Maria’s Guides

Informit.com puts another chapter on its site.

I just stopped by the Informit.com Web site to check their listings for my work. (They list all of my in print books for Peachpit Press, as well as articles I’ve written for them and excerpts from my books.) I found that they’d put another excerpt from my Mac OS X 10.4 book on their site: “File Management in Mac OS X 1.4 Tiger.”

If you don’t have the book and want to check out this sample chapter, please do. Frankly, I think it’s easier to read in the book, without the links and tiny pictures. Maybe this excerpt will convince you to buy a copy; if so, you can get it at a discount by clicking a link on their site.

Technorati Tags: book, excerpt, howto, MacOS, free

I tweak some settings to support more blog links without using up too much sidebar space.

This site doesn’t include a lot of links to blogs. One of the reasons for that is that I’m extremely particular about the sites I link to. I don’t link indiscriminately. I only link to sites I think are worth visiting.

And as we all know, there are just too many sites out there that just aren’t worth visiting.

The other reason I don’t have a lot of blog links is that I just don’t want my Home page sidebar to get too long. It’s already very long — if I wrote shorter entries, it would easily exceed the length of my entries as it often does on wickenburg-az.com.

So today, in preparation for supporting more blog links, I converted my WebLogs link category to a true blogroll, with a limited number of links. If I have more than the number of links I specified (5), WordPress will randomly choose which links to display each time the Home page is opened.

Setting this up in WordPress is easy. Here are the instructions for a server installation of WordPress:

1. Log into WordPress and go to the Dashboard.
2. Click the Links button to view the Manage Links administration panel.
3. Click the Link Categories button to view the Link Categories Administration panel.
4. Click the Edit button for the category you want to limit entries for. You’ll see the Edit Category administration panel for that category.
5. In the Category Options area, enter a value in the Limit box and choose Random from the Sort Order drop-down list.
   
6. Make other settings as desired in the administration panel.
7. Click the Save Category Settings button. WordPress saves your settings and brings you back to the Link Categories administration panel.

From that point forward, the links in the category you modified will be limited to the number you specified, randomly selected and displayed. To display more or fewer links, just repeat these steps and change the value in the Limit box.

WordPress.com handles links and categories a bit differently. If you need instructions for doing this on a WordPress.com blog, use the Comments link for this post to ask and I’ll whip them up.

Technorati Tags: blog, howto, links, blogroll, WordPress