The excellent team over at Themify found a way for this to work – the full details are here. 

Thanks for your help guys!

I had a few issues changing over the themes – caused by a rogue widget/plugin that was running in my old theme – Themify support was excellent, if a little hampered by our different timezones – but, as someone who works in support myself – I was impressed with the response and the willingness to take on the issue.

I’m still tweaking some of the fonts and features of the site – but hopefully everything will stay working whilst I tinker away in the background.

Let me know what you think…

Posted from WordPress for Windows Phone

Another Monday, and another blogger kick starting a blog for the nth time.

In situations like this, it’s de rigeur to write about the personal circumstances that stopped you posting; the bereavement, the illness, the broken PC, the holiday or the difficulties at work.

I won’t bother. It’s simple. I fell off.

And I didn’t bother to get back on. Some of the above excuses are true in this case, but really, my motivation went.

It’s back now – and I’m ready for a new week, a new start, some new projects and some new words.

Not joining in, no stupid jokes, Shakespeare isn’t French (Radio 4) and the AA aren’t using jetpacks. Gordon Brown won’t run those posters. And this one is just daft.

Not playing, it’s not funny.

To make your site absolutely the best it can be, you need to have a great search facility to allow your visitors to drill down to the content they need. Now you can add a Bing search box to your site (just like the one over to the right).

Bing is the search engine from Microsoft, and it just keeps getting better and better, crisp results, cool features and a high pace of development makes it a growing choice amongst web users.

To install a Bing search box is really easy – there are only 4 steps to search perfection:

1. Visit Bing Box – part of the services provided by Bing – and click ‘get started’ on the advanced search box option.
2. Enter your site details and the URL of the site(s) you want search – it can be up to 10 – then click ‘next’.
3. Edit the language and dimensions of the search results – the click ‘next’ – you may need to tinker with the width of the search box, and any colour requirements you have to blend in with the theme of your site.
4. Copy the code snippet to where you want the search box to appear – I used a WordPress text widget which allowed me to paste the code internally and edit the title – so the search box now sits in the sidebar of my blog.

A very cool and tidy integration – and lets your readers get the maximum out of your site.

How else should site owners be pimping their web pages?

I’m rebooting and changing direction a little bit, and will begin that by paying some much needed attention to my site. I’ve had a bit of a redesign and made some things work that were broken – my DJ Mixes page is now completely functional, with links to all of my recent mixes now available. I’ve added some social networking tools to help bookmark the best posts.

I’m planning to focus my attention a little bit more towards my work – I recently went on a course delivered by Nicholas Bate on Personal Excellence, and he spoke about creating a personal brand, and being very deliberate about the processes you follow as you ‘put yourself out there’.  I’ve been quite inspired since that course and have used the summer vacation time to reassess and plan out how I’ll do that.

I’m really excited about this next phase of my online life.

Its really easy to setup your wordpress blog, or any website to show your Live Messenger status – I did it two or three minutes. Heres the steps:

1. Make sure you have a working Live Messenger ID – download the client here
2. Go to http://settings.messenger.live.com/applications/websettings.aspx and sign in with your Windows Live ID
3. Enable the setting to show your status to the web
4. Copy the appropriate code into your HTML – I copied it into sidebar.php on my WordPress theme and wrapped in an list object so that it styled nicely.

There is a much more detailed tutorial on how to set this up over at Angus Logans blog – but honestly, if I can do it in a few minutes, then anyone can.

I look forward to hearing from you on messenger – and I hope this works for y’all!

Full information on the tools I used to make it so – after the jump

To build mattrutherfordDOTcom I used:

• Cutline Theme for WordPress – really nice theme in its original state, but I wanted more white space so removed all the lines and the photographic headers leaving only the structure in the place. I also added in an asides category and styled it slightly differently.
• Twitter for WordPress – plug in that displays my twitter feed in the sidebar. Twitter is an amazingly useful site for keeping your presence updated…you can also link it to your facebook page, so that stays in sync.
• Last.Fm for WordPress – plug in that displays your latest last.fm plays on your sidebar. Last.Fm is great for tracking the music you listen to across multiple platforms.
• FlickrRSS for WordPress – again, a simple plugin that can display pictures from your stream, very customisable – I use it to display my latest picture, but it could be any number of pictures in a number of styles and shapes.

For recording stats:

• Get Clicky – really simple analytics package with a WordPress Plugin that just works – very simple, and will do me until I can get access to AdCenter Analytics (Gatineau)

Tools:

• Macromedia Fireworks – to create the head graphics
• FileZilla – for FTP heavy lifting, lightweight – full featured FTP client
• RightLoad – for quick FTP work, really simple right click to upload a file to an FTP destination

Honorable Mentions:

Diet Coke, Radiohead – In Rainbows, King Creosote – KC Rules OK, my trusty old Dell Desktop (I’ll upgrade you soon), Moleskine Notebooks and the Christmas break.