Posted 12 Aug 2009 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
WordPress is a great blogging and content-management tool. It is highly extensible, evidenced by the thousands of plugins available for it, but also the WordPress Codex, where you can learn all things related to making WordPress work best for you.
Below, you’ll find 5 great WordPress hacks that add functionality to your site without sacrificing a lot of time or energy.
1. List your upcoming posts. Do you write a lot of posts in advance? Generate buzz for them by posting a list of your upcoming posts in the sidebar. Paste the following code where you want the list to display:
Posted 05 Aug 2009 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
Most related posts plugins for WordPress work about the same. They generate a list of possibly related posts based on keywords and categories and display them simply at the end of a blog post.
Everyone loves graphics nowadays, so why not combine photos and your related posts into clickable related posts that will grab a reader’s attention and keep them clicking for more? LinkWithin does just that by generating 3 clickable related posts thumbnails based on relevancy, popularity, and date of publication. The WordPress widget requires no code modification of your theme files. The images and links display underneath your post on single post pages. LinkWithin also works with TypePad and Blogger. You can also get the widget code yourself and set it up on other blogging platforms, if necessary.
This is a preview of
LinkWithin: Display Related Posts in a Fresher Style
.
Read the full post (206 words, 2 images, estimated 49 seconds reading time).
Comments Off
Posted 29 Jun 2009 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
I just upgraded my WordPress installation, and lo-and-behold, my blog wouldn’t load after I upgraded! The administration panel loaded just fine, so I knew that it wasn’t a database error. So, I did a little poking around to see if I could find the cause of this error.
First, I checked out my plugins – it is possible that plugins may be incompatible with an updated version of WordPress. I disabled each one, then reloaded my website. No dice. Page still doesn’t load.
Now, on to re-enabling all of my plugins.
Comments Off
Posted 18 Mar 2009 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
I love WordPress because it is so easy to modify to fit your needs. Some tweaks can make your theme more personal, others add functionality to tell your visitors more about you as a blogger. Take these four tweaks, add them to your WordPress blog, and see how it improves your blogging experience!
Add the number of posts to your sidebar:
<?php
$my_query = new WP_Query('post_status=future&order=DESC&showposts=5');
if ($my_query->have_posts()) {
while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
<?php the_title(); ?>
<?php endwhile;
}
?>
Add “Tweet This” to your posts by placing this code in “The Loop” in single.php
This is a preview of
Improve your WordPress Theme with Snippets of Code
.
Read the full post (172 words, estimated 41 seconds reading time).
Comments Off
Posted 04 Mar 2009 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
Are you using Feedburner for your RSS feed? Why not?
Feedburner gives you stats on how many people read your feed, click on your posts and visit your site and more. Statistics are important to any blogger who really wants to improve their blogging experience. Plus, who doesn’t love bragging rights about how many readers (subscribers) you have?
photo credit: adria.richards
Make it easier for your readers to get your content into an online feed reader like Google Reader or Netvibes, or a desktop program like FeedDemon. Cutting down on daily visits to individual websites saves your readers time – and increases the opportunities you have to reach a wide audience.
Comments Off
Posted 21 Jan 2009 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
The Lessnau Lounge brings to the table two great WordPress plugins – Twitterdoodle and RSSdoodle.
Twitterdoodle allows you to create mashup posts (or roundups) of tweets about a specific topic being talked about on Twitter. For example, if you want to make a post about Apple iPods or your favorite tv show, Twitterdoodle has some great features, such as an option to make posts go automatically to your category archives and not your blog’s front page.
RSSdoodle works the same way, except it compiles lists of blog posts from around the web.
This is a preview of
Mashup RSS feeds into Posts with RSSdoodle and Twitterdoodle
.
Read the full post (110 words, 1 image, estimated 26 seconds reading time).
Posted 07 Jan 2009 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
ZdMultilang is a WordPress plugin that helps you translate your blog posts, categories or tags in three easy steps. Once you install the plugin, your readers will be able to select the language they want to translate your site to, too!
- Install and activate the plugin via the WordPress administration screen or by manually downloading from the site and uploading to your server.
- Select the language(s) you want to use on your site, using the directions on the plugin website.
- Use the Options tab to set additional preferences, such as where you want to display the language switcher or whether or not to use flags as markers for language switching.
Posted 31 Dec 2008 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
In our wildest blogging dreams, we all hope to hit the front page of Digg with a well-written and popular post.
To survive the large amount of traffic that will come your blog’s way whether you are on the front page of Digg, popular on StumbleUpon or getting loads of search engine traffic, install WP-Cache, a well-known and popular WordPress plugin.
The concept behind WP-Cache is very simple. It simply builds static pages from your site, which will allow your site to stay up during major peaks in traffic. Other reasons to use WP-Cache include if you have limits on your bandwidth and want to cut back on server requests or if you usually have slow performance from your server.
Posted 17 Dec 2008 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
Leaving comments on WordPress powered blogs can be tiresome and frankly, tedious.
There are two ways to work around this problem – one is a Firefox extension and the other is a browser bookmarklet.
I’ve mentioned bookmarklets here before, and this one works just the same. Single click and drag this link (WordPress Comment) to your browser toolbar. Be sure to edit the name, email and website values after saving by right clicking on the link and going to preferences. A WordPress comments bookmarklet could come in handy on many blogs, but the developer says there are problems with some themes not having the right coding, so the fields do not automatically fill in. Note: I have only tested on Firefox 3. (Source: i0nutzb)
