Make Money from Blogs » Wordpress

Making a child theme to preserve the changes you have made in the WordPress theme

ashish — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 08:37:12 +0000

Rare is the case when people do not make a change to the WordPress themes that they have installed. They may fiddle around with the .css files, changing font sizes / font colors, etc to customize it as per their own preference. So, you have a theme that looks somewhat good, but then you realize that it needs some work; you fire up your text editor, open up the css files and the functions file and make some changes. Or you could add some new php code to your functions file and use it within your themes to add some functionality that was missing. You could even go further and add new template files, over-ride some of the templates that are being used in the theme, and so on.
And then, you know how important it is to upgrade your plugins and themes in order to ensure that the security levels of your blog remains high. So, you see a theme upgrade, and go ahead for the upgrade. What you did not really think through was that the theme upgrade replaced the files in your theme, including the changes that you had made so lovingly, and some parts of your blog get affected. That is bad, but there is really nothing you can do about it. But, there is something you can do, although it requires some effort. WordPress gives a functionality called ‘Child Themes’, that allows you to make changes, and these changes are preserved even when you upgrade your themes. Here are some tutorials that allow you to learn the scope of what you can do through Child Themes, and the process of doing so.
Child Themes on WordPress Codex (link)
Introducing Thirty Ten, my guide to creating a Twenty Ten Child Theme (link)
How to make a child theme for WordPress: A pictorial introduction for beginners (link)
Ten Good Reasons to use WordPress Child Themes and Template Parts (link)

How to plan for a trip when you are used to writing a blog post every day

ashish — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 20:30:39 +0000

Most people recognize that to increase the number of users coming to your system, and being sticky in the sense of keeping your subscribes as regular readers, you need to ensure that you are providing regular content that is rich and somewhat unique (that you are a presenting your own opinion, not simply copying something from somewhere). One approach that seems to work is that you provide content on a daily basis. This approach ensures that you readers get something to read every day, and works well for many publishers. Doing a daily update also ensures that search engine bots come to your site on a daily basis, and also increases your rank in Search Engines.
However, not all of us can spend 365 days in a year near your computer, sending out updates and post. You do need to plan for days when you will not have access to a computer, or are otherwise indisposed (you could be enjoying some travel with all the money you make blogging, as an example), but you need to ensure that you still churn out those regular daily posts that your readers have got used to. Well, you can do all this by scheduling your posts for the future (and you can do this whether your blog is on WordPress or on Google’s Blogger).
What you need to do is to plan for the number of days that you are going to be gone, and have that much extra posts written up, make sure that they are all in draft status, and then you should setup them for future publishing. Refer to these 2 articles (for WordPress and for Blogger).

WordPress Plugin: Adding Google Analytics functionality to your pages

ashish — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 08:00:11 +0000

For those of you who do not know of it yet, getting data from Google Analytics is an important of your overall strategy. By integration of the code from Google Analytics, you are able to get a lot more information about your visitors, and do the analysis about which techniques work, and which techniques don’t work. Given all this, people find the process of installation still tough enough that they keep on putting off installing the code. How about doing the installation of Google Analytics via a plugin ?
Well, here is a solution. Refer to the “Google Analytics for WordPress” Plugin for WordPress available at this page.
What does this plugin do ?
This plugin easily adds your Google Analytics tracking code (the new ga.js one!) to all pages within your blog.
This plugin adds the possibility to tag and segment all outgoing links, so you can see whether a click came from a comment or an article.
It also adds the possibility to track just the domain, instead of the complete link, so you get a better view of how much traffic you’re sending where.
By enabling AdSense click tracking, your AdSense clicks are tracked to /outbound/asclick.
By default Google Analytics only tracks a select group of search engines, which might not include your local big search engine. With this plugin, you can add extra search engines to those Google Analytics tracks by default!

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)

How to add a Facebook Fan Page Box onto your blog (WordPress, Blogger, others)

ashish — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:32:50 +0000

Facebook is now proving to be a big social networking tool, with a huge number of people spending time on Facebook. It should form an important part of your strategy to get more Facebook users to visit your Facebook Fan Page, and to interact over there. The ideal case is when people are really interested in the topics at hand and do a lot of interaction on the Facebook Fan Page. A link back to your page means that you get a lot more traffic from a new source. However, you need to ensure that your users have enough techniques and tools to easily sign up for your Fan Book. If you have a blog, you should invite your Blog readers to sign up for your Facebook Fan Page. I will give an example of how to setup your Facebook Fan Page on a blog called 5 Photo Tips (link).
Facebook provides many tools for people to enhance the value of their Fan Pages, with one way being through the use of their tools listed at the following page – Facebook Connect (link). This page gives you ways to extend the use of Facebook. At some later posts, we will explore what all we can do, today we are just interested in the use of this tool called Facebook Widgets (link) which are some existing tools to extent the Facebook Fan Box onto your Blogger account.
Once you see the “Fan Box” option on the following page, click on the option.

Once you click on the Fan Box option, then you reach a page where you can select the required Fan Page (you should be logged in to your Facebook Profile for this to happen). If you have more than 1 Fan Page, then you can select the desired Fan Page through a combo box.

In case you have a Blogger account or a TypePad account, then there are already default buttons to select, but if you have a WordPress Account, then you need to select the third option “Other”. This provides the code in a small text box below the buttons that you can copy and paste into your WordPress account.

You can customize the options present on this page by referring the instructions at these page (link). You need to take this code and insert it into your site. The minimum width required for the Fan Box is 200px, and you should change the number of connections that can be viewed to 100 (the maximum; the default is 10).

Now you can log into your WordPress account, and add the copied code into the Widgets section. Once you log into your WordPress Account, go to the Appearance -> Widgets and then add a new “Text” widget and add the code, and you are done. You have the Facebook Fan Box in your own WordPress blog.

You want to see the end result ? Go to http://5phototips.com/ and see the Fan Box at the right side of the page.