The Busy Bee

Someone recently sent me an email asking me the following question, and I thought I would share the answer here.

The Question

“I’m hoping you can point me in the right direction about where to look to change my thumbnail picture that auto fills on one of your client’s WordPress blog when I post a response?”

The Answer

Those images are called avatars, and on a website powered by WordPress, you assign a photo to your email address by going to http://en.gravatar.com/.  There you can assign an image to your email address, or assign multiple images to different email addresses if you have several email address, like I do.  Since WordPress powers more websites than any other platform in the world right now, that is a lot of website blogs.

It is pretty quick to set-up and sometimes takes a little time for your gravatar to show up, but it should within 2 or 3 days from my experience.  I also recommend using a .png image file over a .jpg as I had issues with JPGs when I was last adding images, but that may have changed by now.  Not a big deal, just a preference.

If that helped, or you have something to add to my explanation, please share below, and see if your gravatar shows up.

Happy commenting.

Xmarks has a service that allows you to sync your bookmarks across browsers.  There are built-in options now to sync bookmarks within a browser, but not across browsers.  So Xmarks has been filling the gap for a while.

Unfortunately I have been having issues for a very long time (many many months) getting it to work on Safari.  Because I don’t use Safari that frequently, (I prefer Firefox primarily because of an indispensable web development addon called Firebug), I have not been super aggressive with getting the issue fixed.  I have gone back and forth about 10 times at least with Xmarks, now owned by LastPass, and never received any productive help.

Today, I changed something that seems to have made all of the difference.  I realized that I have to login with my email address and not my Username – even though the login box says “Username or email address” – that is not the case, at least not with me.  When I try to login with my username, it does not login, but when I login with my email address, it does.

More details:  I am on a Mac, now running Lion but two weeks ago was running Tiger and can only assume it was the same issue there.  To set preferences for logging into safari, you would open System Preferences and go to the Xmarks tab.  From there, on the General tab, there is a button to “Change login”.  Use that button to enter your EMAIL ADDRESS and password.  Try now.  For me, that worked.

What were the symptoms?  I had Xmarks working fine on Firefox, but not on Safari.  Everytime it tried to sync, it would just give the logging in… pop-up for a long time and eventually would say something like, “Sync Failed” – even though it was not really the sync, it was more accurately that it just could not login.

Hope this helps someone.  If it does, feel free to share below.

If you are interested in the WordPress User Guide, click on that link to start at the beginning.

How to make an email address on your website automatically open a users default email program on their computer and insert that email address in the To: field.  Instructions here are specifically tailored to use with WordPress, but can be applied in any case.

1. Add the email address to your website’s content as you would any content.
2. Then you are going to make it a link, jut as you would make some text link to another page, for example. So you would highlight your new email address (ie double click over it or click-drag your cursor of the email address); and then click on the “Link” button in your website editor to open the pop-up dialog box that allows you to add a website address.
3. INSTEAD of creating a link starting HTTP://….. – you will want to erase that part and insert the following: mailto:john@cnca.com
4. …where john@cnca.com is the email address being used. By putting mailto: before the email address, this causes the effect you want.
5. That is it. Save your changes. You do not have to specify a Target for that link in the pop-up.

For instructions on how to create a Forward in a Cpanel based hosting environment, click on How to Create an Email Forward in CPanel.

For example, if you generally use an email address myname@yahoo.com, and you want to add an email address to your website myname@mydomain.com, and have that newly created email address (which has your website’s domain name), then you will want to create a forward to forward myname@mydomain.com to myname@yahoo.com).  This will have the effect of automatically forwarding all email to your yahoo.com email address without having to share it on your website, (and also you can share a more professional email address on your website).  This is often desirable if you do not want to change how you manage your emails, as you would still be able to continue to just check your yahoo.com account as usual.

Instructions on how to create a Forward in a Cpanel based hosting environment

For example, if you generally use an email address myname@yahoo.com, and you want to add an email address to your website myname@mydomain.com, and have that newly created email address (which has your website’s domain name), then you will want to create a forward to forward myname@mydomain.com to myname@yahoo.com).  This will have the effect of automatically forwarding all email to your yahoo.com email address without having to share it on your website, (and also you can share a more professional email address on your website).  This is often desirable if you do not want to change how you manage your emails, as you would still be able to continue to just check your yahoo.com account as usual.

The one downside is that you will not be set up to send email from that new domain, only to receive.  In many cases, this is not an issue

1. First, login to your hosting account.  You can get that information from your hosting provider.
2. In the various sections of your hosting administrative panel that will present itself, there is a section titled “Mail”, and in there an option called “Forwards”. Click on Forwards.
3. Displayed will be a list of existing forwards (if any) and under that list is a button “Add Forward”. Click that button.
4. In the field under Address > Address to Forward, you will enter, for our example, just the name john.
5. On the right side of that field you may have options as to what domain name you want to have your new email address connected to. The options presented will be only those domains in your hosting account.
6. Then below that where it says Destination > Forward to email address, you will enter the email address you want your new email address to be forwarded to – for example, john45@yahoo.com
7. Then click on the button at the bottom of the page, “Add Forwarder”. That is it. Use the button at top right of your screen to “Logout”.

If you want to learn how to add an email link to your website, specifically within WordPress, click on How to make an email address link.

Here are the basics. If you want to, for example, conduct transactions online with credit cards, via a form or shopping cart, where customers enter their credit card information, you will want to offer your customers the security that once they hit the submit button, their information is not being viewed by other than you.

How do you do this?