So, here we go:

1. First and the most important resource is twitter itself. We all know that no matter what we do, trial & error is the best thing to test things. So, if you want to spread the word about your business, or simply interact with people, just do it and you’ll learn a lot of stuff
2. The big juicy twitter guide – just click on the link :) It’s a tiny guide to introduce you to twitter
3. Twictionary – A dictionary to introduce you to twitter terms & stuff
4. The Twitter Blog – Guess what: the twitter official blog
5. Explore twitter – Learn more about twitter

That’s about it for now, come back tomorrow for more. I’ll be posting about information analysis and how you can get numbers from twitter.

Cheers!

I do have an account as well and it’s fun to spend some time sharing your thoughts or commenting on other’s stuff. It’s really fun. But this isn’t the point right now, I wanted to tell you I’ll spend some time researching tools for twitter and wordpress especially and share them with you here. I already have a big list of twitter tools, but I have to make it pretty before posting it.

Cheers and see you soon.

PS: you better subscribe to my rss feed to get the news when they’re published :)

It’s been a while since I posted on my blog last time. I’ve been really busy with my new release.

Inspired from few websites, I’ve built a wordpress exit script plugin which literally boosts your conversion rate and response rate. The site went online yesterday at noon and since then I’ve got a few emails from people interested.

Go and check it out, the website is www.monetizewordpress.com .

That’s it for now, I’ll come back with more info soon.

Cheers!

However, I got the most from memberwing (google for it and you’ll find it, it’s the first result). This plugin is very easy to use, it has no options and that’s why it got my vote :) To use it, simply insert {+} or {++} or {+++} in your post, depending on the user level you want the content to be accessible for. For free, you go with {+}, for the premium you go with {+++} (for more info on that, read their website). Everything before that sign is free and available for the public, what’s after that sign is only viewable by the registered users. I didn’t test what will happen if you put the {+++} sign 3 times in a post :) I invite you to do that maybe you discover bugs and report them to the plugin owners.

That’s about it right now, if I’ll decide to build my own cool membership plugin in the future, I’ll let you know. If you want to be noticed when an update is out, simply read my blog and subscribe to my rss feed.

Cheers,
- Peter

It’s a pretty easy job to do, you don’t need too many skills for it, you don’t need to mess with code or anything… and it’s even easier with wordpress 2.7.

For older versions: let’s say you found a plugin on the net and you want to use it. Simply download it to your desktop, unzip it there and then upload it to your /wp-content/plugins folder on your server. After it’s done uploading, login to wp-admin, navigate to the plugins page, spot your newest plugin and hit the “activate” button next to it. That’s about it. Of course, assuming you know what FTP is and your plugin doesn’t have settings you have to mess with. If it does, you can find them (or at least for most plugins) in the settings menu (it’ll add a submenu with its name, it’s pretty intuitive). To upgrade your plugin, repeat the steps above: download, unzip, upload to wordpress plugins folder and it will upgrade the database, there’s nothing more for you to do.

For the current version (2.7), they’ve made it even easier. They’ve embeded it in the interface, so you don’t have to use FTP anymore. Simply go to your plugins page and search for the button named “add” or “add new” or “add plugin” (or whatever :) ). Hit browse, search for the plugin on your local harddrive, upload it and you’re good to go. After it’s finished uploading it will prompt you to activate it, I suggest you do so :). Same for the options, if your plugin has options/settings the chances to find them in the settings menu are over 90%. To upgrade, do the same as when you installed it.

One thing you should consider, there’s a plugin called “one click upgrade” (google it). It’ll make your live easier when speaking of upgrading your plugins. It will search automatically for newer versions and let you know if you have to upgrade any of your installed plugins (with a click of a button). You may want to give it a try.

That’s all folks :)

Happy blogging,

Peter

Ok … back to the topic. In this post I want to teach you how to upgrade your wordpress blog. That’s a pretty easy task. If you created your blog using fantastico, then you should go back there and find the appropriate button. It’ll do the job, there’s nothing else for you to do. If you followed my guide on how to install wordpress (or not :) ) and installed it with your own hands, you probably know what to do already. Simply go to wordpress.org/download, save the latest release on your PC, unzip it and finally upload it to your blog folder on your server (maybe site root, maybe not). After you’re done, go to your admin panel. It’ll say your database has to be upgraded if it’s the case (and it is when you upgrade from older versions to 2.7, it happened for all my blogs), just hit that button and you’re good to go.

That’s it :)

The good news is that from now on, wordpress has its own auto-upgrade feature embeded. For older versions, you should’ve had a plugin installed to do that, but from now on, you can simply go to the “Tools” menu and hit “Upgrade”. It’s pretty easy and intuitive so go ahead and try it.

I thought it might be useful to list 7 of my best posts here so you don’t get lost while browsing my blog by jumping from a post to another.

Let’s start with the start:

1. How to install wordpress – Here I wrote a whole guide on how to install wordpress. To be honest, I didn’t like the famous “5 minutes installation guide” on wordpress.org so I wrote my own. The tutorial posted on this page explains how you can create a new blog from scratch using cpanel, ftp, etc. Of course, there are other ways, some of them even easier (maybe) like Fantastico. But your hosting company has to upgrade their software right after the release, so you depend on many factors. Anyway, it’s one of the many solutions, test it and rate it.
2. How To Display A Static Page On Your Home Page – by default, wordpress shows the latest 10 posts on your main page. This can be good or bad, depending on your preferences. The good news is that you can change this setting from the admin. To find out more about this, just click on the link in the title of this paragraph.
3. Top recommended WordPress Plugins – A small personal wordpress plugins collection. I think you must have them (or at least some of them) installed on your blog to make your life easier. The post includes: All in one SEO pack, google xml sitemaps, social bookmarks and few more. Check them out.
4. How to recover your admin password (if the password recovery feature doesn’t work) – you may think this will never happen. But it does … it did happen few times for me so I thought it would be great to let others know how I did it before they quit trying and get a new fresh wordpress installation losing all their data.
5. Top 10 WordPress anti spam plugins – Another collection of mine, this time to help me get rid of spammers. Yep, they attack blogs too (and attacked mine as well). The best seems to be akismet but there are few other options from which you can chose your destiny, so read the whole post before you make a decision (and maybe test them one by one).
6. How to integrate Google Analytics with your blog – A common problem for bloggers is to have their google analytics code installed on their blog so they can track traffic. This post explains exactly what you need to do to have it working.
   
7. The best permalinks structure – If you don’t know what permalinks are, then search this blog and you will find a post explaining that for sure. In the 7th post listed here I explained what’s the best way to have your URLs listed and why is that.
   

Enjoy reading,

Peter

The bad part is that videoblogs require a lot more disk space on your server and better bandwidth (and a streaming software as well) so it’s not that easy to move to it.

People like to see what they’re going to buy. Therefore, if you look at this from a business perspective, you get a lot of benefits because puting a presentation video on the internet is like having video advertising for free where you can display your products and services. Some people would like to see the proof that they’re getting their money’s worth before spending them.

On the web things are pretty much static right now unlike in television in which all are moving. If you something that’s moving you’ll get attention for sure, and if the video is good enough, people might buy your product even if they don’t need it. If you’re just starting a business, you don’t need to invest too much, you can just start at home. All you need is a camera (I’d say a good one, not just a webcam) a microphone, a video software, some lights and you’re good to go.  You need to invest in a good camera because the better the resolution is, the better the output is and you want to present your goods in an optimum way…

Light is very important so make sure you illuminate the whole area when capturing images. The brighter the area, the crisper the images will be.

Another very important aspect is your voice. You need sounds, especially your voice during the video.  The software can be any as long as it does the job. You simply need to be able to cut bad angles, tune the video for its best quality and export it in a format for the web.

As for the downsides, I already named few of them: diskspace and bandwidth for the server. On the client side, I’d say it might slow down a little the visitor’s computer but not that much but they can experience high load times if they’re on dial up or any kind of slow connection. Their connection speed must allow them to view a video real time for the best experience, so be careful with that.

Well, that’s about it. I’ll let you decide if you’re going to use videoblogging or not. Oh.. and by the way, you can merge text blogging with video blogging, meaning you can integrate videos in your current blog. That’s good news :)

Take care,

Peter

For instance, I’m writing this post on my blog right now (blog A). Someone might find it useful and mention it in his blog (blog B). When he publishes his post, his WordPress scripts send a xmlrpc request to my blog. My blog then verifies the existance of the link in the post and if it’s there it automatically posts the pingback onsite as sucessful.

The next few weeks we’ll be releasing a series of tutorials on how to design and code a WordPress Theme. If you missed our first tutorial, it’s located here.

We’ll cover topics like:

• how to design/draw a WordPress theme
• how to slice the final image and export it to html
• how to create the css stylesheet ready for use with WordPress
• how to ‘code’ the theme
• the wordpress header
• the wordpress footer
• how to create the index page
• how to create posts pages
• comments pages
• and so on

The tutorials may include videos(or pdfs) or not, it depends on you. If you feel you’re interested in this tutorial series, then get our RSS to be notified when a new post is made or bookmark this page. Here we’ll post the links to each topic and updates.

Also, feel free to ask any questions or make any suggestions.

I’ll be providing a demo premium wordpress theme with options in the admin area ( this will be for advanced users only though : )  ).

Keep in touch,

- Peter