Feed your WordPress Demons!
Have you ever wanted to show a note at the top of each of your posts (RSS subscription would be one) to your new visitors but keep them hidden to your regulars? If so, then you should definitely check out the free Wordpress plugin WWSGD. It’s an excellent plugin that allows you
What Would Seth Godin Do is a plugin that allows you reach out to your new readers and provide them with a call to action.
As you can see in the image above, you can use the box provided to you by WWSGD to communicate all kinds of information to your visitors. I use it to talk about the latest GPS or PC Deals on my tech blog. The good thing abut it is that you can specifically target the new users and make them feel welcome. At the same time, you can give them the opportunity to sign up for your newsletter or feed, or join your YouTube subscribers.
WWSGD is a free Wordpress plugin and is compatible with the latest version of Wordpress. Check it out here.
You may have seen this book already, but I just came about it when I was surfing through a list of books that Amazon was recommending I should take a look at. It’s amazing the gems that you can find using the Amazon’s recommendation system. Well. After finishing up this book, I can tell you that this book is indeed a gem.
You have probably seen all these books that claim to teach you something unique. But when you are done with them you feel cheated as they show you only the theory but nothing pragmatic. Well. Wordpress Theme Design shows you how to build a custom design Wordpress theme from scratch. That’s right. It’s like having someone walk you through the code, showing you how Wordpress themes are designed. If you are familiar with PHP, but don’t know your way around Wordpress, this book is a must read. In fact, it’s the shortest way to finding your way to Wordpress mastery. And if you know programming but don’t know PHP, you can pick it up fast by reading this book. I do recommend you getting one of those PHP in 24 hours books to get you started, but you can certainly follow the code provided in this book and proper explanation is giving as well. Regardless of your level, after rading this book, you will understand the anatomy of a good Wordpress theme.
After reading this book, there is no doubt in my mind that Packt Publishing is the best publisher for Open Source technologies out there. They are the best.
Have you ever wondered how some people keep posting to their blogs each and everyday without getting overwhelmed by the amount of work that is needed to keep multiple blogs up-to-date. For a long time, I wondered about the very same fact, and I always thought that there got to be a Wordpress plugin/script out there that could help automate the process. I got to admit that I have tried many free scripts and plugins but none has come close to Autoblogged as far as the features and flexibility offered by this plugin. Not only can you import your RSS feeds to your blog, you can also take advantage of the template provided to make each and every post unique. What does this mean for your Wordpress blog? Simple. If you have enough combinations of words and phrases in your template, you can make your blog look as if it’s being updated personally by you each and everyday (For me that was a big deal as I did not want my readers to know that I am actually taking time off).
So here is how autoblogged work. You can add your feeds individually to your Autoblogging center through Wordpress Dashboard. You then get a chance to define how the tags are going to work out for your feed and what category you want your posts to show up under.
You also get to choose a different author name for each feed or choose a random author for each post. Now I don’t recommend using multiple author names to deceive your users, but it is certainly possible. You can also post vidoes from YouTube to your blog, if you are running a video heavy Wordpres blog.
The template feature is my favorite. It simply sets this Wordpress theme apart from any other I have seen. It’s one thing to have the ability to import RSS to your blog. It’s another to have the ability to actually modify each and every post and make them unique.
You can use the template to rotate sentences before and after each RSS post. In addition, you can define where you want the video/image to show up with each post. If you are a bit more advanced, you can use the built in regular expression search and replace feature to take the post optimization feature to the next level (keep in mind that the system automatically recognizes duplicate posts and avoids them. So you can import then RSS feeds from different sites, and just set it and forget it).
This plugin has been a life saver to me. I run over 35 blogs and unlike this one, a lot of them run on autopilot. It is certainly helpful for me to have the ability to automate some of my tasks without having to put hours of time researching for new posts. The price is affordable too. You can get the single server version for only $59. If you are really hardcore, you can get the developer version for only $129, which is a steal really.
I am sure by now you have had a chance to check Twitter out for yourself. If you haven’t, you really should. Microblogging is the future of blogging and Twitter doesn’t show any sign of stopping. So go check Twitter out if you haven’t already.
Many bloggers that I know are way afraid of the commitment that they need to put forward towards Twitter. It’s true that you have to take care of your twitter account, but at the same time, you can use the free plugin Twitter Tools to simply your tasks such as posting blog notifications to your Twitter page. In essence, you can keep your Twitter followers up-to-date all the time by automating the process.
This plugin is very easy to use. All you have to do is activate it, and you can access your plugin settings under setting tab of your Wordpress dashboard. It is also a widgetified plugin which means you can just drag and drop your twitter posts to your Wordpress blog. My favorite feature though is the daily digest feature. Basically, if you use tools such as Thwirl to “tweet” heavily daily, then you can use this tool to create digests from your Twitter posts and put them on your blog. Think about it. You can put your focus on your twitter account and your major updates will be automatically inserted to your blog. Overall, this is an extremely useful plugin, and it is for free, so definitely check it out.
Here is how to install Twitter tools:
Download the plugin archive and expand it.
Put the ‘twitter-tools.php’ file into your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
Go to the Plugins page in your WordPress Administration area and click ‘Activate’ for Twitter Tools.
Go to the Twitter Tools Options page (Options > Twitter Tools) to set your Twitter account information and preferences.
The march towards Wordpress 2.7 continues with the release of Wordpress 2.6.2. The good people at Wordpress are working very hard to keep the system clean and safe for all the bloggers. The new release however is released to help bloggers who allow registrations on their accounts to take advantage. Here is why you should upgrade:
With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password. The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit. However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.
Pretty nasty, isn’t it? With all these hackers out there to comprosie popular blogs, you should definitely keep up with your updates to avoid major issues. You can download Wordpress 2.6.2 here.
