How to Avoid Orphans in Blog Titles (Wordpress)

I'm a proofreader by day, and I am constantly noting orphans (or widows, depending on who you ask), which is a single word or maybe even two small words that break to the next line, creating an awkward, unbalanced appearance. I noticed this happening recently on my Wordpress blogs but didn't have much of a clue how to fix it. Here's how: you simply add   in between words with no spaces before and after, like this:

Add these characters in between words

Doing this creates a single unit out of the three words that will break to the next line together if the title runs too long.

How to Add Sidebar in Single Post Pages With PlainTxt Wordpress Theme

The PlainTxtBlog Wordpress theme is one of my favorites. However, under the hood, it's totally confusing for new users. I was trying to figure out how to get the sidebar to appear on Single Post pages, which are the permalink pages that people mostly come across from a search engine. The sidebar just wasn't there--so frustrating. I'm not sure why the author left it out.

I actually contacted the author for help and thanked him for the wonderful theme. He responded that he does not supply support for his themes (understandable) and directed me to the readme file, which did me no good. After about a month of searching, I think I figured it out. Here's what you got to do.

First, go to your Wordpress theme editor and access the single post php page (it will be called single.php). Go to the bottom of the code and add the following line just before the code. Now, go to your style.css page and delete this line:

body.single div#container,body.page div#container{margin:0 0 2em;}

Now, click on a permalink (single post) page and the sidebar should appear.


*Update* In some versions of the PlainTxtBlog style, the sidebar is suppressed in the style.css page by the display:none attribute. Open the style.css page, do a search for sidebar, and find the style instructions that say display: none. Remove the body.single sidebar text from that set of instructions. The sidebar should now appear on the single page.

Wordpress Tip: How to Show a Complete Post in Category Archive View

On a another blog I run in which I use the PlainTxt Wordpress theme, I noticed that often Google would link to a category of my site, but when you navigated to that part of my blog, all that would appear were partial posts with no graphics. It looked crappy, like the searcher accidentally clicked on a spam blog or something. I wanted to fix it. Unfortunately, it took me a couple hours to figure it out.

The answer lies deep in the bowels of the Wordpress code in the archives.php file. In the code there is a call for something called "the_excerpt," which strips down each post to the barebones and removes any graphics. To get your Wordpress blog to show the full post, graphics and all, simply replace the_except with the_content. Check it out, the full posts.

Now hopefully people who navigate to your categories view will stick around a little longer after thinking they have the full site available to them and not a bunch of spam.

How to Fix YouTube Problem With Wordpress

I was having a problem with YouTube videos "breaking" the alignment of my Wordpress blogs, causing the sidebar to drop down the side of the page and in general messing up everything. The problem happens when you try to edit a post that has already been published.

To fix the problem, you'll need a plug in called Smart YouTube. Plugins are easy, so don't sweat uploading it if you are an amateur blogger. It's just a matter of a little uploading into your plugins folder.