Archive for April, 2007

Wordpress Plugins and the Power of Social Bookmarking Sites

Thursday, April 26th, 2007
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Blogger used to be a good blogging platform, especially for beginners. It was easy to use and setup, and not much technical know-how was required. There’s one major setback to using Blogger, though. You can’t take advantage of social bookmarking sites, at least not as effectively as you can with using Wordpress. There are numerous Wordpress Plugins, and some take advantage these sites.

These social sites act as a “vote” for your website. When people bookmark your blog posts or articles, they are sharing them with others. Other people pick up on your content, and they might bookmark them as well. The more votes the better. Google loves content, that’s no mystery. Google will reward your site for that content and the fact that high authority social bookmarking sites are linking to it. This means more traffic! A lot more in fact.

So how do we take advantage of these social sites when blogging? The answer is Wordpress Plugins. Blogger doesn’t give us any way to automatically bookmark every post we make. It has to be done manually. That’s very time consuming! Services like OnlyWire or SocialMarker can make this a lot easier, but you still have to take the time to use those services.

There is a much easier way to drive this traffic to your blog. You have to be using Wordpress to take advantage of this. Wordpress is probably the most popular blogging platform, and it’s no wonder why that is. It requires a little more technical knowledge, but don’t be scared away. The benefits are far greater!

Wordpress makes use of Plugins. Wordpress Plugins are basically little applications that perform a function or process. There are numerous Plugins that were made for Wordpress, and there will be many more no doubt. They all serve a different purpose.

Here are some Wordpress Plugins that you DON’T want to be without so that you can utilize the power of social bookmarking sites:

ShareThis - Allows users to share and bookmark your posts.

AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget – This allows your readers to bookmark your posts.

ShareThis and AddThis are pretty much the same thing. It doesn’t hurt to have both. You want to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to bookmark your posts.

OnlyWire Autosubmitter - This will automatically submit your posts to your OnlyWire account.

Sociable - Automatically adds links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.

Tweet My Blog - This will automatically post a tweet to your Twitter account when you make a new post, bringing more traffic to your blog. You can sign up for Tweet My Blog at my blog; there is a link in the resource box. You’re also going to need a Twitter account. So grab that and start getting followers, the more the better.

This is just a small example of the Wordpress Plugins that are available. You want to make sure you have these Plugins installed so you get traffic from the social bookmarking sites. The potential here is huge, and you don’t want to miss out. If you’re not yet using Wordpress to blog, I suggest you get on board.



By: Alan Mater

About the Author:

Visit Alan Mater’s Work From Home Blog where he shares his knowledge, tips and advice. He also offers work from home opportunities and resources on his website.



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Wordpress 2.3 Easy Upgrade Tutorial

Saturday, April 14th, 2007
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The recent release of WordPress 2.3 with new features and database changes begs the question, how should a webmaster plan and then implement the upgrade. Any upgrade that involves database changes should be undertaken carefully, and preparation is key to a successful upgrade.

Typically, most webmasters install custom themes and additional plugins, and of course they upload extra files such as images to their /wp-content/uploads folder. All of these files need to be backed up and stored off server prior to undertaking the upgrade process. The database itself also needs to be backed up.

Backing up your site is best achieved by installing the BackUpWordpress plugin and selecting the default backup options which will create a compressed file of your complete site including files and database. If anything does go wrong it should be relatively easy to restore this and import your database into MySQL using phpMyAdmin or your host’s preferred database manager.

Once you are certain your site has been backed up, you’re ready to start preparing for the upgrade. Are your plugins and chosen theme compatible with WordPress 2.3? Most modern themes shouldn’t cause any problem except that non v2.3 themes may not include the tags code needed to make use of the new tags feature of WordPress 2.3. This is a relatively simple update to make, and simply involves adding extra php code to the theme’s index.php and single.php.

Open index.php and single.php in your favorite text editor and search for the following code , and simply add the following code before or after depends on where you want the tags will be displayed (before or after your article).

The plugins used in yor site will need to be checked against the list of compatible plugins. Any plugin that isn’t compatible will likely not work correctly or at all. You may need to contact the plugin author for an update or discontinue using that plugin until an update is available.

You should now be ready to upgrade your installation to WordPress 2.3, and if your host provides wget functionality simply copy the zip file to your server then unzip them directly into your WordPress folder. If wget isn’t available to you, then you’ll need to download the zip file and use an ftp client to upload the unzipped files.

Once you’ve uploaded your WordPress files, make sure your WordPress 2.3 compatible theme is uploaded to /wp-content/themes. Did you need updated plugins? Upload these to /wp-content/plugins. You should now be ready to initiate the WordPress update script.

Navigate to the admin section of your site, WordPress will automatically recognize that an upgrade is required. Once completed, and if all has gone to plan, you should be able to login to Dashboard without any difficulty. Good luck.



By: IC

About the Author:

This article was written by DynamicAds, DynamicAds is an Ad Placements Rotator plugin for WordPress that is fully compatible with WordPress 2.3, it allows you to rotate your ads not only in one place but at various locations on your site.



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