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How to add Tweet Button from Twitter

January 20, 2011 by

Would you like to add the authentic, official Tweet Button from Twitter.com to your blog or website? It is the best choice if you want to avoid plugins that can increase your pages load time (increased page load time is not good for SEO) and eat up your server’s valuable storage space? If yes, this button is for you.

The benefits: It allows your visitors to share your content on Twitter without leaving your site or blog and helps you promote your Twitter account at the same time.

There are three buttons to choose from and you have the options to customize them if you wish. Given below are the simple steps to add Tweet Button to your website/ blog:

1. Choose your button that suits your taste from the three buttons showing vertical count, horizontal count or the only the button showing no count, and customize it (if you like) with your Tweet text that people will include in their tweets automatically.

2. You can optionally recommend up to two Twitter accounts for your users to follow after they share content from your website, including your own or your friends or associates.

3. Once you have done the above steps, you can just copy and paste the self-generated code into your site or blog! Done!

Here below is a simple Tweet Button with no count. Try it.

Button with vertical count is below:

Button with horizontal count is below:

Make your own Tweet Button at Twitter.

Filed Under: Blogging, How-to, Plugins Tagged With: , , , ,

Harmful Hidden Codes in Free WordPress Themes

December 25, 2010 by

After having encountered some unexpected problems like pre-installed AdSense link unit codes, theme supplier’s RSS feeds URLs, and some other codes like multiple URLs of third parties that I could not remove from any visible PHP files, I made a search for the possible reasons, as I knew that some FREE theme suppliers do include such codes as a price or cost for supplying such free themes. One of the most popular WordPress theme developers is transparent enough to declare in his site that certain codes are pre-installed to set off the costs for developing themes and running the site. He frankly instructed to join as a member and get the instructions to remove the codes, of course for a small membership free, and it is worth it.

In the case of another themes supplier, the approach was different. The instructions in the supplier’s site simply said that for free themes no support or guidance is available, and for support (meaning to remove unwanted codes or remove ads or other things not related to you), you should select only premium themes. I even appreciate such an approach.

But what about themes that do not have any visible problems, but have hidden codes that are encrypted and embedded in the theme files, quite often in such a fashion that you cannot detect them? Such codes can even steal your passwords and login details and all that can cause losses and security problems for your business and site. A detailed explanation with examples can be found at www.tech-evangelist.com.

If you are using a free WordPress blog, you are the safest, because everything supplied therein are pre-tested and safe. For those who install WordPress in their own self-hosted WordPress sites too, there are 1,296 themes available for free download, which show 25,066,203 downloads at the time of writing this post. You can go to http://wordpress.org/extend/themes and download FREE themes from there. These are WP-tested themes and hence safe.

The next alternative is to go to the sites of the developers of the same themes offered by WP and download FREE themes, if available (most of them offer both FREE and premium themes).

Also, there are thousands of reliable theme developers who offer free WordPress themes and plugins as a community service for WP. Search around and you will get the preferred theme that is safe too. In the next posts, I will include the addresses/ URL sources of some such reliable theme suppliers. Anyway, my intention is not to say that all themes suppliers and developers are embedding malicious codes, but there are a few who do so.

Filed Under: Themes Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

New Facebook Registration Plugin for WordPress

December 24, 2010 by

Facebook has recently released a customizable registration form that can be auto-completed by the existing Facebook users. It can be easily integrated into your WordPress site’s registration process with the Facebook Registration Plugin for WordPress.

This tool was developed by Facebook Developer Paul Tarjan and it provides a user-friendly registration process to integrate Facebook into your blog or site. When this plugin is installed in your site, Facebook automatically completes the registration form for Facebook users, and another form for those not wanting or able to utilize Facebook to register.

This plugin also allows users to sign up for your site with their Facebook accounts. It is a simple iframe that you can drop into your page. When users log into Facebook, they see a form that is pre-filled with their Facebook information. It also eliminates the need to go through two separate logins.

Installation of this WordPress plugin is quite easy. You can simply download it from WordPress plugin repository and unzip in your plugins directory. Then activate it using the Plugins menu option in your Admin Panel, when a ‘Facebook Registration’ options page will be available under ‘Settings’. Simply enter your Facebook App ID and App Secret in this page, and you are done.

You can download the Facebook Registration Plugin from WordPress here. For more information and support of this plugin go to http://beyondwp.com/2010/12/21/facebook-registration-plugin-for-wordpress/.

Filed Under: Plugins Tagged With: , ,

RSS problems and solutions for WordPress

December 23, 2010 by

While I was searching for something regarding RSS feeds, I came across a highly informative tutorial named 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks For WordPress written by Jean-Baptiste Jung for Smashing Magazine. I think many bloggers and readers can make use of it and solve certain problems relating to RSS feeds. As RSS is very powerful for blog syndication and WordPress is the most preferred platform for blogs, the problems and their solutions suggested by Jung covers useful RSS-related hacks for WordPress. It contains solutions for the problems and the codes to solve the problems.

The first problem listed in the article relates to the mistakes that you may notice in your new post, but before you make the corrections it will be published in your RSS feed. You can gain a time gap by creating a delay between the publication of the post and its availability in your RSS feed by pasting a code into your theme’s function.php file so that you can edit your post after which only the RSS feed will be published.

Many WordPress blog-beginners may start using FeedBurner only after having created a lot of content and a lot of subscribers might have subscribed to the default WordPress feed. In such a case, how do you start using FeedBurner without losing the existing subscribers? The suggested solution also helps those who change their WP themes quite often and have to edit bloginfo and replace their FeedBurner URL. You can edit the .htaccess file and add a code to redirect visitors to your FeedBurner feeds and to avoid the hassle of manually editing your RSS feed every time you change your themes.

For monetizing RSS feeds, FeedBurner can insert AdSense ads into your feeds, but you cannot use other ads. The suggested solution is to edit the functions.php file and paste a code into it, without editing WordPress core files.

Though your blog may look great, when the post is displayed in an RSS reader, it may not display images. To avoid this problem, it is suggested to add a CSS class to display the image as a block.

Sometimes bloggers publish news or announcements that they do not want to appear in their feeds. The problem can be solved by excluding the numeric ID of the category editing the functions.php file by pasting a code.

Many blogs talk about a lot of different topics, but your subscribers may like only some categories in their feeds. Similarly, you may like to display the names of all your category feeds in a list to your readers by editing any of your theme files, where you want to list your categories and their accompanying feeds, by using the ‘wp list categories’ function.

The last problem and the solution suggested is regarding using WordPress as a CMS to manage online portfolios or company websites, when the RSS feed may not be that useful. The hack to do the job is to paste a code in the functions.php file without disturbing the wp-settings.php core file.

Filed Under: Blogging, RSS Tagged With: , , , , , , ,