Although we use a paid fee service that offers more branding capabilities for our RSS feed, the majority of our clients use Google’s free service called Feedburner.

This post is not to offer distinctions between the two though I may do that one day, but to illuminate a feature that I think many bloggers are unaware of that I think would be valuable to your readers if they receive your feed as an email in their inbox.

First and foremost…if you are using Feedburner, check to see that your posts are available for users to sign up for via email subscription. Login to your account and take the following actions:

1. Click on the Publicize tab
2. Click on Email Subscriptions in the left column
3. At the bottom of the right section, select Activate. Once activated, links to your Feedburner RSS feed will now show an option to allow users to sign up for an email subscription in lieu of using a reader. This choice means that notice of your posts will be sent to them via email.
4. You can also capture the code for the Email Subscription form if you want a form to display on your site. This is optional.

The default information that is displayed when an email notification of your post is received by your reader in their in-box has your blog name and/or text you’ve chosen inserted in the From and Subject columns and does not provide any information for your readers on the content of your post and would look something like this:

It’s easy to make a modification in your Feedburner account and have your readers receive your posts with the subject line showing the Post Title, like this:

It’s a simple solution. In the same section in your Feedburner account (Publicize/Email Subscriptions) click on the section under Email Subscriptions for Email Branding.

This section allows you to customize some aspects of what your email will look like. For the purposes of this post, we’re just concerned with the section labeled Email/Subject Title:

The default setup will have your post ‘From‘ field duplicated in your ‘Subject‘ Field (see the 1st image above for some examples). To have your post title replace this 2nd occurrence, simply remove the text in the Email/Subject Title: field and replace it with:

${latestItemTitle}

Save this information and each post created and delivered via email through Feedburner will now show the title of your current post in the subject line. If you want to customize the subject to include your text that shows along with the post subject; simply include it on either side of the code and it will display along with your post title; for example:  Our Latest Blog Post – ${latestItemTitle} – VinoLuciStyle.com. See some examples in the 2nd graphic above.

I think it’s a huge value to your readers to be able to know what your post is about and catch their eye with your amazing content…right?

WordPress includes an import feature for posts for users switching from Blogger to WordPress, however, it does not insure that the post titles will remain the same, instead creating new post slugs based on the post titles, which can  be notably different from those generated by Blogger and include these issues:

• Blogger truncates the title much sooner than WordPress (less than 40 characters in length)
• Blogger excludes English article words (a, an, the)
• Blogger drops characters with accents, instead of converting them to their closest ASCII equivalent
• Blogger ends post titles in .html when WordPress completes the post title after the last word in the title with a /

So for example, a post title like ‘The Best Fried Chicken Tapãs’  in Blogger would have a resulting permalink in Blogger that would look like this:

best-fried-chicken-tapãs.html

This title would be changed during the import process in this way:

1. Include the word ‘The’ when creating the permalink from the title as it was a part of the post title
2. Remove the ã in tapãs as it contains an accented character
3. Remove the .html as it is not a properly formed WordPress file.

Resulting in a new page permalink of

the-best-fried-chicken-taps

It’s crucially important that the permalink either doesn’t change or that your new site is setup to manage the required changes when moving from one platform to another. Not attending to this issue might not matter to some but to most bloggers; having links in Google resolve accurately to the correct page in a new platform is of critical importance.

Instructions

1. First, import your posts from Blogger using WordPress’s built-in importer; you will be prompted to install a plugin that you will need to activate and run.
2. Once the import function is completed, download, install and activate the wp-maintain-blogger-permalinks-1.1.zip plugin.
3. After installing the plugin, under Tools > Maintain Blogger Permalinks click the button that says Maintain Blogger Permalinks. Once you’ve completed the operation, you can deactivate and delete the plugin.
4. Now to structure your permalinks..go to Settings > Permalinks and select “Month and name”
5. To ensure that your old Blogger URLs ending in “.html” get redirected to your new “.html”-less WordPress permalinks, edit your .htaccess file and put the following above the # BEGIN WordPress text:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([^/]+)\.html$ $1/$2/$3/ [QSA,R=301,L]
</IfModule>

NOTE: Your RewriteBase line above should match the one in the # BEGIN WordPress block already in the .htaccess file

To confirm that the rewrite rules above are working, take your latest permalink and replace the trailing slash “/” with “.html”

1. A permalink from Blogger: http://example.com/2010/11/best-fried-chicken-tapãs.html
   If you paste that URL into your web browser, it should automatically redirect to:

   http://example.com/2010/11/the-best-fried-chicken-tapas/

You should be good to go. We have found some examples of problems with occasion posts as the result of characters that can’t always be caught with the rules in the htaccess file and the easiest way to manage that is by changing the shortlink in your post to match the address that the post is resolved to after these revisions.

You know how you can select a variety of gravatars to use for the users who leave comments but aren’t setup with any system to have a gravatar display.

Now you can create a custom gravatar matched to your site and have it display!

First, create the image you want to display; I suggest 44X44 pixels square.

Just paste this code into your Custom_Functions.php file and upload it, then upload the imagine into your Thesis/custom/Images directory and name it gravatar.jpg. This image will now display for all of those posts instead of something determined by WordPress.

/* Add a Custom Default Gravatar */
if ( !function_exists(‘custom_gravatar’) ) {
function custom_gravatar( $avatar_defaults ) {
$myavatar = get_bloginfo(‘template_directory’) . ‘/custom/images/gravatar.jpg’;
$avatar_defaults[$myavatar] = ‘visitor’;

return $avatar_defaults;
}
add_filter( ‘avatar_defaults’, ‘custom_gravatar’ );}
/*—————————————————–*/

Take a look at Vino Luci Style and see the wine glass avatar for users without one!

After installing version 3.0 of WordPress, Thesis theme has a minor conflict. When trying to access the Custom File Editor from the admin toolbar, you may see a message similar to this:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function use_codepress() in /ANY_OLD_DIRECTORY/public_html/wp-content/themes/thesis_XX/lib/admin/admin.php on line XX

The editor is still usable but will no longer have syntax highlighting until DIYThemes finds a solution. until then, this fix allows you to again access the file when in WP admin.

You will need to access your site via FTP; dowload admin.php from this directory path. (wp-content/themes/thesis_XX)/lib/admin/admin.php).

Using a plain text editor, comment out the line that calls for syntax highlighting; place two forward slashes just before it:

// if (use_codepress()) add_action('admin_print_footer_scripts', 'codepress_footer_js');

I use the Thesis theme for WordPress for all of the sites I deploy so an upgrade to a new version means a lot of sites need this upgrade activated. The instructions on the theme website seemed awkward and I’ve found this method to be easier and works like a charm. Here are the simple steps (this assumes you have an FTP program installed; if you don’t you can download FileZilla for free).

1. Backup your database; if you don’t have a database backup plugin installed, now might be a good time to do that. Schedule regular backups while you’re at it!
2. Navigate to www.diythemes.com and login with your assigned user and password and download the 1.7 version to your hard drive.
3. Unzip the file.
4. Login to your website via FTP; your host can provide you with access information which will include the FTP address along with a user/password combination. I use bluehost for hosting; so using them as an example, the FTP address would be ftp.yourdomainname.com (substituting your actual domain name). Your  user and password are the same as those created to login to the bluehost Control Panel. Contact your web host for these specifics as they may vary widely depending on hosting platforms.
5. Locate the unzipped version you just downloaded to your hard drive in the left screen of the FTP program. Open until you can see the ‘custom’ directory.
6. Browse through the files you’ve connected to on the right to get to your current Thesis themes directory. This may depend on your web host, but for bluehost, it would be public_html/wp-content/themes/thesis_16/
7. You should now see a ‘custom’ directory in the right panel that displays files on the server.
8. Delete the ‘custom’ directory from the new unzipped  version 1.7 in the files on the left (your hard drive).
9. Drag the ‘custom’ directory from the version 1.6 on the server to your hard drive to replace the directory you just deleted.
10. Go up one level in both panels so that you are now viewing the folder for Thesis 1.7 on the left and your current installed themes on the right.
11. Drag the thesis_17 folder into the themes on the right. You should now see theme directories for both 1.6 and 1.7
12. After the theme has finished transferring, login to your WordPress admin panel and navigate to Appearance/Themes. You should now see the 1.7 listed as a choice. Select and Activate the theme. It may not look accurate in this display; view your actual site and it should look the same as before.
13. Your Thesis Theme section in the admin menu should now have five sections for managing the theme.
14. DO NOT DELETE THE OLD VERSION – Your custom stylesheet that is located in the ‘custom’ folder may have web addresses that direct it to files in the Version 1.6 custom/images directory; either modify these addresses in custom.css in the new theme to reflect the new version number or make sure you keep the older theme files so that your images continue to display for any of these addresses.

If you have issues with this method, revert back to the older Theme version. This has worked seamlessly for upgrading over a dozen sites but not all installs may be exactly the same. You might want to try the instructions located in the www.diythemes.com site or try the forums for alternative methods depending on your situation.

I’ve been blogging for some time now and with that blogging has come relationships all over the world so thought it was time to move my web development company site to a blogging platform and provide a source for client information in the most timely manner.

Look for tips and tricks on developing a WordPress blog, using the Thesis theme, domain name transferring information…and more.

If you’re so inclined, please visit my own food blog at www.vinolucistyle.com for recipes, wine reviews and the occasional gardening tip!

Welcome, hope you’ll come back…