Here is another very short YouTube video on how to move a blog, i.e., migrating your blog to WordPress from other blogging software such as TypePad or Blogger. Please note that you can find many tutorials like this on the Internet, and you will find many more articles posted by professional bloggers. The most important thing is that many of them may not give you the complete idea, and it is for you to understand each step before you move your well-established blog. If you mess around things that you do not understand you may neither have your established old blog nor the new blog on WordPress. So, backup every thing before you prepare yourself to move.
Video: Blogger to WordPress migration
January 25, 2011 by
Here is a short but very lucid video clip by Amit Agarwal, one of the most successful blogger and the founder of Digital Inspiration. It explains how you can migrate your blog from Blogger (blogspot.com) to WordPress, without losing your Google juice, RSS readers, etc. For more clarity and step by step instructions go to the post entitled Migrate your Blog from Blogger to WordPress
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How to beat the low-traffic syndrome?
January 6, 2011 by
Well, traffic is the life-force of any blog or site. It is especially so if you are a blogger and started blogging with dreams of building up a blog that is visited by a lot of people who are interested in the unique content that you create. Your enthusiasm may last a few days till you are hit by the biggest dampener of your blogging spirit – very low traffic or almost no visitors on certain days.
It happens because of a few things. First and foremost, it takes a few days for your blog to be indexed by search engines that sent the bulk of traffic to most sites. Even if you submit your blog or site to search engines this may happen. Links exchanges and other means of link building also help, though link exchanges are not counted by search engines like Google for your link popularity computation. Commenting on other blogs and sites helps a lot, but mostly in the form of clicks from visitors to those blogs who find your views interesting. The maximum benefits from the SEO point of view comes when your links are picked up by other blogs and quoted to show some important views expressed by you, or to recommend your blog otherwise. However, all these take time. But you have to continue link building, and keep updating your blog with new compelling fresh and unique content.
Posting some content every day, many times a day, or at least as frequently as you can, helps in many ways, because, as soon as you post something, search engines are alerted and your blog is crawled and indexed. A regular practice like this can boost your traffic in a very short duration of time. When more visitors come in, it provides a psychological boost to your enthusiasm to blog more and more.
Reading inspirational and motivating posts in other blogs and authentic sources like WordPress can motivate you and lift your sagging spirits. Today I read such an article published by WordPress.com titled Challenge for 2011: Want to blog more often? and that made me write this post. It is really inspiring because it gives you tips to think and concentrate on ideas to blog about.
How to modify WordPress Themes
December 26, 2010 by
If you are using a standard WordPress theme other than a custom theme developed exclusively for you, chances are that you will lose all the modifications that you made to your theme, when the original theme is modified by the theme developer.
As most of you using ready-to-use WordPress must have noted that you always want to make changes in the look and appearance of the theme. The easiest way to do such changes without changing the core design or structure is to edit the CSS style sheet. For example, you do not like the font Verdana and want to replace it with Arial, you simply add Arial as the first font in the appropriate places in the style sheet. And you are done and find your site or blog showing up with your desired font.
In the above way, you can change font sizes, colors, and many other things just by editing the style sheet. With changes in some other files, you can entirely change the look and feel of your site. Some people may love to present their site in the most aesthetic way and experiment with the themes and style a lot. This may be required even in a custom designed theme, as you find something or the other always needing improvements.
So, you have done everything and all on a sudden everything is lost! You feel frustrated. To avoid this create a Child Theme, the original theme remaining as the parent theme. By doing this, when the parent theme is updated by its developer, you can still continue with your own modified theme as your modifications are automatically preserved, as the Child Theme settings override the Parent Theme, as the Child Theme inherits the functionality of the Parent Theme.
To create Child Theme, simply create its own directory named as ‘original theme-child (or anything you like), and place your modified style.css file in it, and you have a child theme of your own! You can do so without modifying the styling and layout of a parent theme, with some understanding of HTML and CSS. Such a Child Theme works as good as your own custom designed theme and it is not affected when the parent theme is updated. Your newly created child theme can have as little as a style.css file to as much as any full-fledged theme contains with the optional additions of functions.php, template files and other files. For a good understanding of creating your own Child Theme and examples of changes and scripting, visit official WordPress Codex for Child Themes.
WP announces WordPress 3.1 Release
December 25, 2010 by
As a Christmas present for those who love WordPress, the first release candidate (RC1) for WordPress 3.1has been announced on December 25, 2010. It comes after the Beta stage and before final release.
Though WP 3.1 does not have any known issues or bugs to be fixed, it is possible that WP developers might have missed something, especially as regards plugins and other software running based on the core WP software, the release announcement says.
It is available for free download, but WordPress advices to download and test it, and ‘not on your live site unless you’re extra adventurous’. To test WordPress 3.1, you may want to try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin.
You can find the original WP 3.1 release announcement and download WordPress 3.1 RC 1 HERE.
WordPress Recommended Web Hosting Companies
December 25, 2010 by
When I decided to setup this WordPress blog, my first effort was to find out a hosting company that gives me a comfortable data storage facility at an affordable price. Such a company must also meet the standard technical specifications of WordPress too.
As one of my sites with my own domain and shared hosting is running from 2006 onwards, I know the limitations and the problems a hosting company can create for the website owner. Though I do not face any serious problems from my hosting company so far, there were too many limitations that I am not comfortable with them. So, I wanted to avoid such problems and did not want to use my existing webhosting company’s services. Moreover, it is a website hosted on Windows server.
Whenever you need a hosting service like WP blog hosting, the best way to find out which company suits what kind of hosting is to find out how other WP blogs are comfortable with which hosting service provider. So, I visited many WP blogs, read the opinions of other bloggers, and read the recommendations of WordPress.
Frankly, all these put me into more confusion, and the whole exercise took more than a week, and it did not make me any wiser than before. Then, I mostly depended on my own ideas, and bought a domain and hosting from GoDaddy.com, though many others may be much better than them.
I also have plans to migrate some of my blogs hosted on Blogger (free hosting, though with my custom domains) to WordPress and I want to use different hosts for each of my blogs for my own reasons. That means, though this blog is already hosted, I am still on the lookout of other hosting companies. And I am back on the recommendations of WordPress for hosting.
In the opinion of WordPress, Bluehost, DreamHost, MediaTemple (mt) and Laughing Squid meet the best hosting environment recommended by WP, though the vast majority of hundreds of thousands of web hosts out there. Also, if you go to the WP page where the hosting details are published and click on the link or banners there, ‘some will donate a portion of your fee back—so you can have a great host and support WordPress.org at the same time’.
At Bluehost you can have ‘WordPress Auto-Install’, get unlimited storage and unlimited monthly data transfer, host unlimited domains on one hosting account and they promise one free domain as long as you host with them. They also offer many more facilities, including free Fantastico, free SimpleScripts, and mirrored storage backups.
DreamHost offers unlimited domains on one hosting account, unlimited databases, storage and bandwidth, plus a free domain registration forever, topped with a 2-week free trial. I prefer them for the FREE-TRIAL offer!
MediaTemple offers a 1-Click WordPress installer and updater, 100GB storage, 1TB data transfer and allows multiple sites at a monthly price of $20 for their lowest priced plan, which is slightly higher than the above two companies. But, I think they may be more supportive and user-friendly, though I have no experience about their services.
The fourth hosting company on the WP recommended list is Laughing Squid that offers cloud hosting services that are available in multiple plans. Micro Squid Plan at $6/ month(1 GB disk space, 25 GB bandwidth), Mega Squid at $8/ month (2 GB disk space, 75 GB bandwidth), Ultra Squid at $12/ month (3 GB disk space, 150 GB bandwidth), and Super Squid at $16/ month (4 GB disk space, 200 GB bandwidth).
Go to the WordPress page at http://wordpress.org/hosting/ and make your choice, click on your choicest the hosting company there and enjoy the special discounts offered for WordPress users.
How to Install WordPress – Video
December 23, 2010 by
In this short video, Michael Pollock, the marketing and product development expert of Solostream, explains in a simple, yet, in a lucid way, how to setup WordPress successfully. Pollock is ‘also a blogger, a WordPress developer and an entrepreneur’ as I understand from the site of Solostream. I hope those who find setting up WordPress difficult, especially bloggers who are new to WordPress, shall find this video tutorial highly useful.
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.
