Got a question with yesterdays post about cleaning up the unused plugins. There are a variety of plugins available to add social promotion to your blog. Could probably do a list of 50 or more with no problem.
First here is the question.
When I put my share buttons on (Using Sexy Bookmarks Sidebar Widget plugin)I can not figure out how to get the subscribe by email to work. You know that little icon with the envelope. I would also like the Google buzz button to work but I don’t know how.
First I am not familiar with Sexy Bookmarks but most of the items work the same. When I did a search for the plugin there are no instructors and very little information on it. Personally, if it is not supported and I have trouble with a plugin that is usually enough for me to get a different one to do the same thing.
I use share bar here and it has a settings page where you can pick and choose what you want to show.
The only item that needs to be set up with them is the Twitter name. This way it will reference you when someone tweets.
Google Buzz just needs to be enabled to make it show on your blog. It should be linked so that when someone selects Buzz it posts to your Buzz account under your Gmail account that you are logged into.
Now if you are not currently logged in to a Gmail account you will need to log in before you can post.
The little envelope opens a pop up that you can add the to email of who you want to send information about the site and your own email, then a message to that person. It is not a link to subscribe to your blog.
Hope that helps you and I always welcome questions that people have and try my best to answer them here. Leave your comments and questions in the comments below.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
Decided to do something a bit different here today. Usually I answer questions but I have been thinking of creating a regular, semi-regular. weekly? (really not sure how often it will depend on whether you find this helpful) question that I ask. (Yes I will probably pontificate on it too. Don’t know how to keep my mouth shut.)
Todays question is…
What did I do to actively promote my blog today?
Now there are the big things you can do.
Add a quality post
Guest post for someone else
Submit an article
But it is the little things that seem to help the most in my opinion. These are the things you need to make a part of your routine.
Thanking someone who retweeted your post
Leaving quality comments while traveling through the blogosphere.
There are a lot more of both and I want your answers as to what you think and what category they fit in.
I do know that regular interaction and asking that question at the end of each day will make you more aware of what you are doing to improve your blog.
I got the all-in-one seo plugin and i like it. my question is: do i have to fill in the tags in the WordPress template sidebar as well? If I do so, do both count or is one overridden?
The short answer is yes you should and no they are different.
Confusion about the difference between filling in your keywords in All In One SEO and adding tags is quite common from some of the questions I get.
When you add your keywords into All In One SEO it creates the appropriate keyword meta tag in the header of that post’s page.
There is a lot of debate as to how much weight the various search engines give to this meta tag anymore. I’ll leave that debate to the people who specialize in those types of things.
I will say it does not seem to hurt unless you are keyword stuffing there. That can be a detriment but no one but the search engines can say for sure whether it helps or hurts and they just don’t tell you.
Now tags are different. They actually create an archive page on your blog for each separate tag. The search engines will index this content if they can find them.
It adds additional content to your blog. It is important that your theme or your plugins will create links that the spiders can find and follow.
The new Twenty Ten theme adds them automatically for you but not all themes do. If they don’t you may want to add a plugin that will help with that or set up a tag cloud in your side bar.
I have seen posts get listed in Google with a double listing from tags. One for the post and one for the tag page.
Hope that helps you understand the difference between tags and keywords. Although very similar, they are different and help in different ways.
When I talked about the new beta release of WordPress 3.1 and listed features I got this comment. Time to answer up.
Mike, can you spend a moment some time talking about Ajax. I use it to scour my sink. Not sure I understand its internet applications.
Ajax is not a cleanser at least as it is used in relation to WordPress although I have visited a couple blogs over the years that could use a good scrubbing.
Ajax stands for “Asynchronous JavaScript And XML”. Now let me see if I can put that into something understandable. That mouthful obviously isn’t. At least for old bald guys.
It is a scripting language that will let you change pages using javascript with out reloading the page. Makes for faster refreshes on the page as you are doing things.
WordPress uses it primarily in the dashboard and allows things like drag and drop widgets.
It allows you to have faster page loads on things like moderating comments, adding or removing things from lists like your blogroll, your categories and those types of things.
Now some themes are starting to incorporate and use it. Plugin developers can use it for similar things where the plugin uses lists of various types.
More and more places will be using it and it is a big help for making your admin pages load quicker.
Hope this helps and like a lot of changes in the various versions the Ajax changes will not necessarily be visible but will make it easier to use the dashboard and save you time.
Your questions and comments are always welcomed.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
When I talked about the release of the WordPress 3.1 beta I got a question about something I had said in the comments. Those questions often become blog posts and this one definitely has.
Thanks for the info.
Hey, how do you go about setting up a ‘WP test site’?
There are a few ways to do this. At first I just set up another version of WordPress in a new folder on my domain. You can set it up exactly as you normally would but I have since actually grabbed a domain and set up my sites that I play with test things on there.
The new domain was so that I could actually test a lot of things and not affect any of my current domains. If all you are going to do is just check out the latest versions and plugin combinations you probably don’t need to do that. You should turn off indexing on it though just in case.
Go to settings – privacy and check the “I would like to block search engines” box.
If you are going to be testing anything that might be considered gray or black hat (like some of the autoblog stuff on the market) you probably don’t want it to affect your blogs that you have worked hard on generating traffic from the search engines. This is when having a separate domain is worthwhile.
Now you have a place where you can add and configure new plugins, test the latest version and see how you can use the new features. I always add new plugins to my test site first because if there is going to be a problem I don’t want it to happen on my good blogs.
Now before I got WP Twin this often meant that I would really screw up the blog and it was not always easy to fix. If you clone it first though I can quickly put it back to what it was. Definitely much better than redoing the whole site which has happened more than once. Regular backups of these sites will save you time whether you use WP Twin or back them up manually.
If you want to be on the absolute edge then add the WordPress Beta Tester plugin. This will allow you to upgrade to the latest test version daily.
If you like to play with test new things having a test blog can really help you and save you the aggravation of messing up your good blogs. Even then eventually you will screw something up on your good blogs so regular backups are important.
Your questions and comments are always appreciated.
Good question today. There are a number of reasons to want to remove the date from your posts and this question was asked by a good on line friend. (Amazing how on line you can have friends that you have never met face to face and still feel you know them from their blogs, Twitter and Facebook.) The topic of when to remove a date just might make a good discussion for the future. I love when answering one thing gives me another topic to talk about. Now to write it down before I forget it . The comment with the question is below.
Mike,
I just read some information about increasing your site SEO keywords by making a keyword statement in your footer. For example, If you are selling horse pellets (keyword) then you would write something like “Make your horse happy! Horse pellets do the trick.â€
So this comes just in time I will be giving this a try.
Now teach us how to take the date off of our sites.
Before I start this a warning any time you are editing your theme. Always, always, always, always (get the point yet?) make a back up of your theme files before editing them. I know this fact the hard way believe me. (Almost as bad as the “Assume Monster”.
Now the first thing is that different themes will have to be dealt with differently. Some of the newer themes that take advantage of all the added features in WordPress are structured differently. Quite a few of the premium themes make this tough for the same reasons.
The following will work for most of the older themes like the one I am using here – Flexibility.
There are two files that need to be edited – index.php and single.php.
To do this (only after taking care of the step in the warning above) you can either edit the theme in your favorite editor or do it from the dashboard. To access the dashboard go to appearance – editor.
Then click on each file in the right sidebar.
When you open the file you will have to look for something that looks like date, time, etc as a php call. On this theme it is called the_time and is highlighted below.
Remove that whole line and save the file. Make sure to remove if from opening brace < to closing brace >.
You will need to do the same thing with single.php.
Now not all themes have this type of code as I mentioned when we started. For example, if look at the Twenty Ten theme the main index page will pull something different.
This time to display the whole post it is calling on a different php file. Unlike the other theme’s files there is no easily discernable items like title, date or time. You will need to dig deeper.
Now I did that with this theme and found that trying to edit the files was creating problems in the display of every thing including the admin area. (Boy was I glad I had a back up )
So I went looking for an answer and I was not the only one that had the problem. When I went to the theme page on the codex there was a little section on the right sidebar that said “What people are saying”. I clicked that and found an easy fix as it led me to the posts in the WordPress help forum on that theme. Actually there was more than one but this was by far the simplest.
You can remove that portion from your blog display through adding a single line of code in the style sheet. This time all you need is to go to the editor as mentioned before and select the file style.css.
This is what I use and it is literally the last line of code in your Stylesheet (style.css)
}.entry-meta{display:none;}
It worked on my test blog fine.
With the more complicated themes that take advantage of the new features in WordPress it becomes harder to find things as the amount of code can be mind boggling.
That is one of the benefits of using a premium theme that has support and one of the reasons that I recommend Woo Themes. Support is becoming more and more necessary even for little fixes that used to be simple as themes grow in complexity.
Very much like what has happened with automobiles. They used to be easy to fix and tune up. Now they have become so complex you need a computer and special tools just to diagnose a problem.
Hope this helps and your questions and comments are welcomed.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
Today’s question is about customizing your footer and a lot of the answer will depend on your theme. Remember that you can leave any questions you have in the comments below and I will try and answer them here.
How do I customize the footer, such that I can have a left justified, a centered, and a right justified text? Does this require simple html, or is there something different that you do?
As I stated above a lot of this will depend on the theme you are using and any options that are written into it. There are themes that use widgets in the footer and will allow you to create multiple widgets there.
Flexibility the theme I am using here currently allows that and it would be easy to just add the settings for 3 widgets and them drop your HTML into a text widget in each of the spots.
Most don’t so lets look at the easiest way I know of to add that to your footer with HTML.
Adding tables with regular HTML would be the easiest way. You will need to go to your theme files and edit footer.php on most themes.
Any time you are editing your theme files it is important to have a back up first. Whether you use an editor and do it on your computer you need a back up of your file just in case what you do totally messes up your theme.
You can do it in your dashboard by going to appearance – editor.
Then select your footer from the list on the right.
At his point it becomes very theme specific (and one of the reasons to have a back up). Add your table with your HTML where you want it to display and save your file.
If you are using a free theme you may not have the right to remove links that are included such as theme credit and are violating your license if you do.
Check your display and if it looks the way you like and you did not break anything you are done.
Hope this answers your question. Questions and comments are always welcomed below.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
Sitting here on Sunday doing my posting for the week and a scary thought came across to me. Am I being bitten by the assume monster once again?
Regular readers will know that assume is one of the words that I hate worse than some of the 4 letter words. Every time I start to use it it up and bites me. Not a fun thing.
So it made me stop and think. (Always a dangerous thing to have happen especially when you are old and bald.)
The thought was, am I targeting things wrongly. For the most part I tend to target the topics to help new bloggers. But…
Yeah I know another bad word but. Not as bad as butt which is what the assume monster normally bites but not a great word.
Before I get into the but let me step back to when I first started blogging a long, long time ago on a galaxy far, far away. Ooops going into Star Wars mode not where we want this to go.
Back when I created my very first blog I had help from a friend to get it installed. At that time I did not even have an ftp client and I loaded the whole thing via file manager in cPanel. (This was before WordPress was around.)
All of my sites at that point were in static html and I really had no idea what php was, what a data base was or any of the things that I take for granted today.
Move to today where I rarely if at all use any static sites. Everything is based on a WordPress back bone and I even take mini sites and skin them into my own themes. Night and day to say the least.
Now back to the but… Yes the one with just one t not the one with two.
The but is that there are probably a number of regular readers that would like more advanced items and I may be ignoring them because I assume (yes that bad word again) that most readers want just the basics.
So tell me am I right that most readers want just the basics and tips to make it easier (like Monday’s post on the new Aweber plugin) or should I be covering more advanced things too.
Leave your comments and let me know whether that assume monster has bitten me in the butt (yes with 2 t’s ) or not.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
Maybe it is just boredom but one of the things I am looking at as the year wraps up is changing up the look of some of my blogs.
More and more I am looking around and trying to find new looks for sites.
One of the places I have been looking at is Woo Themes.They have a wide variety of looks and I pulled down one of their free themes to check the ease of customizing them.
See one of the problems I have with some of the more popular premium themes is that you take one look at a blog and know what the theme is. Now I am not sure if that is because of laziness on the blogger’s part or if they are just not easy to edit.
The other is to look at how clean the code is so you don’t end up with conflicts when using certain plugins. Nothing worse than fighting conflicts between themes and plugins.
Finally I want it to allow you to take advantage of the changes that have happened with menus in 3.0 without a lot of extra coding.
Would love to get some input from readers as to what themes you have found that are..
Easily customizable so they look unique
Have clean code
Take advantage of new features WordPress adds
So let me know what you have found and like as I continue to get ready for lots of changes in 2011. Leave your comments below.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
