Are you a “Visual” blog post creator? or a “Text” creator?
I’m not normally involved with the HTML text in my posts. I usually click on the “Visual” tab and just let WordPress take care of the rest.
But I’ve been wanting to find an easy way to display all, or most, of my posts on one page, like I saw another blogger do.
So I was all set to slog through manually creating links for a page showing all my posts, but then I found out that WordPress can do it automatically! Pretty exciting.
After much searching, this video, and this website convinced me that WordPress plug-ins can do some pretty amazing things with content. So I followed the instructions to the new world of plugins, searched for just the right one, and clicked to install it, and…
Oopsy daisies!
Surprise! The WordPress plan I have doesn’t include plugins. Sigh.
Back to the interesting but more complicated websites I ran across, that explained how to use shortcode. This one was irresistibly simple, leading me to the Display Posts shortcode. And this one had a neat variation with grids. This one helped me choose parameters.
And as a bonus, they kind of tied in to the online HTML course I took a couple months ago! What fun!
So enough researching, it was time to try it. I experimented with the shortcode on a new page, then saved the draft, clicked “Preview” to see if it worked, and it didn’t. I made a change and repeated the process. It took me about 5 tries to figure out that the example that I pasted onto my page…
[bracket]display-posts category=”fishing,hiking”[bracket]
…couldn’t possibly work because I don’t have Fishing or Hiking Categories! (Ha ha, that’s what I get for thinking I’m so clever.) Things went much better after I put in my own categories, like Book Responses. (But I still haven’t figured out the grids.)
So… here is the first of my new pages, My Book Reviews. More of the same will follow.
I hope you find it useful to discover an interesting book or two! Happy reading!
Happily Writing 