Welcome to My Site!

My name is Honey Silvas. I am a website developer and WordPress consultant.

I provide support and training for both WordPress.com and WordPress.org (self-hosted) websites. If you need help with your blog or website, I answer questions for free at ZenAnswer.

I also do paid private consultations whether you want step-by-step coaching or you want me to fix the problem for you.

In this site, you can find out what’s happening in my life, as well as read about my work in web development, Project Life, photography, videography and other random projects.

You can find out more about me here.

How to Migrate Followers from WordPress.com to Self-Hosted Site

Here’s how to migrate your followers from your WordPress.com site to a self-hosted site.

First, you need to have Jetpack installed in your self-hosted site and connect it to your WordPress.com account.

How to Disconnect a Jetpack Site from WordPress.com

Here’s how to disconnect a Jetpack site from WordPress.com.

Note that if your Jetpack site is still live, you need to go to the self-hosted site’s Dashboard and disconnect Jetpack from there.

Most Epic Air Safety Video

This Lord of the Rings-inspired video for New Zealand airlines will definitely make people pay attention to in-flight air safety.

The Book With No Pictures

Here’s a funny, smart children’s book from B.J. Novak, better known as Ryan from the TV show “The Office”. He shows how a book with no pictures can be really entertaining.

How to Embed a Series of Tweets from Twitter into a WordPress.com Post Without Duplicates

If you are trying to embed a series of tweets from Twitter on your WordPress.com site, sometimes it includes the parent conversation, showing duplicates tweets and making it hard to read.

That typically happens when you are trying to post your tweet like this:

https://twitter.com/thetwitterusername/status/thetweetid

Here’s how to remove the duplicate tweets from your WordPress post or page.

You need to embed the tweet with a shortcode like this

[ tweet https://twitter.com/thetwitterusername/status/thetweetid ]

(but remove the space after the opening bracket and before the closing bracket)

and add the

hide_thread="true"

to hide the duplicate parent thread.

Here’s the syntax for it. Just copy and paste this code into your post or page editor and replace the URL (the part that starts with http) with the URL of your status:

[ tweet https://twitter.com/thetwitterusername/status/thetweetid hide_thread=”true” ]

(but remove the space after the opening bracket and before the closing bracket)

Here’s more about embedding Twitter into WordPress.com:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/twitter/twitter-embeds/

How to Display Only Certain Posts on a WordPress.com Post or Page

Sometimes, you just want to display only certain posts on a WordPress.com post or page. Here’s how to do it:

1) Assign the posts you want to display to a category by following the directions here:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/categories/#adding-categories-via-the-categories-module

2) Then, in the post or page where you want to display your posts, place this code:

``

where you replace category-name with the name of your category.

How to Change the Font in your Post in WordPress.com

Here’s how to change the font face in your post in WordPress.com:

How to Set the Featured Content in WordPress.com’s Chronicle Theme

If you’ve seen the Chronicle theme demo, you might be wondering how to display the 4 horizontal images on the banner, the one that says “Raspberries on a Ledge”, “Bicycles in London”, “Making Cheese on a Summers Morn” and “A Temple in Bali”.

Those posts are marked as Featured Content, and are displayed prominently in the home page.

How to Change Font Color in WordPress.com’s Chateau Theme Without the Custom Design Upgrade

The default background color of the Chateau theme is white, and the font color of the text is black.

If you change the background color of Chateau theme to a dark one, it can sometimes be hard to read the text if the default font color is also dark.

How to Change the Color of the Top Navigation Menu in WordPress.com’s Ubud Theme

Here’s how to change the color of the top navigation menu in WordPress.com’s Ubud theme.

First, you need the Custom Design Upgrade. Then add this CSS code to change the background color of the top menu.

#site-nav {
    background: #000000 !important;
}

where #000000 would be the new color you would like to use.

To change the highlight color of the top menu in Ubud theme, add this CSS code.

#site-nav ul li a:hover {
    color: #00ff00 !important;
    background: #ff0000 !important;
}

where #00ff00 is the color of the text
and #ff0000 is the color of the background of the highlighted menu.

Here’s more about how to customize your Ubud theme:
https://wordpress.com/themes/ubud/

How to Exclude a Category from the Category Cloud Widget in WordPress.com

Sometimes, you don’t want a category to appear in the Category Cloud widget in your sidebar.

Here’s how to exclude a category from the Category Cloud widget in WordPress.com.

How to Connect Your WordPress.com Site to your Facebook Business Page

To link your WordPress.com blog to your Facebook Page (business account) instead of your personal account, here’s what you need to do:

How to Connect your WordPress.com Site to Your Google+ Business Profile

If you want to connect your Google Plus business account to your WordPress.com site:

1) Go to Google Plus at https://plus.google.com/ and log in to the account of your Google+ business page.

2) Then in WordPress.com, go to your Dashboard under Settings > Sharing.

3) Beside Google+, click Connect and it should take you to a page on Google where you can select from your different Google+ accounts. Just select your Google+ business account.

If you want to connect your personal Google+ account to WordPress.com instead, you can follow the steps outlined here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/google-plus-profile/

Scorpion: A Review (Not Really a Review, More Like a Fact-Check)

Scorpion, a new TV show on CBS, is in one of my least favorite genres of all: the action-IT genre.  This is the genre where high speed car chases, explosions and the like feature prominently in the life of an IT person.  As soon as I saw the trailer with the Ferrari under a flying airplane, I already knew this was going to be one of those shows.

The show is based loosely (and I mean very, very loosely) on the life of Walter O’Brien, a computer expert who helps the government solve complex issues.  Walter is considered one of the five smartest people alive worldwide with an IQ of 197.

How to Display Retina-Ready Images in your WordPress.com Site

Here’s how you can display retina-ready images on your WordPress.com site.

First of all, what are Retina-ready images?
Retina-ready images are basically just high-resolution images for Retina HD display devices such as the iPhone 6.

This technique should work with any WordPress theme and should work for blogs hosted at WordPress.com as well as self-hosted blogs.

1. Create an image and make the width and the height twice the size of what you want to display it at.
(So if you want your image to display at 200 x 300 pixels, create an image 400 x 600 pixels.)

2. Insert the image into your post or page.

3. Go to image properties.

4. Change the displayed image size to half the width and half the height.
(In our example, the displayed image size would be 200 x 300.)

 

You can also modify your CSS to show high-dpi images.
Please read these threads to see how it’s done via CSS:
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/adding-retina-graphics?replies=8#post-856539
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/retina-images-again?replies=32#post-938101