It’s a Google-coded technology that allows real-time RSS updating for your blog.

Here’s a cheesy demo of “PuSH” with some helpfully contrived metaphors:

Joseph Scott has released a new PuSHPress plugin to bring the benefits of this technology to your Wordpress blog. See the documentation here

To install, just go to the area for adding new plugins in your dashboard, search by keyword “PuSHpress” and install. You might need to update to the newest version of Wordpress, but you should probably do that anyway.

So, good content or bad, folks will get a chance to read it faster. With any luck, it won’t be analagous to the food being terrible, but the portions being too small.

What do you think?

It’s so simple, but not intuitive. To the best of my knowledge this works with Wordpress 2.7 and newer versions.

In the dashboard, go to “Media,” then click “Add New.” From there, you can browse for the file on your computer – no need to upload the .pdf into your server’s root directory or anything, like silly me tried to do.

After you’ve hit “upload,” you should see the Media Library, with your new file at the top. Click the title of your new file, and you’ll be able to see the “file URL.” It’s where your file lives now. Highlight the address and copy it to the clipboard.

Then, in your post or page, whatever you’re working on, you can make a link from text or a photo to your pdf’s new place of business. In visual mode, simply highlight the text you want to use to refer viewers to your pdf and click “Insert/edit link” or use the keyboard shortcut of Alt+Shift+A. Enter that saved pdf location into “Link URL.” In “Target” you can choose whether the pdf opens in a new window, or the same one.

Voila!

In html mode,  it will look something like this (the following is from my hubby’s stone masonry company blog, where I wanted to be able to allow folks to see his print brochure in pdf format. I linked the pdf’s URL to a photo of the front panel of the brochure. You can see it live here:

<a href=”http://elementalstoneandwaterworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/GreenBrochurea.pdf”><img style=”border: 0pt none; float:left; padding-top: 10px; padding-right:10px; padding-bottom:10px” title=”Brochure front panel” src=”http://elementalstoneandwaterworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/BrochureFrontPanelJPG.jpg” alt=”Brochure Front Panel” width=”214″ height=”479″ /></a>

Sorry for the melodrama, but my beloved theme, Deep Red, from Arcsin also went from sizzle to fizzle. Things stopped working. When my dashboard lost its stylesheet, I tried to work with it for a while then blamed my plug-ins, and offed them one by one, firing squad style.
Today, it came to my attention my permalinks weren’t behaving the way I wanted. With a sigh of trepidation, I went to the developer’s site and read the litany of complaints: like I, others had been shunned. It was time to stop blaming myself. It wasn’t me, it was my theme. It’s antiquated and won’t work with the current Wordpress version.
So, sorry Deep Red, it was steamy while it lasted. Now I’m on the rebound with Gray Shade. Maybe not as flashy, but at this point I’ll take dependable.
I still can’t get the dashboard to get along with the stylesheet unless I’m using Internet Explorer – sigh. Maybe my expectations are just too high.

Update: Learn from my misfortune! AdBlocker can block the CSS stylesheet of your dashboard. The most important lessons are those you figure out on your own.

Did you ever fall in love with the perfect blog theme only to discover after loading it, that it simply won’t do what you need it to do? Same thing happened to me about five times today.

Toadpress (by Jinsona) had a frog in silhouette, serving as a type of a splash page. I know, I know. Believe, me, it annoyed me so much, I couldn’t imagine a potential reader would stay with me long. It was really beautiful, though, and went with  the “tub” part of my online venue’s persona.

I had to throw the amphibian out with the bathwater.

Then there was “TV Retro” from Amazing Wordpress Themes, which had such a clean look (except for the verbage at the bottom advertising college loans or some such thing. I don’t know what’s at the bottom of my current theme – don’t look!). I also loved the graphic of a torrent of water pouring out of the telly. Problem was, it wasn’t widget ready, as it turns out. The worse problem was the amount of time all this was taking me to figure out.

Next I tried this really crazy looking theme called “Garden 3.0,” which I was ready to live with. I think I was going for “edgy” at that point, because that’s how I was starting to feel. Its fatal flaw was really mine. It had fields for ads and flickr that I didn’t want to appear, and I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of them.

Mashable came to the rescue, however, with its “20 Great Free Wordpress Themes” article. Here I found my new love, “Deep Red.” Check in tomorrow to see how the honeymoon’s going.

Now, if anyone could tell me how to get the text to wrap around the photos, they’d be my hero.

(Heroes are fickle: A dragon captured a young maiden and put her in the tower. He told her if she could charm any of the passing knights-in-armor, she’d be a free woman. He gave her a burlap sack slip to wear. As each suitor rode by, she waved and smiled. Finally, the dragon took pity on her and said, “Miss, knights don’t stop for damsels in dis dress.”)

Note: Read my July 25 post, “Even a warrior princess needs rescuing sometimes” to find out how I solved the text wrap issue…with a little help from a friend.
And – shudder to think – alas, the butterflies do not a lasting relationship make… Well, me with the butterflies, yes, but that’s a different story.