TheoBloggers Online Community

We’ve activated Viper’s Video Quicktags site wide, which means you may see some new buttons in your blogging toolbar.  These buttons allow you to easily insert video clips from places like YouTube into your blogs.  Have fun!

One of our favorite things about WordPress is the flexibility when it comes to using themes.  There are hundreds and thousands of themes for you to choose from out there, most of which are free from sources like WordPress.org.

Themes on TheoBloggers.com act a little differently than what some WordPress users might be used to.  If you’re used to stand-alone self installs, you’ve been able to add and remove themes at will.  If you’re used to WordPress.com, you’re used to being limited to what is available in your Themes options of your Dashboard.

TheoBloggers.com works as a hybrid of the two.  Since this is actually WPMU, all blogs pull from the same themes folder.  Since everyone uses the same folder, we can’t let just anyone have access to that folder all willy-nilly like.  Someone might accidentally (seriously, it was an accident) delete the theme you want to use.  As such, access to the themes folder is limited to TheoBloggers.com administrators.

What this means for you:

• If you want to use a theme that isn’t in the themes directory, send us an email with either a link to the theme or the theme itself attached to the email.
• If you want to use a custom theme that you have sole ownership of, send us the theme and let us know at that time.  We can activate the theme for your blog and then disable access to that theme by other users.
• Limiting access to themes is available ONLY when the theme is custom (i.e. Greg England or Roger Butner).  Please do not send us a request for limited access to an open source them simply because you want your blog to be “unique”.  We understand that desire, but it doesn’t work for the open source community.

Happy Blogging!

Thanks to http://randomizer.org, the completely random winner for this giveaway is…

Wendy Cayless!

Stay tuned for more giveaways from TheoBloggers, and be sure to check out the features of the new TheoBloggers.com

Update!: We’ll give away one additional prize for every 20 comments left on this blog entry.  20 comments yields 2 prizes, 40 yields 3, and so on.  Share this link with as many people as you can.  Tweet it, blog it, Facebook it (is that a verb?)… whatever you want to get the word out.

We’re just itching to give something away, and since we haven’t gotten the limited edition TheoBloggers.com swimsuits back from the print shop yet we’ll just have to go with what we have on hand. That happens to be… hosting!!!

To celebrate the 21st day of the new TheoBloggers.com Online Community (which will be Saturday, May 9th), we are going to give away a year of free hosting to one lucky winner!! That will include all the normal set up and support that comes with a TheoBloggers blog, including transfer from an existing blog!  Here’s da rules:

• Visit http://theobloggers.com and find your way to the main blog (you’ve done this if you’re reading this).
• Leave a comment on this post saying you want to enter the drawing.
• On May 9th at 9:00 p.m. we will close comments on the blog and randomly select one lucky winner from those that have left comments.
• The winner may gift the prize to the person of their choice.
• The winner must claim their prize within two weeks of the drawing.  If this doesn’t occur, we’ll draw again.
• The prize includes hosting only and not custom domain names.
• Existing account holders can have the value of the prize credited to future hosting services.
• We reserve the right to make up more rules as we find need.

So what are you waitng for?  Leave your comment now.

One important aspect to blogging is working communication loops into your blog.  Being able to comment is one way for readers to get in touch with you and give you feedback, but what if they have a longer, private, or off topic messages to send you?  Easy solution: a “Contact Me” page.

It is really easy to insert a “Contact Me” page on TheoBloggers.com.  Since we’re using the Contact Form ][ plugin, you simply have to add the following into a blank new page (take the spaces out between the brackets and the words. If I do it, it inserts the form):

[ CONTACT-FORM ]

All kinds of options are editable in your blog dashboard under Settings > Contact Form ][.

When you publish the new page, the contact form will look like this:

Some of you have contacted me about problems with scheduled posts not actually posting. This is a problem with the WordPress software and has been documented in the WordPress forums. We’re looking for a workaround, but as yet haven’t found a good one. We’ll let you know as soon as we have something.

Okay, we’ve learned that the multi-user version of Bad Behavior doesn’t have all the customizable features that the full version has.  No biggie, especially since it is still an awesome plugin.  You can see the spam that it is catching by logging into your dashboard and visiting Tools > Bad Behavior.

We’ve also installed several additional anti-spam features.  Some of you will notice a new comment section for visitors that includes a captcha (little code for people to type in to get their comment approved).  This is a standard anti-spam/anti-bot feature that will now work to your benefit.

After we activated the new features I haven’t received a notice of users dealing with a spam issue.  If you have some trouble, be sure and let me know.

Some of you have told me about spam issues.  We’re in the process of adding some protection for you so you don’t get all those lovely emails from Russia.  Unless, of course, you have friends and family in Russia, in which case you’d want to recieve those emails.  At any rate…

The first installation we’ve made is called Bad Behavior.  This has been activated site wide, and you can edit your personal settings in the “Tools” section of your dashboard.  There are tons of options there.  If you don’t understand them, let me know how I can help.

To increase link usability, we’ve activated the plugin My Link Order site wide.  This will give you a lot of flexibility in how your links are ordered and displayed.  You can find My Link Order options in your dashboard under the “Links” section.

You may have noticed the patchwork quilt symbol next to your name.  This site is set up to work with gravatars, which are Globally Recognized AVATARS.  Using gravatars is how most of us get our picture next to our name on this site.  If you’re tired of the quilt, visit gravatars.com and set up a gravatar to work with the email address attached to this site.  Be sure to set the rating to “G” instead of “R” or “X”, otherwise it won’t show up.  Within a few minutes, your picture should show up on this site next to your name.

Super cool or what?