Continuing on from the previous post, where we discussed both the Contact Form 7 and the Akismet plugins, below is a list of useful plugins that you may or may not want to try out on your own website.

It is very difficult to screw things up completely when you try new plugins. Make sure you read the instructions when installing plugins. If you notice something that’s gone wrong with your site after installing a plugin, just de-activate it and see if that solves the problem. If not, don’t call me.

This is not a good idea

Dead links are links that no longer work usually because other websites re-arrange themselves or just go off-line periodically.

Broken Link checker is an excellent way to discover which of your links are still valid and which are not. With this plugin, you will not only see a list of how many (working and non-working) links your site currently has, but you can also fix the broken link easily through the admin screen.

Google XML Sitemaps – One of the easiest ways to get more visitors to your site is to make it easy for search engines to look over what your site is about. Sitemaps streamline this process.

This plugin is very easy to use. You set it once and basically forget it. Every time you add a new post or update a previously-written post, the sitemap is automatically updated and Google is notified of the change.

Page Links To – This surprisingly useful plugin allows you to easily point WordPress pages or posts to a URL of your choosing. It can be an URL on your site, or on another site. This is a good, simple way to set up navigational links to non-WordPress sections of your site or to off-site resources.

SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links is a neat little plugin that you can use to automatically link keywords and phrases that you put into your posts as well as those that people leave in their comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

This plugin also allows you to set up a list of keywords that you would like to always be linked to a specific URL. Like, say, an affiliate link. The plugin will do all the work in the background so you don’t have to worry about things.

You can also add the nofollow attribute to those links as well as force them to open in a new window, so people will remain on your site while visiting wherever you chose to send them.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

Registering a Domain Name
Choosing a Web Hosting Company: Hawk Host or Liquid Web
Pointing Your Domain Name to Your Web Host
Using cPanel and Fantastico to Put Up Your First Website
Changing The Default WordPress Settings On Your First Website
Locating, Loading And Activating Useful WordPress Plugins For Your First Website
A List Of Useful WordPress Plugins

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That said, some fights can also be kind of amusing. Sometimes this is because inmates can confuse primate behavior with regular, sane human behavior. At times, as evidenced in this report, the “inmate fighting dance” resembles a mating dance of sorts.

My children, fighting over a bath toy

On (Date) I C/O (Officer Me!) was assigned to housing unit * as a housing unit officer when, at (TIME), I/M ******* proceeded to yell at another inmate in what appeared to be some kind of challenge to combat.
On the above date, at the above time, I/M ********* stood up and yelled at another inmate as that inmate sat at a table playing cards with several other inmates. I/M ******** yelled in Spanish, which I was unable to catch much of except for the frequent references to “verga.” It appeared that I/M ******** had some kind of serious issue with “verga.” The other inmate did not appear to respond at all, playing cards and ignoring I/M ********. I/M ******** then took several steps back and began to take off his clothes. As I/M ******** took off his shirts, I told I/M ******** to stop yelling, to put his shirts back on and to go to his bay to cool off for a while. I/M ******** did so, but once he was in his bay, he took his shirt back off and began yelling at the other inmate again. The other inmate continued to ignore I/M ********. Due to the possibility of I/M ******** continuing to disrobe as a prelude to a physical confrontation, I called for assistance from the floor supervisor and the floor escorts. Once the supervisor and escorts arrived, I pointed them towards I/M ******** and informed the escorts that while I/M ******** had not made any physical attacks, I/M ******** needed to leave in order to prevent a possible conflict.
In conclusion, I/M ******** yelled at another inmate, took his own clothes off and appeared to be attempting to goad the other inmate into a physical confrontation. As a result he was locked down pending hearing in housing unit ** room **.

Verga. Disrobing. Posturing. All ingredients necessary for ensuring the procreation process. Also, ingredients necessary for fighting.

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Moby came forward today and stated as much on his Facebook page:

ok, so sarah palin is releasing a book. and it’s filled with some insightful, thoughtful gems, like: ‘here’s my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?’ -sarah palin.

well, mrs. palin, let’s look a bit more closely at what you’ve written. you believe that god intended for us to eat animals because they’re made out of meat. ahem. i mean, i’m not a professional logician, but i can see that the extension of your logic might lead you to some places with which you might be uncomfortable. bear with me, ok?

your logic sort of stands as:

1 meat is good (due to the fact that you like it)

2 animals are made out of meat (which is obvious, as meat is the stuff that surrounds their bones)

3 thus eating animals is good (and divinely sanctioned).

the problem, of course, being that other things are also made out of meat. like, well, people. and doggies and kitties. and cute little human babies. so if we follow your logic, mrs palin, you are actually suggesting that god intended for us to eat humans and dogs and cats and human babies, as these things are all technically made out of meat. i’m not even being swiftian, i’m just exposing sarah palin’s thoughts to some simple logic. which might be problematic, as she is also the person who once talked about looking out her window and seeing vladimir putin staring back (although he’s technically 8,000 miles away, unless he’s recently moved to kamchatka). or perhaps they do things differently in the palin household, who knows. perhaps she really does think that we’re intended to eat humans and kittens and babies, as god did make them (aka-us, in some cases) out of meat. i meah, let’s be clear, she’s a crazy sociopath, so anything is possible.

I’d like to point out to Moby that Sarah Palin is an individual who subscribes to the ideas of the pentecostal church. This means that she’s pretty much bugshit.

A recent scientific study has proven that people who claim to be pentecostal are either armed forces members in basic training that are trying to take advantage of the extra 2 hours away from their sergeant on a Sunday or – as old people like to gently point out – they’re “touched.”

Still, she might have a point, as I pointed out in my response to Moby:

Eating Babies Is Easy

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I love steak.

All kinds of steak.

As long as the steak is cooked medium-rare, I am usually pleased with the steak.

I have been especially happy with steaks from Texas Roadhouse, Omaha Prime and Outback.

I have not been happy with steak from Caniglia’s Venice Inn Italian Steak House, but that may have been just because the name was too long. I do remember thinking that the steak I had there was not very good.

A Steak

Steak cannot do the following:

• Kill Vampires
• Contemplate complex mathematical concepts
• Drive a John Deere tractor
• Power a Federation Starship
• Throw a 70-yard touchdown pass
• Expose Republican lies and propaganda
• Expose Democrat lies and propaganda
• Fire a handgun

Things steak CAN do:

• Be tasty
• Piss off vegans
• Make me a very happy man

Steak is wonderful.

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Now that you have your website up and running, it’s time to explore the wealth of plugins that are available for WordPress.

Plugins are part of what makes WordPress such a great framework to build a website with. There are thousands and thousands of plugins out there that are each designed to do something that WordPress can’t do for itself right out the box.

Some of these plugins are extremely useful and some of them aren’t.

Some of these plugins are free and some of them aren’t.

Just because a plugin is free doesn’t mean that it isn’t as good as a plugin that someone is charging for.

For most people, the first two plugins that they are exposed to are “Akismet” and “Hello Dolly.”

Wordpress Plugin Management Screen

Akismet is a anti-spam plugin that is designed to prevent people from coming onto your new site and leave comment spam. Comment spam is very common on the internet. It involves people (or computer programs) coming to someone’s site and leaving a worthless comment that usually includes links to their own site. Usually this is done to promote someone’s viagra or cialis site.

Hello Dolly is, well, useless.

So first things first, we’re going to activate Akismet and then go on to finding other useful plugins. Go click on “Activate” right under the Akismet tab. That will bring up this screen:

Akismet Almost Ready

WordPress helpfully points out that you need to enter your WordPress API key for Akismet to work. So click on that link, and go to this screen and follow the directions on the detailed diagram below:

Detailed Explanation For How To Configure Akismet

Once you’ve done all that, Akismet will now constantly be working behind the scenes to keep spam off your new website.

But we’re not done adding plugins quite yet. Let’s add a plugin that will allow your readers to contact you via e-mail. First, go to the “Add New” tab under the “Plugins” tab:

WordPress Add New Plugins Screen

And then you search for what you’re looking for – in this case, a contact form:

Searching For A Contact Form

Once you click “Search Plugins” to the right, you get taken to this screen, where you can see the plugins that are available:

Selecting A Contact Form From The Install Plugins Screen

Usually it’s a safe bet to go with the highest rated plugin that performs a particular task, although not always. Due to the fact that I’ve used Contact Form 7 on several sites, I can vouch for it as doing exactly as it says.

So once you click on install, you’ll see this:

Installing Contact Form Plugin

Now that the contact form plugin is installed on your site, click on the “Activate Plugin” link to activate it and go to the next screen:

Contact Form Plugin Activated

Once a plugin is activated there is usually a place on the left-hand-side menu to change the settings for that plugin. Usually the new menu choice can be found under the “Settings” menu tab, but not always.

With the Contact Form 7 plugin, you get your own little menu addition. It looks like this:

Contact Form 7 Plugin Menu

Once you have this up, highlight and copy the code that’s pointed out for you to copy. Note that your left-hand-side menu has changed, it now has a settings tab for the contact form plugin. So once you grab that code up at the top of the screen, let’s set up your new contact form.

You may have wandered through this menu section before – the pages section. Pages are basically parts of your site that are intended to be more static than regular posts. Usually, pages are good spots to put “About Us” sections, menu items and contact forms. This is what the “Pages” section of your site looks like:

WordPress Pages Screen

It’s very important to remember that WordPress Pages are not the same thing as WordPress Posts. Right now we’re just working with pages.

As you get more comfortable with the different concepts, you can fiddle around with creating and deleting pages a bit more. For now, just do what I tell you or you’ll get a knife in the throat.

How To Create A Contact Page In WordPress

As you can see in the detailed and professionally-done image above, there are several elements to be aware of when looking at the “Add New Page” screen in WordPress.

First and foremost is the page title field. This is where you put the title of the page. In this instance, it’s going to be “Contact Allen” – because we want people to contact Allen. Because he’s so friendly and loving.

Once that’s done, click on the HTML code tab. This will show you everything in an HTML friendly way. If you put code into your pages at some point, you will want to use this tab. If you have your HTML tab up, you can paste that Contact Form 7 code that you copied earlier into the field that actually contains the content of the page. I’ve helpfully labeled it “You Write Stuff Here.”

For pages, you’ll probably want to go to the “Discussions” section at the bottom and uncheck “Allow Comments” and “Allow Pings.” Contact pages don’t need to have the ability for people to leave comments on them.

Here’s what I added for AllenSelby.com’s contact page:

Contact Page Almost Done

Note the “Url” that I pointed out. If you ever want to send someone directly to this contact page, you can just send them that url. WordPress is nice in that it handles all that behind-the-scenes stuff.

So, once you have your contact page set up, hit “Publish” and go to your site. There, you’ll see something like this:

AllenSelby.com Now Has A Contact Page

Notice that I now have a new page – the “Contact Allen” page. You should have something like that on your site now. If someone goes to your domain, they will now have the opportunity to fill in the fields, hit send and magically send a message to you!

And that’s just awesome.

Feel free to experiment with plugins and see what works best for you. In the next post I’ll list a slew of WordPress plugins that I’ve used in the past and that I’ve found useful.

The Guide:

Building Your Own Website

Registering a Domain Name
Choosing a Web Hosting Company: Hawk Host or Liquid Web
Pointing Your Domain Name to Your Web Host
Using cPanel and Fantastico to Put Up Your First Website
Changing The Default WordPress Settings On Your First Website
Locating, Loading And Activating Useful WordPress Plugins For Your First Website
A List Of Useful WordPress Plugins

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I am sure that they wish this was otherwise.

I’m almost as sure that elements of my wife’s family been planning my death for quite some time.

It could have something to do with the comments I leave in their conversations, or it might not.

Either way, baby knife fighting is something that just happens.

You get 3 or 4 babies in the same room, they start staring at each other, words are exchanged, knives come out and pretty soon you have a mess on your hands.

It’s perfectly natural, however.

Baby Knife Fights Can Get Nasty

Babies are not the only things that have knife fights. Knife fighting is one of the most common behavior traits that can be observable in the animal kingdom.

Lobster Knife Fight

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Now, Lifestyle Homes owner, Don Fuller, isn’t declaring bankruptcy and liquidating assets to pay off creditors – instead he’s just shutting his doors and stopping work until someone wanders into town and buys a home from him.

From the story:

Brian Waugh says the garage floor in his four-year-old Lifestyle Home near 103rd and Harrison keeps raising concerns. “When it heaves up to where it’s cracking, heave up and starting to separate, I think it’s unacceptable.”

Bad garage floor! Bad!

According to Brian Waugh, the heaving started inside his first-year warranty and the builder has been promising to replace the garage floor ever since.

After being contacted by Six On Your Side in early September, the owner of Lifestyle Homes responded with an e-mail saying his project manager was working on a plan to replace Waugh’s garage floor by mid-October.

Last week, Waugh got a message left on his voice-mail from Don Fuller of Lifestyle Homes. “Got some bad news yesterday, looks like I’m going to have to shut down Lifestyle.”

Fuller said the government tax break for first-time homeowners hasn’t help him, a builder of homes worth $300,000-$700,000 usually purchased by second or third-time buyers.

So Lifestyle has shut down, laid off two full-time employees and can’t afford to hire a concrete contractor to fix Waugh’s garage floor.

“I was extremely shocked, actually upset about it,” said Waugh. “My wife and I, we had a good experience building the house, a quality home, but this kind of ruined the whole thing.”

The best quote from the story:

Waugh said he an his wife are pleased with the quality of the rest of the home, but the garage floor that continues to slowly heave upward doesn’t fit his lifestyle.

Really, I’d think that a garage floor that did anything other than just sit there wouldn’t fit anyone’s lifestyle. Of course, maybe Mr. Waugh is just making a statement.

Although Fuller has shut down Lifestyle Homes, he’s not giving up completely and refuses to file for bankruptcy, hoping the market for his type of home will improve so he can pay the subcontractors he owes and replace Waugh’s garage floor.

I’m sure that will happen.

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Some of it is green.

Most of it worries people.

Anything that’s both green and coming out of your body seems to be a popular search term, for whatever reason.

Google Query Suggestions For Why Do I Have Green

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Unfortunately, most of those times you won’t have Google there to provide a helpful guide.

If you’re looking for a way to shoot a pistol with both eyes open, may I suggest that you open whichever eye you have closed?

Google Query Suggestions For - Shoot A Pistol

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Siouxsie and the Banshees (the Banshees have changed, but Siouxsie has remained the same) have been around since the mid 1970’s, way back when punk was new.

They have a slew of great music that they’ve put out over the years.

Hugely influential, the group initially had problems getting signed to a record contract. They also went through a lot of guitarists, including Robert Smith of the Cure.

Siouxsie Sioux

Dazzle

Forever

Rhapsody

The Last Beat Of My Heart – from Superstition

The Killing Jar

If you’re going to get just one album, Superstition would be a good place to start.

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