At the end of 2009, Cllr Ken Hawkins and I worked together to set up a new website that Ken uses to write about issues in Elmdon and Solihull in his role as a councillor at Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council.

Ken was already blogging on Google’s Blogger platform. However, following a few sessions at a Social Media Surgery, he was keen to do more with his blog both in terms of content and presentation.

I helped Ken by setting him up with a WordPress site, transferring legacy content over from the old blog to his new WordPress site and setting up the new blog layout.

Ken wanted his blog to have a clear layout with straightforward navigation. To provide this, I chose the Grid Focus theme by Derek Punsalan.

Rather than a traditional ‘menu’ navigation, all the content—posts, comments, contact details and Ken’s tweets—contained within a single page and browsed via categories.

We wrapped up with a demonstration session on using the WordPress admin interface to write new posts, upload images, assign categories and how to manage comments.

I was stuck trying to embed this flickr slideshow a few weeks ago so I asked for help on Twitter. Josh R and Warren Pearce pointed me in the right direction, mentioning a workaround using Vodpod to convert the slideshow to video and then posting the video to WordPress.

After some further digging, I found a solution I quite liked within this post by Geeky Coder.

The method

1. Go to flickr and login.
2. View the photostream or set and choose to view as a slideshow.
3. Open the share options and copy the embed HTML.
4. Use the VodPod Firefox Extension for WordPress and paste the embed HTML (you’ll need to have already registered a Vodpod account).
5. Preview the slideshow as a video.
6. Post the newly-created video as a new draft in your WordPress.com blog. (This is my variation to the method described by Geeky Coder. I wanted to add copy text with the slideshow before sending the post live.)

Step-by-step video

Geeky Coder made this useful video with captions to walk you through the process. The embed HTML method starts at 1:00.

Post the Vodpod video to a new draft in WordPress.com

View a flickr set in slideshow mode and click the Post to WordPress extension in your Firefox toolbar. The Post video to your blog options appear in a popup.

Add your WordPress blog details and choose details » in the popup options:

Select the draft checkbox (and any other options you want):

Now choose the Publish button (nothing will go live on your blog at this point despite the confirmation screen in the Post video to your blog popup).

Go to your WordPress.com admin site and look in Posts > Edit. You should now have a new draft post:

Preview the post to see the video display just like an embedded flickr slideshow:

That’s it. You can now edit your post as normal, including the embedded HTML.

This post is a braindump of a workaround. While it’s partly for my own reference, I hope the workaround is useful to others. Please feel free to add any suggestions on making the process easier.

Linking between posts is also essential if you’re writing a series of related posts.

But one result of linking between posts has always bothered me. Trackbacks or pingbacks displayed in the comments on your own post don’t make sense in the context of your own site; trackbacks and pingbacks only make sense where other people link to your post.

So how do trackbacks and pingbacks appear in the first place?

In WordPress, if you’ve enabled trackbacks and pingbacks for the post you are writing:

…and you add an absolute link to a second post within your site:

…a trackback will appear in the comments list of the second post.

How to prevent trackbacks for posts within your own site

You can prevent trackbacks appearing when linking between posts on your own site by using a relative link, rather than the absolute link.

For example, use the relative link:

/link-to-another-post

…instead of the absolute link:

http://www.yoursite.com/link-to-another-post

Hat tip to Tim J for the answer to my request on how to solve this issue.

There are some areas that I’ll tweak further over the coming weeks, such as designing the comments in a more interesting way.

This is also an opportunity to start writing my own blog (well overdue, I know!), in addition to showing examples of my web and email design work. I’m planning to write about web and email design, tinkering with WordPress and other adventures in maintaining websites and web content.

This updated portfolio design, the fourth version, sticks with the green colour palette of version 3 yet makes heavier use of the green elements. The green and white palette is mainly taken from the British racing green Mini Cooper, with some influence drawn from the twilight woods in Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth.

Photo of Mini Cooper courtesy of Toni Viemerö

I’ve also chosen to use a dark background to provide some contrast and shape to the blog, while keeping the bulk of the actual content on a white background.

The portfolio navigation in the sidebar to browse by project type or style makes use of WordPress’ categories.

So, here it is. Time to stop the CSS tinkering — I’ve gone as far as I am prepared to in making the site compatible back to Internet Explorer 6 — and time to go live.

I’d really appreciate any feedback on the new look and navigation. Please do add a comment or get in touch.

Hillu’s site runs on WordPress, which I ‘skinned’ with a custom WordPress theme. The bulk of the site content is contained within seven image galleries of Hillu’s textile work. The archive of gallery images was edited in Photoshop for levels, colour, contrast and sharpening.

View the live site at www.hilluliebelt.com.

Home page design

Photo gallery design

Credits and plugs

The image galleries are built on the Popup Image Gallery WordPress plugin by Andy Staines.