WordPress Plug-In AuthorSure Review

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Update–As of November 2017, it has been two years since AuthorSure was updated, so although I still love WordPress, I can no longer recommend this plugin. 🙂

Have I mentioned before how much I love WordPress?

I love WordPress. Just in case.

I realized a few years ago that there is no privacy on the Internet, and rather than avoiding the Internet entirely as a way to keep my privacy, the more important part was to control my privacy. So I set up a Facebook account, I got a blog, I started tweeting. I was still nervous about putting myself out there. I liked it when someone found my blog, yet I wasn’t really ready to engage.

When John Ellis first started talking about authorship and proving your existence on Google+ and how everything is connected, I really only half-listened because it was more about engaging and letting people know who you are. (Sorry, John!)

But then I started seeing more and more how John is right. No fear. You may screw up, you may say or do something (lots of things) that people don’t like, and your SEO might be set up completely wrong, but it doesn’t matter. Communication can resolve a lot of problems. Google may be the benevolent dictator some of us love and some of us hate, but his point that Google wants real people on the Internet and not crazy s*ammy machines and h*ckers is a good one. Google is actually helping us to take that control over our privacy even further. We choose what goes out there and how.

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Changing Your WordPress Blog Name

Whatever you want to call it. I thought I would be clever and change the name of my blog from jennysschrader.com/WordPress to jennysschrader.com/blog. There’s that fantastic General Settings page on my WordPress dashboard where I can change it with just some typing and a few clicks, so no problem, right?

Oh…so many problems.

First, there’s the whole sticky wicket of not being able to access my dashboard once I’ve saved the changes, so no way to change it back. Then there’s something to do with permalinks, which can be “pretty” or “ugly” (that one still has me befuddled). And then when I went looking for help, I didn’t realize that you have to do the process differently because my blog is connected with my site name, and that uses WordPress.org, not WordPress.com. Nevertheless, I went for it, changing code willy-nilly and uploading new files (which was also irritating, because it took me a while to figure out that I can change the code right there on the File Manager site, and don’t need to download it to Dreamweaver first). Somehow completely manage to delete both index.php files for the blog and the website itself. Thankfully (because I had downloaded to Dreamweaver) managed to upload the main site index.php from my desktop and figured out that I could just download the WordPress index.php from the WordPress site. Whew!

But wait! There’s more! Now I can access my website, but I still couldn’t access my blog—the site or the dashboard. Back to WordPress.org to do more research and discover the intricacies of phpMyAdmin. Luckily, I have cPanel, so I can access that through there. (Of course, didn’t discover that until after downloading phpMyAdmin and trying to install it–wouldn’t recommend that!) Changed the first problem, still didn’t work, more research, then realized I had to change another problem and…ta da! I’m finally back up and running.

The lesson from all of this? For the love of God, do NOT change anything unless you know what you’re doing! There are even warnings all over the place on the WordPress site. Should have listened… But I didn’t know until I tried to change it on the General Settings page (they made it look so easy there!). But I learned a valuable lesson about how to work with code and the php Admin stuff as well, so I think it was all worth it. And again, completely impressed with WordPress because if you want to do something, then you can. Tons of options. And even if you are an idiot and try something like this, there are other people out there who have screwed up on the same thing and there are forums (where they make you feel a little better about being an idiot) that help you fix it.

So I may try it again when I’m feeling a bit more adventurous. Currently, though, I’m patting myself on the back because I made a mess and fixed it and only wasted an hour or so. Not really worthy of a back pat, but still…

I’m honestly just glad that I’m not the girl who tried to help her friend change the url, got into a complete disaster of a mess, tried like crazy to fix it (I think about 54 posts on that particular topic and most of them were from her), and the poor friend just got frustrated and reinstalled WordPress, which erased everything from the blog.

I wonder if that friendship survived…

 

WordPress really is amazing.

I was even telling a friend about it last night. She was contemplating going with Blogger. Ha! I said. Forget Blogger. Everything you want to do you can do it with more flexibility and distinction in WordPress. Blogger is nice and easy and doesn’t give you too many options, so there’s not an overwhelming amount of information…  Basically, it’s perfect for what it does. Families who want to keep their distant relatives and friends updated on how cute their kids are, and hobbies and other interests… I speak from experience. I have both kinds of blogs. Started out on WordPress and thought I’d get a Blogger one for fun. The Blogger one has only served to frustrate me. Things that I can do easily (well, easily now that I’ve figured out how to do them) on WordPress are very tricky in Blogger. Even moving the page settings around in the sidebar in Blogger has proved challenging for me. I click and drag, but it doesn’t always go where I want it to, and then I’m left with something I wanted in the sidebar up in the header, or in the footer. I don’t know why…

And WordPress has these incredible widgets. I download and use for a while to make sure I like it, and then donate. Because money is important. Sad, but true. (Although the person who developed my theme is no longer supporting it. Not sure how I feel about that.) Among my favorite widgets are the WP to Twitter, which (as expected) tweets whenever I’ve made a new post. So I feel extra productive–I’ve written a post and updated my Twitter account. My new favorite is Shashin, which uses Picasa to get all your photos right where you want them to be. And here I was uploading them one at a time to my media library… Foolish girl.

And my absolute favorite? The favicon. I never even knew that’s what they were called. Where have I been? I always wanted one, and there are so many resources out there… I can make my own at favicon.cc or download one at any number of sites, or generate one with from an image or photo at Favicon from Pics. I just used a small image from my background and had it converted at Dynamic Drive. They had the best graphics for what I wanted. But since I’ve found the photo option, I may just do that instead. So many decisions… See what I mean? Perhaps too many decisions with WordPress… But still. I would never recommend Blogger instead.