Make Your Blog More Dynamic with Apture

WordPress is a great platform to build a blog or portal with and share your thoughts and content with the world. It’s easy to assume that people will take time to go through the hassle of spreading your content around without you doing anything to make the process easy for them. In reality, websites that take advantage of social media tools have a better chance of going viral on Twitter or Facebook. Apture is one of those tools. It adds a social bar to the top of your WordPress website and gives your visitors an easier way to submit your stories to Facebook, Twitter, or share it with others via e-mail.

Apture not only adds that customizable header to your blog, it also makes your blog more dynamic. Your visitors can search for what they are looking for by selecting a phrase or a word on your blog. Since this is a Javascript-based solution, they won’t have to leave your website to do their search.

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10 Awesome Things To Do with WordPress

Millions of people use WordPress to run their blog. We all know WordPress is good for more than just blogging. You can create all kinds of awesome websites using this content management system. Businesses, artists, and entrepreneurs can all use WordPress to accomplish great things.

While there are plenty of projects you can tackle with WordPress, here are 10 awesome things that you can do with WordPress right now:

Start a Social Voting Website

Creating a Digg style site could not be any easier with WordPress. Themes such as Nominate let you start your own social news aggregator and get your community involved too.

Start a Question & Answers Website

Q&A websites can get you a lot of traffic if you play your cards right. Besides, they can connect you with your readers and customers. That’s always a good thing. Themes such as Instant Q&A and Answers have you covered here.

Build a Forum – Discussion Board

You don’t need PHPBB or vBulletin to get your forum online. gForums is a simple to use theme that takes advantage of WordPress to do the job, so you get to use your favorite platform to start your board.

Get Your Wiki Online

There are plenty of open source CMS solutions for Wikis. If you have tried those and still want to use WordPress to get the job done, WordPress Wiki has you covered. (more…)

10 Ways To Start a Job Site with WordPress

These days there are a lot of people who are looking for jobs. If you are a blogger or a portal owner, you can help out your visitors by letting them connect with those who are hiring. Adding a job board to your website can be valuable for you as well (building a stronger relationship with your visitors and make money).

There are two ways to start a job board with WordPress. You can use a plugin or a theme. Plugins do work great if you want to have a job board next to your website (perhaps on the same domain). Job themes can offer that and more. They can be used to create niche job sites (on existing or new domains). The choice comes down to your situation. With that said, here are 10 ways to start a job site with WordPress.

Job Board Themes for WordPress

Job board WordPress themes let your visitors add new jobs, find out about the latest Job listings, and even apply for jobs. Here are 5 powerful themes that can handle these tasks.

Job Board Theme: the best job board theme on the market (at the time of this writing). Has plenty of color schemes. Paypal is integrated into the theme as well, making it easier to start a paid job board with WordPress.

Jobpress: a classic job board WordPress theme that is colorful, well-designed, and can handle small to medium-size job sites. It’s easy to customize too.

DirectoryPress: a wonderful theme to start a job directory with using WordPress. Your directory can be a free or paid one depending on your business model. (more…)

How To Integrate Google Wave Into WordPress

Google Wave may be ahead of its time a bit, but it is expected to revolutionize the way we communicate with each other. Let’s face it. The e-mail technology has been around forever. It has major issues that have not been addressed in the past few years. Google Wave is a great tool for collaboration. It makes sharing content and discussing ideas with others much easier. There are plenty of plugins that you can take advantage of to add Google Wave to your blog. But what if you don’t want to use a plugin? Thankfully, there is an easy way to get the job done.

As long as you have a Google Wave account, you should be ready to go (if you have a Google account, you are set). Once you have logged on to your account, you need to grab the link for the wave that you want to add to your blog. Grab the link from the top of your browser and use Google Wave Element tool to grab the code you will need to add Wave to your website.

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60 Best Twitter WordPress Plugins

So you are interested in getting more out of Twitter? WordPress has some cool plugins that you can use to integrate Twitter into your Word Press community and drive more traffic to your website. Whether you want folks to vote for your stories on tweetmeme or just find out who is linking to you from Twitter, there is a plugin for you.

Here are 60 best Twitter plugins to get the most out of Twitter on your blog:

1. Twitter @Anywhere Plus: adds @Anywhere functionality to your WordPress website without you having to know too much about programming.
2. TweetSuite: a complete Twitter solution for your blog. Adds all kinds of useful widgets to your website.
3. Tweet Stats: adds “Most Tweeted Posts” and “Recently Tweeted Posts” to your blog’s sidebar.
4. Social Media E-Mail Alerts: a very handy plugin that alerts you when you get traffic from a specific social networking site.
5. Twitter Publisher: sends your posts to Twitter and shortens them using bit.ly or awe.sm.
6. WP Twitter Users: lets you show-case readers who have used their Twitter handles on your blog.
7. Twitter Goodies: adds your profile / Twitter searches to your blog using a widget.
8. Twitter Tracker: allows you to display Twitter search in your side-bar.
9. Twitter Bubble: a nice, different way to show your Twitter discussions on your blog.
10. Tweetbacks: another tweetback plug-in for WordPress.
11. Twittar: a plug-in that uses Twitter to show avatars in comments.
12. Twitter LiveBlog: lets you liveblog on your WordPress blog.
13. Twitter Counter Cache-rizer: it records your number of followers and displays it even when Twitter is down.
14. BirdFeeder: yet another Twitter plug-in that sends your posts to your Twitter account.
15. MyTwitter: show your Twitter status on your blog and update it from your WordPress blog. (more…)

Turn Your Tweets To WordPress Posts with Twitter Digest

Are you a Twitter junkie? If you spend hours of your day chatting with others on Twitter and sharing information with Twitterverse, you probably are. I personally spend a few hours of my day sharing information on Twitter and reading what others have to say about various topics. You may not think much of your individual tweets, but you’d be surprised how much value you can provide to your blog visitors if you turn your tweets into blog posts on a daily basis (depends on the type of content you share on Twitter).

You can always write a script that digs up your Twitter posts and adds them to your blog. But why do that when you can use Twitter Digest. It’s an innovative plugin for WordPress that grabs you tweets and groups them together, turning them into blog posts. You do get to define post frequency for your tweet posts. If daily posts are too much for you, you can always go with weekly tweet posts.

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WordPress 3.0: How To Enable Multi-Site Feature

WordPress 3.0′s release date is almost upon us. It’s one of those major updates that we all have been waiting for. The new code has many advantages over the current code that most of you are running on your websites. But my favorite WordPress 3.0 feature is the multi-site feature. Prior to WordPress 3.0, you could not host multiple WordPress sites using one install (you could but you’d need WordPress MU). That functionality is now embedded into WordPress 3.0, allowing WP webmasters to create separate blogs for each author on their website. It can save webmasters time as well (not having to deal with WPMU and all its hassles). No need to install WordPress 100 times to start 100 new websites. Just install it once and add new websites in the back-end.

As you may have guessed, this feature is not enabled from the get go. You’ll have to do some small modifications to your website and .htaccess file to get this feature to work. In order to enable it, you’ll have to add the following code to your wp-config.php file.

Once you have added the above code, you are going to see the Network option under Tools menu in your back-end. There is still some more work to be done though.

Go to Tools -> Network to bring up the above page. Here you can choose how you want your additional sites to be added to your WordPress site. I personally prefer sub-directories, but it depends on what you want to do with your WordPress network. Whatever you do, don’t forget to add the following lines to your wp-config.php and .htaccess files (your URL will be different). (more…)