Here’s a quick tip! WordPress has this frustrating habit of stripping extra <br> and <p> tags out of your posts once you publish them. This is particularly annoying because the tags stay in when you preview, and aren’t stripped until you actually publish.

Instead of using <br> or <p> tags in your post (which isn’t really kosher anyway), try using this:

<br style=”height:4em” />

This should give you that extra space that you’re looking for. If you need even more space, change the 4em (to 5 or 6em, etc.) until you get the amount of space you’re looking for.

Also, if you’re ever trying to post code like I did above you’ll need to use “& l t ;” in place of the “< " and “& g t ;” in place of “>” (remember to remove the spaces and don’t include the quotes). Otherwise the browser will recognize the code you’ve typed, and format accordingly.

Hope that helps!

Popularity: 100% [?]

I recently set up a new blog using the Clean Machine Template.

I liked the template a lot, but I was bothered by the fact that the title and description of the blog were automatically converted to lowercase. I wanted to change this setting so my blog title would be capitalized properly.

To illustrate the problem, this is what the blog looked like with the unaltered Clean Machine theme. Notice how the blog title is all lowercase (so is the slogan/description).

This is what I wanted the title to look like (nicely capitalized).

It turned out to be a pretty easy fix.

To fix it, you need to edit your style.css file. Click on “Appearance > Editor” and choose style.css in the right hand column (click the image below to make it bigger). Locate the portion of the style.css sheet that says “*/ Header /*” and change the text-transform from “lowercase” to “none”. Then scroll to the bottom and click the “update file” button.

If you also want to remove the lowercase setting from the slogan under the blog title, scroll a little further down until you find the section containing “.slogan {” and change that from “lowercase” to “none” as well.

I changed both the header and slogan settings so my blog title and slogan now look like this:

That’s it! See, I told you it was easy!

Popularity: 60% [?]

Yes it’s true, you can pay for a deluxe hosting package through godaddy.com and host multiple blogs on the same account. The blogs share bandwith and storage, and that saves you money!

When I set up TysTips.com I signed up for godaddy’s economy hosting plan for $4.75 per month. The economy hosting provided 10 Gigs of storage space (10,000 MB), and 300 Gigs of monthly bandwith (300,000 MB). That was plenty of space (in fact, at the time of this post, TysTips.com was only using 22 MB of storage space and 32 MB of bandwith per month. Basically I was using 0.2% of the storage, and 0.1% of the bandwith. Why not put that other 99.7% to work hosting other blogs? Get the idea?

To do so I had to upgrade from the economy to the deluxe hosting package. This cost me an extra $1.90, so it was like getting another hosting account for $2. For the extra dough, you get some extra space. The deluxe plan has higher storage and bandwith limits (150 GB of storage, and 1.5 TB of bandwith). Furthermore, if I host a 3rd blog it won’t cost me anything extra. I could have 10 blogs hosted on the same deluxe plan, all sharing the storage space and bandwith for $6.65 per month. The steps below will be broken down into 2 parts. Part 1: Upgrading your plan, and Part 2: Hosting your new blog. …read full articles of "How2: Save Money! Host Multiple WordPress Blogs on a Single Godaddy Hosting Account"

Popularity: 78% [?]

If you’ve ever wanted to publish a post to a separate page in your blog and hide that post from appearing on your bogs main home page (a.k.a the index page), Ultimate Category Excluder is for you.

For example, TysTips is intended to be a blog about blogging tips and tricks. But sometimes I write posts about other fun stuff, like TechToos, or my various projects. Since these posts aren’t directly related to blogging, they don’t really jive with the scope of the blog. Therefore I like to tuck them away in a separate page within my blog. To do this for my projects, I created a new page in my blog called “Projects”. Now I have a dedicated place to post entries about my various projects. To prevent these posts from detracting from the mission and scope of TysTips.com, I also wanted to exclude them from my main home page. That way if someone landed on my main home page expecting to see tips and tricks, they wouldn’t see a bunch of posts mixed in about nerdy electronics projects. Make sense?

For me the easiest solution was a little plugin called Ultimate Category Excluder. It’s extremely simple to use and it works great. Here’s how to use it:

1. Make a distinct category (or categories) for all the posts you want to excluded from your Main Home Page. In my example, all project-related posts are given the category “Projects”. (I use the Inline Posts Plugin to make sure that all my Projects Posts show up on my Projects Page - Directions on how to do that can be found here.)
2. Download Ultimate Category Excluder (UCE), unzip, and upload to

…read full articles of "How2: Publish a Post to a New Page Without Posting to Your Main Home Page in WordPress 2.5.1"

Popularity: 75% [?]

In my previous post (here) I talked about how I added a  new page to TysTips.com entitled “Projects”. Now I’d like to show you the easiest way to add posts to your new page in Wordpress 2.5.1.

Adding posts to specific pages in a Wordpress blog is made simple by a the Inline Posts Plugin. Here are the steps:

1. Download the Inline Posts Plugin, unzip, and upload it into your wp-content/plugins/ folder. I use FileZilla to manage my content, as illustrated below (click the image to enlarge).
2. Activate the plugin by

…read full articles of "How2: Publish to a new Navigation Tab (or Page) in Wordpress 2.5.1"

Popularity: 19% [?]