How to add a gallery in WordPress

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Gary Grant

We’ve got a few new authors in The Garage and there have been some questions about how to upload a pretty gallery of images so another tutorial is in order.

First, a bit of history:

In the early days of WordPress, the image management functionality was rather limited unless you were a techie. The rest of us had to rely on plugins to make our lives easier. Arguably, the most popular galleries plugin was/is Alex Rabe’s NextGen Galleries. The problem with NextGen is that while the end result looks great and works well, it is a bit of a pain in the ass to create the actual galleries. Also, it is fairly easy to create a galleries page that allows all of the galleries to be displayed.

The more recent versions of WP have addressed the functionality issues surrounding galleries and it is now no more difficult to add galleries than it is to upload single images.
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How to write a post in WordPress

Posted on October 18, 2010 by Gary Grant

For some readers, this may seem like an overly simplistic post, but when bringing a new writer on board there is always a bit of a learning curve if they haven’t worked with WordPress. Thankfully, WP is the standard of blogging/publishing platforms and the mechanics of writing a post hasn’t really changed much since day 1. That means that I can write this once and stop hacking it together every time someone new drops in to write.

Step 1: go to the WP login page that you were supplied with. The address should look something like http://blahblahblah.com/wp-login.php/ and enter the username and password that you were given. Be careful, as these fields are case sensitive and the smart admins out there will mix things up to keep safe.
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WordPress 3.0 is up and running

Posted on June 21, 2010 by Gary Grant

With all the excitement and hoopla over the introduction of WordPress 3.0, I have to say that I’m somewhat underwhelmed. Sure, I’m only looking at user interface stuff right now, but many of the new features are not supported by Thesis.

I’m stoked to learn the MU capabilities though, as we have another site that needs to be launched and I’m hoping to get it up and running shortly.

Oh, one bright spot is that the actual upgrade is super fast.

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Please excuse the appearance

Posted on May 8, 2010 by Gary Grant

Yes, it looks a bit messy here at the moment. I’ve been using BumpyStick to test out the Agentpress child theme for Genesis and my Thesis layout is a bit mixed up. Over the coming days I’ll fix things up a bit and write about my experiences with Genesis.

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Are you using social media to promote your business?

Posted on April 7, 2010 by Gary Grant

I shot this quick video earlier today aimed at car dealership management, but the content is relevant to any business so I thought I would post it here too.

I’d love to hear some feedback from the non automotive crowd.

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Video test, unscripted, a bit of jibberish

Posted on March 30, 2010 by Gary Grant

Just playing around with webcam and videopress. My initial impression is that videopress took a very long time to upload this video.

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Time for a break, I’m tired of fighting

Posted on March 23, 2010 by Gary Grant

I’m testing out a few ideas for one of our other projects. I’d like to add in a free classifieds section to host free ads for special interest cars to drive some additional traffic. Given that WordPress is known to be such a powerful CMS tool, I thought there would be a number of classifieds plugins. It would seem that there are actually very few.

ClassiPress has a great rep, but it is a theme that only deals with classifieds, not a blog with classified functionality. There is WP Classifieds that appears to be rather flawed from the comments section of the developer’s own blog. Neither is what I need.

Then, there is Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin. It appears to be the most usable plugin for my needs, but it seems like I’m fighting to fix something every step of the way. I’m able to find a solution for every issue I come across, but the dev forum is disjointed and hard to follow and I have to really dig for each answer.

I’m going away from this for now and I’ll be back later to see what I can do to bring this thing together. Either that or I’m going to use the WP ecommerce plugin and go a totally different direction. At least I know it works!

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How Ford and Scott Monty use social media

Posted on March 19, 2010 by Gary Grant

While the auto industry as a whole, especially here in Canada, doesn’t use social media vary effectively, there are a few bright spots. One of the brightest is Ford, who brought Scott Monty on board to co-ordinate their new media efforts a couple of years ago. I’ve been lucky to get to know Scott in both a virtual sense and in the real world, yet it continues to amaze me how much this guy really knows about the place of social media in the modern business world. Because he operates in such a transparent manner and is always happy to speak with others in new media, Monty is a person that any aspiring social media marketer should be paying attention to.

This video was shot at Blog World Expo last October by WebPro News and is a great introduction to Scott and the modern Ford.

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So you have a Twitter account. Now what?

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Gary Grant

You’ve heard that social media is crucial to your business and that it is essential to have a Twitter account. You’ve visited Twitter and set up an account in just 30 seconds.

You think: Wow, that was easy!

Looking at the screen, you are now wondering: OK, so now what?

Don’t worry, every Twitter user thought the same thing the first time they signed in. The Twitter web interface is really quite basic and not very intuitive. You have no followers. You don’t know what an @reply is. You know what a DM is, but don’t have any. Most importantly, you have no followers. How do you find followers?

The first thing everyone should know about using Twitter, that nobody tells them is that they should be using an outside Twitter tool to help make sense of all the information you are about to receive.

Twitter is an incredibly powerful community building tool, but just like many tools, the operator needs some add ons to actually make it useful. Think of that home table saw you bought when you finished the basement. You brought it home, plugged in it and started cutting 2×4′s only to discover that the saw started struggling after just a few cuts. That is because the blade that came with the saw was crap. You need to spend an additional 80 bucks to buy a good blade that will actually last and give you some accuracy. Twitter is just like that except that most of the add on goodies are free. Free is good.
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Social media: As easy as going out to lunch. Or is it?

Posted on March 13, 2010 by Gary Grant

Years ago I worked with a lady who sold Volvo’s for a living. She was a funny little lady from Singapore who had traveled all over the world. Along the way she picked up a knack for making people like her and was very comfortable approaching total strangers and saying hi. She loved to eat but claimed that cooking was not her forte, so every meal was enjoyed out. Restaurants all over town looked forward to Irena’s visits as the vibe in the full dining room would always be positive with our star in the room as she walked from table to table saying hi like she owned the place.

Every one of those people Irena spoke to remembered her. Every single one also ended up with a business card in their pocket.

You could say that Irena was very strong at social networking.
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