Hey

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!

I am going to explain in a few words how to take a video from youtube.com and embed it so your visitors can see it directly from your blog.

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.

Back with more howtos. Current lesson: how to mess with plugins.

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

In a previous post I named few reasons for keeping your wordpress blog upgraded all the time. This is very important because you’re avoiding the latest exploits and probably lots of hours of tears and work :). Another thing you should do is to hide your wordpress version from the public. In case you aren’t up to date with your blog, they won’t know that. Now .. depending on your theme, that may be already hidden, but take a closer look just in case and remove it.

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.

Anyone who has writing abilities (or simply they just think they have it) has a blog on the internet these days. There are lots of blogging softwares that are easy to use and don’t require technical abilities so everybody can aquire a blog online.

For some of us, blogs are their projects for their daily living, as they talk about their life or bring tribute to friends and family. Furthermore, blogs assume a profound meaning to endorse a product, supply information on a topic, post tutorials, and the list could go on. Simply pick a subject and you can find a blog for it on the internet.

Blogs can be written by politicians, sports people, musicians or even kids. The fact that anyone can compose and regarding any subject matter under the sun, complaints about certain write-ups are an issue. A lot of blogs are mentioning names. So, please bare in mind that you have to be very careful and take a lot of responsibility when posting to a blog and avoid saying things that can become controversial.

Why having a blog?

1. Simply as a hobby or daily dairy – You can write about your daily activity, friends, what’s going on with your life or how you feel in a given moment.

2. Topic blogs – these blogs are focused on a single topics, like sports, politics, computer hardware, etc. They are frequently read just like magazines.

3. Marketing blogs – corporations are into blogs as well. A blog can be a very powerful instrument for business communication forming eagerness and anticipation regarding their products and services offered, or used as tool within the company, keeping employees well informed about company issues and news.

Build your own vs. others software

Maybe a lot of software developers will tell you that using ready made sofware packages is pointless. Well, they’re right somehow, because we all have our own needs and requirements and you cannot find a solution ready to meet all of our requirements. On the other hand, the existing sofwares were built after years of research and many of their features aren’t just random picked. Besides, building your own, even if you’re a developer can take a lot of time and resources to build one from scratch and since the blog is the place you need to write, you better focus more on writing posts rather than code.

Where to host my blog?

It’s simple. You have 2 choices: one would be to pick an existing platform that provides a hosted service (like blogger, typepad, live journal etc). You can have it setup really fast and in only few minutes you can start writing. A second option would be to have a self-hosted solution. Of course, there are few advantages and disadvantages. It is better because you don’t rely on anyone and you don’t risk to have your blog shut down for no reason (which can happen on hosted platforms) but at the same time, you’ll be needing some techie skills to be ready to start. The most used platform for self-hosted blogs is wordpress, but there are few more like Movable Type or Textpattern.

Few weeks ago I wrote a post on this subject. If you didn’t read it you can find it here.

In that post, I was talking about 2 different ways of integrating google analytics with your wordpress blog. One was by editing your theme files and the other one by using a plugin (actually in reversed order). Well, the problem is now that those guys that wrote the plugin are not giving it away anymore to the public, but integrated it in a bigger software package and are selling it for $295 (I’d say it’s a little too high for many people’s budget).

I noticed that few days ago when a reader of this blog told me I was pointing to an expensive software as being free so I had to tweak the post a little.

Anyway, the point is I’ll write my own plugin very soon (I plan to release it at the end of this week) so if you want to grab it when it’s up, just leave your email in the box you can see in the upper right corner and I’ll shoot you a message when it’s the time.

Take care

Everybody knows what a blog comment is and what is it used for, but lately we hear more and more about the term ‘pingback’. In WordPress talk, the pingback (not to be confused with an ICMP ping) is a method used to notify us when someone links to us from their own blog.

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.

Ok, it’s time for some action again.

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

I know everybody is waiting for it. I opened their official website this morning and I saw some good news and some bad news. Good news is they’re working on it and there isn’t much to wait, bad news is that the original release date was 10th of November and they’re currently testing the beta 2.

To be honest, I didn’t see many improvements, I was expecting something really ‘wow’. When I installed the beta 1, the first thing that I noticed was the new admin area. So far so good. Now it’s easier to navigate in the admin panel and it has a better dashboard as well.

If you’re interested in the new features, you can go here. I enjoyed the XMLRPC comments posting and the core updating. Good job with these!

Anyway, go and test it and let me know your thoughts.

- Peter

As I was promissing few days ago here, I’ll name few tools that you can use to fight agains WordPress Spam.

Here we go:

1. Akismet – a very popular plugin which comes by default with wordpress. To use it, you need to signup for a wordpress acount and get an API key for your website.
2. Defensio – A wordpress plugin that helps you filter your comments and also provides rss feed for both accepted and ‘spammed’ comments.
3. Simple CAPTCHA – Adds turing text to your comment area to eliminate automated comments
4. Challenge – Adds a challenge to your comments area, the regular stuff being additions and multiplications
5. Referrer Bouncer – You don’t need to do anything to use it. Just activate it.
6. Email Immunizer – Simply converts all your emails on your website to numeric references to prevent email colecting
7. WPBayes – Implements the spam filtering with the Naive Bayesian technique, which means it marks the comments as spam or not based on your previous decisions. To be honest, I didn’t use this one
8. Spam Karma 2 – This one assigns a karma score based on multiple factors like the age of the post, the email, if there’s a link inside, etc, etc.
9. WP Spam Hitman – It fights agains wordpress spam using a series of patterns. That’s all I know about it, please test it and let me know if it’s a good one.
10. Did you pass Math – Does the same thing as the one at point #4.

Well.. I think 10 tools are enough to keep you away from spam comments. Test them and use the one(s) you like the most.

- Peter