Archive for the ‘WordPress Tips’ Category
by Robyn-Dale Samuda on June 21st, 2010
Your blog’s loading speed affects more 
than just user experience but is now a factor used by google to determine an overall ranking for your site. The reasoning is clear according to google and other search engines’ goals, which is to provide the most relevant search results from sites that offer the best user experience. Site speed is definitely something we cannot not ignore and should take advantage of every opportunity to improve.
Here are 9 effective techniques and tips that can be easily implemented to make your blog lightning fast. Read More
Categories: Blogging Resources, Blogging Tips, WordPress Tips
Tags: Increase Blog Speed, WordPress Tips
by Cassie Emelia on June 21st, 2010
Are you running WordPress 3.0 yet? If so, you might have come across a nifty little addition called Menus. You’ll find it on your admin Dashboard in the Appearances section, and here’s a little screenshot of how it looks:
As you can see, I’ve set up a new menu named “Lorraine Menu†here, and added various things to it by selecting from the elements on the left side of the page: a link to Devlounge, links to some pages, and so forth.
Also of note is the message beneath Theme Locations that states:
The current theme does not natively support menus, but you can use the “Custom Menu†widget to add any menus you create here to the theme’s sidebar. Read More
Categories: WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips, WordPress Tutorials
Tags: Devlounge, tutorial, wordpress, WordPress 3.0, WordPress Tips
by Remkus de Vries on June 16th, 2010
I saw an interesting tweet fly by today from Ozh in which he offered advice to ditch the Trackbacks all together on a WordPress blog. Which got me to think, do we really need trackbacks or have the become just another version of spam most of you like to get rid of? The question has been on the minds of people for quite some time now, but with the recent outburst of trackback spam I think the question has become quite relevant again.
Ozh mentiones a few reasons why he ditched the trackbacks all together:
- I get too much of them to have the time to check them all
- They make ugly [...]anchor links[...] in my comment moderation queue
- A third (on my blog at least) are spam (mostly caught by Akismet hopefully)
- And when they’re not spam, 95% of the time they come from a website I can’t understand because I don’t speak that language
Personally I don’t receive that much trackbacks on my own posts to the level that it has become a problem, but I do notice more and more sites turning them off and not displaying them anymore. Now, I can agree with Ozh that trackbacks certainly don’t look very nice, but by separating the comments from the trackback and only displaying the titles of the blogposts that placed a trackback you can still keep it relatively clean.
One thing I have done, is by using the plugin No Self Pings, is disable all internal trackbacks. I don’t see the point and if it’s relevance you’re after there a much more sophisticated solutions for that such as the wonderful YARPP plugin.
If trackbacks aren’t your thing the easiest way to do so is to disable the ability to allow trackbacks via your Discussion Settings, but I’m curious what you all think. Does it add value? Do you still allow trackbacks? Are you receiving a lot of spam?
Categories: WordPress Tips
Tags: trackback
by Robyn-Dale Samuda on June 14th, 2010
There’s no doubt that social media has become the marketing medium of choice for the new, seasoned and tech savvy blogger. Personally, I can attest to the fact that there are strong relationships that are built through the effective use of social media and tons of readers at sites like Twitter and Facebook to woo to our blogs.
At the same time we should never forget the power of effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the driving force it holds for the casual and professional blogger. It has become super easy to do through some excellent features and plugins for WordPress and its mastery can easily become second nature for the everyday blogger.
Let’s look at a few SEO techniques that can put your blog on the search engine map including some that most bloggers tend to ignore. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tips
Tags: Search Engine, seo, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tips
by Remkus de Vries on June 9th, 2010
Most of your focus on optimizing your WordPress sites is probably on the look and feel of your design and the layout of specific things. Getting that content to display as perfectly as possible. Given that fact it’s a shame we spend as close to none time on optimizing our RSS Feed output. Sure, we hook our feeds up to Feedburner, but most don’t even select the ‘Optimize Feed’ option. Which is strange considering the ratio of people that view your content via RSS versus the actual site.
RSS is supposed to deliver your content as clean as possible, but there are however a few things you can do to optimize the output of your RSS. Here a few plugins that can help you out: Read More
Categories: WordPress Tips
Tags: feed, rss
by Remkus de Vries on June 4th, 2010
I’m sure you’ve read about if before. Before or after a tutorial on how to improve your site with a script, plugin or just plain regular hack. Read what you ask? To backup first and foremost. As you may have noticed BloggingPro went offline for a while due to serious hardware failure. As soon as it was fixed all that had to be done was restore the backup. I had a similar problem to other day where updating a bunch of modified PHP files via FTP at the same time somehow screwed up the contents of these files and subsequently a lot of data. Boy was I glad I backed up…
Backing up your software sounds like a chore to most of us out there, but I guarantee you you will thank yourself for doing it plus there a plenty of solutions to automate it.
Perhaps you’re not really sure when to backup and when not? Here’s just a few things you could be doing that in my opinion requires a backup first: Read More
Categories: WordPress Tips
Tags: Backups
by Remkus de Vries on May 26th, 2010
The best way to add a bit of color to your site is by making good use of great imagery. Finding matching images for your posts can be difficult every now and then, but getting those images to show in a consistent manner throughout your site can be a pain. What I mean specifically is when you have finally found a matching image it most likely will not have the perfect resolution.
Perhaps you have noticed here on BloggingPro most images in post do not exceed the 240px range, but of course not all images can be found in exact that width. Most of the time you need to crop or resize those images you found to the proper width size.
Read More
Categories: WordPress Tips
Tags: images, media upoad
by Remkus de Vries on May 21st, 2010
A lot of times I hear people asking how to best approach fiddling around with certain design elements in their current theme without their visitors seeing any mistakes they make. A different version of the same question is about wanting to implement a complete new design and layout and optimize it to your liking. Also without you bothering your regular visitors. There is a very simple solution for that that requires a only a few simple steps.
Just a Few Steps
The only thing you need to do for this to work is installing the Theme Test Drive. There is a different way of seeing how your site would look like in a new a new theme, by the way. Read More
Categories: WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tips
Tags: Maintenance, testing
by Remkus de Vries on May 11th, 2010
We all like to be kept up-to-date on our favorite WordPress sites. The best way to do so is to subscribe to the RSS feed. Unless you’re using a plugin such as Feedsmith which redirects all your feeds to your Feedburner feed, you have a lot of options to subscribe to. You have the general site feed, of course, but also the comments feed and the category feeds. But.. what you don’t have is a feed for pages should you as a company decide to only use WordPress with static pages and not with a blog.
Now a while back this would’ve not been the most interesting problem in need of a solution, but since WordPress is being used as CMS more and more and thus only using static pages, a proper solution is in need. Read More
Categories: WordPress Tips
Tags: cms, feed, wordpress cms
by Remkus de Vries on May 6th, 2010
By now you should be aware that WordPress 3.0 comes shipped with Custom Post Types. It’s a feature that may not be easy to grasp at first, but it holds almost infinite power over what you can do with WordPress. Custom Post Types are not set in stone as to what they exactly are. It’s more important you realize that they can represent any type of content you want. WordPress already ships with several post types such as posts, pages, attachments and even revisions, so it’s basically up to your imagination what you can do with it.
There are three sources about Custom Post Types I think you all should read to get a better grasp of what it can do for you. I’ve heard people say that the new WordPress 3.0 Custom Post Types feature is really not all that important, but I’d like to show them different by presenting you these three great sources. Read More
Categories: WordPress Tips, WordPress Tutorials
Tags: custom post type, WordPress 3.0, WordPress resources
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