Creating A Sticky Post In WordPress

Sometimes it’s helpful to create a sticky post in your blog, one that stays at the top of the home page and appears as the first post.  Actually, sometimes it’s useful to have several sticky posts, but just how do you create these?

Simples if you know how…

Wordpress Sticky Post

If you are creating a post in WordPress, the top right of the screen ought to look like this image above.

To create a Sticky Post, click on the Edit field to the right of where it says Visibility: Public, and the screen should change to look like the image below.

Wordpress Sticky Post

All you need to do to make your post a Sticky one, is to check the box that says Stick this post to the front page and then click on OK.

You can easily test this by modifying an older post, making it sticky, and then viewing the home page for your blog. 

To stop a post from being sticky?  Well I will leave you to figure that out…


The A-Z April Blogging Challenge

Along with around 1,500 other writers I have been publishing articles in April as part of a challenge to write 26 articles, each with a theme of a different letter of the alphabet, beginning at A and working through to Z with each successive day.

A-Z Blogging Challenge

There are no prizes, just the feeling that you have accomplished something when you complete the mission, plus having 26 more articles on your blog, and hopefully some more regular followers.

So What Did I Write About

Beginning with the letter A on April 1st, here are the articles that I have written for the challenge so far:

A Is For April – which means April Fools Day, practical jokes, and a quick summary of the A-Z Blogging Challenge.

B Is For Brain Tumor – which my wife was diagnosed with in January, and has now almost fully recovered from thankfully.

C Is For Come Find Me – where can you find me on the internet.  If you would like to follow me on other sites like Facebook, Twitter or Stumbleupon, here is where I am.

D Is For Dine With Me – which discusses various articles that I have written about food and dining.

E Is For Evony – one of the most addictive multi-player games online.  Here I dealt with the addiction that my wife and I both had, and how games like Evony can destroy your lives.

F Is For Fish & Chips – the Great British Takeaway meal, and with my wife having spent some time in her grandparents Fish & Chip shop when she was growing up, a subject that she knows a lot about.

G Is For Gloomy Mornings – don’t you just hate waking up when it’s still dark and you look up to see just a grey sky full of threatening rain clouds.

H Is For History – one of my favourite subjects at school and ever since.  I especially love ancient history, and here my followers get to find out what it was that first interested me in history.

I Is For International Calls – which used to cost a small fortune, but which if you know what to look out for when buying an international calling card can now cost less than an inter-state phone call.

J Is For Jamaica – which is about my first trip to Jamaica in 1989 to install a computer system for one of the petroleum companies, but it’s not about work, it’s about my experiences there and my travels around the island.

K Is For Kingston Jamaica: That Is – ja mon!  This article goes on to describe more of my travels around the island of Jamaica and what it was like to be working in Kingston.

L Is For Lime Cay In Jamaica – the final part of my trip to Jamaica describes the pirate town of Port Royal, a visit to paradise at Lime Cay, and getting stranded adrift in the middle of the sea in a small boat.

M Is For Money Can It Make You Happy – which asks the question that if money is the root of all evil, why sometimes you need money to be happy.

N Is For Nuts! – which means anything from peanuts and cashews to an expression that was made famous during the Battle Of The Bulge.

Oh Dear My Muse Has Left Me – and how to overcome that dreaded phenomenon otherwise known as Writers Block.

P Is For Payne – not PAIN, PAINE or any other spelling forms…

Q Is For Queue – it’s just something that British folk do…

R Is For Reverse – meaning a change of direction, and this article changes direction after inspiration from an unexpected source…

S Is For Spam Comments – just something that has become a fact of life these days, but we can deal with it if we choose.

T Is For Today – I didn’t want to write my “T” post about the same thing as everyone else, and I wasn’t sure what to write about, so I thought “why not Today”.

U Is For Upside The Head – one of those phrases that really winds me up and makes me see red.

V Is For Vampire Woman – let the freak show begin as strange people try to change themselves to look demonic.

W Is For Wedding – and in 2 days time it’s the Royal Wedding, a huge celebration in the UK.

X Is For Xylophone – that often forgotten musical instrument, related to the Marimba that originated in Africa, and that is very entertaining to see someone play.

Y Is For Yawning – what is it that causes us to yawn? Is there a scientific reason?

Z Is For Zecharia Sitchin – a man who probably came closer than anyone to unraveling the mysteries of man’s most ancient times.

Whether you are a new visitor to Off The Record or whether you have been reading my articles for a while, I hope to see you back here reading my future articles, and if you do like them, please leave a comment, and help by sharing them.  You can find a Share button at the end of each article.


Our Blog Is Almost Two Years Old

It’s hard to believe that the first post was published on our blog on New Years Eve 2008, which is almost 2 years ago.

I had great hopes for this site, and Debbie and I spent a while trying to come up with a good domain name, the meaning of which you can see if you visit our About page.

At the time of creating the blog, both Debbie and I were creating lenses on Squidoo, as well as being involved on a new site Tagfoot as mentors.

I was also still living in Florida, with Debbie in the UK, and we were still 7 months away from my moving back to the UK so that we could be together all the time.

Over the months Debbie found it hard to get enthusiastic about writing, and so most of the articles in the last year have been up to me.   I also found it hard to work a full time job, create lenses on Squidoo, write articles on Associated Content, and try to earn money online to suplement my income from my full time job.

As a result, some weeks have seen just two articles published on here.  Firstly an automatic post that features my Tweets on Twitter for the previous week, and secondly a post that highlights the articles that I have published on Associated Content in the last week.

At this time I am not 100% sure which direction the blog is going in, since I would dearly love for Debbie to be writing again, since she has a lot of experience in dealing with children with emotional and behavioral problems, and also she has been ill recently and could write a wonderful diary on her history of Meniere’s Disease.

I have been posting shopping bargains and special offers as well, which is another area of diversity, and so in some ways it might be a good idea to create multiple blogs rather than just have this solitary one.

The one thing that will not change in 2011 is that the blog will go on, and hopefully if things continue to go well for us, Debbie will come back and write more, and give our readers more to think about and to enjoy.

If you do enjoy this blog, please can you give us a Thumbs Up on Facebook or any other social sites that you use, and hopefully our readership will grow over the coming year, as will the number of our articles.

Merry Christmas to you all and a Happy and Prosperous New Year for 2011.
Tony & Debbie

Tagfoot – Social Bookmarking Redefined

TagfootTagfoot is a brand new social bookmarking and networking site, and it’s unique.   This is your invitation to join Tagfoot and find out all about this great site.

From a description alone you might think that Tagfoot is just another site like Digg or Stumbleupon, but aside from being able to bookmark pages, there the similarity ends.  The whole interface and experience is something else.

With Tagfoot you can bookmark different types of items, including  news, photographs and videos.  There is even a facility to build your own wishlist (more about this later).  Maybe you would like to let the world know about your blog or website, your photographs, the latest funny video you found on You Tube, or a news headline .   This is the place to do it.


follow_my_footsteps

You can share anything with other members.

Over time you can build up a list of friends on Tagfoot who have similar interests.  Members tag themselves to identify things that they are interested in, and when you bookmark an item you have the ability to share it with friends, either by name, or by specifying various tags.

Tagfoot is a wonderful online community made up of diverse, vibrant, fun and interesting people of all ages from all around the world. There’s quite a following from Squidoo and Hubpages on there, plus from other social networking sites as well.

follow_my_footsteps

This is the fun part…

Once items have been shared with other members, you can comment on them and rate them. We have some fantastic, side splitting conversations as well as more serious ones too. The more you interact with others on Tagfoot, the more you will gain from it. It’s not just about promoting your own stuff. It’s also about helping out others.

If you like an item that someone has shared, you can opt to give it a Foot-Up, which tells the person who bookmarked it that you like this type of item.  You can also foot comments on items up or down.   The more you bookmark, share, comment on or foot up, the higher your footing.  The Tagfoot home page shows you your rank or footing and it’s fun to rise up the charts as you find more things of interest to comment on.

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Now, here’s the clever part…

badge_profootIf you have a Google Adsense account or an Amazon affiliate account, you can earn money on Tagfoot.

Add at least ten items each to your bookmarks, news, videos and wishlist, and you can then apply to ‘Support’ to have your Google Adsense account linked into your Tagfoot account. Adsense adverts are displayed on every page, and a percentage of these will be for your account.  So the more interesting and diverse your bookmarks, the higher the chance of you earning something from the clickouts.

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And there is more to come…

If you have an Amazon account, you can add items from Amazon to your Wishlist and tag them.  There is a Widget that you can configure to select Wishlist items that match given tags, and you can display these items on your web page or blog using the Widget.  This will drive people to Tagfoot and if they buy – well I think you get the picture.  You can see an example of the Tagfoot Widget at the top right of this page.

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Do you Twitter?

badge_twitfootTwitter is rapidly becoming the site to be on, with millions of tweets being sent out daily.  There is an interface from Tagfoot to Twitter so that having bookmarked a page, shared a page or footed an item, you can opt to have a notification sent to your Twitter account.  Cool eh…  Add Twitter to your Tagfoot account and you get a shiny Twitfoot badge.

Tagfoot is spam free

There’s no spam on Tagfoot, or at least if someone attempts to spam it’s soon discovered and reported. You decide who to accept on your friends list and if they get too heavy with the shares they send you, you have a variety of options to control what you receive.   Tagfoot has it’s own police force, a select group of elite members called Bigfeet, who constantly monitor postings to ensure that everything is running smoothly and that nobody abuses the system, either by posting spam or illegal material, or by oversharing their posts.  Guess what?  If you achieve the elite status of Bigfoot, you get another shiny badge on your profile.

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So what do you think?

Hopefully this description of Tagfoot has got you curious.  Even better by now if your curiosity has got so aroused you already clicked on a link and checked it out.  If by this time you are still not sure about Tagfoot, all I can say is that both of us have been members for a few months and we wholeheartedly endorse it.  We have learned a lot, laughed a lot, and met a lot of great new people.  So what are you waiting for?

I hope that you will take a look at Tagfoot, sign up and become a participating member.  Certainly if you have your own websites or blogs, this is a great place to give them more exposure to the world.  We would love to hear from you to know what you think, so please leave us a comment if you have anything to say, or indeed if you have any questions we can answer for you.

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Don’t Miss The Definitive Guide To Tagfoot
100 Tagfoot Tips