Posts Tagged ‘Blog Tips’

WordPress Tweaks: Pagination

In case you are wondering what is pagination? It’s mechanism to break large quantity of data/text into pages for better usability and accessibility. For instance think you are searching for “Free blog tools” on Google, which will return around 35,500,000 results and if Goggle show you all the results in one single page-just guess how you will react? But they don’t, instead they break the results into several pages and you notice a numbered navigation link (ref: Fig. 1a) bellow each page for better navigation. Not only Google or other search engines but as well many top class web sites like New York Times, BBC so many others. Pagination is all about increasing usability where certain article turns into epic J After all when your user can navigate easily, your article/stories get more attention/affection or whatever you are after. Fig 1.1 Now our issue is how can we bring that pagination to our WordPress blogs? There are several plug-in available on WordPress plug-in directory who do paginations together with other tasks. But for the sake of just pagination why add another plug-in, and total freedom of customization cannot be achieved if you use a plug-in. WordPress got very simple and…
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Making your WordPress site/blog faster

Most of the time we all talk about increasing readership, this time why not we will go for performance enhancement. Few days ago one of my subscriber expressed that, he experienced sluggishness on the back end while using WordPress as a CMS with high number of pages. He isn’t the only person who came across this problem, a lot of WP users experience related problem generally. Question is whether these problems resides in the core of WP or occasionally forced by some other issues? Actually there is no simple answer for that, any CMS whether Drupal or WordPress can experience same issues caused by numerous reasons without anything to do with the core itself. I will keep the focus of the discussion on the WordPress (self hosted) related issues to narrow it down. Why not we turn the spotlight on the fundamental reasons first, so that it would be easier to eliminate them? Your WP (WordPress) powered site may experience sluggishness for- MySQL server or connection issues. PHP Memory Limit. Apache log rotator problem (for Apache server). Broken/Degraded PHP code in template/theme files. Excessive plugin uses/ use of plugin(s) with broken codes. Some particular third party widgets/ JavaScript codes. WordPress Dashboard’s display of RSS…
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Free Blog platforms: Series A

Last year I wrote two articles (Blogger’s Gear 1 & 2) featuring some of the most outstanding blog platforms/apps. But a lot of changes came to blogosphere since then, some of those tools grew bolder and some of those lost in thin air. Not only that, we were presented with a lot more new tools /apps for blogging. So I decided to give a blogging tools roundup which are available now not used to be available last year. You can say revision with amendment and affix. As you can feel it’s not possible to cover all those outstanding apps/platforms in a single blog post. That’s why we will cover all those in different series (Two in each series). In this series we will discuss free blog platform or applications that can be self hosted (You install and manage it under your own hosting). (This list is unordered, so instead of following the serials you should compare features to find out which best suits your needs.) WordPress Licence: GNU General Public License (GNU GPL) Platform and database: PHP 4.2+ & MySQL 4.0+ Supported OS: Cross platform Maintained by: Automatic Though WordPress (WP) 1.0, the first release was just a PHP based…
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Terapad changed the world of free blog hosting

Finding free yet flexible blog platform solution isn’t that easy. It’s get more harder when someone seeks a blog integrated with lot of other stuffs yet easy to handle, easy to customize and most importantly free. There are quite a few free solution that provide excellent service together with quality, looks like Terapad.com just join in that list. Terapad.com is now free, which was previously paid blog platform at it’s early stage of launching. The coolest part is they are offering a lot more then just a blog. Terapad.com which is owned by UK based SiteJourney Ltd. during it’s early launch last year used be $18/month subscription fees. But from January 2nd, 2007 they announced it to be free. Though it is ad supported (only one column ad in the sidebar), but easily can be removed by $5/month and additional 10GB bandwith. The key features of Terapad.com– 10 GB bandwith and 2 GB storage limit. In a close interview with Terapad’s Managing Director Stephan Tual, I came to know that if any blogger cross the limits (which is highly unlikely), they will take it into consideration depending the activity of blogger (Spammer precaution you can say). You can integrate built in…
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Lazy Sunday’s CMS thoughts

Well this is Sunday afternoon, just before the big holiday break of the year. In this lazy afternoon I got some weird idea to check out some paid blog hosting/utilities/CMS. Let’s discuss best four paid Blogging utilities or The “Big Four” according to media available, though these provide trial version or shareware version. Are they really impressive compare to free utilities we use? Are they worth paying the price? TypePad: It’s more like a Blog hosting system rather than a utility. Pc Magazine’s editor’s choice and many more award winner cost starting $49.50/yr up to $149.50. They offer tree Levels of Blog hosting—Pro Level, Plus Level and basic level with 30-days free trial. Apart from traffic, good looks, easy design it didn’t had any effect on me. It’s recommended for those who can’t or don’t want to buy a domain and setup his/her own Blog. A little effort can certainly save you the cost of TypePad. Since I noticed they are using almost MovableType alike Blog software which is free, they just make some modification and put some script which allow user to use built in features easily. Blog Harbor: There are no installations required, same like TypePad a Blog…
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Keyword Complexity

Well guys we all know how important is to understand value of keyword, but not without the original content. As I mention in my earlier post jungle of high value keyword populated senseless writing won’t do you any good. So what to do? Why not write contents and compare how much it worth to Google, and what are the definite keywords that Google Adwords advertisers pay for, and already present in your Blog. You might say yeah right! There are thousands of fraud site, claiming to sell Google keyword list etc. etc. Its nothing like that, what I am suggesting is why not compare your existing Blog, and see what are the Google keywords present in your Blog, how much they cost etc. Google already present you that tools for free, just we don’t know, that’s the reason those Dishonest people doing business taking advantage of our lack of knowledge. Google Adsense is built right on the Google Adwords. So you need to understand “It’s all about results” as Google Adwords says. The Adwords too let you—Search for keyword Variations Site related keywords- Means the tools will bring out all the keywords in a given URL. Not only that you…
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Circulate your blog

Getting your Blog circulated across the net is the next best thing that people do with Blog and there are two very good motives for doing this. You can include references in your Blog to websites that you own and if you mention them in such a way that they sound worth a visit, then you will get visitors. So the more people you can get to read your Blog the better and one effective way to do this is to get your Blogs onto as many sites as possible. The classic route here is to submit your Blog to Blog directories such as blogtopsites.com, bloglogs etc. (search Google for ODP Directories). But careful about one thing that is duplicated Blog, same title or same content can make your Blog mark as bad neighborhood by Google. So the best practice is linking Blog across the net rather copying same Blog everywhere. If your Blogs widely distributed across the Internet it will generate a whole spider of back-links to your websites, or to your other Blogs. A back-link is simply a link to your websites/Blogs and many of the search engines, Google included, use the number of links to a websites to…
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Blog as a business

Whether you know it or not, weblog, i.e. blog is somewhat a major cyber business now. In fact you can now compare blog with early web bubble era. This booming business is getting funded by VC’s, purchased by big companies and so on. Why? Well its hard to answer why blog is booming as business. But easier to answer why it shouldn’t be left alone from business. Blog means interaction of people, unlike chat or any other social web forms through blog, blogger express their vast views, ideas, opinions, and readers as well interact with it through comments. Today’s world business is consumer oriented, means every business wants to get into consumers head, what they think, their reaction etc. So what could be better tools then blog to reach out consumers? None so far. For example- X company developed a new model of phone, and they want to know how consumers will take it. Without blog they would have through few static website with some corporate bashing which hardly consumer believes. But with blog now they send some test model to few bloggers and blogger express their opinion through blog, readers/consumer talk back to those opinion. So as a result…
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Business blogging abc’s

Business blogging is a bit different than the traditional blogging we do. Business blogging is one kind of corporate blogging where the focus is gaining business advantage. Unlike traditional corporate blogging, business blogging does not limit to blog on its products and service only. Recent year’s blog has become so powerful that business opportunity seeker using it more often. In business blog a corporation/or entity hire professional/ entrepreneur bloggers to blog for them following their directions. Though the bloggers have complete freedom on his/her writings but subject matters are mostly selected/chosen by the employer. Those blogs drives interested readers and possible business advantage to the employer. Blogger of business blog either paid a fixed salary or contract basis.Clarity blog’s goals and objectives are similarly important in traditional and business blog. If I was being hired by a company to develop a blog I would work very hard at finding that company’s expectations for the blog out before starting it. The best practice would be doing research, lots of it. My sense in many of the questions that I’m being asked by bloggers and by business people wanting to hire bloggers is that many business blogs are being started simply because…
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