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10 WordPress Hacks to Make your Life Easy

Displaying Gravatars in comments

To refresh your memory, Gravatars are little user images from Gravatar.com that are displayed against your comments in the theme (if the theme is built to support Gravatars). A lot of WordPress themes are built without the support of Gravatars. So, here is some help for you to add Gravatars in your theme. Open up your comments.php file from the theme folder. Find this piece of code :-

<?php comment_text() ?>

Replace the above code with the following code :-

<div class="gravs">
<?php if (get_bloginfo('version')>=2.5)
echo get_avatar( $comment->comment_author_email, $size = '50', $comment->comment_author_link);?>
<?php comment_text() ?>
</div>
<br clear="all" />

The above code will display the Gravatars. Now let us add some CSS to the style.css file for your theme.

.gravs {margin-top:20px;}
.avatar {float:left; margin-right:5px; margin-bottom:5px; padding:3px; border:1px solid #999999;}

When you check your theme again, you will see the Gravatar images against your comments.
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All About RSS

Many of you may already know all about RSS but a lot of Internet surfers and newly established bloggers are still not familiar with the three-letter acronym. In order to make life easier for them, here is a detailed article that explains the word. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; syndicating means republishing an article that comes from another source such as a website.

RSS is a means of publicizing updates about websites. It may or may not include a summary and photos of the latest posting. But those that provide summaries (thus Rich Site Summary) allow users to skim through the article so that they could decide later on if they want to access the website source. The RSS feed usually contains the title of the update originating from the website. It is also usually the link to the website source.
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Premium WordPress Theme - Expression

“Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.â€

Breaking that silence, I present to you a refreshingly new Premium WordPress theme called “Expression“. This is a soft-colored WordPress theme with a minimalistic but feature packed approach. Here are some features of this premium theme :-

This is the first time that I am releasing a Premium theme with “Theme Options” that let you change elements of your theme directly through the WordPress Administration panel. Read more

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Website Traffic Analysis - Key to Success

Its very important to analyze the traffic that comes to your website because it can really make or break your website. But before you can make full use of this traffic analysis, you must understand how to interpret this data.

Hosting companies will usually provide you with basic web traffic information that you will have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your hosting companies can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data - the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is mostly an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your website visitors to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.

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Blogging Recipe for WordPress Newbies - 100% Success Rate

If you are new to the blogging world and have recently thought of starting up your own WordPress blog, then let me give you a “success recipe” that every new blogger must follow to cook up some decent traffic. The following recipe might look overwhelming at the first glance but it can be essential for giving a solid foundation to your blog.

Ingredients required for this recipe :-

A newly installed WordPress blog (Instructions here) A crispy theme (Free Themes - Premium Themes) 7 freshly written articles (How to write Articles) 4 spicy plugins :- All in One SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps, No Ping Wait, Related Posts $100 to spend on advertising (If you lack here, go with the free modes of advertising - explained below) Finally, a strong will to follow the recipe (I have no resource for this..you are born with it )

I have spread this recipe through a week’s schedule, so be patient and take it easy. I can promise you that at the end of this period, you will see a good stream of visitors on your blog. So, munch on..

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Why Leave Comments?

I know that many of you readers come here, read what you want to, take what you want to, do what you want to without me knowing that you ever came here! So, if you have been a silent reader of my blog and want to know the benefits of leaving comments on a blog’s posts, let me give you some tips on why you should be doing it.

1. Do you know me?

If you regularly leave comments on a particular blog, it will make the blog owner recognize you and also your website. When you do this on multiple blogs, you will be socially recognized in the blogging community. Also, most of the blogs nowadays use Gravatars which can help in branding and getting some popularity for your own blog. I think that leaving comments on popular blogs is the best way to be known around the Internet.

2. Building Community

A community is built around people and their views. Leaving comments is a way of showing that you care and want to share your opinion with others including the owner of the blog. The comments can be a suggestion, feedback, appreciation or even criticism. They are good as long as they are not spammy or abusive. So, even if you are just stopping by, try to make that little effort of writing a comment, even if its just a line.

3. Getting What you Want

You should leave a comment because that’s the only way the blog owner can judge what the reader/customers want without getting a written e-mail or any other form of communication.

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How to Choose your Blog Hosting Service

Every blogger has got two basic choices when building his own blog— Either he can sign up for a hosted solution, or he can install a serve-it-yourself solution and take care of it on your own. Signing up for a hosted solution is generally easier (especially if you don’t already have your own website and you’re not terribly interested in jumping through a hoop or two to get one), while installing a serve-it-yourself solution can be more powerful.

Popular hosted blogging CMS (Content Management Systems) include Blogger.com, Typepad.com, Vox.com, Squarespace.com, and others. With these services, you simply access the site, go through a registration process and, in some cases, enter your payment information to cover the monthly fee. (Some are free, some require payment.) These are hosted services - somebody else worries about the Internet server, setting up the Web addresses and all that sort of stuff. You’re given a URL for your site (mostly a sub-domain), some online tools for editing your blog (and, perhaps, for editing the template and making some minor changes to the functionality), and you’re ready to go. With a serve-it-yourself CMS (like WordPress) you’ll need to do a little legwork. First, you’ll need some sort of web hosting account from an Internet Service Provider. You might already have something along those lines from the Internet Service Provider that you use for Internet access, or you may need to shop for a web hosting account that will support the specifications of your blogging software.

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Why use WordPress?

If you are new to WordPress and looking for reasons to use WordPress as a CMS (content management system) in your new website, let me give you some.

Open Source Software

WordPress is an Open Source software which allows it to be used free of cost. You can use it on any kind of personal or commercial website without have to pay a single dime for it. It is built on PHP/MySQL (which is again Open Source) and licensed under GPL.

User Friendly

You don’t really have to be experienced to use WordPress on your website. Nowadays most of the hosting companies provide the ability to install WordPress on your site at a single click of the mouse. The administration section is easy to navigate and its even easy to add articles/content to your website.

Themes Support

You will never run short of templates when using WordPress. If you don’t like the themes that come with the default installation of WordPress, you can hunt on the Internet and you will find thousands of free themes that you can download and use for your website. There are themes which can even make your website look like a regular site instead of a blog.

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WPdesigner.com going down the Drain?

If you are a WordPress enthusiast and have been following the latest news, you will know that Small Potato (Wpdesigner.com) recently sold his blog for $65,000 to some Polish guy called Pawel Ciszewski. It is really amazing that the blog was sold for that much money even when it was not earning any substantial revenue. But anyway, I feel that SP (Small Potato) has made a wrong choice by selecting someone who is not related to the WordPress field and the blog is in jeopardy now. I guess SP was in a hurry to pack his bags for his tours.

There has been no news posted since March 28, 2008 on the blog which is making the blog readers impatient and many have already unsubscribed from the blog. Pawel who is the new owner, promised the blog readers that he is hunting for theme designers and other staff who will run the blog. But its very ironical that there has been no update after that point. According to some readers’ research, Pawel Ciszewski runs some online casino sites. So, this really shows how much he will care about the reputed blog which was taken to a high level by SP. But SP, shame on you… your baby is dying out there and no one really cares.

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