wordpress dev » Uncategorized

How Do I Get My Blog Noticed?

wordpress — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:29:45 +0000

When you first create a blog and start posting to the world it can be very frustrating that nobody ever visits it!

Because there are now billions of websites and blogs competing for attention it can be quite a challenge to make your blog visible. To get your blog noticed by your ideal visitor, first you have to get it noticed by the search engines.

The leading driver of web traffic is the search engine Google and so you need to please Google. The other major search engines, Yahoo and Bing, tend to copy Google so if you please one you please them all.

Now, actually only a few people in the world (and they are the high powered Google executives) really know how Google’s search engine decides to rate and rank blogs but, for the rest of us, here are a few pointers that definitely help to get your blog noticed.

It all really starts with keywords. When you first have an idea for a blog you need to visualise your target audience and to ask yourself the question ‘what does my ideal visitor type into Google search that would ideally lead them to my blog?’ For example, if your blog was all about ice skating techniques, your ideal visitor might type in the keyword ‘how do i learn to skate’. If that’s the sort of person you want to attract to your blog you want to set up your blog like this:

Your domain name should be descriptive and should convey to Google just what your blog is about. In our example, ‘iceskatingtechniques.com’ would be a good and better domain than ‘iceskating.com’, which is probably too general and would have more competition.
Your blog title should be explicit and should contain your keyword. This is the text that appears when the search results are displayed and so it should be phrased to attract the visitor to click on to the home page of your blog. ‘Ice Skating Techniques – Learn How To Skate Like A Star!’ would be a good title.
You should have regular blog posts with titles like ‘How Do I Learn To Skate?’ and ‘Learn Skating’ and ‘Advanced Ice Skating Tips’ – all the phrases that a rookie skater (and your ideal visitor) would type into Google search.

That’s just the start. Then you’ve got to get inbound links to your blog. If other websites or blogs contain a link to your blog with the keywords ‘How Do I Learn To Skate?’ and ‘Learn Skating’ and ‘Advanced Ice Skating Tips’, pointing to your appropriate post, then Google treats that as a recommendation and begins to take notice.

I’ll deal with the question of getting inbound links next week. Stay tuned!

RichWP WordPress Themes – Free for a Limited Time

wordpress — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:55:00 +0000

I received word a few days ago that the paid WordPress themes from RichWP will be available for free download for a limited time. All you have to do is fill out your first name and email in an optin form and the download links will be emailed to you.

Keep in mind this offer is available directly from the source, no shady sites involved here. More information on the various themes and when the offer will end are below.

The Themes

Here’s a selection of selection of some of the themes that will be available with demo links. There are 11 in total.

Affiliate Theme – For what I’m guessing is for… affiliate sites.

BigNews – A newsy layout with lots of room for pictures.

Photo – A gallery style layout great for portfolios and such.

Conclusion

You’ll notice all of the themes have the exact same minimalist style, although each individual theme has a different layout and may have different functionality depending on which one it is.

Why? It seems to be a marketing move, and I guess its working considering all the people retweeting it, and people like me blogging about it. It also seems Felix is planning on updating all the themes for WordPress 3.0 with a framework/child theme mindset, which will be available to already paying customers.

When does the offer end? I was wondering the same thing, and here’s the answer.

You might as well just get them now. I signed up myself and had them all downloaded within a few minutes.

RS19 – Free WordPress Theme

wordpress — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 15:10:20 +0000

Today we have yet another a ported WordPress theme originally designed by Roshan of Rambling Soul. It’s pretty much just a standard blog theme with three widgetized areas (404, sidebar, intro text) and threaded comments.

5 Plugins to Convert WordPress Blogs to Membership Sites

wordpress — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 13:50:35 +0000

Guest post by Louise Baker.
Here are 5 WordPress Plugins to convert your WordPress blog into a membership site. There are many reasons why someone would want to create a membership site.

Some may want to provide proprietary information, some may be offering educational material for a fee, some may want a private area to discuss matters that could be very personal, and others may just want a safe place to talk about whatever they want to. Whatever the reason, whether the membership site is paid or unpaid, WordPress is a great software platform to use as a springboard to turn your blog into a membership site.

WordPress? The blog place? Yes, that WordPress. Although it is most often thought of as a blog site or software, WordPress has an ever expanding functionality. Users can turn their blogs into almost anything they want, including a membership site. While there are a number of paid plugins available, this article is focused on free options you can use to try out a membership site and see if it is right for you.

Convert WordPress Blog into Membership Site

So here are 5 WordPress plugins that can be used to turn the blog you started years ago into the membership site you want today.

1. WP-Members – Designed to restrict some or all of the content you publish to your blog, WP-Members allows excerpts and teasers of your posts to be viewable to the public. You decide how much by inserting the restriction tag where you want. In order for users to see the full post, they need to register and login, which is also available through the use of this plugin. Essentially the opposite of WordPress’ open nature, it blocks all content on your site to outsiders, and allows you to determine what is shown to those not logged in.

2. Members Only – This plugin will essentially block all access to your site unless someone is logged in. Visitors attempting to access information on the site will be met with a log-in page. Once logged in they will be re-directed back to where they started at. Includes functionality for restricting and managing feeds.

3. Wp-Private – Another teaser program, Wp-Private allows some of the content you post to be viewable by the public and the part that you don’t want seen to be accessible only by logging in. Great way to get people signed up to the site to see what else is going on.

4. Are Paypal – Designed to turn a blog into a sort of membership site, Are PayPal has numerous options. Owners can set up different levels of payments, for example pay to gain access to a single post, to the entire blog, or to whatever package of posts the owner chooses. Posts are visible to Google so they can be ranked in the search engine, yet privacy is retained and access is limited. Fully integrated with PayPal.

5. s2Member – More than just a way to collect PayPal for accessing the blog, s2Member bills itself as a full-featured membership management system that integrates with the WordPress software. Multiple levels of membership, custom access packages, ability to limit access to pages, posts, protection of tags, categories and even URLs, s2Member has many many options available. Probably the best and most expansive free plugin for paid membership sites.

Louise Baker writes about online colleges for Zen College Life and most recently ranked the best psychology schools. You can also submit guest posts and share your WordPress tips and tools.

Original article: 5 Plugins to Convert WordPress Blogs to Membership Sites
Copyright 2010. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.

5 Top WordPress Forum Plugins

wordpress — Fri, 28 May 2010 06:38:08 +0000

Guest post by Vinnie Lauria.
It is easy to add a forum to your WordPress blog using WordPress forum plugins. Well, WordPress (WP) has evolved quite a bit since 2003 and now stands to be more than just a blogging system, it’s a full Content Management Service (CMS).

One technology important to any thriving community is communication between its members. A forum is a great way to facilitate the many-to-many conversations within a community that a blog cannot address.

This article compares the popular service offerings available for adding a Forum to your WordPress site.

	Tal.ki Forums	WP-Forum	bbPress	Simple: Press	Zingiri
Facebook & Twitter Integration	Yes	No	No	No	No
Email Notifications	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Embed Media & Videos	Yes	No	With Add-On	Yes	Yes
Search Engine Optimized URLS	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
Last Release	May ‘10	Sep ‘08	Jul ‘09	Feb ‘10	May ‘10

1. Tal.ki Embeddable Forums

The Tal.ki Forum plugin for WP is simple to install and configure as it automatically detects your WordPress theme and styles itself accordingly. Tal.ki really shines with it’s social network integration, allowing members to publish topics to their Facebook and Twitter feeds. Tal.ki is unique from the other plugins as the same forum can be embedded onto multiple websites, and not just WordPress.

2. WP-Forum

The most popular forum plugin, with over 57,000 installs is WP-Forum. WP-Forum supports different skins and admins have the option to turn guest posting on or off with optional Captcha. Tight integration with WordPress makes this plugin easy to use and administer. One thing to consider, is that while popular, WP-Forum hasn’t been updated since 2008 so there are security concerns as patches haven’t been released for known bugs.

3. bbPress Bulletin Boards

While not a conventionally installable plugin, bbPress is made by Automattic, the people behind WordPress. bbPress is separate software from WordPress and requires a bit more experience to set up, but it closely integrates with a WordPress blog and it’s membership.

4. Simple:Press

Simple:Press is a feature rich forum plugin for WordPress. It is fully customizable and comes with a number of skins and icons. Through it’s powerful and flexible permissions system it is suitable for those who wish to run private, specialist forums with invited members but is equally able to accommodate open, public forums that allow guest posting.

5. Zingiri Forum

Zingiri is a unique plugin that integrates existing forum software, myBB, into WordPress. Zingiri provides the glue to connect MyBB, an easy to use, powerful, multilingual, feature-packed, and free forum software with WordPress. MyBB also includes a reputation system, multi-quote, and the ability to create custom BBCode (called MyCodes).

Guest author Vinnie Lauria is the co-founder of Lefora.com Forum hosting and organizes the 5,000 member Silicon Valley New Tech Meetup which has featured hundreds of companies that have built their startup in Silicon Valley. You can also guest blog on QOT and share your WordPress tips.

Original article: 5 Top WordPress Forum Plugins
Copyright 2010. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.

Video Interview at WordCamp Raleigh

wordpress — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:12:40 +0000

To those of you who don’t know, this past weekend I was at WordCamp Raleigh. It was my first WordCamp, and overall I found it to be a great experience. I met a bunch of people in the WordPress community, and everyone I encountered was very friendly and welcoming.

While I was there, I met Jeffro of WP Tavern and he pulled me aside to do a video interview. In the interview I talk about:

My experiences at WordCamp so far, including the quality of the cookies
Anything new I’ve learned from the sessions, including what I can apply to theming
Whether or not I will attend future WordCamps wearing a lab coat
Future plans for Theme Lab, including the Underground

I’ve embedded it after the jump, check it out.

Let me know what you think of the interview in the comments. And now that WordCamp Raleigh is over, as well as the Page.ly contest, I’ll get back to the regularly scheduled content including themes, tutorials, and CSS tips galore.

Why WordPress?

wordpress — Tue, 25 May 2010 12:02:30 +0000

Anyone who’s been around on the Internet for more than a few weeks knows that things can change very fast. Yesterday’s state-of-the-art can quickly become todays old-hat.

This is what’s happening with web design. If you want to learn how to build your own website it’s no longer just a question of ‘HTML For Dummies’. The technology for building and display web sites is getting more and more complex by the day.

Beginners who start out by trying to teach themselves web design find that they have to master several complex coding languages: not only HTML but also CSS, Javascript and PHP to name but a few. And if they do manage to pull it all together and throw up a webpage they risk it looking seriously amateurish. It’s a tough world for budding web designers these days!

So, what can you do if you want to create your own website? Why, use WordPress of course!

Seriously – as web design has become progressively more complex, so WordPress has become correspondingly more sophisticated and powerful and easier and easier to use.

WordPress lets you create your own web presence without needing to know any coding languages. All the background work has been done for you by some of the smartest programmers in the world, and best of all, it’s free! Every new version that is released contains ever more enhancements and the number of useful plugins (which enhance the functionality even more) grows daily.

I’ve done a couple of tutorials to show you how to get started. Look over to the top right of this page to see what’s there for you to download.

Page.ly Contest Winner Announced

wordpress — Tue, 25 May 2010 01:26:58 +0000

For the past week or so I’ve been running a contest to win a free hosting for life from Page.ly. I closed the comments last Friday but being busy with WordCamp Raleigh I didn’t have a good opportunity to pick the winner until I got back home.

And the lucky winner is…

The Screencast

As usual, here’s a screenshot of me picking the winner on Random.org.

So congrats to Marek Zee for winning the contest.

Conclusion

Okay, Page.ly sponsored just one winner. I made a typo in my post that said there would be two winners, which I copied from a previous contest post (admittedly, pretty lazily). Sorry for the confusion, and thanks everyone for playing.

I Am Attending WordCamp Raleigh

wordpress — Fri, 21 May 2010 14:36:17 +0000

Thanks to a bit of last second planning and a ride from Benjamin Bradley, I am going to be attending WordCamp Raleigh 2010. I realized a lot of you probably wouldn’t recognize me if you saw me there, so I made this quick video.

Apologies for the crappy web cam quality, but hopefully you got a good look at me. If you see me there, I’d really love to meet you. It should be a lot of fun and I’m definitely looking forward to my first WordCamp.

WordPress and WordPress MU Merged?

Make A Custom Twitter Widget Without A Plugin

wordpress — Tue, 18 May 2010 16:27:46 +0000

I’ve been asked a few times about which WordPress plugin I use to generate the “Twitter Feed” list in the footer of my site. I actually don’t use a plugin at all, it’s a snippet of Javascript from Twitter that displays a list of my recent tweets that I styled with CSS. In this tutorial, I’ll show you:

The necessary HTML and Javascript code to pull the latest tweets
An overview of the HTML markup and associated CSS selectors
Two examples of custom-styled Twitter widgets I’ve used myself

Read on to see the rest of the tutorial…

The HTML and Javascript

Twitter used to provide this code on their site but for some reason they removed it in favor of these much less flexible widgets. You’ll need two pieces of code.

First, place the following code where you want the list to show up:

Twitter feed loading

Note: The

Twitter feed loading

is not a part of the original code Twitter provided, but it’s required to make the HTML validate. It can also provide a useful message while the feed is loading, as it could take a few seconds on a slow day.

Second, you’ll need to place the following lines of Javascript as close to the tag as possible.

I currently have it right above my Google Analytics code. You should keep these lines of Javascript as low as possible on the page because in the event that Twitter doesn’t load, everything below that code will hang (which isn’t a big deal if it’s already at the bottom).

Overview of HTML Markup and CSS Selectors

Now you can’t see the HTML markup the Twitter widget generates without using something like Web Developer Toolbar. Lucky for you, I’ve done it for you. Here’s a sample list with just one tweet as an example.


RT @Screenr: Cool Screenr update: Now your screencasts publish twice as fast. http://screenr.com/aDp 46 minutes ago

#twitter_update_list – Selects the entire list
#twitter_update_list li – Select individual list items
#twitter_update_list li span – Selects the “tweet” part of the list item, not the time ago link
#twitter_update_list li span a – Selects the link within the “tweet” part of the list item
#twitter_update_list a[style="font-size: 85%;"] – Selects the “time ago” link, in a somewhat hacky way (see note below).

Note: Since there is an inline style in the time ago link which sets the font size at 85%, it makes it somewhat difficult to override without a hacky piece of code. I’ve used this before to reset the font size to the same as the rest of the list:

#twitter_update_list a[style="font-size: 85%;"] { font-size: 1em !important; }

That probably doesn’t work in early versions IE because of the “!important” part. You can also use display: block; to move that link to the next line.

Live Example

For a live example, check out the footer of Theme Lab. Or if you’re reading this in your feed reader or an unauthorized scraper site, check out the screenshot below.

Here’s the code I use for the list:

#twitter_update_list {
	font-size: 13px;
	line-height: 21px;
	list-style: none;
	}
#twitter_update_list li {
	background: url('images/twitter-divider.gif') bottom left repeat-x;
	padding-bottom: 7px;
	margin-bottom: 9px;
	}
#twitter_update_list span, #twitter_update_list span a {
	color: #ababab;
	text-decoration: none;
	}
#twitter_update_list a {
	color: #6f7276;
	}

The first line selects the entire list. It sets the font size, line height, and makes sure no bullet points show up.
The second line makes a small 2×1 image repeat below each list item as a sort of divider. The padding sets the space between the tweet and the top edge of the divider. The margin sets the space between the bottom edge of the divider and the next tweet.
The third line sets the color of the tweet, including links, and makes sure no lines show up below links.
The last line sets the color of the “time ago” link.

And that’s it! If I had to change one thing, I’d differentiate the the in-tweet links somehow, and maybe add hover effects on links as well.

This Can Be Used On Any Site

Unlike all the other how to do XYZ without a plugin posts out there, there is no actual WordPress code used in this tutorial.

Since this uses no WordPress code, it’s not filed under the WordPress Tutorials collection. It can be used on pretty much any kind of site, assuming you can edit HTML source and CSS.

If you want to use it within WordPress, I would suggest manually editing your theme files to insert the two lines of Javascript in the footer of your site, or even hooking it into your wp_footer() hook.

As for the widget itself, you can either paste the code inside a text widget or manually code it into your sidebar (or wherever).

Conclusion

Hope you all liked the tutorial, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. If you have any requests for quick WordPress or CSS tips, feel free to let me know. It may be featured in a future Tutorial Tuesday post at Theme Lab!