MissTick
Thingish Things

This is a collection of all the tricks&tips to help you set your diary the way you want. I think, it has grown big enough to qualify for a dedicated entry. Feel free to contribute with your comments. (please note the irrelevant comments might get privatised to preserve the idea of a cheatsheet) HOW TO GET YOUR DD NAME TO BE DISPLAYED AS A HOT LINK WHEN YOU POST A COMMENT I’ve noticed that it was a feature few of us miss from the old diary system: when someone posts a comment on your diary, their name isn’t displayed as a link, so you cannot just click on it to go to their diary pages to respond. Apparently, it is NOT SO!!! The new diary can be set to display your name as a link to your diary very easy: just log on to your Dashboard–>Users–>Your Profile and edit it so that when it says: Contact Info: Website add the url of your Diary. Also, it is worth noticing that this won’t work in retrospective, i.e. any comments you made before this edit, won’t display your name as a Hot Link. So, don't forget to leave a fresh comment. Also, please note that if you are NOT logged in to DD when posting comments on other diaries, then it won’t pick up your diary link, unless you specifically enter it into Website field for this comment. FRIENDS NOTIFIES It’s a bit confusing, methinks and not particular user-friendly. Here is my interpretation of how I think it works: on Deardiary–>Friends page: User Level Settings - here you will see those who have asked permission to see your friends only entries and to get notifies. You cannot add anyone in here, THEY have to ask you to appear in this list. Diary Level Settings - here you will see all diaries whom YOU have asked to see their friends only and to get notified. YOU have to ask them first. how to ask: type their diary name in Friends field on top of Deardiary/Friends page (in Dashboard) –>Search–>Select diarist (from dropdown list) you want to get notifies from–>Add. you will see their name in your Diary Level Setings and can tick Request Diary Notification. they will still have to approve it though, but once they done, you should see it on this screen as Yes in “They Notify You” column. DASHBOARD HELPFUL OPTION when you page through dashboard, playing with your settings, don’t forget to click Screen Options – it will give you more configuration options to play with. For example, by default Appearance–>Menus doesn’t show a choice of link target. That means that you cannot choose if your external links should be opened in new tab/window. But select Screen Options in the top right corner of the Menues dashboard page and tick the box Link Target in Show advanced menu properties. Almost every dashboard page will have a Screen Options – an additional menu that doesn’t come by default. Make sure you checked them out – it worth it. One of the advantages of it I found particular useful – on Dashboard page (the top one) it gives you a choice of what to Show on screen – so when you log on into your diary, you can configure what you want to see there and what you don’t want to see. Makes your own welcome page a bit less cluttered. STICKY POSTS VS RECENT POSTS (Genesis theme only!) If you mark any post as STICKY, the post will be placed at the top of the front page of posts, keeping it there until new posts are published. So really it is not as sticky as far as stickiness goes. You want to display few recent posts and also few posts from not so recent times that you want to have an instant access from any page of your blog. To always have a certain post handy for referral from any page of my blog, I put it as a Widget into Primary side bar: Dashboard–>Appearance–>Widgets–>Genesis Featured Posts You will have a choice of which posts to choose and how you want them to look. On my site I put them as a Sticky Posts sorted by the date. HOW TO GET YOUR MENUS TO SHOW ON THE TOP OF A PAGE, UNDER THE HEADER Dashboard–>Appearance–>Menu. Create Custom menu first – put all the links you want in it, give it a name. Then on the same Menu page – –> Theme Locations–> the top bar is Primary Navigation Menu. The secondary navigation would sit right under the Primary one Basically, the idea is to create few custom menus and play with placing them in different places, You can also use Widget option for that as well as Theme locations.