Big Bagel

The codex page for query_posts has a few good tips for usage in a template. If I read it right, when used in a template, it ignores parameters passed through the url (such as what page it’s on). Try this:

global $query_string;
query_posts( $query_string . '&category_name=Blog&paged=' . get_query_var( 'page' ) );

Hopefully that works (I’ve never had to do much experimenting with this in the past so my advice might be lacking).

Edit:
It might also be easier to create an entirely new query rather than use query_posts.

Maybe this would work:

query_posts('category_name=Blog&paged=' . get_query_var( 'page' ) );

When you are editing a page you can set it as public, password protected (anyone can visit the page if they have that one password), or private (only users that are editors or administrators can view/alter the page). If you need more control you would have to use a plugin like this one or this one.

Only you see the edit button; only people that are logged in and have the ability to edit that page/post will see it. It’s just a way for logged in users to quickly edit a particular page/post without going through the dashboard.

Are you using a wordpress.com hosted blog or a self hosted blog?

Manually delete (by using FTP for example) that plugin’s folder from your wp-content/plugins folder. That’ll kill it and clear up the problem.

When you’re editing a post/page there’s a checkbox that lets you allow/disallow comments. If you don’t see the option, make sure it is set to be displayed in screen options (top right).

If you can’t use a custom menu and the theme doesn’t provide a custom way to alter the menu, then you have to find in the code where it’s creating the menu and add your own home link. From the html generated by the theme I would say you should add something like:

<li class="page_item">
    <a title="Home" href="https://www.on-hands.com/">Home</a>
</li>

inside your menu’s unordered list (<ul id="menu-nav" class="mnav dropdown fix">). Like you said, the theme can’t be downloaded freely so I can’t really give any more specific advice without knowing more about the code. Maybe the creator(s)/other users of this theme would be able to help more.

Yeah, some not so awesome theme authors/distributors rig their own links/ads to kill the site if someone tries to remove them. The official theme repository is a good place to look for themes written by awesome people.

That link is shown only to people that are logged in and have the ability to edit that post/page. Log out and check the page again.

By ads, do you mean the “Designed by…” stuff? I would assume that this line:

<?php padd_theme_credits(); ?>

is the culprit.

Bah, all this should work. It seems for some reason that get_post_meta is returning an empty string even though the arguments look correct. Maybe W3 Total Cache’s object and database caching weren’t refreshed? All I can think to do is completely turn off all the caching, check (yet again) that everything is properly matching, and try once more.

Those troubleshooting comments didn’t show at all when you added them to the code? (not even three blank <!-- -->?) Cause then we could at least see what exactly get_post_meta is returning and exactly what WordPress thinks your custom field key is set to. If the php file they were in was processed at all they should have shown up. Perhaps the cache didn’t properly rebuild itself?

Since it’s a blog hosted on wordpress.com rather than a self hosted blog, the forums or support page over at wordpress.com would probably be able to help you better.

When I created an options page I used this awesome tutorial here. It’s about creating option pages for plugins, but it’s the same thing for themes; just put your code in the theme’s functions.php file. The two pages here and here may also help.

Yup, I prefer concatenating with periods myself (‘text’ . $variable . ‘text’) when it comes to variables, but using double quotes alone does work.

All your comments are good standard programming practices, they’re just a bit overkill here. (Assuming WordPress functions always work as they should. ?? )

If he were using an array of arguments like you suggested then it would in fact take an integer, but he’s currently passing all the arguments as a big string. I’ve asked and he’s using the proper values in his custom field; you can see what he has as the custom field in one of his previous post.