So, my help for you on this issue:

• Twhirl – I started using it few days ago and I must say I enjoyed playing with it. The coolest thing seems to be the retweet button (not present on twitter.com)
• TweetDeck – Many say it’s crashing, I didn’t try it to be honest, but it seems promissing
• GTwitter – As almost every software on this planet, the twitter desktop clients have an equivalent for linux as well
• Witty – Twitter for Vista
• TwitterPod – Twitter client for mac. I don’t have a mac so I didn’t try it.
• Twitterific – Another one for mac
• Snitter – This one has a version for Mac and Windows as well. Didn’t try it but seems to be cool

If you’re using other desktop clients, simply reply to this post and I’ll be happy to add them here.

So …

First thing you need to do is to write a new post or go and edit one. Put the cursor at that point where you want to embed it, let’s say somewhere in the middle of the post. Now, switch to the HTML mode of your editor (I made a printscreen of my view now so you can spot it faster).

Ok … next step is to find your youtube video. That’s pretty easy. Open a new browser window, go to youtube.com, find it and then you’ll notice it has an embed “code” somewhere on the right hand side of the page, like in the image below:

Click on that, copy it, come back to your original browser window with the post editing and paste it. Hit update/publish and you have it.

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 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

What is a Theme Chooser For WordPress?

It’s an addon for WordPress that makes it possible for your visitors to change the layout they want to see with just a click of a mouse. Yep, that’s possible and very easy to implement. First, you need to have multiple themes installed on your WordPress blog. Where to find them? It’s simple: google will give you all the answers you need. Just do a search for “free wordpress theme” or other related terms, and you’ll find a dozen of free themes to add to your blog. The next step is to upload them. Once you have them on your computer, unzip and use your ftp client to upload them and last, activate them from your admin area.

The next step is to ‘install a WordPress theme chooser add-on‘. By default, WordPress offers you the possibility to upload as many themes as you want, but use only one at a time. However, you can change that. How? With an addon. You have two options for this task.

The first one is “theme preview“. This one will allow your visitors to choose from a list of themes and preview them in the browser. Although there is a single theme activated as the main one and all the visitors will see it when they land on your blog for the first time, they will be able to switch to another one very easy. You don’t even need to install the themes. To install this plugin, just download it from the wordpress plugins website, unzip, upload to your server and activate it from the “plugins” menu in the admin area, then access your blog with an URL in this format: www.yourblogdomainname.com/index.php?preview_theme=some_theme (of course, change “some_theme” with your theme name). That’s it, test it and let me know if it works … or not :)

The second option is “Theme switcher“. This plugin does the same as the first one. To install it, just upload it to your plugins folder and then activate it from your admin area then add your themes as they say on the instructions page (you can find it in the settings menu). They offer 2 formats: full list or dropdown.

To conclude, if you want to let your visitors view your blog the way they want, you have at least 2 possibilities to do that, so you can’t say it’s impossible, even if your tech skills keep you far away from beeing an expert in this area. The theme chooser for WordPress makes it possible.

Hope this helps,

- Peter

Right now I’m using a plugin to add google analytics to my website, but there are few other ways to do that, depending on your imagination :).

First, let’s talk a little about this plugin. You can download it for free right here: Download Google Analytics for WordPress

Next, upload it to your “wp-content/plugins” folder and activate it from your plugins page in wp-admin. Once this plugin is active, you will have a new button in your settings sub-menu. Click on it and you’ll see this screen:

Here you can paste your google analytics code. Please note that this plugin works with the old version of GA as I marked with red in the screenshot (I hope in the near future we’ll have a version that will support the latest script from google). Hit update options and you’re done.

Another thing, if you’re logged in, this plugin won’t show the code in your page, so if you want to check it’s there, you need to logout first.

A second option would be to edit the theme files. This is good and bad at the same time. Good because you don’t have to get stuck with uploading plugins and so on, and it’s bad because it won’t work once you update your theme (or switch to another one). So it’s up to you if you use this method or not.

Here’s how to do this: first, you have to know what files from a WordPress theme are used always. These files are the header and the footer (the others might be used or not while user navigates on your website). Therefore, you may put the google analytics code inside one of those 2 files. I recommend editing the footer.php file because google instructions say that you have to place their code before the </body> tag. We’ll do so.

To edit your footer.php file, go to “Design” \ “Theme editor” and select “footer.php” from the right column. Once it’s loaded in the textarea, paste your code before the </body> tag, just like in the image below and hit the “Update file” button.

That’s it. You have installed Google Analytics on your WordPress Blog.

- Peter

(You can find an update for this post here)

Here’s the post in case you want to read it:

How to Make Your Title Appear In Your Links

The problem is that, by default, hosts don’t set folder permissions to allow writing for apache and WordPress needs to write the .htaccess file on your server in order for the permalinks to work. If you go to your permalinks settings and try to change their format and see the image below at the bottom of the page, this means you have a problem with your permissions.

Here’s how to deal with this.

If you have the ‘x’ theme on your cpanel admin area, read below. If you have ‘x3′ scroll down a little.

Once you’re logged into your cpanel, hit the ‘File Manager’ button:

Once it’s open, start browsing until you reach your blog root folder. To enter a folder, use the yellow icon near the folder name. If you click on the folder name you will get a list of options on the right upper corner.

Also, please note that your blog root folder might be on your cpanel account root folder or it might be in a subfolder. For instance, if your domain is called wordpress.org and you can reach your blog by typing that address, then you have to navigate to /public_html. If your blog is located at www.wordpress.org/somefolder/blog/, then you have to navigate to /public_html/somefolder/blog. If you encounter any problems with this step, please mail me or post a reply on this post.

Now you are in your blog root folder. You have to put there a .htaccess file. If you cannot see it in the listing, then it means you don’t have it and you have to create it. If you can see it, you only have to set writing permissions for it.

Here’s how to add the .htaccess file: click on “Create new file” and you’ll see a small box in the upper right corner of your browser. Put “.htaccess” inside and hit “Create”.

Now you have to set permissions for it. To do that, click on the file name in the listing

The contextual menu will appear in the upper right corner. There, click “Change permissions” and make sure the ‘user’ and ‘world’ writing permissions checkboxes are checked. When ready, hit “Change” and you’re good to go. Now you may go to your WordPress admin area and change the structure of your permalinks.

I’ll come back later with the screenshots for the ‘x3′ theme on cpanel as it’s a little different.

Take care,

Peter