Tag Archives | blogging

Creating a Sticky Homepage in WordPress

Creating a Sticky Homepage in WordPress The process is relatively simple and is very effective when you want new visitors to your site to read an introduction to your site, but have more instant news updates appear as well. First, navigate to Posts > Add New and write the content you’d like to always be present on your homepage. Under Publish > Visibility (top right side) click Edit. Next, click the check box to ""Stick this post to the front page"". Publish your document, then navigate to Settings > Reading. The default setting for WordPress front page displays is ""your latest posts"" and this what you’ll need to be set to for your latest post content to appear on the homepage. Now that you’ve made a ""sticky homepage"" that particular post will always be at the top. Further customizations can be made under Reading Settings, such as the number of blog posts to show on the home page and whether to include the full text or a summary. In the case of our Site Sparker website, our blog posts are very short so we’ve chosen to post the full text. But if your blog entries are very long, then you should choose the Summary setting so that only a portion of your blog appears on the homepage. That will ensure visitors can scroll very quickly through all of your posts to find what they’re looking for. If this is at all confusing, you can find a video version of this tutorial at the link below, where it’s explained visually, inside the WP interface.

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WordPress 2

Wordpress 2.5.1 Is Available

If you’ve yet to realize WordPress 2.5.1 is now available and you should update your current WordPress to make sure that it’s up to date. The update has some bug fixes which are important and also some more performance enhancements which were unexpected. If your blog is using any sort of open registration then you need to make sure your WordPress blog is running on version 2.5.1 because there is a serious defect in WordPress 2.5 and not many people know of it yet but the public eventually will become aware of the vulnerability and capitalize off of it. To protect your blog you should make sure to download the update which is WordPress 2.5.1.

There were some improvements made to the admin panel and more specifically the posting pages and this was well needed. More importantly though this update fixed seventy bugs and some of them were quite serious. This is why if you don’t update your WordPress software then you could run the possibility of being exposed to intruders due to bugs in the old versions. The widget admin has also been tampered with, and I feel for the better as it’s now easier to customize your sidebars.

One of the best security updates implemented in this version of WordPress if the ability to add in the SECRET KEY constant into the wp-config.php file. This will help your WordPress blog become more secure which is very important when blogging, especially once you get popular. Once you’re popular at blogging people will do anything they can to gain access to your blog, and usually the main cause of people gaining access is due to an old version of WordPress being installed rather then the newest version. If you want to make sure that your blog is safe and secure then download the update which is WordPress 2.5.1 and make sure that you get your SECRET KEY for you blog. There is also other plug-ins you can find which can benefit your blogs security features. Blogging is worldwide and very popular now and people are earning thousands of dollars blogging, if you’re one of the people out there blogging then ensure you have the most up to date version of WordPress at all times. The best place to find out about the current version of WordPress is at WordPress.com.

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The Punchcut WordPress Theme – Want a Theme For Your Blog That is Customizable, Simple, Yet Complex

The Punchcut WordPress Theme – Want a Theme For Your Blog That is Customizable, Simple, Yet Complex?

The Punchcut WordPress Theme is a very different theme than what we are all used to. It is a very simple theme, yet it is also very sophisticated, and really carries its own kind of voice. The themes overall layout has been created in a way that is competitive, and extremely user friendly. Needless to day, most of the traffic that this theme receives is because of how simple yet complex the theme itself is, which simply places it miles ahead of many other themes that are currently available.There are so many flashy themes available in the market at the moment,. which leaves this theme really in a league of its own, deserving all of the positive chatter that it is receiving all over the web. Needless to say, there have been plenty of webmasters who have purchased this theme, and incorporated it into their blog, which is a statement to itself of the level of quality and ease of customization that has gone into this theme.

The best element of the Punchcut WordPress theme is that it really doesn’t matter what the overall theme of your blog is, this theme in itself is suitable for any layout, and has a very unique yet simple design. The contents of the background allow for the contents of your blog to really stand out more than the flashy elements of the theme, which in itself, is something that all to many themes lack these days. Of course, this is exactly what most blog owners seek in a theme these days, with content being king, especially when it comes to not only ranking well in the search engines, but retaining visitor loyalty.

One of the turn offs about WordPress for the inexperienced user, is that sometimes, even basic customization can be a very difficult task. The Punchcut WordPress Theme offers a level of customization that is unparalleled in a theme in its price bracket, all accessible through the fully functioned administration panel. Even the inner coding of this theme is clearly labeled, so that anyone with even so much as a basic HTML knowledge can jump right in and add their own personalized element to this theme. Of course, the only drawback of using custom themes for WordPress is that it is never going to be unique, however with a combination of the administration panel, and easy to understand and modify coding, this explains in good part the popularity of this theme.

To cap this article off, the level of customization, beauty, simplicity and usability in this theme is something that is rarely seen, with so many people wanting themes for WordPress that are colorful, flashy, and with fancy java script elements that only serve to slow down the page loading speed. The PunchCut WordPress theme has kept these considerations in mind, and the result is a theme that is beautiful, easy to customize, easy to install, and is something that will keep your visitors coming back time and time again.

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The Punchcut WordPress Theme – Want a Theme For Your Blog That is Customizable, Simple, Yet Complex1

The Punchcut WordPress Theme – Want a Theme For Your Blog That is Customizable, Simple, Yet Complex?

The Punchcut WordPress Theme is a very different theme than what we are all used to. It is a very simple theme, yet it is also very sophisticated, and really carries its own kind of voice. The themes overall layout has been created in a way that is competitive, and extremely user friendly. Needless to day, most of the traffic that this theme receives is because of how simple yet complex the theme itself is, which simply places it miles ahead of many other themes that are currently available.There are so many flashy themes available in the market at the moment,. which leaves this theme really in a league of its own, deserving all of the positive chatter that it is receiving all over the web. Needless to say, there have been plenty of webmasters who have purchased this theme, and incorporated it into their blog, which is a statement to itself of the level of quality and ease of customization that has gone into this theme.

The best element of the Punchcut WordPress theme is that it really doesn’t matter what the overall theme of your blog is, this theme in itself is suitable for any layout, and has a very unique yet simple design. The contents of the background allow for the contents of your blog to really stand out more than the flashy elements of the theme, which in itself, is something that all to many themes lack these days. Of course, this is exactly what most blog owners seek in a theme these days, with content being king, especially when it comes to not only ranking well in the search engines, but retaining visitor loyalty.

One of the turn offs about WordPress for the inexperienced user, is that sometimes, even basic customization can be a very difficult task. The Punchcut WordPress Theme offers a level of customization that is unparalleled in a theme in its price bracket, all accessible through the fully functioned administration panel. Even the inner coding of this theme is clearly labeled, so that anyone with even so much as a basic HTML knowledge can jump right in and add their own personalized element to this theme. Of course, the only drawback of using custom themes for WordPress is that it is never going to be unique, however with a combination of the administration panel, and easy to understand and modify coding, this explains in good part the popularity of this theme.

To cap this article off, the level of customization, beauty, simplicity and usability in this theme is something that is rarely seen, with so many people wanting themes for WordPress that are colorful, flashy, and with fancy java script elements that only serve to slow down the page loading speed. The PunchCut WordPress theme has kept these considerations in mind, and the result is a theme that is beautiful, easy to customize, easy to install, and is something that will keep your visitors coming back time and time again.

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Is Working Online Really For You

What was it that made you start looking online to earn an income? Perhaps you know someone who makes money online or perhaps you saw a story on television of someone successfully making money online. It doesn’t matter what brought you here, what matters now is: Is working online really for you? Where do you start? How to start making money without blowing your budget? Is working online really for you? The first thing you need to look at is your self discipline. To make an income online and be your own boss requires a lot of self discipline. It is very easy to get side tracked when you are working online and very easy to spend more time on your computer than you originally intend. Spending too much time online can affect your family life as well as affect the quality of your work. To be able to work well and achieve good results you need to stay focused and if you overwork you will lose your focus. You need to be self disciplined enough to give yourself tasks and a time limit online and make sure you stick to it. Taking breaks is just as important as spending time online. Taking breaks gives your mind the rest it needs to concentrate fully on your work when come back to work after your break. By not taking breaks you will easily become distracted and not be able to think clearly. Having good self discipline and keeping on track with your goals is very important. If you can do that, then working online can very well be for you. Where do you start? The first thing you will need to do is research. You will need to look into the different ways to make money online and decide which one would best suit you. There are many ways to make money online such as: • Selling on ebay • Selling from your own website • Earning money from Adsense • Writing articles • Writing ebooks • Promoting items for commission as an affiliate • MLM programs And more. You will need to do a little research to find out how some of these work and what will be involved. Find out which one will best suit you and your needs and decide which one you wish to pursue. How to start making money online without blowing your budget? Many of the above ways of earning money online can be started with little or no capital. If selling on ebay is what you would like to do long term, you can start off with no capital by selling items around the house that are no longer needed. Earn a little capital by doing this and then move on to visit some second hand shops or garage sales. You would be amazed at what you can pick up from a garage sale that can sell for much more than you pay for it. The other way to sell on ebay without any start up capital is to dropship. With dropshipping you are selling an item that is stocked with the supplier. You don’t pay the supplier until you have received the money from the customer. Then you pay the supplier and the supplier will ship the item direct to your customer. This is a good way to sell since you don’t need to worry about storing stock and you can do it with no money upfront. Writing articles is another good way to start earning money with no start up capital. There are companies online that will pay you to write articles for them. There are many topics to choose from to write about and you don’t need any cash at all to start. This is a great way to earn money to then invest in other online ventures. Whatever you decide to do online, always make sure you do your research before jumping into anything and especially so before handing over any money.

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How To Sell On Ebay

Being an Ebay seller is a great way to earn an income working from home and with the internet becoming more and more popular it has become possible for many people to earn that income online. Ebay is the world’s biggest online auction place and has millions of people all over the world that you can sell to. It is possible to start selling on ebay with little or even no start up cash. You can quite easily start off your Ebay business by selling items from around your home. Most people will have some items around the home that they have no use for anymore and as they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Selling items around your home can earn you enough cash to start investing in your business. Once you have made a little money, but not quite enough for any big investments, you can do some shopping at garage sales or second hand shops. You will be amazed at some of the bargains that you can pick up second hand that will sell very well on Ebay. Children’s items sell particularly well and in particular baby goods that are still in good condition and also brand name toys such as Thomas The Tank Engine toys. The other way to start selling on Ebay without any start up cash is to use dropshipping. This is when you sell items on behalf of the supplier. You list the item for sale on Ebay, and once you sell the item and have received payment from your customer, you then place the order with the supplier. You send the supplier their cost price for the item and they will ship the item directly to your customer. So at no stage do you actually handle the products, it will be sent straight to your customer so there is no need for you to have to worry about keeping stocks of items. The main advantage of dropshipping is that you do not need to send the supplier payment until you have received the payment from your customer, so you don’t need any investment capital. The other advantage is that you don’t need to worry about storing stock and possibly even purchasing stock and then being unable to sell it. The disadvantage of dropshipping is that you always need to keep in touch with your supplier to make sure they have good quantities of the products you are selling in stock. You don’t want to list an item only to find out your supplier has none in stock. You also need to keep yourself up to date with your suppliers pricing, otherwise if your supplier increases their prices and you are listing items at the old prices, you will end up making a loss on the product. Whether you prefer to use dropshipping or to purchase your stock up front, always make sure you investigate your supplier well before placing any orders and sending any money. There are many fraudulent wholesalers so always check the credibility of your wholesaler and find out as much information as you can about them. Always send your payments through a secure method of payment that can be traced and returned to you should your supplier turn out to be fraudulent. It can take some time to find a good supplier and it may also pay to join a wholesaler membership site such as salehoo. As a member of a respectable wholesaler site you are much more assured that the suppliers they recommend are legitimate suppliers.

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Great WordPress Plugins- Identifying Another One Of Them

Great WordPress Plugins: Identifying Another One Of Them Another of the great WordPress plugins that deserves special mention is ""Simple 301 Redirects"". One thing about essential WordPress plugins is that if you do not know about them or do not know how to use them, you do not realize how great a functionality you are leaving out of your content management system. ""Simple 301 Redirects"" is a good example of this. I recollect that I have been in and out of internet marketing three times over the years before this my final stay. Each time I resurfaced on the internet marketing scene, had I known about this great WordPress plugin, no doubt my search engine rankings would be higher today. I simply would have deployed it to transfer my old blog posts to the new amended/updated pages and thereby seamlessly preserved the old pages rankings. But alas, each time I resurfaced on the internet marketing scene, I simply discarded the old blog posts and posted new/updated pages of these old blog posts on my new blog without linking the two. That is one of the many setbacks great WordPress plugins like ""Simple 301 Redirects"" set out to correct. It provides an easy method of redirecting requests to another page on your site or elsewhere on the web. It’s especially handy when you migrate a site to WordPress and can’t preserve your URL structure. By setting up 301 redirects from your old pages to your new pages, any incoming links will be seemlessly passed along, and their pagerank (or what-have-you) will be passed along. Note that ""age"" and ""number and nature of backlinks"" are critical factors in search engine rankings. Any action you therefore take to preserve these for your blog posts will definitely positively impact your search engine rankings. I’ll give you a perfect example here. I wrote a blog post in December 2009. At that time, I still was not as thoroughly grounded as I am now in search engine optimization (SEO) and so was not optimizing effectively for my intended keywords. I recently changed the title and made some minor adjustments to the body of the blog post and were it to be before, I would simply have left it at that. Does it strike a chord in you that anytime you do such and leave it at that you are simply beginning your SEO for that post all over again? All the backlinks to the previous post will be gone forever. So also the age, as the new blog post will now be indexed afresh while the old blog post on subsequent visits by the Google bot will read ""not found"", again compounding your crawl errors in your Google webmaster tools. Note that all these ultimately negatively impact your page rank. So what did I do? I simply inserted my old url in the ""Simple 301 Redirects"" interface and pointed it to my new url which I also inserted in the interface and saved. Just as simple as that and wow! a whole lot has happened with those simple steps. The backlinks and age of my old blog post will be seamlessly passed over to my new blog post and the page rank of my web page preserved. Let me explain another purpose to which you can deploy this plugin that I have identified as one of the great WordPress plugins. If you go into your webmaster tools account, you will see indicated, crawl errors that resulted while the search engines were trying to crawl your web pages. You can rectify some of these errors and thereby have a more ""efficient"" website which will impact positively on your search engine rankings by utilizing this plugin to redirect some incorrectly specified links to their originally intended destination. Those links that you have control over and can still amend such as your backlinks in forums, you can make amends to. But what of incorrectly specified links that you no longer have access to? For example, links on your articles republished on other sites. This is again better explained with an illustration. I erroneously inserted a link in one of my articles which was republished on another site and noticed the error from ""crawl errors"" in my Google webmaster tools account. The link led nowhere i.e. 404 page and I subsequently redirected it to its originally intended destination, thereby preserving that backlink. This becomes very important when you realize that you can have many of such errors over time.The ""Simple 301 Redirects"" plugin’s many uses can only be limited by your imagination. In summary, the ""Simple 301 Redirects"" is one more of the great WordPress plugins.

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Make My Own Website – Efficient WordPress Websites With WP Super Cache

Make My Own Website – Efficient WordPress Websites With WP Super Cache

Online visitors are in a hurry. One of the important questions is how to make your own website run smoothly. It does not matter, if you have a large or small WordPress website, there is a probability that your site responds with delay.

This is because when a visitor searches for specific information, the result is found by sorting through the website’s database and generating the content to display. To improve this process, you should use the WP Super Cache plug-in.

Caching is a method of create a static copy of your website in a temporary place. This technique allows quicker response when a search for information is done. The location of cached information is always the first area to look upon. Therefore, if the needed information is cached, your website can immediately provide information being searched for.

This static copy of your website is available to all of your visitors. More or less a 100% of the users in your website are served with cached information. And because of this, the search mechanism will not overburden your server.

This allows for processing of other important tasks by the server. Thus, your website can be loaded on an explorer in the most efficient way possible because your server can be fully dedicated in doing only that.

The major benefits of employing WP Super Cache plug-in your website are:

It frees your server of processing tasks because a cache file can be used in replacement of searching through the whole database.
A server with correct load can be expected to perform well even when there is high volume of traffic in your WordPress site.
Users of your website will never experience any form of slowing down since the memory in your server can be used to balance system processes.

WP Super Cache plug-in is very easy to use. You may think that its purpose is quite complicated but the installation and usage is not. Simply follow these steps and make WP Cache plug-in immediately work in your WordPress website.

Before installation, you should make sure that no other version of this tool is installed as plug-in. If there is one, remove it first before installing the new one.
Download the latest version of WP Super Cache.
Install WP Super Cache
Right after that, go to the plugin’s configuration section (under Settings/WP Super Cache) and change the status to ON.
On the same screen, in the “”Mod Rewrite Rules”” configuration section, update the rules by hitting the button there.
There are also instructions how to update your /wp-content/cache/.htaccess file (just easy copy and paste)
Save the settings and you are ready to go.

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