Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’
by BP Guest Blogger on December 17th, 2012
If you consider your blog as a business, then you might understand the point being made here in a better way. If you don’t, consider it to be a one and then think whether a business would really get a kick-start without any valuable investment in and for it or not? A simple answer to this question is NO. That’s because any tangible quality item in this world is not free, and so is any digital item that you purchase and use online.
Any blog needs some good investment – in it and for it. Just like a business invests in its offices, transportation, employment, advertising etc., a blog also needs to invest money at various important events, for several different items. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
Tags: blog, business, google, Kevin, Plug-in (computing), Software developer, wordpress
by Jonathan Bailey on December 12th, 2012
Last month I found myself with my back against the wall: My theme was falling apart.
In June of 2011 I had switched my site to the Headway Theme Framework, version 2.X. The changeover, initially, went very well. The theme was wonderful on the test site and, despite a hiccup or two in transferring it to the new main site, things were up and running quickly.
But problems slowly began to arise. The theme would occasionally have errors where the settings would change or elements would be added, causing sections of my pages to be repeated many times over. Most of the time the problems were minor and easily fixed, but they were annoying. However, over time the problems began to escalate.
After setting up the theme, I was at a major plagiarism conference in the UK when my site broke completely and became unreadable. The smaller errors started to become more common and it began to feel as if I was doing patch jobs on the theme weekly or more regularly.
I tried addressing the issue with both my host and with Headway’s support but none of the changes, including increasing the memory in my VPS, seemed to help. The people at Headway encouraged me to upgrade to the 3.X branch, saying it was much more stable and resource-friendly. However, there’s no upgrade path to go from 2.X to 3.X, meaning that doing so would require starting from scratch. In my mind, I didn’t have the time to set up a new theme and the patches, while annoying, were not time-consuming.
But then things went from bad to worse. In one day the theme went down three times and, the last time, temporarily took the entire database with you. Though I have good backups of my database, nothing causes a moment of panic quite like realizing that 8 years of hard work may have just been erased.
Fortunately it wasn’t, but with errors now as frequent as coffee breaks, I knew something had to be done quickly. So, that evening, I set out on one of my most ambitious WordPress-related tasks, creating an entire new theme in one night. Read More
Categories: WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips, WordPress Tools
Tags: CSS, headway, headway theme, pointelle slider, site development, slider, theme, wordpress, WordPress theme
by Jonathan Bailey on November 29th, 2012
If you haven’t been following WordPress development closely this past year, you haven’t missed much. The last major version of WordPress, 3.4, was released On June 13th and the next, 3.5, is scheduled to be released on December 5th.
Neither version added what could be considered major user-facing features, especially to bloggers who are already working on the platform. Version 3.4 introduced greater theme controls and improved localization while 3.5 will introduce a new default theme and revamp the upload/insert workflow.
While all of these are great features and important to have, they don’t exactly set the world on fire with new functionality either. They’re incremental improvements and not sexy new features that get bloggers excited about new releases. However, cautious updates make sense given that it’s important for the WordPress core to be stable and consistent for the many corporate applications it sees these days
However, that doesn’t mean WordPress is being left to stagnate. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and primary driver behind developing the WordPress platform, has been dishing out a bevy of new features and tools, but they haven’t been baking it into the WordPress core. Instead, they’ve been taking advantage of WordPress’ plugin architecture and have built a plugin of plugins, named Jetpack, to incorporate new features they don’t want to code into WordPress itself.
While the reception of Jetpack was somewhat cool at first, it’s grown to incorporate a wide number of features, many of which have been widely requested by bloggers for some time.
So, keeping in mind that Jetpack is being rapidly updated, what are some of the best features it adds? Here are of the best to consider. Read More
Categories: WordPress Tips
Tags: automattic, jetpack comments, jetpack wordpress plugin, notifications, photon, plugin, publicize, push notifications, wordpress, wordpress stats
by BP Guest Blogger on November 14th, 2012
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Tell me if this sounds familiar: You’ve been working away on your blog for a while now — months, maybe even years. You don’t have a huge audience, maybe a few thousand readers, maybe even less. But it’s a dedicated audience. They read every post, they get into it in the comments, and they tell you they consider your site a valuable resource.
But properly maintaining a blog is hard work. You’re diligent about posting frequently so that your audience stays engaged, and the hours are really adding up. You’re starting to wonder about the bottom line. With your traffic, ad revenue won’t amount to much (if anything), and you’re not crazy about sponsored posts or affiliate programs that might tarnish your blog’s reputation. Read More
Categories: Blogger Tools
Tags: drupal, joomla!, wordpress
by BP Guest Blogger on October 25th, 2012
(Photo credit: C.P.Storm)
You may have noticed that the SEO game has become a lot more difficult lately… Mostly due to the recent algorithm updates like the Penguin and, like always, due to the ever-growing competition for valuable keywords.
However, some things remain unchanged. For instance, you still need to find a way to let Google know which keywords you’re targeting.
The fact is that Google can figure this out on their own, kind of (through links, and social media interaction), but introducing some good on-page SEO can make things a lot quicker.
You have to be careful, though. Google now openly admits that they discourage all forms of active link building, and probably any other type of active SEO work as well.
So how to overcome this and not get in trouble? Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense, Blogging Tips, Blogging Tools, Blogging: How To
Tags: Alt attribute, App Store, google, iPad, Keyword density, keywords, search engine optimization, wordpress
by BP Guest Blogger on October 23rd, 2012
WordPress (Photo credit: Adriano Gasparri)
Choosing the WordPress theme might be difficult. Everybody has a genial idea to look for hot topics, but a page that looks exactly like Facebook or Twitter will not only be ridiculous, but it also show bad taste and lack of originality. This is why it is important to come with a brilliant idea, and to have a great, original, unique and pleasant theme.
It is important to establish the purpose of your blog before choosing a theme. For online portfolios, you should have an elaborated plan, and you will also need to be patient, as those blogs need some time before gaining the expected recognition.
Even if you think about a programmer, it will cost you some money. Whether you want to choose a predefined theme, or you want a new theme created especially for your blog, you must know that there are advantages and disadvantages for each one of those methods. Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense, Blogging Tools
Tags: blog, CoffeeCup, Facebook, IBM, twitter, Uniform Resource Locator, Website, wordpress
by BP Guest Blogger on September 20th, 2012
Nobody likes to fail. Unfortunately, it’s a part of business, and while “I succeed because I fail” is somewhat of a cliche, it still rings very true, and there are real lessons to be learned from not coming up on top. Besides the somewhat obvious “soft lessons” we gain from failing time and again, there are also more direct ways we can leverage failure to come up significantly better than we were before.
While not all of these answers may be directly applicable to your business, hopefully they will offer enough motivation that when you suffer your next, inevitable dip in business, you’ll see opportunity through that collapse. Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense, Marketing, Opinion
Tags: Company, Employment, google, wordpress
by BP Guest Blogger on September 13th, 2012
Many bloggers these days are turning to content curation as a tactic to add to their repertoire of blogging tools. As they do so they are finding that content curation can be hard work. Maybe not as hard as content creation, but it does have its own hurdles and can be very time consuming to do well.
The biggest hurdle to content curation is also why it is valuable to your blog’s community – there is so much information to read through and digest out on the internet. To do well at curation, you need to process 20, 50 maybe 100 articles and posts per day to find great information to curate. Just skimming a bunch of titles from your RSS feed and posting them without comment just doesn’t cut it these days. Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense, Blogging Tips
Tags: blog, google, twitter, wordpress
by BP Guest Blogger on September 12th, 2012
Blogging is a simple technique applied by most, and is one of the newfound ways to make money online. Yes, making money though blogging is not a difficult thing when done in a right way. Blog is nothing but a website that requires regular updated content. In simple words, blogs are online dairies with content listed in chronological order for easy access. Blogs have content arranged in order so that readers can scout the website and find related posts without any difficulty. Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense, Blogging Tips
Tags: Blogger, Make Money Online, Social Media, wordpress
by BP Guest Blogger on September 11th, 2012
When we think about monetizing our blogs with passive income we generally think of adsense or paid banner advertising. But did you know can also monetize your blog and earn passive income using e-commerce? It is now possible to set up and maintain a profitable e-commerce store right from WordPress.
Setting up an e-commerce store was previously only possible using expensive or confusing softwares such as X-Cart or Zen Cart. Both are excellent e-commerce solutions. X-Cart is quite pricey and has a steep learning curve. Zen Cart a free solution is a little more straight forward but will still require some clever navigation through the admin interface. Both systems however run independently from your main website. Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense, Blogging Tips
Tags: Electronic commerce, Passive income, wordpress
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