Month: January 2009

Blogging 123: Customizing Your WordPress Profile

When you create your username in WordPress or WordPress.com, it has to be all lowercase letters (or numbers) with no spaces. That doesn’t look very professional when you username is associated with a post or a comment on your blog or someone else’s. 

Fortunately, you can customize how you want your name to appear on WordPress (or WordPress.com) blogs, and the screencast below shows you how. It also shows you the process for uploading a photo (or Gravatar) to also be connected to your WordPress comments (or posts, if your WordPress theme includes Gravatars on posts.)

There are several other customization options to which I briefly allude in this screencast, but the two I’ve listed are the most important, in my opinion.

Update: You can view the screencast in the SMUG group in Facebook.

blogtalkradio Interview on Sharing Mayo Clinic

I had the pleasure this morning of doing an interview with John C. Havens on BlogTalk Radio, on his Transparency program. It was live Web radio, but with the segment now posted here. We talked at length about some of the stories on Sharing Mayo Clinic, which launched a week ago yesterday.

Give it a listen and let me know what you think!

Blogging 122: Special Characters in WordPress Easy as π

When I did the post about the µAudio Player plug-in for WordPress, it reminded me of a WordPress feature that SMUGgles might find helpful.

You don’t need to use this very often, but then again that’s why they’re called “special” characters. But occasionally you might need to insert one of them, like 

  • ©
  • ®
  • ™
  • or even ∞

You access the special characters by clicking the Omega (Ω) symbol in the Visual editor when you’re writing a post. Like this:

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If TV Newsrooms Are Requiring Versatility…

…do you really think as a PR professional that you will be immune from the need to retool and innovate?

See what the Chicago Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal reports today about restructuring at WMAQ-TV, Chicago’s NBC affiliate.

News producers, writers and editors at NBC-owned WMAQ-Ch. 5 were told Wednesday they must reapply for new multi-faceted positions, the demands of which reflect the station’s efforts to provide content not just for TV but the Internet, mobile devices and other emerging platforms.

The new jobs – with titles such as platform manager and content producer – are to be posted beginning Thursday, not just for internal candidates but outsiders as well.

In response to concerns about whether existing staff will be able to adapt, station manager Frank Whittaker says WMAQ plans to make training available.

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Blogging 369: Adding an Audio Player in WordPress

As you can see in the post about Sharing Mayo Clinic being featured on FIR, it’s possible in the self-hosted version of WordPress to provide a Flash player for your mp3 files, which enables your users to listen to the audio track without downloading it and opening in another program, such as iTunes.

What you may not know is that it’s really easy to provide this functionality.

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