Lighting a candle

It’s the darkest day of the year.

Even though the sun is currently shining into my window, it feels pretty dark. In all kinds of ways.

I’m behind on everything.

I’m drowning in email.

I’m cold (currently typing in fingerless gloves).

I’m sleepy at all the wrong times. Which also means I’m also awake at all the wrong times.

“Closing out the year” seems like an impossible task. So does starting a new year.

But…

According to TimeandDate.com, at my latitude, tomorrow’s daylight will last three seconds longer than today’s.

Three more seconds of sunlight may not seem like much. Even day after day after day.

The long warm twilights of July seem impossibly far away.

But they’ll get here. Three seconds at a time.

And I’ll get there too.

Three seconds at a time.

How about you?

Candle image by Bangin on Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

Friday follies: Live from the brake shop

This blog post comes to you from a Midas brake shop in Fontana, CA, where I’m waiting for someone to take a look at the squealing brakes on Bridget, my adorable family car (she’s a Honda Fit, so really her whole name is Bridget Fonda the Honda — all of our cars have had names, and all the Hondas have been named after members of the Fonda family).

I’m sitting in a fairly comfy chair, I’ve plugged in my laptop, and there’s actually a decent wireless connection. I’ve worked in worse places, so I’m pretty happy at the moment.

Normally I’d be reading a book at a time like this, but the internet connection at my house isn’t working, so I’m grabbing all the online time I can.

See, we had a super-apocalyptic version of one of our normal fall Santa Ana windstorms on Wednesday night, and at 4:30am the power went out for thousands of people in our area. After a 15-hour outage, power blinked back on at about 7:30pm on Thursday. Hallelujah! We could cook! Bathe in hot water! Watch television!

I secretly was hoping we’d have to have a completely candlelit evening, though. I love candles.

Except that the router wasn’t picking up an internet connection. So after trying the various reset-restart-reboot operations, and spending 45 minutes on the phone with Verizon tech support, I learned that we’d need a new router. Which Verizon was happy to ship to us at no charge.

So I’m without internet until Monday.

(I did try to arrange to pick up a new router from a local Verizon store, but that turned into a scavenger hunt game of chase-down-the-right-phone-number and then take-a-number-and-wait-in-line-in-the-store-where-they’re showing-Secretariat-on-TV (I haven’t seen the movie yet! Spoiler alert: HE WON THE TRIPLE CROWN!! Then I got to see what I think was the first 10 minutes of the Karate Kid remake, featuring Jackie Chan eating noodles with chopsticks) and then leave-before-my-number-got-called-because-I-can’t-miss-my-brake-appointment…)

This is an interesting situation.

I had to reschedule a client call, and of course all my client work is being delayed, because working on live websites requires being connected to the internet.

There is non-online work I can be doing, of course — planning, writing, filing, organizing, etc. But the actual work, the part where I run backups and install plugins and publish blog posts and tweak sales pages? Can’t be done without an internet connection.

So it is fascinating to notice that part of my reaction is logical and sensible because the majority of what I do requires being online. And that another part is the jittery, twitchy, impending delirium tremens of internet withdrawal.

Of course I never considered myself addicted until I couldn’t get my fix.

And then it was a surprisingly short time until I caught myself thinking ridiculous nonsensical things like I can’t learn anything! and then doing weird things like booting up my laptop in the brake shop. Kinda like your alcoholic uncle rifling through the fridge and downing a jar of maraschino cherries with a chaser of vanilla extract.

This “unplugging” thing people talk of? I don’t really do it. I work at home and my computer is always on, always connected.

That advice to batch email checking and only do it once or twice a day? Never thought it applied to me.

I never thought I suffered from Internet hangovers because I’m never offline long enough to get the shakes.

So this weekend will be an interesting experiment.

Remaining conscious and noticing what’s going on will be key.

I don’t know how I’ll feel about it — I’ll have to experience it first. Right now I’m OK, but of course I’m still online, and that’s about to change.

Have you ever tried an experiment with batching email, limiting internet access, or intentionally unplugging? How did it go for you? What did you notice? I’d love to hear about it in the comments (but I may not reply until Monday!!).

WordPress menus: If you can’t use them, you seriously need a new theme

I’ve had three clients in as many weeks who came to me with problems with the navigation menus on their websites.

In every one of these three cases, it turned out that they weren’t able to use the built-in WordPress menus, because their themes were outdated. And with WordPress 3.3 due to be released in the next few weeks, theme compatibility is on my mind.

If you’re apprehensive about updating to WordPress 3.3, get a Website Tune-Up and I’ll handle the upgrade for you, as well as making sure you’re completely backed up.

Navigation is important. If your visitors can’t find things on your site, they will go away.

To meet this need, every website should have these two things on (almost) every page:*

  1. Clear navigation menu(s). The navigation links should have short, obvious names. On my site, for instance, the purple navigation bar that appears just below my header has six links: Home, About, Contact, Store, Free Goodies, and Subscribe. My Store link also has a drop-down menu listing the individual pages describing my products and services.
  2. A “search this site” form. This can go in the header, in the navigation bar, or in a sidebar, but please put it in a consistent location across your site. And test it once in awhile to make sure it works.

*I say “almost” because there are always exceptions. On a sales page, for instance, you may not want to include a search form because you want the single call-to-action on that page to be clicking the buy button.

Is your theme compatible with WordPress Menus?

These three clients, with different websites, were all telling me that they couldn’t reorder their menu items or add items to their menus. And at first I was baffled, because the WordPress menus are really easy to work with — you just drag and drop to reorder, and adding a page is a one-click operation.

But in each case, the problem quickly became clear when I logged into their WordPress dashboard to find that their theme was not compatible with the built-in WordPress menus.

If you’re not sure if your theme is compatible with the drag-and-drop WordPress menus, visit Appearance –> Menus in your WordPress dashboard. If you see a message telling you that “The current theme does not natively support menus…” then you need a new theme. Period.

If you see this incompatibility warning, you seriously need a new theme.

Yikes! What if you need a new theme?

The WordPress menus have been drag-and-drop for at least a year now. So any theme that is not compatible with WordPress menus is outdated.

Good theme developers update their themes when WordPress introduces cool new functions like drag-and-drop menus, so it’s possible that you can simply update your theme to the latest version. If you bought a premium theme, updates like this are part of what you paid for. Ask the theme creator how to update your theme.

If your theme doesn’t have a menu-compatible latest version, you seriously need to get a new theme. Seriously. You are missing out on features that will make your WordPress-wrangling easy, quick, and fun. And older code (yes, older than a year is pretty old in Internet time) is more vulnerable to corruption by Internet Bad Guys.

With a Website Tune-Up, I’ll update your theme to the latest version, if one is available (and I’ll also update you to WordPress 3.3 when it comes out).

If you need to switch themes entirely because your old theme is outdated, consider my new Fairy Godmother package, which includes two one-hour consultations with me plus my time to fix, tweak, and test your site.

Got a question about WordPress menus, themes, or wine? Leave a comment!

Wine menu image adapted from Civertan on Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License

Anchor yourself with easy jump links

Anchor and chain linksI’ve previously explained how WordPress is an internal linking powerhouse, but even the super-easy and super-powerful WordPress link dialog box doesn’t contain a built-in way to add jump links.

Jump links, also known as anchor links, are links that take you to a specific part of a page, instead of the default top location.

I personally prefer the term jump links because it captures the idea that these links let readers “jump” to various parts of a page (and also because technically all links use the HTML anchor tag…so every link is an anchor link).

So…what if you want to link to something other than the top of the page?

Good news: Yes you can!

News that might be not-quite-so-good: You have to do a little bit of manual fiddling to get it to work, including (gasp) adding a tiny piece of HTML code to your page.

Why use jump links in the first place?

Links should be useful. And sometimes that means linking within the content of a page.

F’rinstance, here are some situations that might call for jump links:

  • A long post or page with a table of contents at the top. Each item in the table of contents links to a subhead lower down on the page.
  • The handy “return to top” link at the bottom of a page.
  • At the top of a sales page, you can include a link saying “Want to go straight to the price?”
  • Footnotes.[1]

Let’s say, for example, that you have a long page, and you want to let readers jump straight to Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3 of the page from a table of contents at the top. Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1. Figure out where the jump will start and end

At the top of your page, you’ll have some text that you want to turn into clickable links to sections of your page. Maybe a list, like this:

Part 1: Thesis

Part 2: Antithesis

Part 3: Synthesis

And then lower down in the body of your page, you’ll have subheads, using Header 3 style, that match those table-of-contents listings.

Let’s link up the table-of-contents entry “Part 1: Thesis” with its subhead. To do that, we’ll start with the subhead itself.

Step 2. Locate the end point of the jump in HTML view

Visual tab and HTML tab

The Visual and HTML tabs on the WordPress post box

At the top of your WordPress post box, there are two tabs, labeled Visual and HTML. Most of us do our writing entirely in Visual view, which is fine for most purposes. This is one of the few times you’ll need to take a peek into the HTML code of your page.

If you click the HTML tab, you’ll see that the text of your post is still there, interspersed with HTML tags. What you want to do is find the subhead where you’ll be pointing your jump link. If you’ve used the WordPress visual editor to give this subhead a Header 3 style, it will be wrapped in the appropriate HTML tags like this:

<h3>Part 1: Thesis</h3>

Step 3. Add an id attribute to your HTML

Now that you’ve located the HTML tags that enclose your subhead, you need to add one small piece of code to the first tag, so that this:

<h3>Part 1: Thesis</h3>

becomes this:

<h3 id="thesis">Part 1: Thesis</h3>

Pay attention to the spacing: Leave a space before the “id” but make sure there’s no space between the closing quotation mark and the greater-than symbol. And remember, you’re not deleting any characters, only adding.

You get to choose the text between the quotation marks — it will become part of your link URL, so use only letters and numbers, and no spaces inside the quotation marks.

You can add the id=”linkname” attribute to any HTML tag, not just <h3>. Subheads are easy to find and it makes sense to use them, but you’re not limited to them for jump link purposes.

Step 4. Switch back to Visual view and make sure it looks OK

Now click the Visual tab again and make sure the subhead — and everything after it — looks all right. “All right” in this case means “visually indistinguishable from before you added the id=”linkname” attribute.” In the Visual tab, your subhead should look unchanged.

Step 5. Add a link at the origin point

Now that you’ve prepared the end point of your jump link, you can use the built-in WordPress link dialog box to add your link in the usual way: Highlight the text you want to turn into a clickable link (in this case, the table-of-contents entry corresponding to the subhead) and click the link icon in your editing toolbar.

Now, instead of putting a full URL here, simply type the number sign (#) followed by the word you placed between the quotation marks in your id=”linkname” attribute, like this:

Optionally fill in a title, then click the blue “Add Link” button to save the link. Your table-of-contents entry should now show up as a blue, underlined link.

Step 6: Test the link

Once you’ve added the link, I suggest previewing the page to make sure your jump link works as intended. In the Preview tab, click the link and see if you jump down (or up) the page to your desired end point.

If it works, you are good to go.

If it doesn’t (if you click the link and nothing happens, for instance, or if you are taken to your home page instead of the same-page end point you expected), first double-check your HTML change.

It’s also possible that your theme or one of your plugins is rewriting your link URLs. The solution is to use the full URL of the page plus the “#linkname”, instead of just “#linkname” in the URL field, like this:

The tricky part here is that you are linking to the same page you’re currently editing, and if that page is unpublished, it won’t show up in the list of “existing content,” so you’ll have to manually type the complete and correct URL, make sure it ends with a forward slash, and append the “#linkname” text.

Now you can easily create tables of contents, footnotes, and intra-page jump links. Jump away!

1. ^ See how that little superscript “1″ took you right down here to the bottom of the post? Neat, huh? The thing to remember with footnotes is that you always want to provide your readers an easy way to jump back up to exactly where they came from, or you’ll lose them. That’s why the little “^” symbol at the beginning of this footnote is another jump link that goes right back up to the footnoted text. If it’s good enough for Wikipedia, it’s good enough for me!

Image adapted from dorron on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License