Welcome to Rockstar Guide Books

Posted on June 30, 2010 by MJ

Thank you for visiting Rockstar Guide Books.  This site is about helping you achieve success with online tools and your personal life.  While WordPress is the current emphasis of Rockstar Guide Books, the plan is to expand into other online tools as well.  You can read my posts down below this one.

Your presence online depends on knowing how to use the tools that are available.  My goal is to help you succeed with these tools.  In recommending other tools online, I work to find low cost or even free tools to help your online presence grow.

Please follow me on Twitter @LoveRockstar

Need articles? Look at the list, there will be at least one to fit your needs.  Use the Ezine Publisher beneath the article to add it to your website or blog!

Get one of the Rockstar Guide Books or join the new coaching program! People who have used the guide books have been amazed at how everything was explained in detail while reaching people on their technological level.

This will help propel you and your blog to new levels.  ~

Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love!

MJ Schrader

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Single Posts and Facebook

Posted on October 13, 2010 by MJ

After discussing the Facebook features of the last two days you may be curious how to add them to a single post as you can see on this post.

Above is a like button. It appears on single posts and says like about the particular post.

What you want to do is actually as simple as copying and pasting.  However you are adding code to your current theme.  It does have the possibility of causing problems.  If you are at all uncomfortable with adding codes then please do not do this.

If you are still here you must feel comfortable with adding codes.  For the next step you want to scroll down to appearance on the dashboard.

Open the box and select editor.  Now you will note a whole long list of different things you can edit on the right.  As themes title forms differently you will have to read the list carefully. Most call it Single Post, you might recognize the file name as single.php.

Select this and the code will appear in the middle box.

Look for <?php the_content(); ?>

Now you can either add the code below, before for a like button at the top of the post, or below for it to appear beneath the post.    Simply copy these code and paste it in one of those two locations.

<!–Start Facebook–>
<iframe width=”465″ height=”61″ src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=65&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light” scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ allowTransparency=”true” style=”border:none; overflow:hidden; width:465px; height:61px”></iframe>
<!–End Facebook–>

Now read Additional Facebook Plugins that was yesterday’s post.  Find the plugin you want to add to your single posts.  You will probably want to add it just before or after the comments.  This code can vary, but ti should look similar to

<?php comments_template( ”, true ); ?>

So you will want to past the code you get before or after that.  Again if you are not comfortable with CSS or other codes, do not do this.   Otherwise remember as easily as you can paste the codes in, you can cut them out.

:)   YOU ROCK!

MJ Schrader

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Additional Facebook Plugins

Posted on October 12, 2010 by MJ

The Facebook developers have made it easy for you to quickly and easily add various types of Facebook applications. They have some wonderful boxes where you select the features you want on your box, and click get code. This code comes in Iframe which most sites use or XFBML for other sites.

Why are these called plugins?

While with WordPress you typically download the plugin to add it to your site, these are codes that are called plugins. Plugins are actually “mini programs” which is why Facebook developers call them plugins. In this case however, you are simply going to get a code and add it to your website.

Are they adaptable?

All of the plugins allow you to change the width. This makes it easy for you to add to your sidebar or to the main page or anywhere you want it. Most all of the plugins allow you to change other options to make it fit your unique site needs so you can make it fit.

What types of plugins do they offer?

There are currently 8 different plugins available.

  • Login allows readers to login to Facebook.
  • The Like button is quickly being added to sites both big and small.
  • Recommendations can show your readers what they might like on your site.
  • Activity Feed shows readers what their friends are doing on your site.
  • The Like Box shows readers a live stream of your Facebook Fan page.
  • Facepile shows your readers which of their friends have already joined your site.
  • Comments allows for comments anywhere on your site.
  • Live Stream is great for live events so they can share their activities and comments in real time.

Which Facebook plugin should I use?

Just like the features of each plugin depend on your particular needs, so does the plugin that you need. Most sites would recommend that you add the Like Button after that it is up to your website. If your site it too cluttered with gadgets and gizmos you readers may avoid it, yet with popularity of Facebook, you want to make certain some of it is offered. This will help build your popularity in a word of mouth format.

By the way, see the box below this post?  Yes, that’s a Facebook plugin called the activity feed.  And does anyone want to learn how to add the like button to each post?  And how I added the activity box to the posts?  The problem is, it does take going into your CSS code and I want to provide what YOU want :)

Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader

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Adding Facebook WITHOUT Plugins

Posted on October 11, 2010 by MJ

As I have said before plugins are helpful, but the more plugins you have the more potential for problems.  In addition, why add plugins that get poor ratings when you can add a Facebook like button simply and easily?

Facebook has great developers and they have made things simple for you.  You just visit the developer site and find that they have several different options for you that will give you the complete code you need with just a little bit of typing.  Type your site name, and then choose the options you need.

Yesterday was a mention of the like button.  Now you can visit the developers site and get one to add to your WordPress (or any site with HTML).  With this code here, you want to put it someplace like a sidebar since this will be for the overall site.

Simply visit the Facebook Like Button at the Developer Site.  You type in the name of your site or your fan page site or whatever URL you wish.  You have a couple of options to choose.

You will probably want to change the width unless you are putting it across a whole page.  Most sidebars are only 200 pixels.  If you have 2 sidebars, probably they are 150 pixels or less.  If you do not know, just make a guess.  You can always change the width to something smaller if it goes over and repeat the following steps.

After the width, you have a couple more options to choose.  Then you press get code.

A popup window will appear with 2 sets of code.  The first is what most users will need which is Iframe.  Most sites do not use the XFBML code.

Now you will want to open a second tab.  In it you are going to open your WordPress website, or other site where you can add HTML codes. With WordPress you are going to scroll down to appearance.  Click it.  Click widgets.

First you are going to the right hand of the screen to click the down arrow on what is called the sidebar or “primary widget area” depending on your theme.  This will open the area so you can drag and drop in  a text box.

In the middle of the screen you will see several boxes.  Scroll down to the text box.  Right click on it and drag it into the box you opened in the step above.  Now click the little arrow on the right to open the text box and head back to the Facebook developers page.

You are going to Copy (ALT+C) the Iframe code and go back to WordPress Widgets.  Inside the text box you are going paste (Alt+V) the code there.  Now go to the upper left and click your website name so you see how it looks.  If it goes over the edge you will want to reduce the width. Again these instructions will vary if you do not have WordPress.

Now your visitors can “Like” your website which will show up on their walls and hopefully bring in a few more visitors.


Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader

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Why Do I Need Facebook?

Posted on October 10, 2010 by MJ

After yesterday you may be curious what does Facebook have to do with my website?

Or how can I get linked to social networking sites?

For a website or business this is how you can create viral growth. With each person who comments, recommends or likes your website on Facebook, there are several people who see that. Some will visit your site. Some will visit and recommend, and some will even recommend your site simply because someone else recommended it.

What should I do?

The key is to help your readers share your website. Add a social bookmarking plugin to your WordPress posts. Sociable and Sexy Bookmarks are quite popular. By visiting the Facebook developers site you can create a “like” button that you can add to your widgets to be ever present reminder for readers to “like” your website. Encourage readers to share by asking. Yes, it really is as simple as asking them to share the site. By the way, please click the like button on my website.

Why is this important?

With these tools, your readers can make a public statement about your website. These typically offer a link, to your website or post. When someone shares this information it becomes a post on their social networking site wall, it becomes an item that can be searched, and on Facebook it becomes part of their profile. Imagine your website flashed across several profiles. Each profile could bring you several people, viral advertising. Best of all this viral advertising is free.


Live Laugh Love

MJ Schrader

Tomorrow will cover how to add Facebook to your blog WITHOUT PLUGINS!!! (Yes, you can do it!)

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Why is Facebook Important?

Posted on October 9, 2010 by MJ

You probably have heard that Facebook has surpassed all countries by having the largest population of the world. While Facebook is made up of people around the world, it is this aspect that continues to bring people. A person can be friends and leave messages, pictures and stay in touch with family and friends whether they move down the street or around the world, this draws people into the community of Facebook.

What is Facebook?

First you need to get an understanding of what Facebook is. This site is a social networking site. Thus it allows individuals to network with those they know and sometimes because of various connections, people start networking with those they do not. The conversations shared, pictures, videos and other media made available through the network is called social media.

Why is that important?

When people see someone commenting on the same items, there may be a connection made, even a friendship. The people on Facebook share information to connect with friends and in this way they connect with new friends. You may notice two friends who do not know each other suddenly become connected because of you and their similar comments on your posts.

While it may be strange that people become connected this way, it is as it always has been.  The difference is now people connect online.  Before social networking, people mostly had to connect in person.  Now, people who have similar interests, like similar items, may choose to connect.  They will also alert one another of things they find interesting.

So when someone sees something like the above on a friend’s site they might just check it out.  This way people share what they like and others can know in case they might like it as well.

Live  Laugh  Love

MJ Schrader

Tomorrow will cover “Why Do I Need Facebook?”

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Add A Slideshow without a WordPress Plugin

Posted on October 8, 2010 by MJ

Yesterday covered How to Have a Picnik with Google Pictures and WordPress. Hopefully it taught you how to add pictures with Google’s Picasa online photo storage.  Today is going to cover how to add their link to an album or create a slideshow.

To Add an Album Link or Slideshow

You will need to be logged into Google. You will need to be able to add HTML to site. In WordPress go to the upper right of where you are writing your posts and click HTML. Find where you are going to want the slideshow and go to Picasa in another tab.

If you are on the page that shows all of your albums over on the right you should see two words “Embed Slideshow.” That will show pictures from all your albums. You can copy the code you see there and paste it on your HTML page of your post.

If you want just one album, click the album name. This time you will see “Link to this album” on the right. While this will give you a code to link to the album, it will show just one picture. This may be fine in some cases. But when you clicked that link, “Embed Slideshow” appeared as well. Click that to get the HTML code you need for the slideshow you want. Now you have a slideshow.

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Have a Picnik with Google Pictures and WordPress

Posted on October 7, 2010 by MJ

You probably know that Google offers quite a few tools that can help your website. You may have heard of Google Reader, Google Docs, Gmail, but have you heard about Picasa?

This is an online photo sharing site.  When you use their online photo sharing, you can create albums to organize your pictures according to your needs. You can add tags to find certain pictures easier. Tagging people is made easy with their face recognition software.

How much is it?

Their free option allows you to upload up to 1 GB worth of pictures. People with lots of large, high quality pictures may want to upgrade to the paid options which range from 20 GB to 16 TB. You can edit pictures online without having to buy expensive photo editing programs with Picnik, their partner. Most features are free.

What is this going to do?

If you have large high quality pictures you do not want to load them to your website because they will slow your site down. You can use the “add image” in your posts and use the URL. Copy the image location and size down to what you need for the post. You can have the image link to the “original image” which will allow readers to see the original image.

Even if your images are not big, think about this. Each image you load takes up some memory, after a year or several that’s quite a bit of memory that may be used. This will allow the images to be stored elsewhere which will keep your website running faster and smoother.

How do I add pictures?

With WordPress you probably already know how to click the little box that looks like a picture above your post that you are entering. Normally when you click that box you might upload from your computer, instead you are going to click the “From URL” tab that is at the top of that popup. You will want to right click the image you want from Picasa and copy the Image URL, this phrase is slightly different on each browser.

Tomorrow will cover how to add a slideshow!  :)


Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader

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7 WordPress Photo Plugins

Posted on October 6, 2010 by MJ

Photographs can help you tell a story, help plant a seed in someone’s mind or just add a bit of sparkle to your blog post.  But what if you do not want to use the standard media library.  What if the plugin that your friends recommend does not work on your blog? Are you doomed?

Of course not!  Here are 7 options just for you!

1. NextGen Gallery is probably the most popular WordPress Photo Gallery plugin. Create a slide show, a media RSS feed and more. Easily move, copy, upload and delete images. You can even add a flash photo gallery.  See the NextGen Gallery video

2. Featured Content Gallery is a photo gallery WordPress plugin. It allows you to create an automated, rotating image gallery on any post or page. It is very easy to integrate and you simply add a field where you want the gallery to display. Choose from dozens of options to customize according to your website.

3. Flickr Gallery is a great photo plugin if you use Flickr. With their shortcodes system your pages and posts can quickly and easily have your Flickr images incorporated. You can turn on database caching for faster loading.

4. WP Photo Album easily allows you to manage WordPress photo albums. Create albums and move photos to and from them. Upload and delete photos and add a bit of code to post your album where needed.

5. Lazyest Gallery with a name like that, how can you not like this WordPress plugin? It creates thumbs and slides automatically. Easily manage comments per image or folder. Arrange your images and folders as you wish and handle many other details as you see fit.

6. Shutter Reloaded is an image viewer but is minimal in size. It will resize large images, combine images in sets and pre-load images for faster display. You can customize background and color for captions, buttons and menu.

7. Lightbox 2 allows viewers to see a larger image in a unique format. Once an image is clicked it will pop up and the rest of the page will darken. Load times remain almost the same.

Tomorrow I will cover one more option.  It is not a plugin so it will need a bit more explanation than these do.

Live ♥ Laugh ♥ Love

MJ Schrader


Please thank Donald Tregde for this post!

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Is Your Website Working? Is There Really a Problem?

Posted on October 5, 2010 by MJ

Today was supposed to be about plugins, tomorrow will be.  Today is a lesson and warning. Some day you will probably have someone tell you that your website is broken.  What is worse is the person may even blame and attack you. It crashes their computer, their browser or causes them other problems. It may be something you can fix, then again it may not.  It may not be anything you have control over.

There are too many variable

If you have WordPress there are over 11,000 plugins and over 1000 themes. Any person can have any number of plugins. There are dozens of themes with options to modify their appearance. Thereby we are talking probably millions of possible combinations.

However there are more variables, in addition to themes and plugins there are web host services. There are hundreds of different hosting options available. They can add in another variable that can mean something can work on one web host and not another.

Add into this equation that people have different browsers and what may work on one will not work on another. All of my sites are built with me using Firefox. I have tested most of them in Chrome and Opera. There are also Internet Explorer, Safari and other lesser known browsers. These read themes differently so the curved corners on Firefox 50WomenProject.com do not show up on Internet Explorer and actually mess up a bit in Opera.  Addons, plugins and other features can make their browser more unique and add more variables.

Let’s also add into the equation that some people are on PCs and others are on Mac. Then there is Linux which is a another operating system. These read and respond differently to different plugins, themes and such.

Oh, and since we do not have enough variables… let’s add in the fact that a regular monitor and a widescreen monitor pick up things differently. So when you visit one website with a regular monitor, that was designed on a widescreen, it may appear that things on the sidebar are cut in half.

What are you trying to say?

All of this is to say that you can not please everyone and take every possible variable into account. You can take most of them into account. You can make it work for the majority of the people who visit your website. You cannot make it work for every single person who comes to your website.

Someone is liable to tell you that you have the wrong plugins, theme or combinations because your website made their browser crash. Maybe, maybe not. It may be the cookies from a site they visited earlier disagrees with your site. It may be a random variable. It may not, but if your site works for most people then be happy!

Check your site on a couple different browsers. Ask friends who use different browsers or computer types to check your website. If there are problems turn off all your plugins and turn the back on one by one testing as you go. Try a different theme. Try http://IsMyBlogWorking.com. Once you are confident your website works for most people, do not worry about people who say your website crashes or does not work.  You have a great website!

Live, Laugh, Love

MJ Schrader

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A Story About WordPress Plugins

Posted on October 4, 2010 by MJ

Themes have been the topic the last two days.  With plugins you can make additional changes that benefit both you and your readers.   Some will help readers find you, some can help your readers enjoy the site, while others can help you enjoy your back office more.

One thing to note, since I have been asked before… there are over 11,000 plugins.  This number grows daily so if you have seen me mention a smaller number… I did.  There were just over 2000 when I started working with WordPress.

Finding Your Site.

You may want plugins that help search engines find you.  Perhaps you want an SEO plugin such as All in One SEO or Platinum.  I prefer Platinum, but it’s personal preference.  You probably want Google XML SiteMaps.  It maps your site and keeps the map current.

Socially acceptable

Some people like social media plugins that allow readers to share favorite posts with social networking sites. Sociable, Sexy Bookmarks and many more allow your site to be shared on various social media formats.

Security

There are plugins for various types of security.  Backing up your blog was mentioned two days ago and is in related posts below.  You can hide your blog, your pages, change your robot.txt.  The types are too many to list and are as unique as your needs.

Speaking of Unique Needs

If you have pictures, audios or videos you may want a related specialty WordPress plugins. You may have another specialty plugin you need.  Don’t worry, I plan to cover some of the better plugins over the next few days.


Live, Laugh , Love,

MJ Schrader

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