lost as much content since I’ve used their templates. And when I do, someone’s there to help me quickly find it and get my website back up.
But the biggy, the one WP modification we make, that can do more damage than anything else is a plugin installation. That’s because plugins are pieces of code, and once installed, they can “break” the code in your template. The only way to save your website is to delete the offending plugin. Some plugins are malicious and leave code on your website that can only be deleted by a professional.
Over the next year, I’m doing a series of blog posts about some of the more popular WordPress plugins, and I’ll include screen shots. One of the problems I’ve encountered with installing WP plugins is that after putting hours of research into getting the plugin installed and working correctly, it’s just not what I need, or it doesn’t fit well with the rest of my site, or it is just more trouble than it’s worth. So, I delete it and go looking for another.
With that in mind, my blog posts will be designed to ease your pain in your quest for that perfect WordPress plugin that will work symbiotically with your website and give you a site that builds your following and promotes your business!
Is there a WP plugin you’d like to know more about? Please leave that information in a comment on this post.
Stay tuned!
