Virginia Breeze

Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of my Wordpress blogging adventure. The earliest post I can find is here

Not much has changed since then. I am still trying to relax and you will still see photos here of subjects that are primarily attempting to help me (us?) do just that.

These early posts are part of a Wordpress.com blog that still finds a few readers each day. It is a nice little blog and has some interesting posts in it along with some pretty bad ones. It’s all part of learning to be a blogger I guess.

Now I have four or five blogs and three of them are very active. I am happy to have made it this far and appreciative of those who were around last summer and still hang around here sometimes.

Hopefully things will progress in the second year. But blogging is about having fun unless you are making a living doing it. Are any of us making buckets of money?

If the answer is no then we should be doing things we enjoy when we blog! Right? There are Template Tombstones littering the Internet and many of them in my estimation belong to bloggers who were not enjoying themselves. They were not happy with the “progress” they were making perhaps. They were trying to do what the experts said they should do instead of what their hearts hoped they would do.

And they were not making money either. I met some of them in the past year and thought they were pretty wonderful people. No doubt they still are. Wherever they are.

Let us have a moment of silence as we remember some of their most memorable posts.

Thank you. Amen. Have a great Monday.

Update:// I deleted Wordpress.com.   So the earliest post is from this blog now.  It’s the same photo but it’s in a different place and the date is different.

More Writing

We have really taken a tour in this effort to install a super plugin for Wordpress. And there is only one thing left to do prior to reaching our goal.

It is time to install Plugin Central by Vladimir Prelovac. So go to this post and locate the plugin. And then use the tools we have discussed in Parts I through IV to install it.

As I have said many times this is a step by step process for seniors or whoever with no background in these things. So please go back and review if you need to be reminded of any steps.

Once Plugin Central and its companion Post-Plugin Library are safely installed and activated in your Plugin file go to the upper left corner of you browser just below the toolbar and click on Dashboard. Now look just below and Dashboard once again in red letters. Just to the right of it you should see Plugin Central. Click on this and the Plugin Central box will open giving you an option to click on and list all of your plugins or only your active plugins.

Now we are going to use this wonderful tool to install NextGen Gallery. Here is the location of the zip file.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/nextgen-gallery.zip

Right click on it and look for Copy Link Location. Left click on this and then go to the Plugin Central/ Easy Plugin Installation box we noted earlier in this post. Below the option to list plugins you will see the area we need. Right click and then paste your zip file in here. Click install plugin and watch as it does its work.

Total Commander is not needed here. In less than five seconds the plugin is installed and ready to use. Or if you are forgetful like me and already installed this plugin you will receive a message that goes something like this “Installation failed. Plugin already installed”.

Oftentimes you do not even need the zip file. Just type in NextGen Gallery and PC will locate it and install it anyway.

Another cool option is to click on the List all Plugins button and get your list of plugins. And then copy/paste any or all of them as you choose into your other Wordpress blogs. This tactic assumes you have installed PC in all your blogs. Just copy/paste into the PC box and click on Install. What could be simpler or easier than that?

It is such a wonderful time saving tool I know you will want to do this. But remember to always backup your database using the plugin we installed in a prior post or one of your own choice prior to any installation.

So you have now installed NextGen Gallery and our mission here is complete. Getting it up and running is a task beyond the scope of this set of posts. However instructions for doing this are in good supply.

Another David has gone into great detail about it. And here is the link.

http://dpotter.net/Technical/index.php/2008/03/04/nextgen-gallery-review-introduction/

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Safety is a cheap and effective insurance policy. ~Author Unknown

Prepare and prevent, don’t repair and repent. ~Author Unknown

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This is the next in my series of posts for folks who have never blogged before and have some basic questions and a need for explanations that hopefully leave out no pertinent details. Our ultimate goal is to install and make functional a very cool plugin called NextGen Gallery.

The steps we have been taking here are baby blogging steps but I wish I had found something like them last summer when all of my blogging efforts began. Maybe there are some others who are just beginning and missed learning about it all beforehand.

We have covered unzipping and uploading files. And now we are going to begin uploading plugins.

Before we upload NextGen Gallery we are going to add Plugin Central as I noted earlier. This will make all of our plugin chores much easier.

And prior to this we are going to upload one other little beauty. It is called Wordpress Database Manager (WP-DBManager) and I use it prior to uploading anything into my blog. Also it has a setting for automatic backup of the database and I receive a backup file in my email once per day.

Because of the complexities of plugin installation it is imperative to back things up before making changes. And getting in the habit of doing this early is the best way to avoid sad circumstances later on. I am assuming that this plugin plays well with your setup of course. It did with mine.

So here is the download location.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-dbmanager/

Go here and download the file into your computer. Unzip it as we discussed in the earlier post. Put it in your plugin file. Open Total Commander and locate the file. Upload it to your blog. Go to Admin/plugins and activate it.

It’s a very easy process once you have done it a few times. Now click on Dashboard in the very top/left hand corner of your window right below the tool bar in your Wordpress blog. You should see the name of your blog just below it and a few other things just below the name of your blog starting with Write and Manage. To the right of them will be the terms Design and Comments. And then you should see some others based on your individual setup. Database is what we are looking for and click on it when you find it.

Now you will see just below Database a line of terms starting with Database and ending with Uninstall WP-DBManager. The second term is Backup DB. And we should do this as we prepare to install a second plugin called Plugin Central.

But we have run out of time and space once again. Next time we will install Plugin Central. Hopefully I have not left out anything so far.

Bye Bye for now.

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I think I have come to the end of the road in terms of my search for a place to put really, really enlarge photos. And ironically it is the same place I started blogging last summer.

I am talking about Blogger! Because you can post photos there that can be studied in very great detail. I didn’t realize this before now. Maybe I missed it last summer or maybe it is something that has come along since then.

So I have started updating my old blog . And the photos can be found HERE .

Here is what I am talking about. Some of these photos will be 2400 pixels across. They won’t fit in a window. But they can be examined in much greater detail.

So now my Wordpress blog has a new partner. Blogger! Who would ever have imagined this happening!