Feed your WordPress Demons!
I hear this story a lot. “I am thinking about starting my own blog, but I am no good with design. I don’t know any Photoshop and don’t have the money to pay a professional designer to create a logo for me.” Well, fear no more my friends. I can tell you from the experience that you either get the whole design thing or you don’t. I am a proud member of design-handicapped club, which means I can’t design any thing to save my life. I have even tried learning Photoshop and Illustrator but I am not creative enough to do anything with what I have learned. But with LogoMaker, I have pretty much don’t have to do anything.
LogoMaker is an innovative self-service logo design service that allows you to design your logo on the fly. You basically sign up for a free account, and you can use pre-designed logos and change them to make your own unique logo.
You can change fonts, add images, and do all kinds of stuff with the template that HP has with LogoMaker. Here is what I was able to create in less than 40 seconds.
Now you can buy logos that you design for only $49. You can then download the gif, jpeg, and the EPS file, and you can change your logo if you know illustrator or Photoshop. But the great thing about Logomaker is that you don’t have to buy your logo. You can use it for free by providing a link back to LogoMaker service. It can’t get any better than that. Now a lot of the gurus may say that buying a $1000 logo gives you more credibility. I don’t necessarily agree with that. A whole lot of startups don’t have the resources to buy expensive logos, and these logos do just fine as far as I am concerned. Best of all, the risk is none or minimal (if you decide to buy). I do encourage you to play with the templates as they are very addictive. After playing with it for a year now, I now regret spending so much time learning everything there is to know about Photoshop (it’s a nice skill for a designer but is not for everyone).
Say you run a Wordpress blog, and you have a thousand posts on your blog. Now let’s imagine someone gets to your Wordpress blog for the very first time and read one of your post. The prospect of going through all your posts to figure out related posts is simply daunting, and people who have the potential to be your loyal readers for years to come may leave your site and never come back as they never got the chance to read the other 10 great articles that you had written about their topic of interest.
That’s where the concept of related posts comes in. To be able to show similar posts on your blog right after every entry can help you gain and retain more readers. Besides, a lot of big blogs have so many gems hidden inside them, and you’d be surprised how your blog can explode by offering related posts on your blog.
I have tried many plugins that offer the related posts feature, but none comes close to Similar Posts plugin. It’s a free plugin that is pretty much plug and play. All you have to do is activate the plugin and bam! You’ll have related posts after your entries. The reason I like this plugin is not its convenience but rather how it goes about showing related posts. With so many similar plugins, you get similar posts based on how you tag your posts. However, this plugin is using a sophisticated search algorithm that compare posts based on the words in them, and that’s how similar posts are displayed. The author says it the best:
The results can be tweaked in several ways to tailor them for you blog. By default the plugin chooses the 20 most frequent words to make its matches but the number is adjustable. It is worth experimenting to see how many words gives the best results for your blog — it has hardly any impact on speed, even if you set the value high enough to include the whole post. The relative importance given to words in your title may be adjusted so that well-chosen titles can be used to advantage or titles with little relevance downplayed. Similarly, tags can be used to improve matching or not according to your blog and it’s needs.
I have personally used 50 and have not seen better results on my blog. I think the law of diminishing returns really apply here. For my technology blog, 50 words has given the best results, but the improvements are not that remarkable. What this means is that the plugin comes with a very decent default setting right out of the box, but if you are picky, you can even use custom fields to modify the behavior of the plugin.
This is a very smart plugin regardless of how you look at it. But it is particulary useful if you are running a Wordpress Job site or an online comparison site. Think about how much you can improve your site’s stickiness by showing people other jobs that they may be interested in. The good news is that the plugin is for free. The bad news is that the plugin is for free, so I do recommend you testing it out so you can differentiate yourself from your competitors. Here is where you can get more information on Similar Posts plugin.
I don’t know about you, but I have always wanted to have the ability to clone my blog in a different location just in case. I usually do that on my all shared hosting accounts, but before I got WP Clone, things were a bit more difficult. I had to deal with MySQL and my FTP accounts, and often things went wrong during the process. That’s until I found WP Clone.
WP Clone basically does what a disk image does on your PC. If you have Norton Ghost, you probably know what I am talking about. When Windows breaks, it’d be awesome to have the ability to pop 4 DVDs in and restore everything back to normal, and you can do that with Norton Ghost. WP Clone does that and more for your Wordpress blog. Let’s say you spend a few months figuring out the best plug-ins for a single Wordpress blog. Then you decide to create a new blog in a different place. Wouldn’t it be easy if you could do that with just a few clicks? You betcha!
That’s why I love WP Clone. You can clone pretty much anything on your Wordpress blog. Whether it’s general settings, reading, writing, or even Permalinks settings, you can do it all. Best of all, it takes only a few clicks:
But here are the reasons you should consider getting WP Clone:
WP Clone is an easy to use plug-in, and it does what it promises. This process doesn’t achieve full automation, but comes very close to it. It’s a little bit pricey, but if you have multiple blogs, it’s worth it. I highly encourage you to watch the video by the authors before making a decision on this.
Verdict: 4.25/5 stars
Packt publishing is pretty much known for creating the best books for Open source software such as Wordpress, Elgg, and Joomla. They have done it again with Wordpress for Business bloggers. This book is not about technical usage of Wordpress. It doesn’t show you how to run an automated blog, and it does not tell you which plugins are the best for your Wordpress blog. However, it does tell you how to get started with business blogging.
Business blogging is very much different than personal blogging., The rules of the game are very much different, and it’s not “everything goes” rules anymore. Think about it. If you are asked by HP to run their blog, you simply can’t talk about that silly picture that you took from your cat nor can you talk about how your Grandma’s food tastes awful. Depending on the nature of your company’s business, you will have to change your tone or refine it to reach their audience.
Business blogging is more about fostering solid relationships with your company’s customers and less about having fun and things like that. If you are working for a non-profit anti-AIDS organization, your goal is rally the troops behind your cause and raise the most money to support your cause. If you are working for a credit card company, your goal should be to address the concerns of customers about their rates or maybe answer some frequently asked questions, so you see, a geek like me wouldn’t have a chance at landing a job like that. But of course, I was offered to take on a project like that by a friend of a friend. Naturally, I was going to go in and go down with all guns blazing, but I picked up this book to give me the right mentality to approach the project. Now here is when I tell you that I read this book and became a master of corporate blogging. But in reality, I decided not to pursue the job because I find corporate blogging boring for my taste. The money is good. Don’t get me wrong, But I am not the type to follow a set of rules when it comes to blogging. I think the more limits you put on yourself, the more you hinder your innovative ways.
Nevertheless, Wordpress for Business bloggers teaches you the basics about business blogging. It does have chapters on SEO and blog marketing, which I found useful, but in general, it suits business bloggers,
Verdict: I was going to give this book 4 out of 5 for costing me that job, but in reality, this is a good book for business blogging. Business blogging is too difficult for a lot of us, but for those brave souls who can handle it, this book can serve as a good reference guide.
Due to the nature of sites that use Wordpress, many start-up owners often settle for a Flash or a more static platform than Wordpress. But with launchpad, now you can pre-launch a start-up or an online site without too much fuss.
Launchpad is not a mind-blowing theme. It’s a very simple free Wordpress theme that allows you to put a squeeze box on your start-up page to gather people’s email addresses. It is very well designed, and its license allows you to do as you wish with the template. What I like about launchpad theme is the fact that it fully integrates Feedburner. You can just enter your information in the Dashboard and bam! You have Feedburner on your theme with no code to copy.
One thing that you should be careful about is publishing posts using this theme. Your posts will not be shown on the front page, but the RSS feed reader allows access to your published posts to your subscribers. Make sure you have something other than hello world or “this is a test” as your published posts.
The theme is for free and is GPL licensed. It’s not for a fully-fledged blog, but if you are running a start-up and want to go through a pre-launch before coming out, then you may want to consider LaunchPad Wordpress theme.
