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If you’re a Twitter bug, like I am, you’ll really appreciate this plugin, it’s called Tweet My Blog. I have zero time. Really. Zero. If you know of a great time merchant, I’ll be there in a flash.
Anyway, that’s what makes this plugin so cool. You tweet the minute you hit the Publish button because the plugin does it for you. Watch how easy it is to install. I made a Camtasia about it. Check it out:
Whoa. Really, really cool stuff going on over at WordPress.org. They’ve released WordPress 2.6 with some totally sweet options.
Here’s a quick rundown:
Preview past post revisions.
WP 2.6 lets you see what you’ve done before and even compare revisions to see which is best very easily.
New Press This! button allows you to post from wherever you are online
Snatch snippets of other blog posts, pictures, and get them onto your blog. (With proper crediting, of course.)
See your theme before you actually change it.
A new preview window allows you to see what a theme will look like with your content before you hit the change button.
Get your word count!
This is totally something I can use. Find out how many words are in each post you make.
Give your pictures captions
Let people know what your picture is about.
Fantastico doesn’t have it yet, though, and I’m lazy. I’ll wait. That way, the bugs might be worked out of the new software before I use it. Love that WordPress.
First, I want to thank all of you that wrote a comment or something on Facebook or emailed me to say, “Happy Birthday.” That was totally cool and I appreciate every one of you. You made my day.
But today, I wanted to tell you about this cool little plugin I got today called, “Who Sees Ads?” It allows you to insert ads in a post or into the PHP of the blog template, and it lets you decide who sees them.
For example, if you’re a regular reader, I don’t want you to have to see an ad more than once. If you like it great, if not… It’s nuked after the first or second time you visit.
Or, you can tell it after the ad has been shown 1,000 times (or however many times you choose), don’t show it anymore.
Or don’t show it after a certain date.
Pretty sweet.
What’s even sweeter is that it gives you this little snippet of code, you enter the name of the ad you want shown (you pick these names yourself), and once you put it into the HTML of your post, voila! The ad appears.
It’s pretty simple to use, but if you’re brand new to blogging it could be a tad confusing. I’d wait until you get some chops. Shouldn’t take long for you to catch up, but if you don’t know anything about playing in HTML or PHP, it’s probably not for you.
Check it out below…
Just downloaded Firefox 3.0 today, too. We’ll see how that goes… Maybe tomorrow.
Thanks again for the birthday wishes! The whole day totally ruled.
I was over at Blogosphere News today and see that we’re getting yet another upgrade to WordPress–version 2.6, which is due out in August. The changes are interesting, but not sure how awesome. They’re integrating with Google Gears and making it harder to lose posts if your browser crashes and such. I mean, those things are interesting, but… it may be a developer dream. Since I’m not one of those, I’ll withhold judgment until I see the results.
I also watched a video today that was pretty interesting from Michael Gray of GrayWolf’s SEO Blog
He says that it’s best to make your blog super simple for the GoogleBot. Well, we knew that, but here’s something I never thought of. (And Duh… shame on me.) Michael says that when you’re choosing a category for your post, it’s best to keep it in ONE category, not two or three or the “very bright for a 5-year-old” GoogleBot may think that you have dupe content on your blog.
Well…
We all know that’s bad.
I’m going back and changing the posts that I just had to add categories to for my readers’ sake.
But, then, who needs readers?
I mean, I want to be a good SEO person and do all the right SEO stuff and make the Google ghods love me, but hey…
The audience is really what matters, eh?
From here on, I may try to keep my categories singular.
Wow. I always wait a little while when WordPress makes sweeping changes to their software. I don’t care how great the programmers are (and WordPress is totally smokin’ awesome), there are going to be bugs. I like to wait until the bugs are worked out.
But…
I have a membership site about learning to blog and Web 2.0 and all kind of cool stuff about blogging, and decided that so as not to confuse my members, I’d better do the upgrade.
Wow.
My favorite feature thus far?
Automatic plugin updating.
OMG… It’s totally awesome. Plugins aren’t hard to upgrade, of course, but they’re time consuming, especially when you have as many as I do. But the newest version of WordPress has a new feature… the automatic upgrade. You click on the link and it downloads, unzips, installs, and reactivates the plugin for you!
Is that cool or what?
I’m in blogger heaven today. Still haven’t checked out all the cool features, but if the automatic plugin installer was the only thing new, I’d still be tooting WordPress’s horn.
So, if you have a WordPress blog and pay any attention at all to the WordPress development blog, you’ll realize that the WordPress guys and gals are ready to launch a new version–again.
I’m a huge WordPress acolyte. In my membership training site, it’s all I recommend. I mean, I LOVE WordPress.
But what happens? Everyone is totally confused again. Ah… well, grist for my training mill. I guess it’s a good thing.
What will some of the changes be?
First, an entirely new Dashboard. Looks pretty hot. You’ll be able to see stats much easier, and comments and such. Looks more Web 2.0-ish. WordPress is going more social. That’s the bottom line.
You’ll be able to put up a photo gallery, have sub-categories, and the organization will be simplified. You can read all about it:
Or, duh… Just go to your dashboard, and click the link.
WordPress says it changed the dashboard for the simple reason that we just don’t pay attention to it. Well… I do.
Anyway, I’m excited. I think this new creation will be pretty cool. However, I’ll wait to try it, since it’s still in beta. I don’t have the patience for too many quirks, nor the time. But… If you’re a developer or total blog geek, you can download the beta version at the link above.
You go, WordPress, but I’ll wait until it’s stable, thanks.
What’s up with WordPress? Every other day, there’s another security issue and we have to upgrade again. Argh. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could figure out everything at the same time so that we only needed to upgrade once?
Would be. Not possible, but it would be nice.
So, I’ve upgraded this blog at least three times that I can remember, and then, there are the plugins and the themes that don’t jibe, and on and on…
It’s exhausting.
People who are new to blogging are usually wary of doing things like upgrades. But here’s the thing to remember, if you don’t, you’re leaving yourself wide open for mischief.
You may or may not know this, but someone hacked my blog around September and I lost everything. It’s my own dumb fault for not backing things up properly (and WordPress Databackup Plugin is so frickin’ simple to use that I should be smacked). But you get busy and you think you’re going to do something, and who’d want to mess with my blog, anyway, and you just never get around to doing things.
How would you like to lose 2 years of posts? Thousands of trackbacks and comments, and on and on…
Very frustrating.
Still, I wish I had that stuff back. WordPress Database Backup plugin now mails the contents to me every week.
If you’re running Wordpress, unless you’ve already locked down your Wp-content folder with some .htaccess fixes, you may not notice that your Wp-content/plugins folder is naked and bare to the world. That is, navigate to http://www.yourblogname.com/wp-content/plugins and you may find a directory listing of your plugins folder, files and all. How do you fix it? Easy. Just upload an empty index.html into the wp-content/plugins folder and its all fixed.
Well, thank you, Deep Jive! Really hard to do, eh? I don’t want my plugins folder or anything else about me naked in public.
You know, I’m all for list building from my blog, but something in this theme won’t allow me to customize my AWeber form. I tried everything from shortening the name and address boxes to moving everything left, and on and on, and it still came up all FUBAR. You know?
Zo…
I used the pop-up for a while, but it was annoying, even to me! Everytime I tried to check the page, the dam-ned pop-up was there driving me nuts.
And zo…
One of my friends, Charles Burleigh from StayHomeDads.com to be exact, sent his list (which I’m on) a message about pinging and how with WordPress’s auto ping feature it pings every time you make a change to your blog. Well, we certainly don’t want to upset the Ghods of Pingdom and cause our blogs to be banned from the services.
Charles recommended Ping Optimizer from MaxBlogPress. It stops your blog from pinging more than once for each new post. Cool.
But then, I found that MaxBlogPress has more great plugins…
Notice my pop-up? There isn’t one, unless this is the 3rd time you’ve come to my blog. It will show you this cool lightbox pop up for my newsletter a time or two and then, you won’t see it again. It’s very neat. Also from MaxBlogPress, it’s called Unblockable Popup. Fan-freakin-tastic. I love it.
But…
Then…
I found the other one. See that little note at the top of the screen? It’s unobtrusive, right? Well, it rotates different text ads. I have one for HostGator running and one for AWeber, both services I stand behind completely. They rock! I also have an ad for my membership site up there, Blogging4Boomers. (I haven’t formally launched the site, but I’m proud to say that the members I have truly love it.)
And they have several others. This post is getting kind of long, so I won’t describe them all, but you have to check these out. All of them ROCK OUT LOUD!
Have you been over to 103Bees yet? (That’s 10 “cubed” bees, not 103 bees, so like 1,000 bees). What does it do? Well, it’s kind of like Google Analytics. When I first looked at it, I thought, why would I need it? But then, I figure there is no such thing as being too rich or having too many stats. I’m a real stats geek.
So, I’ve used it on my blog. Let’s see what it does for me.
103 Bees is supposed to tell me what the longtail phrases should be for my blog, based on my posts and what people search. Neato. But it will also tell you where to put your AdSense (on what pages specifically) so that you can get more AdSense income, and other cool things like that. Great.
I’m not sure that’s important to this blog, but if I like what I see, I’ll add it to my clients’ blogs. Let’s see how that goes.
Also, the recent renovation at BlogRush is pretty cool, too. The stats are much better, and they’re well presented. It’s not hard to see exactly what’s going on, but there is a video. I haven’t had time to watch just yet, but I plan to do that tomorrow. Anyway, cool beans, Mr. Reese & Co. I’m getting lots of exposure and some traffic. I see it getting better and better over time, as more people catch on.
Still no word on why List Building Blog got bumped. I’m going to resubmit it this week. I can’t imagine why. The widget was high on the page, the content is killer, like 200+ posts on list building and Internet marketing, and it looks really good, too. And then…
WordPress decided to upgrade again. The theme isn’t WP2.3.1 compatible and neither are two others that I recently changed. Argh! Every time I get things the way I want them, WHOOSH!!! Something comes along and means I have to start over. This blog is being cranky now, too, and if you’ve been reading, you know I just revamped.
Expect more changes.
But then, that’s what keeps us interested, eh? Good thing I love blogging. I even like the customization part of getting a theme and making it the way I want things to be. I almost had a red theme here yesterday, but I was smart. Before I started changing things, I put a sentence into the Write blank and tried to save it. When I got an error code, I saw right away that the theme wasn’t 2.3.1 friendly, either.
So, save yourself a lot of work. Put it up, test it with a quick save, and if it doesn’t work… keep looking.
Here’s to keeping things static in the Blogosphere for a while, guys.
Love that WordPress.
