Let’s face it, Facebook, you have managed to make me look like a fool twice this week and while that’s not terribly difficult to do, I’m getting tired of it. This time around I find out that you fulfilled my wish for a way to view status updates only. No application updates, no notes, no videos, no links to helpful articles like this one, just plain old status updates. So where did you put this fantastic new Feed View? Why, down at the bottom of my list of Feed Views. While this is probably not a big deal for most of your users, it’s a really big deal for me because I subdivide all of my users into different categories to help me wade through them a bit better. So, let’s see what we have to in order to see the Status Updates view as our default page view. (Thanks to Amber Ward and her list of friends for this tip)

Step One
Look at the bottom of list of Feed Views for the word “more” and click it.

Step Two
Locate the Feed View titled “Status Updates”.

Step Three
Move your mouse to the right hand side of the “Status Updates” Feed View item, then click and drag it ALL the way up to the top of the list, letting go of it at the very top.

Step Four
Now that the item is at the top of your Feeds List, CLICK IT!!

Step Five
Celebrate! Now you can see all of your friends’ status updates without seeing all the additional blather that they or their apps may be posting.

Mind you, by following these instructions and never looking back you many never run across good information like THIS ARTICLE again in your lifetime, so be sure to use the News Feed and Live Feed views from time to time to get a taste of what your friends are yapping about this week…. you never know what those crazy friends might be up to!!

Happy Facebooking!

Related posts:

1. Fix Your Broken Facebook Feed
2. Facebook’s NEW News Feed
3. Facebook Videos Finally Play on iPhone without Flash?

With the WordPress theme I’m currently running my Single Page posts are nested four levels deep within other DIVs. Each paragraph block in a post is wrapped with its own HTML paragraph tags. Depending on the post, I may have one or more images interspersed between paragraphs.

Viewing this in IE7, revealed large “holes” in my paragraphs (see image at top of post).

My first reaction was that these were “phantom” images that were not displaying. But, checking the post in another browser confirmed that no images were missing. A more accurate description might be that they were “cast shadows” from existing images. Regardless of why they were occuring, the problem had to be with my stylesheet and the way that IE7 was rendering it (a tradition of poor rendering we’ve grown accustomed to from Microsoft).

After much trial and error I determined that the solution was to specify a width to the paragraphs (see photo below). Even though this works on Firefox and other browsers, IE7 doesn’t seem to “pass along” the established width of the outermost DIV which ultimately contains the paragraphs for the post, so it’s up to you as the designer to do so.

In this particular theme, the area containing the blog post is around 565 pixels wide, a measurement established 2 or 3 DIVs earlier in the code. I simply made the stylesheet define the paragraphs in the single-post DIV as being 560 pixels wide, which made everything work, all over.

No related posts.

In Wordpress, these things we call “categories” serve several functions.

Categories quickly inform first-time visitors what the topics are that you, as an author, write about. This is immensely helpful, both for your visitors and for you. Categories, accurately titled and accurately applied to posts (which I occasionally refer to as “articles”), certainly won’t be overlooked by search engines.

The grand convenience of categories is that, thanks to the way that WordPress stores your posts in a database, visitors may elect to view posts which only belong to one category. For instance, you may only want to read the articles that I have published under the “How To” category here on my own website. This rich and powerful means of navigating your data ensures that you’re providing the ultimate convenience to your visitors, and thus to yourself as a content provider.

Find Your Category Listing
Before you press the “Publish” button on that article you’ve been composing, look around for something called “Categories”. In the newest WordPress.com interface they’re listed underneath the area where you compose your article. Just scroll down past the box where you’ve typed the body of your post and look for a listing of your categories (as shown in the image at the beginning of this post).

See All Your Choices
When you first scroll down to look at the list of categories WordPress may only display the “Most Used” categories. To see ALL of the categories you should click the word link that say “All Categories”. (In the screenshot above you’ll see that I’ve already clicked the “All Categories” link)

Make a Selection
Remember, you must PICK a category to associate with your article before you click the “Publish” button to publish your article. All you need to do is to click the box to the left of the category (which will put a little check mark in the box).

Add a Category
Every new WordPress blog starts off with only one category name: “Uncategorized”. It’s up to you as an Author to create more categories as they’re needed. I’d STRONGLY urge you to use single words as categories, to provide clarity for your visitors. Who can figure out a sentence-long category name? Be concise! (However, as you can see in the provided example above, it is possible to use more than one word in your descriptions.)

Warning: Don’t Forget to Choose a Category!
Please note in this same example that I (as administrator of the blog) have deleted the default category name “Uncategorized”. If you elect to do this, be sure that you (and any other authors on your blog) know that they must select a category from the list of categories before they publish an article, otherwise WordPress will create a new category named “1″ and assign it to that uncategorized post, which is obviously not going to be very helpful to your visitors (now is it?).

Multiple Categories
There are times when you might want to list a post under more that one category, and you are able to check more than one category from that list if needed.

I hope that this article helps some of you who don’t understand what categories are, or how they work. Those of us who work with this stuff all the time can lose sight of the fact that some people need a primer on the basics!

Related posts:

1. Make Facebook’s NEW Status Updates Group Your Default