This article is to help those using Postie to easily post articles, images and even movies to their WordPress blog.

Postie will only accept emailed items from a pre-approved address, so make sure you are using an address that is setup in the Postie configuration, let us know if you need to add a new address.

When sending an article, put the title of the article in your subject line, it will be converted by Postie into your title. If you are sending via SMS, put your title in hash marks “#your title here#”.

If you want to categorize the article in a single category, put the category followed by a colon (ex  News: Title) If you need to put it in multiple categories use  [Cat XXX]s (ex: ‘[Cat XXX] [Cat YYY] Title of My Article’ ). You can also wait to categorize your article until you are online and can log in to WordPress.

Start your article with “:start” and finish with “:end”, this will strip out any signatures etc. that follow your article, and only what is between these tags will be published.

If you want to add tags, add this at the bottom of the article in this format:
tags : one, two, three (must be in lower case). You can also add tags later when you get to a computer and login to WordPress

To add a comment to a post, use ‘Re:’ in your subject line. For example, if your original post had a subject line “New Post”. If you then send an e-mail with the subject line “Re: New Post”, it will get posted as a comment on the original post.

You can delay posting of the article with the following:

If you are sending a picture, with or without text, use the :start and :end tags and the following:

#img1 caption=’caption for the image’# (the caption is optional)

You can attach more than one photo, just make sure to attach them in the correct order to correspond to your img1, img2 etc.

If the float is set up, the image will allow any text added after the tag to float around the image. If you want the image to float in the body of your text, include the #img1# at the place where you want the text to begin wrapping.

Add video’s one at a time. Send them as and attachement and put any text inside your :start end tags.

A WordPress Plugin Review: Webpsilon Morfeo Gallery

Here at LDW, Morfeo Show has been one of our favorite plugins for our clients’ Joomla! sites. Thanks to Webpsilson Morfeo Gallery is also available for WordPress.  I find the WordPress version every bit as user-friendly as the Joomla! version. It provides for basic image needs very well.

While the Joomla! version is more advanced and offers a wider range of gallery themes, I do not believe the WordPress version is limiting. It’s meant to display within blogs, whereas the Joomla! version has been developed to be very versatile for websites’ many needs.

There’s one limiting factor with Morfeo on WordPress: you have to get your photos to the site using ftp, and many bloggers are not familiar or comfortable with the ftp side of a website. There is a workarround for this by changing your default upload location to the Morfeo image folder, but you have to remember to switch it back to the default once you are done.  Even with this limitation I feel that this is a plugin worth mentioning.

Thanks to the developers of Webpsilon Morfeo Gallery—it was just what I was looking for.

A WordPress Plugin Review: Subscribe2

The Subscribe2 plugin is a way for your WordPress visitors to sign up to receive an email subscription to your blog. You can configure the frequency with which subscribers receive emails: every time you post something new, weekly, daily or even hourly if you prefer. I set mine to only send out an email when there is something new to read.

My goal was to create a separate page on a WordPress site which would give the visitor a place to sign up for the subscription. I was provided with two options: I could manually insert the Subscribe2 token into a newly created page, or I could simply press the Subscribe2 button in the WYSIWYG and it would be inserted on the new page. I picked the latter, and there it was. Subscribe2 also has a widget option, in case you would prefer a widget on your blog’s sidebar rather than having a separate page for email subscriptions.

I really enjoyed working with this software. Plugins can sometimes be a struggle to get to work, but with Subscribe2 this was not the case. I am happy with this plugin’s performance and would recommend it as a simple and effective way to handle email subscriptions on a WordPress site.

So now you’ve picked out a template and it is time to do some customizing Figuring out a color scheme can be fun with a great online tool called Color Scheme Designer. Often the best way to start is to look at a picture that you want to use in the site, either as a banner, or a prominent picture. Install a great little plugin in Firefox called ColorZilla. Once installed, restart your browser and open that picture in Firefox (you can use file, open from a browser window). In the lower left corner of firefox, you will now see a little eydropper, click on that eyedropper and then click on a region of the picture with a color that you would like to use as a starting point. You will see the color changes in the lower left icon. Right click on this color and copy to clipboard.

Open Color Scheme Designer, to the lower right of the big circle, you will see ‘RGB:’ and some number, click on these numbers and paste or type in the color you chose with colorzilla. Now you have your starting point. Depending on how many colors you would like on your site, you can chose mono, compliment, triad etc from above the wheel to see complimentary colors. To take a look at how the colors work together on a website, below the boxes of color on the right, click on ‘Light page example’ and ‘Dark page example’.

You should also take a look at the ‘Vision Simulation’ link at the top right, to make sure that someone with a different visual perception would see your site. Once you have finished playing around and have decided on a color palette you like, you can click on ‘color list’ below the big circle, highlight all the colors and past them into an email to send to your favorite web-design team, or use them yourself when constructing the css file for your website.

If you have other ways that you have picked out a color scheme for your website, please add a comment so that others can benefit.