by Franky Branckaute on July 7th, 2011 
3 Comments
With the launch of WordPress 3.2 a new monospace was introduced for the editor. Not everyone likes monospaced fonts though. Justin Tadlock explains how to change the editor font, via a simple addition to your theme’s functions.php.
After applying Justin’s tip, your editor will look like this:
WordPress 3.2 editor with different font
by Franky Branckaute on January 19th, 2011 0 Comments
One of the most popular text and code editors for Mac OS X certainly is Panic’s Coda. Sadly Coda isn’t 100% compliant with the WordPress coding standards and neither is TextWrangler.
Luckily not much is needed to make both editors compliant with the WordPress coding standards and in an entry over at Magp.ie Eoin Gallagher, Polldaddy developer, explains how to configure Coda – and TextWrangler – to meet the WordPress coding standards.
Discover how here.
by Cassie Emelia on August 19th, 2010 0 Comments
If you want to grow your blog’s audience and you use WordPress.org as your blogging application, then you need to try the five WordPress plugins listed below. They’re easy to use, free, and can have a significant impact on the number of visitors to your blog.
The more great content people are exposed to on your blog, the higher the chances are that they’ll find something they like causing them to return to your blog again, share your content with their own online connections, and ultimately, drive additional traffic to your blog. YAARP is a great plugin for automatically including a list of related posts at the end of each of your blog posts. The Link Within widget is another alternative.
by Robyn-Dale Samuda on June 21st, 2010 33 Comments
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
by Cassie Emelia on June 21st, 2010 0 Comments
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
by Robyn-Dale Samuda on June 14th, 2010 52 Comments
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
by Robyn-Dale Samuda on May 7th, 2010 15 Comments
WordPress, being the most popular blogging / content management platform in existence, has a huge community of developers and designers worldwide who are constantly brainstorming new and improved ways of making this legendary system more extensible through the use of plugins. Thanks to these plugins (9,486 Plugins according to WordPress.org), the average user can add style and functionality to their blog or website
as easy as the click of a couple of buttons. No coding required.
However, adding tons of plugins can significantly slow the loading time and overall performance of your blog. Therefore, its really important to use those that are absolutely necessary and delete the ones you’re not using. So, for those of you who may want to go the extra mile to guarantee 100% loading efficiency and dabble in a little code, here are some unique customizations that can replace some plugins that you may have installed. Read More
by Remkus de Vries on April 20th, 2010 26 Comments
Keeping your WordPress installation secure is usually not something a lot of people spend a great deal of time on. However, I believe WordPress security, tightening up the place should be your first priority every single time you install WordPress. No exceptions.
With the recent Pharma hack, more info about it plus a solution on Chris Pearson’s blog, going round I thought it was time to focus on WordPress security today. There are a lot of things you can do build extra layers of security for your WordPress installation.
There are a few different layers involved to secure your WordPress installation. I shall list them grouped together as much as possible. Read More
by Remkus de Vries on April 8th, 2010 10 Comments
The soon to be released WordPress 3.0 comes with a new menu management, but your theme has to have this capability built in. But what if you’d rather not edit your theme files or simply don’t want to wait for WordPress 3.0? Luckily there are a few plugins out there that will enable you to have a very flexible menu – without the fancy interface though. These are plugins I have used extensively on many sites which required a custom menu.
Exclude Pages is a plugin that does exactly what the title suggest. It allows you to specify per page whether or not a page needs to be in the menu or not. This plugin adds a checkbox, ‘include this page in menus’ to your page edit screen. All you need to do is uncheck this to exclude pages from the page navigation so that users won’t see on your site. As simple as that. Do keep in mind that pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings. Read More
by Franky Branckaute on March 20th, 2010 5 Comments
Many people blog for fun while others blog to make money but at the end of the day most of us all have the same purpose in mind and the game is all about one thing, one word: traffic.
There are many different approaches to blogging and the best way to achieve long term success with your blog is to create valuable content but sometimes your entries need that small push to take off and you will have to promote your entries, often relying on friends/colleagues to get those first submissions/votes on social networks. On platforms such as StumbleUpon or Reddit verticals those first initial votes can make the difference between no referrals or thousands of visitors to your post.
So off you go hitting up all your friends on Twitter, Facebook and in Basecamp. Guilty as charged.
In this entry I am going to show you how you can easily set up a private network with WordPress and 3 plugins only, to promote your entries among, together with friends, hoping for those often crucial initial votes, submissions to the main social networks to maximally promote your awesome content. Read More
