Cool Blogging Tools | WebsByAmy.com

Archive for Cool Blogging Tools

Adding a ‘Poll’ or Survey to WordPress

I've had several questions lately about adding Polls and/or Surveys to your WordPress blog in order to do a 'contest'. And in a timely turn, today I came across an excellent article with suggestions on how to do this using plugins or add ons that take very little tweaking on your part:

http://speckyboy.com/2010/09/23/top-10-free-poll-and-survey-widgets-for-your-website/

Remember as with any add-in application, please contact the plugin developer if you have any problems or need help with it. And if the plugin is free, plying the developer with money helps to get a response, LOL.

And as with any plugin you add, conflicts sometimes occur, so you need to be thoughtful not not every plugin will work on every site. (That was my 'buzz-kill' disclaimer)

Making Your Own Sidebar Widget

Many of you are very confused when it comes to your sidebar widget.

Some widgets are ‘pre-made’ such as ‘Categories’ or ‘Archives’ and you can just drag them, but what if you want your own sidebar widget with a photo and text and links, etc.?

I have created a video that shows how you can use a WordPress post to create a custom sidebar widget and then use the HTML generated from it to drop into a text widget.

Clear as mud? Watch the video!

Video – NextGen Gallery

I am very excited about making this video and I think that a LOT of you have wanted the ability to create galleries of your work on pages or in posts.

This video shows how to import and use the NextGen Gallery plugin for your WordPress site and use it immediately.

This plugin is capable of way more than I am showing, so I recommend that you get to know it better by going to the website provided by the plugin designer, meanwhile, see how easy NextGen gallery is to use right out of the box!

Embed a YouTube Video in Your WordPress blog

One of the awesome things about WordPress is the ability to drop code in to a post or page without needing any special ‘plugins’. Just remember to drop it in in HTML or CODE view (depending upon your WordPress version).

And I realized after I made the video that I spelled YouTube wrong (I typed it as two words, LOL!). So, trust me on the method (if not my spelling)!

I will be featuring more videos in the coming week(s) on most asked questions… so send me your questions!

Archiving Constant Contact Newsletters on the Web

You can make a save a copy of your Constant Contact newsletter to the web (without paying Constant Contact!). If you are hosting with me, you have web space that you can upload a copy to and this tutorial below will show you how to create a newsletter ‘page’ and link to it from an article.

However, you can also use this idea to create an ‘archive’ of your newsletters by creating a “Newsletter” page and providing links to your latest newsletter(s) for your customers who cannot receive email.

You can use this trick to upload a newsletter to any free space you have on the web (if you aren’t with my hosting) that you can then link to.

Red arrow points to the Upload Media button With any WordPress site, use the ‘upload media’ button from a post or page to import the ‘Newsletter.html’ (the name for my example file in the video) to the web and then just copy the link to where it was uploaded to the server.

I am sure you must be able to do that with Typepad or Blogger, I’m just not familiar with how.

Adding a Photo To Your WordPress Sidebar

This is entirely overdue, but I have finally created a tutorial about how you would get a photo and/or a link (or a linked photo) into your WordPress sidebar using a ‘text’ widget.

You can view this tutorial here as made from screenshots of actually uploading a photo and using html image tags to make it appear.

As a re-cap to the video, the hyperlinking tag is:
<a href="URL">link text</a>

Image tags:
<img src="URL" />

Remember the URL is the address of the destination (or the photo) on the web. For example www.websbyamy.com is the URL (or address) of my site.