Twitter is a legend in its own right nowadays. Its phenomenal growth over the last few years is nothing short of amazing. Who would have thought that an idea like only using 140 letters could catch fire like a bush blaze and spread across the world in such a short time? If you aren’t on Twitter nowadays you are dead in the water. Its one of the must have tools in your web 2.0 array. There are several tools that are available to integrate various aspects of Twitter in your blog. It is a good idea to mix and match them to get the best out of the twitter connection. Twitter does bring a lot of people to your blog if they enjoy your tweets. Working with a blog and all the social networking programs can take a lot of your time if you are going to do it properly and actually make a business out of it. It is fully possible to do but don’t let anyone fool you that it is quick and easy. Even setting up a domain takes a lot longer than most people realize.

Probably like most people you have had trouble in the past getting to grips with putting a quote that you liked on Twitter into your blog. There have been many ways to get around it but nothing quite like getting the actual tweet to come into your blog just as it was. Enter the BlackBird.

The plug-in for Twitter BlackBird Pie allows you to actually take the shortcode and embed it in your relevant post. This can be done in other language besides English.

What the plug-in does is embed the actual tweet in the same text color and uses the actual profile link in that color. It makes use of the hash tags and all the other aspects of twitter in real time. You can use it for multiple tweets in the same post.

You should have a Twitter Tools Plug-in which makes integration between your blog and Twitter possible.
What you really need to do is make a category and call it something interesting. You are then able to enable your own posts to appear on your blog. If you don’t want them to appear as individual posts you can organize a compilation of either daily or weekly groups of tweets. This can be done in the plug in by enabling it in the settings.

The ability to put Tweets in the Sidebar.

There is a widget in the twitter tool that makes this possible and you can then show your tweets in the sidebar. There is also a physicality to archive all your tweets and this gets done every 10 minutes.

Unfortunately only a single account is able to be used on blog and there is not an auto delete as yet.
WP Quote Tweets

This plug-in is a little simpler than the previous one in that it requires more knowledge to use it. You have to create writable folders and things which make it not as user friendly as Black Bird.

Coming up with new ideas as a way of showing images can be a tough job. Let’s face I there are not a lot of things we can do that haven’t been done before in some way. But it is good to be able to decide which of the many ways will suit the theme of the blog we are posting to. So many things on the net become stereotyped in the way we present them that we really need to use both ingenuity and imagination to be able to produce something different. And to be able to produce something both different and unique is an on going goal of mine. Obviously I mean that in a good way. You don’t want to produce something that is unique but such a mess no one wants to look at it.

Some of the plug-ins that are available to use to create images in our blogs are listed below.

WP Get Post Image

This plug-in is a developers plug-in which enables them to incorporate the upload of images via WordPress. It is not meant to be used by the general theme users.

Flickr Gallery

Flickr gallery will show your current photos and will enable you to cache them in a database for quicker loading. You can only use one photoset but it will collect the photos by tags.  The program also deals with videos by embedding the flash movie player.  This is your standard gallery of photos and doesn’t really do imaginative things. You can paginate the galleries however. It will also allow you to insert a single photo into content of your blog. The one good thing is it allows you to collect your photos from your Flickr collection. This plug-in uses the lightbox.

Grou Random Image Widget

With this widget it enables you to show a random image from your folder images. This means the page loads are cut down as only the image is changed. You can do a fade in and out image load. There are 9 different picture frames you can choose from and you can also link to the full image if you so wish. Rather a neat application.

WP Image Tagger

To get good marks from out teacher Google and their spiders we need to tag our photos. This means the spiders understand what the image is about. That is of course if we have thought out our tags properly. Tags need to be relevant to the content and the subject of the blog. In order to tag the photos easily we use the plug-in which not only allows you to tag them but it also places them in categories and integrates the tags into the whole system of the blog. You can then associate them to your photos with the editor and also list the images available on your site and are connected. It makes it possible to do a search of the images on your blog by the tags. It gives a greater possibility of telling the viewing public what is available to see on your site.

Menus are extremely important to a website or blog as they basically show you what is there and where to find it. If it’s too difficult to navigate you will lose your visitors. When I think of menus I tend to think of bright Christmasy style things that are not at all stereotyped. I like the bold and appealing to catch the eye. I guess I am an extrovert. Unfortunately that is not usually the case with websites. WordPress menus in particular are, on the whole, rather on the dull side. Rather quietly and without too much fanfare, they have brought in customized menus on WordPress.com.

Besides using the top menu options with drop downs ext. WordPress have given you a Widget which you can develop up to three sub levels deep. You can use more than one widget if you have a number of different features. e.g. Categories or posts etc.

You can extend the widgets to other sections and have them on other pages and use the new menus there too.
You can use this for numerous different categories and sub categories.
In addition to this widget you can create menus up top on the top menu bar and have a category menu drop down which you can then use to point towards pages where you use the widgets as well.
Some of the latest of the themes support these custom menus and you need to look out for them before choosing a theme. One of these is Notepad.

One of the items you can do with this is to create your menu for navigation. This you do by making a name and then clicking on create menu. Once you have your menu you can create extra pages and categories in it. All you do is find the relevant pages and tick them then click add to menu and it’s done. Don’t forget to save them.

Additional links.
To add new links you will require is to have the http: name. Label it and then add it to the menu.

There are additional ways of changing the menu titles. The little arrow on the end of the title that appears to be a drop down is where you would click and it will allow you to change the name and give it a navigation title as well as an attribute.

If you wish to change the ordering of the menu this can be done by doing a drag and drop method. The only problem with this is if you have thick fingers or drop things in the wrong place. Ask me I have done it. If you do you have to pick it up and drag it again.

If you choose to create more than one menu on a theme, you can customize each separately. Just make sure you activate the correct one by choosing from the drop down and saving it.

Finally be sure to choose one of the themes that uses customized menus or they won’t work. All you will get will be a little red warn box.

If that happens, you can add the custom menu widget to the sidebar. A final word, remember, WordPress.com is different from WordPress.org.

If you are creating a business on WordPress you might well have a need for an auto responder where people can get double checked for authenticity. What a auto responder does is take the email and send a response to the party doing the input of data and wait for the response acknowledging the email verification before adding them to a list of correspondents. This also has the means of allowing people to take themselves off the list of correspondents if they wish to opt out of receiving further emails.

There are several different Auto responders which one can utilize all or most of which require a monthly fee. Aweber is one of the places which has this program available for you. To install it on you WordPress Blog you need to firstly download the plug-in text from Aweber. Remember this is a WordPress.org option. External plug-ins are not an option on WordPress.com

Once you have joined Aweber you can set up the form you require which will be listed in your forms there according to the name you gave your response. I would suggest you keep it in line with the name of your blog so it’s easy to pick out. When you have your list growing you will then be able to write newsletters or updates about your blog informing your email list as to what is going on your blog. People can well respond for different reasons so it’s a good idea to ask for interests. Some might want information about happenings on a particular subject. This means you would then write an article on the subject in your blog and send out a quick email to that select group that has that interest. You do not want to send it to someone just because they on your list. You might have a variety of subjects on your blog from WordPress to kick boxing.  Someone interested in WordPress would be annoyed to get an email about kickboxing. So make sure your different pages on your blog reflect the type of list they are joining. Aweber makes this possible by giving you the text to put in your join page. It is quite possible to have several different lists on your account each with their own response and list. This makes it easy to keep them separate and specific to a particular interest. You then merely copy the html code they give you and insert it in the designated place on your blog.

A newsletter is a good option for an auto responder. By sending a regular newsletter even if it is once a month is a good way of keeping in contact with your readers. By doing this regularly you develop a connection with them and they become regular return visitors.

Should you want to do this yourself without involving a third party like Aweber there is also a plug-in from WordPress which allows you to do this called WP Responder Email Newsletter and Autoresponder Plugin this involves a little more setting up than a third party program but it is free. If you already have Aweber it is possible to import your contacts from there. There is no license or payment for this service.

Every now and again we need to go through our list of plug-ins for wordPress to make sure we have the ones we need. It is a good idea to collect and organize them for ease of use when they are required rather than to have to hunt for them when you need to do a particular thing on your blog. This way you also get familiar with how they work prior to having to the job that requires immediate attention.  I recently went through the list and downloaded some that had been updated and some that I hadn’t seen before..

WP-DB-Backup

Backing up WordPress and your data files is always important. With the internet so prone to attack you can never tell when your site might be hit. While we all try for the very best security there are times when something slips through. This is a time when it is vital to have your backups ready. Instead of having to recreate the site from scratch all you have to do is log in and upload your replacement with the backup. I have several different versions of backups and it’s a good idea to do them often. You can even have this one sent to you by email which means you can hold it on yet another server.  It’s always important to hold the information in more than one place. Although the chances of being hit in more than one place are remote, one can never be too safe.

Tidy Up

Scripts of your source code can become extremely untidy and unwieldy and it’s a good idea to run Tidy up to clean up your code and make sure its optimized. In addition to uses the Tidy conversion tool from WC3 which means it validates your XHTML.
This automatically does an update of your database with the new clean data.

Form Builder

Forms are a part of the internet life nowadays. It is far easier to have a form on your site than delete 600 spam emails a day. Form Builders enables you to build even really complex forms without knowing how to code. There are even pre-made forms on this that you can use just by changing a few items. There are all sorts of built in sections to prevent people from spamming which is an excellent idea. It can also be used for several different languages. With this plug-in forms are built quickly and easily and cam be easily inserted into your blog.  I would recommend you to always use one for your means of contact.

Theme Preview

When you are building a theme it is annoying to keep having to activate it which means it’s live. Wit Preview you can now view it prior to going live. It is an excellent alternative.

WP Debug

WordPress might not have many bugs but when you have one you really need to know what is going on. With this plug-in you can see behind the walls and get to the basics of what is needed to be fixed.

I guess I am almost paranoid about internet security. My Facebook for example (My personal one that is) is so shut down that not even I can find myself. Personally I have heard of and dealt with too many computers that have been hacked or corrupted by viruses. I can never understand what pleasure people get out of being so spiteful to others that they cause them monetary harm by attacking their computers. Many of those folks really enjoy using their computers and it is their only link to the outside world. A lot of them are not really internet savvy and as a result they end up with so many Trojans and viruses their computers crash.

That being said you need to protect your website as much as possible from outside attacks. Some of the things you can do will be discussed below.

Your Basic Theme Info

Your theme has code in the head tags which really needs to be replace so as to make it non visible by taking a couple of steps  so no hacker with bad intentions make use of it to target vulnerabilities.
Head over to your themes header.php and see if this line appears in your code.

If it is there remove it.
You will also need to remove it from the hook. To do this you need to head over to the functions.php area and paste the following code in there

That should deal with that but there are other areas.

Your Login info

Your Login info should not show any error messages. You need to head on over to the functions.php and then place the following code in there.

no more messages should appear now about you incorrect logins or passwords.

Searching on your Theme

Rather than using the default search install a Google custom search or one of the other search engines. There is a whole tutorial on how to install Google search on your site.

Hooks and Calls Reduced

By reducing the number of hooks and calls on your blog you can reduce the slowing down of your site. Do not put stuff on just to have it because each time you increase the load you slow your site down. One way you can reduce it is by changing the call on your blog info to that of your blog name.

In your header.php there will be a particular line of code which you can change.

Take out this:

and replace it with this.

Obviously you need to change the section to your actual blog name.

You need to check all the various function calls which you might need to change because each one adds to the load on your server.

You should also look into using something like WP Cache as this lightens the load because by caching there isn’t such a large server load pull. This is available from WordPress as a plug-in. What it does is store the pages in a static file (rather than having to reload them in php and take them from you database) and thus it can produce them in a far faster time.

SEO is one of the most important aspects of your website. If you don’t do it, or don’t do it correctly, you will never be found on the internet.  The simple fact of the matter with so many websites on the internet you require to have the right indications in your website for a search engine to be able to categories you and put your data into their data back to enable them to come up with your website when the particular group of words are typed into their search section.

They have to be able to pull the information out in a matter of sections and present a useful relevant selection to the person doing the search. This requires you to have put the right work into your website and into the various other areas of the webs to be able to be found.

The search engines use various algorithms to determine your rank on their sites and these are all brought into work when you are found.

When you are on WordPress, one of the most important tools you can use is the All In One SEO Pack plug-in. This tool enables you to put in tags (very necessary). Tags are one of the main items that the search engines use to give relevance to your website.

Make sure you make the title of your post the thing the search engine picks up rather than the blog name. When you have the post name you need to put it into the home title section. And the word or phrase you want to get ranked on and then.

* Post Title: %post_title%
* Page Title: %page_title% / %blog_title%

This should be about all there, but then we need to put in some good Meta tag keywords even though Google now says they aren’t using these any more. It’s important to remember although Google dominates it is not the only search engine.

Your description you will need to do yourself as appropriate to the site. You can, however, use Headspace to install them in each post.

It is important to use your keyword in your title tag as well as the heading of your blog. It should also be part of your logo and should be used in all your anchor texts when you do posting on other sites and in your links there. When you are doing a post try to use your keyword in the opening and closing sentence of your post and try to get it into the main body a few times.

Make sure that you turn your ping back on so when others come and post and realize you have done, it they will return the favor.

Make sure that all the photos are well named with relevant keyword tags. These are picked up by Google as Alt documents and are these are created as alt tags by WordPress.

Make sure your internal linking is done properly and the tags of links are similar or the same. Use a good site mapper or make a page into an index map yourself.
Make sure your 404 page links back properly to the main body of your website. Often someone makes a mistake in a URL they post and as a result anyone following it finds themselves on the 404 page.

I was scrolling and strolling around the internet just viewing various blogs with an overview of the designs and in particular, looking at the inventive footer notes some sites have. Several had absolutely no footer at all which surprised me. Not a scrap about privacy or the legal stuff or even a contact section.

It surprised me in two aspects, one why are they even there if they don’t want people to know about them and two the fact that they have got on to the net and put a website, blog up, but know nothing about the laws of the world.  Most of the time these items appear in the footer, although the footers have got more inventive over time and host a great deal more nowadays.

The fact remains, they need to have them somewhere. I looked at the footers to try to check out the nicest ones I had seen.

I am going to share a couple with you and hope they stay up long enough for you to enjoy too.

Spoongraphics

Created and written by Chris Spooner this British site has an interesting footer in that he has created three separate graphic behind the three columns each with a paper feel but with an interesting touch in design. I sat looking at it for a while trying to figure out how he did it.  He writes about Photoshop stuff most of the time and also does tutorials on digital stuff. Interesting website all round. Thanks Chris for the views and ideas.

Bcandulo

I found this an interesting use of footer.  The normal information isn’t given here but what they have done is make this into a very clever use of a contact form.  Brad Candullo gives his contact info plus a way of contacting him using a contact form and a full resume for download. It was a very clever way of doing a whole lot in a little space.

Web Designer Wall

I really enjoyed the way Nick La had set this footer out. The writing on the top gave it an intimate touch. He set it out in a three part and the first two had that intimate look I mention while the third one was a no nonsense straight forward message about who he is and what he does. It is all backed with a background image that gives a light touch to it. Very well done Nick!

Sam Rayner

Sam Rayner is a young designer in Britain, and he has some interesting ideas. The footer he has used is a sort of add on to the page but in a blended color format. It is in actual fact a five part add on, but it gives the appearance of being in three parts. It shows another link to his portfolio, which is situated next to a vertical link to recent projects. Then comes a link to his Amazon monetize link with a second vertical link to items he considers worth checking and more of the books from Amazon taking the last space.

It’s always nice when one of the companies that create the pro themes for WordPress decide to do a free giveaway. The variety increases on a daily basis and the kinds that are becoming available become more sophisticated as WordPress grows.  And let us face it if you look back to where it was when it first came out it has grown exponentially.

The theme I looked at today is the work of Graph Paper Press and is called Fullscreen. It is available for a free download when you obtain an account with them. You have to sign in to download it.
The idea is nice but although the basics are there for a pro theme, it was a little disappointing to me. The only way I could actually read the theme demo was to run my mouse over the words to highlight them. I realize this might have been one of their design aims but with me it fell a little short.  I do not like to have to peer at something to see what is going on.

I am not usually so critical of work but the fact of the matter is I feel they should have been more critical of their own work that they were giving away as an advert for their company. An advert and lets face it a free bee is an advert An advert should be the very best you have to offer. Well thought out and well presented in every context of the word.

Here we have a good idea for a photographic blog but because it was so dark with the black background and the lettering was almost blacked out until the mouse hovered over it, it was almost impossible to see what was going on.

Images and photos are a good way to improve any blog or website. They tell a story far more easily than words do. That is unless of course you are a poetry or prose expert.  There are many ways of editing and using photos images and slideshows on WordPress to give your blog a new lift.

There are several different photographic formats that are available to be used, but you need to choose the best one for what you are actually going to be using the image for.
 
Different available choices

Portable Network Graphics .png

.png can be used for both Graphics and for Photographs on your site, but you need to remember that some of the older search engines out there cannot see this extension. The resultant photo can be saved in the full 256 colors when you use PNG-8.  If you use PNG -24 it saves 24 bit color. This tends to lead to a larger file size than you would get with a JPEG.

Graphics Interchange Format .gif

This format is used more commonly for actual graphics like logos, etc. Png was actually created to replace .gif for monetary reasons as the licenses of Gif were rather high before the scheme imposed on Gif ran out. This is used with animation as well.

Joint Photographic Expert Group .jpeg

This format is a lossy format which means you do lose a percentage of the actual image, although this is hardly noticeable. The compression rate with this can be adjusted to suit you thus saving on both uploading and downloading times. This is still the most popular method of using photographs on the net although .png should at sometime take over.  There is a new JPEG format in the making and this should be out in the future.

Once you have decided on your photo extension you need to decide what you are going to do on your website with various photos.
If you have a large number of posts that need photos and the blog is fairly old, and it will take time to upload them and post them individually. As yet there is no widget or plug-in to achieve this, but I would think someone will now be putting their thinking cap on.

There are many other ways of posting as well but all of them of a single photo are available with different WordPress plug-ins such as Post videos, etc. There is a vast range of these programs. Here you will find plug-ins for all items like galleries and slide shows.  WordPress Codex tells you in detail how “to wrap your text around your file” and there is another article on “Using Images” in your posts.

SEO Gallery is a good plug-in to use as it does tags and all the necessary SEO work for your Photos without using Flash.

Should you want to get really fancy and put in a panoramic view into your blog, there is a plug-in called WP PtViewer, which allows you to do this. If you want to learn more about this plug-in you need to visit to Marvin Labs.

We all want to make our blog the very best out there. I know I tend to think I can always improve mine and maybe I can. I am on a continual search to find things that make it bigger and better than anyone else’s. But at the same time I keep in mind the need for quick loading of the site. I do not want to overload it with huge photos and long lines of script. One needs to keep in mind that the items above the fold are the ones that get read. Let us take a brief look at what we can do to improve it both for appearance and for loading time.

Photo Sizing

A picture is worth a thousand WordPress.  What a misquote! Its true though improving your blog with photos is very important because photos are the first thing that people look at. One of the biggest problems with photos is the loading time. The result is we need to optimize them for the fastest possible loading but reducing the image size helps tremendously.  Photoshop has an option where you can save for the web and I would use that for a copy of the original that you are going to be displaying in your blog.  Always keep the original intact only change the copy. You never know when you might need it for something else. Once changed you can’t go back. For example if at some time you want to sell that photo you will need the full photo as it was in the original RAW or Jpeg format. If you wish to get rid of more pixels and speed up the loading you can also use the smush.it program on line. It is important to download the image from there and then upload it to your blog or website as they do not retain the images.

Favicons

A professional website almost always has a favicon and the need for one is therefore important or you will look unprofessional. I realize favicons haven’t been out for that long a time but the business of branding yourself has been around for hundreds of years and this is one of the webs ways of branding you.
Make sure you make you own favicon either by making the icon your self and then reducing the sizing to the 16 x 16 pixels or the 32 x 32 pixels and then get it converted to the .ico extension at one of the many favicon generators. You can get animated favicons or static ones.

There are also on line tools for creating you own. One of the ones you can use is the original favicon.ico. Once you have your favicon you will need to upload it and then place the following code in your directory of your theme.

Change the location to find where you image is stored.  I personally like the idea of keeping the theme of the favicon in your logo and maybe even in the heading of your blog. This tends to add to the idea of branding yourself. This way when someone see your post with your logo behind it you will immediately be associated with your blog and website.

Those are just a couple of ideas you can easily implement to improve your website in just a few minutes of your day.

E commerce requires a shopping cart and finding the best one isn’t always the easiest thing. With many of them you need considerable knowledge on how to hack the code to make them work as you want them to. This is a daunting task for many would be e commerce owners with hardly any knowledge of code or how to set about it. I think in actual fact it has chased off many a would be site owner.

There are several carts available and some already on the servers of the hosting company but installing them in the WordPress theme can be another story.
I am going to show you a few that are available and tell you some of the experiences that people have had with them.

Ecwid Shopping Cart

This is a free shopping cart from WordPress. You can do drag and drop with it which is useful. It can also be used in Facebook which is something different. They say it can be installed in 5 minutes which I very much doubt. I have found when they say 5 minutes it tends to be between 5 hours and 5 days for me. But then I can be real dumb on things. The entire card is created in Ajax which is supposed to be very fast. So far there are not many reports on this cart. You can use it for downloadable products and there are three available products the one being free and then the next one up is $17 a month. There are restrictions on the free one, one of which is the fact that the powered by ecwid appears on the site. It is usable with Pay by Check, PayPal, Authorize.Net, Google Checkout, and well as more available options. It appears to be a good option and being available as a free version to be able to try it out before paying for the extended option seems well with the trial.

Try out EShop

This is also a free option and again so far the reports are good. You can customize it to your needs and the two people who I spoke to that are using it have had no problems. The biggest problem with it appears to be the amount of payment options. Although it does use Paypal and several others it doesn’t use Google check out as yet. There also can be conflicts between this cart and other plug-ins that can cause the cart to empty prior to it reaching the checkout. Another possibility is that you might need to change the path of your session.save in the hosting. I would check with your hosting server as to what it should be. Other than those couple of problems which were easily fixed, it seems to be working pretty well. You can’t print your invoice on Paypal unfortunately but I believe this problem is being worked on.

WP e-Commerce

This shopping cart hasn’t received good reviews recently as many folks say you can’t get it working properly unless you do considerable hack on the actual cart itself. After the number of negative reports I have had on it I can not in fairness recommend it to anyone.