August 2008

Hide Your Affiliate Links With WP Affiliate Pro

August 21st in Premium Plug-ins by .

I have always wondered why WordPress doesn’t come with a functionality to import 1000 links instantly to my WordPress blogs. The fact is if you are running an affiliate business from your WordPress blog, copying pasting and editing HTML could take a while. The first lesson they teach you in business school is to value your time. If you value your time more than $10 an hour, you want to find a way to do valueless things done more quickly. Wp Affiliate Pro is the plugin for business really. It comes with a dashboard interface that allows you to add links fast to your blog. Also, you have ever thought about hiding your affilite links, then WP Affiliate Pro is your plugin. You don’t need to go to TinyURL to hide your links anymore. With Affiliate URL, you define what you want your link to look like, and that’s how it will be.

The fun thing about WP Affiliate Pro is that you don’t even need to install it yourself. The programmer will install it for you, so you can be sure that you are getting everything you paid for without having to learn a new programming language.

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Yahoo Buzz WordPress Plugin: Buzz on!

August 20th in Free Plug-ins by .

In case you haven’t noticed, Yahoo! Buzz is now open to public. If you own a blog or planning to start one, you NEED to jump on the bandwagon. Thankfully, there were a few smart folks who were anticipating the release and had plug-ins lined up for yesterday: WPBuzz. Is that smart or what? Having a plug-in handy to push it on the very same Yahoo! Buzz. Has gotten quite number of buzzes as well. In any case, you can download the file from the link above. It’s very straight forward. Put the Yahoo! Buzz WordPress plugin in your plugins folder and activate it. Yahoo! Buzz will automatically be added to your blog posts. Of course, you will need to have Buzz worthy content handy as well, but that’s really outside of what the plug-in can do for your blog. Enjoy!

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Viva7 Magazine WordPress Theme

August 16th in Magazine Themes by .

MediaTricks has just released the smart Viva7 magazine WordPress Theme today. I thought it’d be in order to put down my early thoughts on this great looking theme.

Viva7 which is dubbed as the “first smart WordPress theme” comes with integrated versions of Viva ZOOM, VIVA CAROUSEL POSTS & VIVA CAROUSEL GALLERY along with new Viva Plugins – Viva Videos and Viva Events. We did have a piece on VIVA Carousel a few days back, but the other plugins are also premium plugins that have been included with Viva7 WordPress template.

One thing that I like very much about this theme is the ability to change things without writing too much code. For instance, if you have a bunch of posts that come with images, you can upload your images just you would normally do with other themes and let Viva7 take care of the rest. Basically, Viva7 grabs the images from your directory and displays them in the Carousel and the gallery. It’s pretty amazing! You can do everything here with custom fields, but there are not enough good tutorials on custom fields yet, and you can’t expect to get this done as you would cheaply with this theme.

Customize!:

The theme also comes with a bunch of headers and options that you can use to customize your wordpress theme. Take a look here. But here is what blew me away:

The ability to have real site spots like more expensive enterprise CMS solutions such as Interwoven. Basically you can modify the spots on your page from the WordPress Dashboard easily. If you do any kind of Taguchi multivariate testing for your website, this is just an amazing addition.

Search Engine Friendly:

One of the issues with most WordPress themes is that you have to go and download a bunch of plugins to make them search engine friendly. You can have the best WordPress theme in your hand, but it won’t mater if you don’t get enough eyeballs on it. Well, Viva7 surprised me with their integrated WordPress SEO optimization feature. You can define automated tags for your pages, posts, and everything else, and just set it and forget it. I’d say it’s pretty awesome.

Caveats:

No wordpress theme is perfect, and Viva7 is no exception. You get a very attractive smart WordPress theme that does almost everything for you. But if you don’t like the design available, you pretty much have to do a redesign yourself. So for those of us that are picky about our own designs, then this might not work. But for 99.99% of bloggers, the design features offered are more than enough.

The Carousel and the gallery features are great and the fact that things get done automatically is awesome. However, we were not able to get external images to show up automatically in the gallery. You can download the images, and upload them to WordPress and things will work fine. However, it would be great to have the ability to point to an external image and have it show up in the gallery.

Viva7 is a great WordPress theme with customization features that I have not seen in any other WordPress template. It’s search engine friendly and cheap. If you are looking for a magazine style WordPress theme, then you should definitely give Viva7 a try. Here is how the pricing works:

Verdict: 4.5 out of 5 stars

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WordPress 2.6.1 Released!

August 15th in Wordpress Updates by .

WordPress 2.6.1 has been released and over 60 bugs have been fixed. The focus for this release is to make some minor fixes for Farsi and Hebrew blogs. Also some IE7 glitches have been taken care of as well. My favorite fix is the one that takes care of the HTML issues in feed. I run multiple blogs and I have always wondered why the RSS feed breaks with some feeds. I never actually thoroughly checked the widget.php file, but I always knew it would be a really small fix. Read the rest of 60 fixes here.

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Add a Carousel to your WordPress Blog

August 15th in Premium Plug-ins by .

Have your ever wanted to add a carousel to your blog. You know, having the ability to allow people to go through a bunch of your WordPress blog photos with no problem? I have a tech deal blog that was stagnent for a while due to lack of graphics. So I searched extensively for a plugin that would allow me to get the photos of the latest deals (you know laptops, PCs, and things like that) and display them at the top of my home page. That’s when I found Viva Carousels! Viva basically has a bunch of plugins that are great, but for my need, Viva Carousel was perfect:

Not only you get the pictures that you have added to your post automatically added to this plugin, you can also set a refresh time (having these pictures move to the left every x seconds). Best of all, this version of the plugin is designed for bloggers, so these images link to your blog posts. For what I had in mind (my tech deal site), this was perfect.

Keep in mind that Viva Carousel is a premium wordpress plug-in, and it does cost something. Having said that, if you have the need it for it’s well worth it. I couldn’t be happier with mine.

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How To Display The Right Title with SEO all-in-One

August 14th in Plugin Tips by .

If you are serious about blogging and using the WordPress system, you should definitely try to optimize it for search engines so you get ranked high and get some free traffic. One very handy plug-in that allows you to do just that is SEO all-in-one pack plugin. It allows you to change the title and META tags for each page on your blog. So you can put keywords that are in your post inside your title tags (and everything gets done automatically).

But not every blog is compatible with this SEO plugin. The theme that I am using for this blog was not compatible with SEO blog. The title would not show for the homepage, and that is a big deal if you are trying to get ranked for anything. So here is what you need to do to fix the issue if your title is not showing up.

  1. Go to your Design tab on your WordPress blog.
  2. Search for the following: <?php wp_title(‘ ‘); ?>
  3. Grab the <title> before the above statement and copy through </title>.
  4. Paste it right after where it says <head>

This is not really a complicated thing but for some reason the plugin wouldn’t work if your <title> tag is way down inside your header. This should fix any issues with your home page. Have fun!

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TV Elements WordPress Theme For Video Bloggers

August 13th in Premium Themes, Themes For Video Bloggers by .

Are you a video blogger? If you are, then you should definitely check out TV.Elements. The TV.Elements WordPress theme is designed for those who primarily do video blogging. You can allow people to add comments or subscribe to your videos, which is cool in itself.

You get multiple sidebars for pages, category pages, and posts, and you can drop your META or Tag Cloud widget in there if you prefer. You can also add ads easy, which is great.

You can post videos to TV.Elements easily. You can try the demo here. This theme works with videos from several sources including Blip.TV, Flickr, MetaCafe, MySpace, Veoh, Viddler, Vimeo and YouTube. Besides, if you have FLV player available on your server, you can pretty much point to anything from this video blog theme.

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This theme is compatible with WordPress 2.3, 2.5, and 2.6. We have not tested it below that but the good news is that it’s compatible with the latest WordPress release. You can purchase TV.Elements for $50 for one site. You can get the multi-site license for $125 (that’s for 5 sites). If you want to use it for unlimited number of sites, I suggest you get the developer license for $225.

TV.Elements is a beautiful modern WordPress themes designed for Video Bloggers only. You can easily change it and make it absolutely unique for your blog. Even at $225 (developer license), you still save yourself a ton of money and time and get an absolutely stunning theme.

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