Run A Magazine WordPress Blog with Arthemia Premium Theme

I have been around WordPress for quite some time so technically I have seen most there is to see with WordPress plugins and themes. But you’d surprised how creative some of these WordPress developers are. In fact, WordPress development is a mini industry of its own these days.

Arthemia is one of the most good looking magazine WordPress theme that I have seen. The blend of colors and fonts that are used on Arthemia makes this a very good option for people who are looking for an ready-to-use magazine style template.

You a featured section on the top right of your theme which allows users to skim through your posts. In addition, you get to define a headline (just like any magazine does). In addition, you can show your categories in a very colorful manner. You also get a seperate section for your latest video posts and random posts at the bottom of your theme, which is useful if you are into video blogging too.

Major Features:

So you may ask. What makes Arthemia different than other magazine themes available for WordPress. The answer is really simple. Arthemia is built with user convenience in mind. The designers have made the theme so you don’t have to make major changes to the PHP or XHTML code. That is a very big plus for non technical bloggers.

Feedburner & Analytics:

I have seen themes that come with feedburner integration which is very convenient. But Arthemia goes beyond that by integration Google Analytics into the theme so you can just enter your access code through the dashboard and forget it. Sure. You may say it’s not a big deal. But a lot of folks have trouble getting the code implemented on their sites, so this feature is extremely useful in that regard.

Adsense & Banner Management:

You can’t just blog for free and the designers understand the pain that some of us have to go through when we are stuck with themes that cannot easily fit Adsense and other type of banners. These guys make it easy by specifying a banner space at the top of the page. You can just set it and forget it.

Cross Browser Compatible:

I have tested this theme on multiple browsers and I haven’t seen any major issues so far. I can’t tell you how many times I have bought themes that look good on Firefox and IE, but not good enough on Safari and other browsers (you can add Google Chrome to the list). But Arthemia passes the test in that regard.

Price and Fees:

There are no support fees for this theme, so you can rest assured that your investment is guaranteed to work by the designers of this awesome theme. At the same time, the theme is offered with three different pricing tiers:

• One Site License: You can use it only on one site for $70.
• 5-sites License: You can use this on 5 sites (for $140).
• Developer Pack: Unlimited sites for $240.

Run An Auction Right From Your WordPress Blog with Wp Auctions

Have you ever thought about running an auction from your WordPress site? I am going to be honest with you. I have and I have actually done that too. The problem with running an auction on eBay is that you end up paying a chunk of your hard earned money for them to host your auction page. With Wp Auctions Premium WordPress plug-in, you get the profit for yourself, 100% of it.

Wp Auctions plug-in comes with two types of auctions: 1. Sidebar auctions 2. Pop-up auctions.

Wp Auctions’ sidebar option allows you to run an auction right from your sidebar. You can also host multiple auctions on your side and provide an RSS feed for them. The auction template is very customizable and the sky is the limit as far as the changes that you can make to this page. You can set up a minimum bid, an end date, and all the good things that you can do on an auction on eBay.

In my opinion, the best feature about this plugin is the fact that you don’t have to settle for a set of pre-determined designs for your sidebar widget. You can design and customize your widget to look exactly like a part of your theme. So your widget will not jumpt out or look out of place.

The pop-up widget a little bit more intrusive and I don’t personally like using. But I have seen many bloggers use that, so it depends what your audience can tolerate on your WordPress site. You can also use it to show third-party ads, so depending on what you want to do with this widget, you can monetize your blog with banners ads and so on.

Wp-auctions is a very useful plug-in if you are into running auctions from your blog. It integrates well with WordPress and can be used to monetize blogs in more ways than one. I am still not sold on the idea of using this plug-in heavily, but as far as functionality, it is one of the best plug-ins out there. You can buy it for $24.99 which is not that expensive.

Verdict: 4 out of 5 stars. The plug-in is great and works with PayPal. However, I am not sold on the idea of traffic generation through this plug-in. But overall, this is a decent premium WordPress Plugin and it’s not expensive at all. It’s definitely worth a try if auctions are your thing.

Use Hittail To Track Your WordPress Blog Hits More Effectively

You all have probably heard of analytics packages such as Google Analytics by now. These are simply powerful tools that allow you to track visitors that come to your blog and help you find out how they get there and what they used to get to your site. But Google Analytics and Omniture are simply not for everyone. Unless you have your own dedicated analytics team or you understand how to read Google Analytics, you are going to have a hard time analyzing data.

That’s where Hittail comes in. With HitTail, you can pretty much outsource your analytics, sort of. What HitTail does is give you a live overview of the keyword that people are searching to get to your WordPress site.

Best of all, you also get keywords suggestions and that is extremely helpful if you are looking for longtail and specific keywords to target on your blog (see picture below).

The service is extremely useful if you are not into delving deep into your analytics data on a daily basis. Best of all for $99 a year, you can’t ask for more. You can find the pricing here. This is a must have if you can afford it.

How To Add Breadcrumbs To Your WordPress Theme with NavXT Plugin

I am sure you are familiar with the concept of breadcrumbs. These are those little handy links that show up at the top or bottom of pages and help you navigate through websites. Breadcrumbs are highly recommended for SEO, but they are not necessarily easy to generate for WordPress blogs. Now I say that as it is possible to implement a customized Breadcrumb system for your WordPress plug if you know PHP inside and out. But if you are just a blogger who want to take advantage of breadcrumbs to make your site easier to use, then you should check out Breadcrumb NavXT.

NavXT allows you to create highly customizable crumbs for your WordPress blog without too much fuss. Now some WordPress themes may not quite work easily with this plug-in but most of them do. Basically, all you need to do is to add the following code to your header.php file:

The administration panel for this plugin is very easy to use and allows you to customize all pages such as archives, author pages, and even static front pages. You get to define what you want to see on your breadcrumb here.

Now if you are an advanced user, I highly recommend activating the Core version of this plugin instead of the administration version. The reason is that you can make this plugin perform faster without the administration panel. But you will need the following code to make it work:

The breadcrumbs are often used to boost search engine rankings. The search engine robots love these, and you should definitely consider having them if your theme fits one of these. This plug-in is for free and you can download it right here.

Scheduling Blog Posts In Advance With Post Later

If you are into blogging, and I mean heavy blogging, you have probably thought about running multiple blogs. But you know better than I do that blogging takes a lot of time, and you need to do a lot of research in order to make sure you provide good solid content to your readers. Now taking on a new blog is a whole different challenge really.  It often more than doubles the effort that you have to put in to avoid doing injustice to each of your blogs. But here is the thing most people don’t know about. About 80% of posts that you read everyday are scheduled in advance. In fact, most pro bloggers only blog about the news for an hour a day, having scheduled months of posts in advance. Now that’s how you can run a business on autopilot (your work for 3 months and take 6 months off and spend the other 3 months planning for the next).

If you are using WordPress, you can use it to schedule posts in advance. I personally do it all the time and have had no trouble with it. But what if you are not running WordPress on your blogs. More importantly, what if you run 30 blogs. You will have to log in to each blog and posts in advance. There are passwords to remember, and the process is inconvenient.

Well, that’s exactly why I signed up for Post Later service. Not only can you post to multiple platforms, you can use Post from a central location, and that is very convenient:

Not only can you post to platforms that don’t support future dating, you can also schedule posts for Twitter. Now that’s what I call incredible. But there is more. You can also schedule recurring posts. For instance, you can schedule your posts to go live every 6 months. I don’t know about you but I rather blog in a more convenient way than going through the pain of having to deal with multiple blog platform technicalities and limitations. The service is affordable too ($9.95 a month). Multibloggers should definitely check it out (Postlater.com).

WordPress 2.6.2 Is Out!

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.

Get The Most Out Of Twitter With Twitter Tools

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.