It’s quite easy to put an image into your blog’s sidebar. Here are the steps to getting it right:

1. Make sure the image is the right size. Sidebar widths vary, but are usually 100 - 150 pixels.  You want your image to fit snugly in the sidebar. If necessary, resize the image with Photshop (or similar software) to the width you want it to display. It doesn’t matter if this isn’t exact, because you can adjust it when you see it, but the closer you can get to the actual width of your sidebar, the better the image will display. Leave the height proportional to the width as this is not a critical dimension in the sidebar.
2. Upload your image to your server using FTP. Conventionally, you will create a folder called ‘images’ in the same directory as your blog and upload the image to that folder.
3. Then log in to your blog’s dashboard and go to ‘Design’ (’Appearance’ in Wordpress 2.7) and click on ‘Widgets’. If you have more than one sidebar, display the one you want. Then, from the left-hand menu, click to add a text widget to the sidebar.
4. Click ‘Edit’ on that text widget and it will pop open. In the top line, add any heading you want displayed. This can be blank if you don’t want a heading. Then in the body of the widget, enter a snippet of HTML to display the image:<img border=”0″ src=”http://myblog.com/images/mypic.jpg” width=”125″ ></img>where ‘myblog.com’ is the domain of your blog and ‘mypic.jpg’ is the name of your image. Adjust this, if necessary, if your blog is on a sub-folder of your root directory.  Adjust the width to fit your sidebar.
5. Then click ‘Save’ (’Done’ in WordPress 2.7) to save the widget and ‘Save Changes’ to save the sidebar.

That’s it! Now view your blog to make sure that the image displays OK. If it doesn’t, then go back and tweak the width setting by editing the widget until it displays how you want.

If this post was helpful to you, please help me by stumbling, digging or otherwise sharing this post. Thanks!

WordPress 2.7 is on the way and today I uploaded the beta1 version of the new release to this blog.

The upgrade went well and everything on the blog seems to behave as before. Plugins are still working, widgets are still displaying, theme is hanging together fine.

There’s a new dashboard interface which will take a bit of getting used to but an exciting new feature is the ability to have a sticky post on the front page.  This means you can have one post at the top of the page and all subsequent posts will scroll below it.

I haven’t yet explored all the new gizmos but what I do know is that I’ll have to redo my WordPress tutorial (again!) as soon as WordPress 2.7 gets released in full (sigh).

Read more about 2.7 here:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/11/whats-your-favorite-thing-about-the-27-beta/

WordPress version 2.5 has received a lot of press around the blogosphere, not always very positive.

However, I’ve just upgraded this blog to 2.5 and it seems to have gone very smoothly. All my posts and pages survived and I have successfully reactivated all my plugins. So far so good.

As you can see, I’ve made the start of this post red(!) which is one of the new features in the Visual tab. But another welcome addition is the ability to add media files.

You can now easily add video, audio and other media to your posts and pages.  And your videos don’t have to be played via Youtube (although you can if you want) - you can upload a video to WordPress and embed it into a post or page. I’ve played around with this and it works fine.

What are widgets?

Widgets are the add-on accessories to a blog that make it more interesting.

Widgets can:

• provide extra functionality
• offer individuality
• make money
• and do a lot of other things

So what are widgets? Well, have a look over to the right. See those two columns stuffed with little boxes? They’re WordPress widgets.

Some are the standard stuff of WordPress blogs and are there to aid navigation: Recent Posts, Pages, Blogroll. You’ll see these on most blogs but maybe in a different place, depending on the whim of the blogger.

Other widgets are more particular. The picture of my free WordPress tutorial is a widget. I designed it and stuck it up there to get the visitor’s attention. It acts as a link for the visitor get find more details.

And below that there’s a box headed ‘From the Blogosphere’. That’s a widget. That’s ‘BlogRush‘: John Reese’s famous intitiative to get all the blogs in the world (well, the ones they approve) talking together. If you’re a serious blogger, check it out.

Widgets are wizard. Widgets are wonderful. WordPress widgets are great!