Posted 10 Dec 2008 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
Over the next 24 hours, let us know what your favorite WordPress plugin is – and you’ll be entered to win a $10 Amazon gift certificate!
The winner will be selected randomly and announced on Friday, December 12, 2008 at 12:00 pm EST!
Congrats, John Lessnau and to all who entered. John, you will receive your gift certificate today, and I would like to THANK all of you for entering!
WordPress Wednesdays features posts about plugins, themes and general usage of WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system!
Posted 03 Dec 2008 — by Ellie
Category WordPress

WordPress sends out plain text emails for things like comment and pingback notifications. These emails are usually long and awkward, especially if you have WP installed in its own directory.
Do you want to minimize the wasted characters included in every email you get from WordPress?
“Clean Notifications” solves the problem of long, wordy emails, and formats WordPress emails into clean, HTML friendly messages.
Here’s a comment notification before “Clean Notifications”:

And after “Clean Notifications”:

This is a preview of
Remove the Junk from WP Emails with Clean Notifications
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Read the full post (127 words, 3 images, estimated 30 seconds reading time).
Posted 19 Nov 2008 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
Adding photos to your posts adds interest and a little spark to your pages. Photo Dropper is a WordPress plugin that lets you add Flickr photos to your posts with an easy to use interface.
Photo Dropper searches for photos licensed for shared use and lets you pick the perfect pictures to add to your posts!
- Once you have the Photo Dropper plugin activated, you will see an “Add Photo via Photo Dropper” icon right above your Write Post (or Write Page) editor.Click on it, and enter keyword(s) for a photo you would like for your post (Example: “geek”, “biking”, or “cell phones”) and click the Search button.
This is a preview of
Photo Dropper Makes Adding Pictures to Your Posts Easier Than Ever
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Read the full post (225 words, 2 images, estimated 54 seconds reading time).
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Posted 28 Oct 2008 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
I don’t know how I survived blogging without FeedBurner to manage my feeds! A good analogy for FeedBurner and what it does for your blogs – it is like an alternative fuel for your blog feeds – making your blog (vehicle) run better, faster and smoother – while getting more mileage out of your RSS feeds!
First, you need a Feedburner account set up. If you do not have one, read more on the FeedBurner site – be sure to watch the cool video!
Got your FeedBurner account? Good! Let’s get started!
Navigate to Publicize and first ACTIVATE the service.
Posted 26 Oct 2008 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
Almost every blog software uses some form of categories and tagging to label your posts. You can turn your blog into a well organized internal search engine with a little elbow grease.
Categories can be thought of as a chest of drawers in your bedroom. Each drawer has a specific purpose – one for socks, one for shirts, another for sweaters, and so on.
Tags are subdivisions of each category. Inside of each drawer (category) you can divide your socks by color or type. Same with your shirts and sweaters. Tags are a compliment to categories, so you remain organized.
Posted 15 Oct 2008 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
Are you still contemplating starting a blog?
Or have you reserved a username or webhost, but haven’t made the first step into blogging?
Don’t despair. You aren’t alone! Many people haven’t started blogs yet!
Blogging is a relatively new phenomenon, but as you have probably noticed, blogging is more and more popular, and is now in the mainstream of world news and communication!
I want you to start a blog! Still not convinced? Well, here are 7 Reasons Why You Should Be Blogging!
- Blogging is easy. Seriously. Blogging is just as simple as sitting down and composing an email!
Posted 01 Oct 2008 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
Everyone has their preferences when it comes to what their blog or the blogs they visit look like, but these are several blog design mistake that you can avoid – gaining you a larger audience and happier readers.
Use partial feeds. Everyone loves having to visit a website to get update. Especially when they have 100 to 200 feeds they read daily. Do yourself and your readers a favor and install a plugin like Full Text Feed and say goodbye to partial feeds forever!
Posted 24 Sep 2008 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
When your blog template isn’t working, change it! I know I have said a lot of things in the past about blogging and how to please your visitors, but at the end of the day, blogging is about what makes YOU happy!
I blog here because I enjoy sharing knowledge and challenging myself by coming up with blogging ideas every week. However, I cannot forget my obligation to myself to enjoy life – even blogging!
Posted 17 Sep 2008 — by Ellie
Category WordPress
Using WordPress as your blogging software or even content management software is pretty easy, even for blogging software newbies. Personalization is what makes WordPress stand out, though. Not only can you use code to add functionality to your site, but you can also use any one of literally thousands of plugins to add features you want or need as well!
While I generally use around 30 plugins for this site, I do have a favorite… hands down —- RSS Footer.