BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

Graffiti art has tremendous vitality and a feeling of authenticity. Sometimes ugly, it can also be beautiful and outrageously creative. It can lend freshness and creativity to a building, a neighborhood, or your blog.

I had created a page, where I intended to add a widget that allows you to easily make your own graffiti graphic signature. It’s free. It’s fun. And you just might find a use for the graphics you make.

However, WordPress will not execute the flash code required to implement the widget on a page. Instead you will need to go to the NY Graffiti Creator site and use the widget there.

They do offer the widget code to embed in your own site. (Presumably it works on HTML sites?) It does work if you paste the code in a WordPress Text widget and put that in a sidebar. I have done that, and it worked.

So for now you can see (and use) the widget in the lower right corner of this site. But I will not leave it there for long, so play with it now and remember to go to NYGraffitiCreator.com if you want it later.

By the way, the text entry box is that gray bar right above the control sliders under the Preview area.

Enjoy!

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No matter whether you are going to build a blog dedicated to affiliate marketing, drop shipping, or your own product, it is very important to choose  a platform that will enable you to add content easily.

Today, WordPress and Blogspot are the industry leaders when it comes to the blogging arena. When you answer the following questions, it will help ensure that you are using the best platform for your new blog. Read the rest of this entry →

Image via CrunchBase

I use several plugins to promote WordPress blogs via Twitter. They mainly fall into three categories:

Getting users to tweet individual posts.

Getting users to follow you on Twitter  (so they are reminded to come back).

Automatically tweeting about every single post.

Getting Users to Tweet Your Posts

There are others, but the plugin I use to get readers to tweet my posts is Tweet This. It offers a nice selection of buttons. I get to select which button it will insert at the end of each post.

Getting Users to Follow You on Twitter

The Twitter badge that remains in the upper right (or the left, if you choose) corner of the blog window is one of my favorite Twitter-related blog add-ons. It is attractive and can be eye-catching without being intrusive. Basically it takes up no space.

You get the badge for free at http://www.go2web.com. You select the color, the wording, even the exact position (left/right, and distance from the top). The site generates the code to create the badge on your blog.

The Twitter badge is not technically a plugin, because you have to use the Appearance > Editor and insert it in the PHP code (usually on the footer page), but that is actually quite easy. And the thing just works.

You can edit the color on your own site (instead of regenerating it at Go2Web.com) if you want to. Simply change the hex code in the tiny script you pasted on the footer page.

Tweeting Posts Automatically

Automatically tweeting a link to each post seems to be the most effective of all the Twitter tie-ins I have tried. There are several (at least) plugins that do that, and all of them that I have tried work just fine. Here are the ones I use:

Twitter Autopost

Tweet This

Twitter Tools

Twitter Autopost

Twitter Autopost is the simplest automatic tweet plugin I’ve ever seen. It is not free. I bought it with another automation plugin for less than $5.

Tweet This

Tweet this is free. You can find and install it, using the Add New feature in your WordPress dashboard. Besides adding a Tweet This button as described above, it can be easily set up automatically post to a Twitter account. Just enter a Twitter username and password.

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a whole complex of tools. It allows you to not only tweet automatically when you make a blog post but also to automatically post tweets to your WordPress blog. You have to be careful in setting up this plugin, or your tweet-post-cycle can become circular.

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Image by Peregrino Will Reign via Flickr

The WordPress blog software has taken the Internet by storm. There are so many things you can create with it—automated blogs, static websites, article directories, advertising sites, and more—using easy-t0-install plugins and themes.

For many people, though, WordPress remains difficult to install, despite the huge number of tutorials now available. One answer is the Fantastico feature offered by some web-hosting providers.

Unfortunately experts say that blogs installed by Fantastico are not secure. Such blogs may be able to be made secure, but if you are expert enough to do that, you will not be using Fantastico.

And WordPress blogs need all the security they can get. Now that WordPress installaitons have become so popular, hackers and so-called “script kiddies” are constantly trying to break in and vandalize them.

Blogs must be carefully installed and maintained to fend off outside attack. Otherwise, not only is your blog endanger, if it is on a shared server, an unsecured blog endangers all the other sites on that server, because hackers could use your blog as an entry point to attack the server.

The best protection against outside attack is to do two things: install your blog in a secure way to begin with, and then quickly install each WordPress security version as soon as it is available. There is no such thing as a set-it-up-and-forget-it blog that is secure.

Expert WordPress is a service that lets you install a safe, secure WordPress blog in a couple of minutes—just as fast as Fantastico, but with a completely secure database and blog. And the blog you install with Expert WordPress is also monetized with built-in Adsense and provided with an easily customized special theme. You can, of course, change the theme if you want to.

Over the last three years, I have tried many blogging packages, including a bunch of WordPress tutorials. Expert WordPress is by far the easiest and best I have found. Expert WordPress makes it actually fun to create new WordPress blogs.

The only catch is that the instant installation feature works on only Cpanel hosting software. However, even without using the instant install feature, the Expert WordPress package is so comprehensive , with a complete installation package, including plugins, plus a manual and the absolutely best step-by-step videos I have ever seen.

I love using Expert WordPress to install blogs on Hostgator, but I also use it on IX Web Hosting, which does not have Cpanel. It takes a little longer, but it is still by far the best blog-installation solution I have ever found.

Further, the members area of the Expert WordPress website is comprehensive, and the support is prompt and courteous. Over the years, as both a beta tester and a customer for his products, I have found owner Alex Sysoef to be tremendously responsive and helpful at all times.

Free monthly webinars offer advanced training and give everyone a chance to ask any questions we may have. Expert WordPress even provides a huge package of free articles for blog content, plus a monthly blog content package. Plus, there are promotion tools and other member perks.

I highly recommend Expert WordPress (in case it is not obvious). It is so much fun to make blogs with EWP; I often build them just for fun.

Oh, by the way, did I mention that the basic Expert WordPress blog package (with the recommended plugins included) is free? Yep. You really should check it it.

For those people new to Internet Marketing there is some software that is so simple to use it make you laugh. Gone are the days of learning HTML code and in are the days of WordPress.

WordPress was originally created for blogging and bloggers but an increasing number of people have begun to use it for static websites. A simple way of explaining it is to imagine that you have purchased a domain name and have directed it to a hosting company that supports WordPress.

The way it works is you install WordPress directly from your host and create a user name and password. Then when you want to add text, photographs, video or audio onto your site you can do so by clicking on the appropriate button and once you Save you’re done.

One special feature about WordPress is the list of developers who have written software to do additional things. These plugins, as they are called, are programs designed to add additional features; for example the other day I wanted to create a membership site so that my members could log onto secure areas where I was making available some advanced tutorials.

The intention was to make the information available only to Gold Members. Fortunately these were two plugins that seemed to do exactly what I wanted. Read the rest of this entry →

A blog, believe it or not, when properly prepared creates content, and quite often is put very fast in the top ten of Google. Why it is so, try reading the following contribution to enlighten yourself:

A blog of domestic implements from a few features, allow search engines to crawl the content very quickly. The result was the fastest I have ever witnessed, added a new post within 20 seconds (including the top 10 ranking) for relevant phrases. How can this come about?

BlogPing

BlogPing is a protocol that implements any popular blog system. It serves primarily two things:

1. Blogs to notify each other (They were linked)

2. Notify search engines (Google Hello, I have published a new page)

Especially with the integration of Google Sitemaps that go on WordPress with a click of the hand, you need a search engine’s new content page to look once more. Sitemap opens directly to crawl a new page. Read the rest of this entry →

Securing website is a big challenge for web master. It includes server protection and website protection itself. Situation becomes more difficult when you are using some famous platform for your web site.

As wordpress expert, my aim is to secure and give maximum protection to my clients’ web site. We have to think as a hacker to block all possible ways of hacking a wordpress.

Let’s go through the complete process of securing our wordpress installation.

Securing User Name:-

Most crucial and important part of securing wordpress is to change its default user name “admin”, making your website vulnerable to brute force attach and hacking scripts. If you have access to cpanel use phpmyadmin and go to table containing name user. Edit this table and change the admin name to choice of yours.

Or create a new user with full admin power and login through that id and delete the admin user. Read the rest of this entry →