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Category Archives: Content
How to Create a Hidden Page in WordPress
Every now and then, I find the need to create a page on my blog that is easily accessible, but not widely publicised. Say I want to make a special offer available via a URL on a business card, in a presentation or in an interview. I don't want to keep the page highly secure, but I don't want casual browsers on the internet to find it either; a bit like an Unlisted YouTube video.
What I want is a hidden page. Typical example uses are:
- ClickBank Thank You pages
- Bonus promotions in advertising literature: "For a special bonus offer, visit site.com/bonusoffer"
- Marketing promotions on business cards and in audio files
- Any time you want to make a page with non-sensitive content easily accessible, but not widely promoted
Links to a hidden page should not appear on the site, nor be widely promoted in the usual traffic source channels … Continue reading…
How to Add Background Music to Your Posts
Do you like listening to music while you read? I do. And sometimes when I write a blog post, I find there's a song that's particularly relevant to what I want to say, so I want to make it easy for my readers to listen to that song while they read along. For example see my articles on Into The Wild and Path Of Love on my other blogs.
The way I do this is by embedding a YouTube video with the soundtrack I want on my blog with the video window clipped off by limiting its height to the height of the YouTube play control bar.
To embed the YouTube audio track on your blog, you need the WordPress Video Plugin. WordPress's built-in embed feature can't do this, because oEmbed will scale the video window when you attempt to reduce it's size; when what you really want to … Continue reading…
How to Escape Shortcodes in a WordPress post
WordPress has a feature called shortcodes, which allow you to embed dynamically generated content, often from plugins, into your posts by wrapping the shortcode in square brackets [ and ]. For example, to embed a MailPress signup form, you go:
[mailpress]
This works great, unless you're writing about WordPress plugins, and want to describe the shortcode rather than have it activate. In this case, you need to escape the shortcode by doubling the square brackets around it, like this:
[[mailpress]]
(If you're really paying attention, you'll realize that I had triple brackets around that last example while editing this article.)… Continue reading…