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Why You Should Always Use a Child Theme with Genesis

Every once in a while, I’ll run across a site running Genesis. Actually, it’s more than every once in a while, but what do you expect when so many people use Genesis?! But anyway, I’ll visit a site running Genesis and notice that they’re running Genesis as the active theme, instead of using a child theme. I can’t help but shake my head, because not only is this incredibly risky, but we actively recommend that you DO NOT run Genesis as the active theme on any site.

But why not? There are several reasons, actually.

A child theme allows you to customize

Whenever you read a tutorial for adding or removing things from your site output, it’s likely that the tutorial will says “put this code in your child theme’s functions.php file.” It’s hard to do that when you’re not running a child theme.

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WordPress Tips

4 Simple Ways to Secure (and Maintain) Your WordPress Website

With the wind in my face and long stretches of open road before me, life is very good when I’m on my Harley.

I ride a lot, and as freeing as it can be, a good rider is always keenly aware of the high risks of being on a motorcycle. A good rider plans — as much as he or she can — for all kinds of contingencies.

The key to being a safe rider is the acceptance of risk.

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WordPress Tips

Using Firebug to Troubleshoot and Customize CSS

In the world of web design, and even if you are simply a blogger wishing to change a few tiny things, there comes a time when you need to change elements in your theme’s style sheet. Knowing what to change and where to find it can be the biggest hurdle, but there is a simple tool available that is the web designer’s secret weapon.

The Firebug extension for Mozilla’s Firefox (and Firebug Lite for Chrome) can make short work of finding and changing css elements in your design. It overlays the rendered code of your site in a split screen so you can see and change the HTML/CSS, while being able to instantly view the change.

Installing Firebug

In FireFox, go to the Tools menu, select “Add Ons” and under “Get Add Ons” type Firebug in the search box. Click the Install button. You may need to restart Firefox after installation.

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WordPress Tips

How to Make Money With WordPress (and Genesis)

As WordPress continues to grow and extend it’s user base, many folks are actively looking to exit their day jobs and figure out how to make money with WordPress. Mashable recently published a great article called 7 Ways to Build a Business Around WordPress, and we’d like to take this a step further.

We’d like to show you not only how to make money with WordPress, but also how to make money with the Genesis Framework. What do you say, are you interested?

Become a Developer and Build Client Sites

It’s no secret that a lot of folks are running on Genesis – in fact, our latest statistics show that well over a quarter million sites have the framework as the foundation of their web presence.

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WordPress Tips

How to Use Google Web Fonts With Your Genesis-Powered Website

There is a lot of buzz going on these days with web design and custom fonts – and more than likely you’ve seen some typography that you’d die to have on your site. Some of these are paid fonts, which you might want not want to spend money on.

Google Comes to the Rescue

Google Web Fonts lets you browse all the fonts available via the Google Web Fonts API. All fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and are served by Google servers.

And they are free. That’s great news, right?

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WordPress Tips

How to Use the Icon Set for Bloggers

As part of our free web graphics section of the blog, we recently released an Icon Set for Bloggers. In the comments of that post, folks asked us if we’d explain how to use them into a theme.

Easy to Implement with the Genesis Framework

If you are running any of your sites on the Genesis Framework, using the icon set for bloggers is quite simple – and only requires a few steps.

First, let’s take a look at where the icon set for bloggers can even be used. There are two sections within the Genesis Framework where you can utilize these fine graphics – the post info section, and the post meta section.

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WordPress Tips

Translating a StudioPress theme

A new feature of StudioPress themes is that they are being Internationalized (I18n). This means that you can now translate these themes into your own native language! (Currently Internationalized StudioPress themes: Genesis*, Church, Corporate, Education, & Magazine. This post is a simple “how to” that should help you get a translation done.

Step 1. Download Poedit

To be able to translate a theme, you’ll need a program called Poedit. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux. If you’re using Windows or Mac, you can download it here. If you’re on Linux, get it through your distributions package distribution system.

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