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WordPress Theme + Plugin: Making your site more iPhone friendly – use WPtouch

ashish — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:16:16 +0000

The iPhone is a revolution in the mobile market, leading to its becoming the top selling product in the SmartPhone market. There are a huge set of users out there who use the iPhone for navigating to different sites and consequently form a market for your blog. It would be a mistake to ignore all those users out there who use mobile browsing, especially when people who are your competitors are reaching out to all these users. Hence the quest to reach to out this market, and ensure that your site has a mobile version that will appeal to such users.
There is a counter argument that most sites appear fine on the iPhone browser, but you should think about this question only if your site is a plain site that does not have heavy graphics, or does not have Flash (the browser on the iPhone does not support Flash), or uses a lot of Javascript for rendering the menus, background, or other fancy stuff.
If you want to render your blog / site to iPhone users, you can find a lot of options on the internet, but you will need to evaluate them through actual use to ensure that you are getting the required speed and efficiency.
Here is another plugin + theme that does the same, it’s called WPtouch (site).
Read more from the site:
WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch or Android touch mobile device. It comes complete with all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. WPtouch also offers many customization features through a beautifully designed WordPress admin panel.
Not all websites are created equal, with some sites failing to translate well in the viewport of a small mobile device. Many WordPress sites today make heavy use of different javascripts which significantly increase the load time of pages, and drive your visitors on 3G/EDGE batty. So we’ve come up with WPtouch, a lightweight, fast-loading, feature-rich and highly-customized “theme application” which includes an admin interface to let you customize many aspects of your site’s presentation.

WPtouch comes with a host of built-in features. Some notables include:
User-selected theme toggle (between WPtouch view and your site’s regular look)
iPhone-like application appearance, functions
AJAX, jQuery & JS effects
Full WordPress search, pages, archives, categories, tags and links support
Theme native social bookmarking support
iPhone/iPod touch native post e-mailing support
Ajax comments, posted in real time
Ajaxed pagination (users can browse posts like YouTube videos)
Admin selectable custom icons for pages, logo, bookmark icon
Manually edit your site’s title to fit WPtouch
Show / Hide post excerpts, customize style in different ways
Easily add your own icons to customize menu appearance
Admin inclusion/exclusion of site pages shown in the theme’s menu
Compatibility suite in admin to inform of add-ons, WordPress version support
Automatic Archives page layout (if you have or create a page called ‘Archives’)
Automatic Photo page layout with Flickr (if you have or create a page called ‘Photos’ and have the FlickrRSS plugin installed)

Hosting your videos on other sites to speed up your own site

ashish — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:57:28 +0000

As a part of the process of optimization and enhancing the speed of your website, you should look to see what are some of the major media content that you can offload. Serving video files off your server can be heavier than serving plain vanilla HTML files and take far more bandwidth; and if you reach the stage where a number of people want to view the videos that you are showing, they can put a higher amount of load on your server.
One option that you can utilize is to use a video-sharing site where you can put your videos, and display the video from that site. Youtube is a very good example of such a sharing site and is a very good platform for putting your videos (it has some restrictions though, in terms of the maximum size of videos your can put, as well as the time duration of not more than 10 minute long videos).
So, take your video, get a Youtube / Gmail account, and upload your video. When your video is uploaded, you can also get a code that allows you to embed the video in your own site, and when the user views the site, they video is directly played from Youtube, and not from your site, thus optimizing your site. The plus for this is that Youtube has a lot of viewers, and if you add some site information to the video, this could in turn drive some people to your own site, people who have viewed the video directly on Youtube.

Promote your site by using StumbleUpon buttons

ashish — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:37:44 +0000

StumbleUpon is a great site for increasing the number of readers on your site as well as the number of casual visitors. And when I say casual visitors, I mean casual visitors. A huge chunk of the visitors you get from StumbleUpon are what we call the fickle visitors; they will come to your site with a short attention span. If any of your articles gets StumbledUpon, then you can assume that you will a huge spurt of the number in visitors, along with an increase in the number of people subscribed to your blog. After that, it is upon you to determine whether you can convert some of these visitors to more long term.
Your blog needs to be:
- More attractive and eye-catching
- Have information presented in an easy to read way
- The ads should be tastefully blended and not annoying
In fact, you should put yourself in the average StumbleUpon visitors point of view by first viewing other blogs through the StumbleUpon toolbar, marking other people articles and then studying your own habits. That will help you determine what you need to do in order to ensure that a larger percentage of your own visitors are sticky. If it turns out that you are only self-promoting your own articles without contributing to the community, it is fairly likely that you will get banned. A swap ratio of recommending 15-20 articles of other people to 1 of your own is a healthy swap ratio.
At the same time, you should ensure that people are easily able to recommend your sites through the StumbleUpon site, and for that you can pick up any of the buttons from this site (link), and then put this button your site. If your readers find any of your articles interesting, they will send the article off to be StumbledUpon. At the link above, you get a choice of icons as well as the ability to select your blogging platform so that you can get the required code, ready to put on your site.

Hostmonster users – How to get an update of server status

ashish — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:33:13 +0000

Hostmonster (click here to learn more) is a popular hosting service used by individuals to host their blogs and other sites (although I have not heard of too many professional sites with huge number of users using WordPress as a hosting service). I use WordPress for my sites, and it runs fairly well, with easy installation of blogs, and other similar software. I did not have to learn much to do installation and configuration of my blogs.
However, one pet peeve I have is that the service goes down once in a while, not frequently enough to be an irritant, but I do notice once it is down (and sometimes can take 1-2 hours to come back up). At such times, it is easy enough to go to Hostmonster chat (right on the main page) to talk to somebody from support, and you can get enough detail about when the server will be back up, as well as what the problem is.
However, getting on the phone to talk to support, or to go to the chat system both take time. There is an easier way to quickly find out if there is a known problem on the server, and what the status for that problem is. There is a page called “Hostmonster Server Status Notification’ that has an update for the servers on which you have to host your sites. This page is located at this link.

Getting some quick information on your site – Analytics

ashish — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:54:23 +0000

When you run a site, getting accurate information and statistics about your sites viewers is very important, and people use a combination of measures such as installing the Google Analytics Program, or using a conter program such as Sitemeter.com. Such information helps them to find out where people are visiting their site from (their users geographic location), which section of the sites are more popular, what are the top referrers that people use to find their site (through search engines, through links on other sites, and so on). I regularly use these programs to ferret out such information and have learned much. As an example:
- I discovered that Google Search is absolutely essential in order to get viewers to your site
- A number of referrers to my sites have been through email programs, which essentially means that people are forwarding the subscription mails they receive when a new post is made, and encourages me to get effective subscription tools in place
- I often get surprised about which posts are most popular, and this helps determine that users think differently from what we expect, and also reinforces the belief that using such analytics tools is a necessary part of running a site

Apart from these tools, I also use another tool for generating information about how popular the site is on several parameters:
- How has the performance of the site been in getting number of users over the last few months (have more people started visiting, vs. have a lower number of people started visiting)
- How many sites link to this site (important for generating a better result in search engine results)
- Identifying keywords (very important in terms of defining which keywords should be emphaized in posts)

So, which is this tool that I use ? It is a site, called siteinfo on Alexa, at the following link : http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo. Suppose you have a site about Indian politics called Indiapoliticalblog.com, and you wanted to find out its result on Alexa, you just need to add the site URL (without the http: //), so that you end up with the following URL: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/indiapoliticalblog.com