blogging 102

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes There were several old combinations that worked well together but since WordPress 2.3 came out many of them stopped working properly or stopped working altogether. Fear not there are replacements out there. Unlike many of the regurgitated idiot lists currently out there, everything I list will work in WordPress 2.5 the only version of the blog software you should be running. Ultimate Tag Warrior hasn’t been supported by the author since WordPress 2.3 came out. Many of its features and those of Bunny’s Technorati Tags, Jerome’s Keywords, and other tagging programs are easily replaced in better plugins. The All in One SEO Pack can even be replaced now. The new power plugin combination consists of Headspace2 and Simple Tags. Between these two plugins you can hand every task that you used to require half a dozen plugins and tweaks. convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes The question of whether you should make theme adjustments is always a difficult one to answer. It is even be harder to do and not negatively affect your onsite readers. That being said here are my thoughts. Limit major theme changes to no more than once a month. Anymore than once a month clearly defines you as a noob. A complete theme change is sometimes necessary especially as you are learning, but should be done with caution. When building or choosing a new theme make sure that it is easily tweaked later on. Having a CSS class that will allow the quick insertion of more banners or advertising will save you countless hours of work down the road. • Work out all changes before hand on a test blog with actual posts and pages. I prefer to run a local server using Apache, mySql, and php management on my windows PC Make changes when the fewest people are reading your blog and with a very clear head. A pot of coffee by your side while making... 

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes I hit the jackpot on good plugin finds today for all you junkines. This morning I found myself sitting face to face with a site called Coffee 2 Code and a long list of WordPress 2.5 compatible plugins. I won’t go through the whole list but here are the ones you can bet will find their way into my blogs very soon. · Auto Hyprelink URLs. It does just what it says by coding any plaint URL from your post or comment into a clickable link. While this has the potential for abuse with spam, it does mean you can remove the linking feature from the comments that might redirect someone elsewhere. · HTML Special Character Helper. I don’t this very often, but when I do I really hate looking it up in an external program. · Post to Post Link. While this is easily done with some preplanning normally, the description makes it look even simpler. I haven’t gone through the full trial on it, but it looked too good not to mention. · Extra Sentence Space. As a novelist,...