Tag: wordpress

WordPress avatar — creating one for the blog admin

WordPress allows one to associate an avatar with a user profile. This is a small picture that will be displayed on each post or comment you make to the blog, giving casual visitors a ready means of identifying all your posts. However, it is not readily apparent how the site admin is to set this avatar. There are no settings anywhere in the Site Admin control panels for setting this. Accordingly, the admin is stuck with the default ‘phantom person’ for an avatar.
This Two Minute Tutorial explains step-by-step how to set up a custom avatar for the admin.

WordPress allows one to associate an avatar with a user profile. This is a small picture that will be displayed on each post or comment you make to the blog, giving casual visitors a ready means of identifying all your posts.

However, it is not readily apparent how the site admin is to set this avatar. There are no settings anywhere in the Site Admin control panels for setting this. Accordingly, the admin is stuck with the default ‘phantom person’ for an avatar.

The key to rectifying this is to realize that WordPress does not use a local copy of your avatar. Instead, it uses an avatar that you upload to gravatar.com, and associate with your email address. According to the good folks at gravatar, their name derives from Globally Recognized avatar. By using this service, your avatar will automatically follow you to comments you make on random sites of others. This eliminates the need to upload an avatar to each site upon which you would like your avatar displayed.

Once you realize this, the implementation is pretty simple.

  1. Go to the gravatar.com website
  2. Watch the two minute video to get an overview
  3. Log in with your WordPress.com credentials*
  4. Click on ‘Add one by clicking here’. This will open a screen asking for the source of the picture to be uploaded
  5. Choose from Hard Drive; Internet URL; Webcam; Previously uploaded — as appropriate
  6. Assuming Hard Drive, a new window will open allowing you to browse your file system for the desired picture
  7. Locate the desired picture, then click ‘Next’. This will upload your picture
  8. Crop your picture as desired, then click next
  9. Choose your rating – G, PG, R, or X
  10. That’s it!

Allow some time for the changes to propagate throughout the internet. Clear your browser’s cache while waiting. Refresh your pages, and you should see your smiling face on your comments. WordPress knows your email address, so it goes off to gravatar to grab your picture!

*If you have a WordPress.com account, you also have a gravatar account. You are using akismet to fight blog comment spam, right? Akismet required you to create a WordPress.com account in order to obtain your API key.

embed an mp3 player in your wordpress blog post with WPaudio

One can put an mp3 file into a blog post, creating a clickable link. However, clicking this link will navigate to a new page with the viewer’s system’s default application for listening to mp3 files. It would be preferable to embed a working audio player right into the blog post.
Fortunately, this is readily achievable. There are a number of media players that extend the functionality of blogging platforms to this end. This post describes how to install my favorite such player into a WordPress blog.

I just installed an audio player plugin – WPaudio WordPress MP3 Player Plugin. This is what it looks like:
[wpaudio url=”http://metaversemusician.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Take-A-Little-Time.mp3″]

Here’s how to enhance your WordPress blog to support this player:

  1. Log in to the WordPress Site Administration panel
  2. From the Dashboard, select Plugins > Add New
  3. In the search box, enter ‘wpaudio’ and click the ‘Search Plugins’ button
  4. The search should return ‘WP Audio Player’ select ‘Install’ for this list entry
  5. When the plugin description page opens, click the red ‘Install Now’ button
  6. Once the install completes, click ‘Activate Plugin’

That’s all there is to it! Your blog now provides embedded mp3 players.

add a wordpress blog to a ReverbNation profile

Social media tools provide a platform for musicians and bands to expand their fan base. Wordpress is a widespread blogging platform, and ReverbNation provides a comprehensive toolset to market musical endeavors. But who has time to duplicate their blog posts to both platforms? You don’t have to! You can set these tools up to synchronize with each other!

This article explains how to add a wordpress blog to a ReverbNation profile.

ReverbNation profiles have a blog tab on them. This blog tab can reflect content from RN’s internal blogging system. Better yet, it can accept an RSS feed from a wordpress blog — such as this one. Here’s how to set up RN to accept an external blog.

  1. Go to the Profile page within which you wish to embedded the blog.
  2. Slightly down the page is a row of approximately ten tabs. Select the one entitled ‘BLOG/BUZZ’.
  3. On the upper right of the BLOG/BUZZ tab is a button entitled ‘Blog Preferences’. Click it!
  4. Select the Blog radio button for Default View.
  5. In the Blog section, select the radio button entitled “I would like to show a blog I maintain on another site.”
  6. In the text box entitled ““, enter the URL of the blog RSS feed*!
  7. Click the ‘Save’ button.
  8. Watch your RN blog populate itself with the source blog’s contents! Cool!

*Bonus section – what is the URL of the RSS feed of the blog in which I am interested?

There are several correct answers to this question. Perhaps an example would help to illustrate. In my case, I just wanted to use the entire blog contents, and I did not care in which specific format it was published. My blog is located at http://www.joebear.net/blog/.  In this case, the proper feed to be typed into the text box for Blog Preferences was http://www.joebear.net/blog/feed .  Simple, hunh?

To see how it looks, compare this blog with its RN representation at this link.

Note: this post was copied from joebear.net. You’re reading this at metaversemusician.com. Conseqently, these blogs are likely to be out of sync. Compare the RN Profile with this other blog.

wordpress, pretty permalinks, and seo

URLs generated by wordpress’ default policy suck, from an SEO point of view. Here’s a better plan, that uses the post title as a URL. Using keyword rich titles thereby improves rankings.

I’m sure this is old news to most. However, I discovered today that the default formal that wordpress uses to generate permalinks (URLs to each post) is almost universally reviled in the blogging community.

Essentially, the default format just appends a ?p=index_number to the directory and calls it good. That works, but gives nothing for search engines to hang onto. The search engines especially like to see keywords in the URL. In order to give something for them to chew on, that simple integer has to go.

Upon some googling, I have arrived at this custom format: /%postname%/ . This will use the slug version of the title as the generated URL. Done.

add a ReverbNation widget to a wordpress blog post

ReverbNation widgets can be embedded right within a wordpress blog post. This two minute tutorial demonstrates how.

I think I may now know how to embed an RN Widget in a post. Let’s try, shall we? Here’s the small tune player widget, with the material I loaded into the LTB RN site.


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Have a listen!

It was pretty simple. ReverbNation provides many ways to obtain the code. Each widget even typically provides a ‘share’ button. Clicking this opens another instance of your browser, containing not only another instance of the widget, but also HTML code for the widget. At this point, you just need copy the code, by context menu, <ctl>-c, or even the button labeled ‘copy’ (clever, hunh?).

Once you have this code, you can paste it into any HTML field. For instance, the Edit Post screen in wordpress can accept this code. Just make sure that your editor has the ‘HTML’ tab active, rather than the ‘Visual’ tab active.

That’s all there is to it! Let’s do another! Heck – you do one!

  1. Start a new blogpost,
  2. click on the ‘share’ button above,
  3. click on the copy button,
  4. go back to the post you are editing,
  5. click the ‘HTML’ tab,
  6. paste to the post,
  7. give the post a catchy title — I suggest “Listen to the BEST BAND IN THE WORLD”
  8. Publish

Simple, eh?

BTW, If you like what you hear, sign up for the mailing list – I promise it’ll be a very low-volume mailing, and you can always unsubscribe later:


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You can think of it as a tip in return for this great two minute tutorial 🙂Quantcast