Tag Archives | Additions

Blogging With WordPress

By Randy R on May 20, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Blogging With WordPress

WordPress is a popular open source blog publishing application. First available to the blogging public in 2003, the current release of WordPress is 2.7.1 as of February 2009. Open source means that it is available free of charge for the people to use. It is therefore very common for people to do blogging with WordPress.

WordPress has evolved around the years with introduction of themes, plugins and widgets into the blogosphere. Those additions really made WordPress very popular with bloggers due to the flexibility and ease to modify and customize the blogs. They could produce very professional-looking blogs in a short time frame with WordPress compared to when they had to do it using the HTML codes.

Theme is a way to “”skin”” a blog. It provides control of the look and presentation of the blogs. Without changing the core software, bloggers have the flexibility to change the display of posts and the blogs. By simply modifying some template files included in a particular theme, we can customize the blog’s look on-the-fly without having to worry about compatibility with the application and other components used by WordPress.

Since it is an open-source application, there are many people willingly working on and sharing the WordPress theme with everyone. Most of the blog themes are available free of charge. You can just use search engines to find WordPress theme with whatever additional attributes you want to have. You will be presented with hundreds if not thousands of websites that have more information on themes. You can also visit WordPress Theme Directory for a complete listing of officially recognized blogging themes.

Plugins are used extensively to extend the capability of WordPress blogs. There are just too many things to list down what you can do with WordPress plugins. I guess you can find just about anything you want to do available. If you can’t find it, it is relatively quite easy to make one if you have some basic programming skills. Just like the themes, there are many plugins available. Most of them are also available freely on the web. Beside using search engines, WordPress plugins are also available at WordPress Plugins Directory.

Another benefit of using readily available themes is that many people have designed adsense-ready themes. Adsense is a way to monetize your blog. Adsense is simply an opportunity for bloggers to display google ads on their blogs. They will earn money when people click on the displayed adsense. With adsense-ready theme, it means bloggers can configure adsense easily just by entering their adsense pub-id into some parts of the theme files.

A good resource to learn about blogging with WordPress is available on the web. Using normal search engines to search for WordPress tutorial, there are many resources available. You can choose to do the blogging directly on http://www.WordPress.com Otherwise, you can choose to host the WordPress on your own web hosting.

Installing WordPress can pose a challenge. However, nowadays WordPress is included in Fantastico that you can use to install with just one press. If you don’t have Fantastico in your web hosting, you should be able to do an install following the instructions provided when you download WordPress.

Although WordPress is very easy to use, for first time users who are not technically savvy, it is advisable to start with some basic tutorials to understand the structure of how blogging can be done with WordPress. Once you get the basic, using WordPress will be just like using a normal word processor.

Happy Blogging!

So What

By Randy Roedl on August 21, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

So What’s New In WordPress 2.5.x?

In the beginning, everyone was excited about the news of the release of WordPress 2.5 but just when it was about to make its official debut on March 10, 2008, the release date was pushed back crushing the hope of millions of bloggers worldwide waiting anxiously for its release. Now, the latest stable release of WordPress (Version 2.5.1) is available for download at http://wordpress.org/download/

However, as of the time of release, it’s still in its early copy and was still under some concluding rounds of testing the program and also tweaking it; but it is now stable enough to provide you with a quick overview of some of the feature changes and additions, along with a brief comparison against its predecessor, WordPress 2.3.x series. It’s time to change!

i) The Dashboard

The very first thing you laid eyes on will be the dashboard which is similar to the hub of your blog. The new dashboard now not only features a sleek and more focused design but also comes with a few colour schemes which has switched from very cool, cool blues to the even colder icy blue, sexy dark grey and exotic burnt orange. The other change you will notice right away is the content’s layout. You will no longer have the content on your left and the blog statistics on your right but now you have a single column which has some quick links to the post composing screens, followed by blog stats, any recent comments you received, incoming links and lastly aggregated feeds.

On the plus side, now you can customize the feeds to the feeds that you want to see at a glance. Thus, you are no longer restricted to feeds from the WordPress development blog or WordPress planet. You’ll also be able to personalize your incoming links display such as from Google Blog Search to Technorati.

ii) The Navigation Menu

The navigation menu also has been changed from the straight forward menu of items in WordPress 2.3.x to a reduced menu with a few menu items completely renamed. While Write, Manage, Design, and Comments could be found in the usual spot, but the Plugins, Users, and Settings are now in the mid-upper right corner. The name changes are Presentation to Design, Options has become Settings and Blogroll renamed to Links and can be found under Manage. Under Write, there is also a Link navigation item where you’ll be able to add links to your blogroll.

iii) The Post and Page

The write pages have also undergone complete overhauls, leaving power bloggers who has grown accustomed to the many of the advanced WordPress features such as tags, categories, and trackbacks to do quite a bit of scrolling. Gone is also the option to drag and drop items in the order you’d prefer as you could in version 2.3.x. However, you may find a cool new addition which is the media manager. Currently, it only supports uploading from your computer but soon, there will be an option to add media from popular services such as YouTube and Flickr.

iv) The Post/Page Management

The Manage page no longer has the manual one at a time posts delete or clicking on the Edit link next to a particular entry. In version 2.5.x, to edit post, instead of edit link, just click on the post title while to view posts with a particular tags listed on the Manage page, just click on the tag and WordPress will list all those posts, the same with clicking on the author or category. As an added bonus, you can now mass delete entries.

The date format has also changed to sporting a user friendly “2 hours ago” as opposed to an actual date. After a 24 hour period, it will change to the usual date format. Besides that, you’ll also be able to see the posts’ tags and publication status.

v) The Edit Post Page

Most notable change is the “View this Post” button which has replaced the “preview” link that was hidden between the title and post content. In addition, you’re also able to quickly edit the post slug on the fly. Finally, there’s a quick link for deletion that enables the users to quickly delete their posts and there is an option to view the comments associated with the post, all comments, or even all posts.

vi) The Tag Management

Under Manage, you’ll probably see a brand new sub-menu named Tags. It allows you to do some basic tag management such as adding, editing, or deleting individual tags similar to category management page.

vii) The Media Management

The other new link appearing under the Manage tab is called Media Library, which has replaced Upload, and it’s where you can find and manage each of your uploaded files. WordPress is now supporting a multitude of file formats, such as video and audio.

viii) The Widgets Management

There will also be no need for you to click on any particular widgets onto the sidebar because you now can click on an Add link next to it and it is added! Once it’s already on the sidebar, then you’re free to click and drag however you want them to be arranged. To help beginners, each widget now comes with a brief description detailing what the widget does and widget filters as well as a search function (in case you lose track).

ix) The Other Changes

First, the user filters have been improved a little and clicking on a specific role’s link will only display users with that particular role. Secondly, WordPress will now show you exactly how many comments you have waiting for review in the navigation menu so you no longer have to click on comments to discover them. Third, there is an option (you can also disable it) to support avatars straight out of the box.
In conclusion, this version seems to be heading in the correct direction which has improved over the previous version with several small, yet significant changes to WordPress. For the most part, most people will either love it or hate it. But one thing for sure is WordPress will certainly leave a lot of commotion in its wake.