BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

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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 →

I recently upgraded some of my WordPress sites to WP 2.9. Now I’m having problems with WordPress inserting trash code in posts and pages when I edit them.

That is, if all you do is type text with very little correction, you are fine. But if you type some text, save it, and go back later to add photos, you may be in trouble.

Whenever I start having strange problems, I check the source code. When I do that, I am finding repeated, redundant coding.

On one page I finally had to manually strip all the formatting code and reformat. That worked, but it took time. And that was a simple page with no photos.

When saving changes, after clicking the Update Page or Update Post button, I have actually watched as WordPress randomly inserted extra blank lines in awkward places.

Since 2.9 is not a security update, I am not updating any more of my WP sites to that version. I’m waiting and hoping the bugs get fixed in the next version.

I wish I could revert my WP 2.9 sites to the previous WordPress version, but I think it would take more time than I currently have available for maintenance. I’m not even sure where to get the previous version of WordPress.

Have you been experiencing this problem? If so, how did you solve it?

Note: I am a big fan of the plugin TinyMCE Advanced. I have been told that it can cause problems. Any comments you may have on these issues would be much appreciated.

Meanwhile….Happy New Year!

Kathleen Gresham

Image via Wikipedia

by Kathleen Gresham

When you say WordPress, people automatically think of blogging. WordPress is the blog engine supreme. It is free, easy to install and easy to customize.

Thinking of WordPress as just a blog engine, though, seriously limits your options. That would be a shame, because WordPress offers so many options.

WordPress is a full-featured content management system (CMS). It can keep track of multiple authors and their privileges, provide a place to store documents and allow users to download them, keep track of document revisions and allow you to compare them and reinstate earlier versions—and so much more.

Here are just a few of the things you can do with WordPress. And most options are freely downloadable somewhere on line at no charge.

1. Web Sites

WordPress allows you to build a static web site much faster than any website builder software. Especially if you are not a wizard with that particular sitebuilder. That is, unless you are a super whiz with, say, DreamWeaver, you probably cannot match the speed—and certainly not the ease—with which you can set up a web site with WordPress.

Nowadays there are some great themes with dropdown menus that look like high-quality web site templates and can be easily customized.

Not only that, the search engine optimization benefits of a WordPress site versus a conventional HTML web site are tremendous. There are so many blog networks and SEO plugins and other tools that you can use to promote a WordPress site that are simply not available for HTML web sites.

2. Forums

There are several free plugins that allow you to easily set up a discussion forum, using WordPress. You can use that forum to make money from advertising, offer support for the products or services sold by your company (on line or off line), meet like-minded people, and so much more.

3. Membership Sites

Membership sites are a great way to make residual income. You can charge a fee for joining, for example for a niche membership site, and/or charge a monthly membership fee. Internet marketers often use a membership site to post their products for purchasers to download, to offer affiliate marketing tools and status reports to their affiliates, and to offer support for their products.

Others simply charge a membership fee for members to get access to a host of free downloadable ebooks, software, or other original content in a particular niche.

4. Article Directories and Link Directories

Article marketing is a staple of online marketing, and articles sites have many purposes. If your article site becomes popular, you can make good advertising revenue. If not, you still have a good place to post original or PLR articles with links to your main blog or web site.

You can download free themes and plugins to build an article directory with WordPress. Or  you can build yourself a link directory with other free WordPress themes and/or plugins. You could, for example, add a links page from your main blog to all your other sites.

5. Blogs

Yes, of course, WordPress is still the easiest and most flexible blog engine for self-hosted blogs. The very popularity of WordPress means there are thousands of theme designers and plugin makers constantly providing excellent new free or paid products to add value to WordPress blogs.

6. Combination Sites

Lately I have been making combination website-blogs for offline and online businesses. That is easy to do with WordPress.

For example, see the site designed for Temples Gate, a charming metaphysical gift shop in Houston, Texas. The old site was unfindable on Google for any related keyword or phrase.

The new WordPress-based site rose to Google PR2 in just a few months. It gets traffic via Google searches from all over world.

The site continues to grow as we add more pages, posts, and photos. Google loves sites that steadily grow. And site visitors like to see new and different photos and text whenever they visit the site.

The embedded blog fits seamlessly into the web site, and the site is linked to a Google Calendar so that the store owner can easily add and update the classes, workshops, and other events held at the store.

We will soon add a shopping cart to encourage online purchases. WordPress makes it easy to do that, and several of shopping cart plugins are free. We are still comparing features and usability on a separate test site.

Flexibility and Free Tutorials

Some of the same features can be found on Joomla and Drupal, but nothing beats WordPress for design flexibility and the huge array of plugins, widgets and other accessories available to easily customize it. Also, there is so much free training available for WordPress. WordPress video courses abound, and many of them are free.

So think outside the box when deciding how to build your next site, whether for personal use, to enhance your offline business or for ecommerce. Consider using WordPress even if you are not building a blog. Your imagination is just about the only limit to what you can do with it.

Adding Extra Value to Your Blog

And consider all the options that the WordPress community offers for adding value to your blog. Even if a blog is your main goal, WordPress allows you to add a forum for your reader community or a paid membership area.

If you want to do business on line, WordPress is a great tool for that, too. The sky is just about the limit when it comes to WordPress.

Select Your Hosting Service Carefully

If you intend to build a business in online retail sales, however, make sure you have a good ecommerce web hosting service. Make sure  you use a service that fully supports whatever it is that you are trying to do.

My first hosting was horrible. We could not even get a simple WordPress blog to work properly on their service, and it was a nightmare. So look for quality, not just price, in selecting a hosting service, even if you are not currently planning to get into ecommerce.

What cool things do you do with WordPress? Leave a comment and let us know.

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Kathleen Gresham designs, writes, and promotes blogs and websites and consults on search engine optimization (SEO) and directory listings for online and off line businesses in Houston, TX. For more information, see Houston Blog Web and Web Fresh Leads.