Blogger Tools

Google Webmaster Tools invites webmasters and bloggers to submit an XML compliant sitemap so that all posts, pages, categories and other sections of your blog are fully and quickly indexed by the googlebot crawlers.

With your Google account, you can sign up for webmaster tools and use those tools to improve your site’s accessibility. Submitting a sitemap is one of those tools, this will ensure that all your pages are crawled. The ‘Top Search Queries’ feature will help you to get a better insight of how, when and how often your blog posts are displayed and clicked in Google’s search results. The Diagnostics tool will notify you about crawl errors, pages of your site that generate errors such as 404, HTTP errors and more. There is even a tool you can utilize to see which other sites on the web are linking to your blog and particular articles.

Reason enough to use Google’s Webmaster Tools if you are a smart blogger, but how to go about making an XML compliant sitemap and submit it to Google? As always there is a plugin that can do all the work for us. I have been using Google Sitemap generator for wordpress since a long time. It is the perfect plugin to do the job.

Download the plugin here, upload the files to your wp-content/plugins folder and activate the plugin through the administration interface. Before you can use the plugin, the sitemap needs to be build for the first time. You might want to go through the settings for advanced customization first.

After the sitemap is generated it will be located at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml and each time your write a new post or page, the plugin will automatically rebuild the sitemap and notify Google about the new entries in the sitemap.

If you want to benefit and learn from the diagnostics that Webmaster Tools has to offer you will need to signup and verify your site by adding a meta tag with verification code within in the HEAD tag of your header.php template.

Creating a blog on blogger is free and fairly easy to do. Your webaddress will be assigned on a blogger.com subdomain, and your blog will be hosted on a Google server, thus you avoid paying for the costs of webhosting and a domainname.

When you have a Blogger blog, I suggest you utilize these 12 best and most popular free blogger tools, used by professional bloggers, to get the most out of your new blog.

1. FeedBurner is a tool that will generate a smart feed, compatible with all the free feed readers out there. Using the “Burned feed” generated by feedburner is a great way to distribute your content over the internet. Feedburner, recently acquired by Google, also allows you to put +Add buttons for XML, Yahoo, MSN etc. on your site. Monitor the health of your feed by subscribing to FeedBulletin. Get a cool feed count button to show how many readers have subscripted to your blog feed.
2. Js-Kit is a tool that integrates trackbacks into your blogger blog. It provides other bloggers with a seamless way to add trackbacks to your blog and also imports existing comments and provides live synchronization of new comments with Blogger.
3. Avantblog is free software that allows you to post articles on your blog using a Palm or Windows CE device.
4. My Blog Log tracks outgoing links to let you know where your traffic is going. Discover who’s visiting your site, and connect with your readers.
5. w.bloggar is an application that acts as an interface between the user and one or more blogs. It is a Post and Template editor, with several features and resources that the browser based blog editors do not offer.

Turn your Wordpress powered site into a Youtube Video Blog.

Most bloggers already know that it’s possible to easily embed flash video’s in blog posts. What’s not as well known is that YouTube creates a thumbnail for each video that we can also embed. This makes it possible to create a video blog with an index of clickable thumbnails.

The free Videographer theme works best with the two different plugins: WP Youtube and WP Postratings.

Once everything is installed you can post video’s, simply by including the unique Youtube video ID’s in a custom field in your wordpress posts. With this brilliant theme you an easily turn your wordpress blog into a video blog.

Time to upgrade your blogs again folks. Wordpress 2.5 RC 1 has been released. And this time the changes made are quite drastic. You’ll have to say goodbye to the good old admin interface we’ve worked with for the past years. And accordingly the whole wordpress.org website has been redesigned. Whether you like it or not…

Personally I was so used and familiar to the old admin interface, and frankly I liked it better then this new design, and actually I’m already starting to miss the old look. But let’s have a closer look at the cool new features that come with this upgrade. Its definitely a huge improvement again.

• New option to add in your blog posts (add video, add audio, add media)
• Widget-based dashboard
• Ability to have any number of any widget
• Undo for comment editing
• Search for both posts and pages
• Use wpdb prepare everywhere
• Switch to expect unescaped data for internal functions
• XML-RPC refactor

When I first created this blog, it was my intention to work on my own wordpress themes and release them on this site. However, with so many other opportunities and activities I have online, I couldn’t find the time to start working on a wordpress design. Now we are nine months later, a new year has arrived, and one of my resolutions was to bring new life into some of my neglected websites.

At the moment I find myself almost finished with my very first wordpress theme. This one is not going to be released, as I intend to use it on my own weblog when it’s done, and keep it unique. My 2nd wordpress theme will be released though, and it’s going to be a clean, lite Web2.0 theme.

In the meantime I wanted to share with you some of the themes from other designers that I found when searching for Web2.0 themes. I noticed that many people frequently use the term web2.0 to describe their designs, however, most of them don’t actually have much 2.0 style to be named as such.

Some of the themes that I found to be Web 2.0 Worthy are listed below. These five pretty wordpress themes all feature their own unique characteristics with detail for web 2.0 graphic design elements.

This first theme is called Sodelicious and was created by Rui Castro of web2themes.com. It has a web 2.0 style design with 3 nice features; a Slideshow screen on the left where you can place an animation or featured content, a big sidebar on the right that includes 3 widget sidebars, and 4 social bookmarks buttons that are automatically placed in your posts.

The 2nd theme, made by Aditi Tuteja, was named Curved because of the nice rounded blue corners. This theme supports widgets, and has a nice striped header along with tabbed navigation.

Gossip City is a web2.0 wordpress theme, created by DesignDisease, and is the perfect theme for your gossip and celebrity weblogs. It has a stylish 3-column, widget ready with sweet color palette theme, and was released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

The next theme comes from Ndesign Studio and has a High-tech, glossy Mac style with web 2.0 mini icons. Validated XHTML and CSS, Web 2.0 colors.… the perfect WordPress theme for your technology-related blog.

And finally the last theme is the rather simple looking Webby Blue Design from Justskins.com. This is a 2-column, widgets ready Web2.0 style wordpress theme, with light blue colors. Theme was tested with Wordpress 2.2.x.

I hope that this post was useful to you. Make sure to visit this site again anytime next month, hopefully I have released my own 2.0 theme by then.

When you post a new article on your blog at least once per week, you don’t have to worry that much about getting visitors once your site has an established presence in the search engines. All it takes is to frequently write some unique and quality blog posts, and then the searchengines would automatically send you a ton of traffic for free. And besides that, most blogging systems have features included that enables your site to syndicate it’s content through RSS and pinging services.

But in case you are in need of more readers for your blog, there are plenty of ways to realize that. It’s called Blog Promotion, and it doesn’t necessarily have to cost any money. Below I have pointed out three of the easiest free methods for getting more visitors to your blog.

1. Utilize the potential of content syndication
Like I mentioned above, most blog platforms have syndication tools integrated that will allow you to distribute your content over the web, and with systems such as wordpress you can define a custom list of ping services that will be notified automatically each time when you add new content to your blog. In an instance, a link with a description of your newest blog post could appear anywhere on the web to surfers who use the particular content networks that you’ve pinged.

By default, wordpress has added a limited number of update services to the ping list, including Technorati and Ping-O-Matic. The list can be found under the Options » Writing Tab of the administration panel. It is recommended to manually add at least the more important services, like Google Blogsearch. But many more can be added! There is a comprehensive list of English blog pinging services available on the wordpress codex site.

TIP: It is recommended to make use of the wordpress Optional Excerpt feature, if you don’t want your original post content – or parts of it – to be syndicated through these networks. Many networks redistribute their content which means that other webmasters could easily display your work on their websites using RSS parsers. Using optional Excerpts will prevent your post content from being copied via the RSS source, because it allows you to specify a different feed description for your articles.

2. Gaining more exposure with the PingBack feature.
PingBack is a weblog feature meant to link related blog posts from different authors together. It works like this: If you include a link in one of your articles to another blog post that has pingback enabled, then the author of that blog would get a notification in the form of a pingback, and would have to approve it as if it was a comment. When approved, a link with description of your post would be automatically included as a comment, and the pingback is completed. This could ultimately drive more blog readers to your site.

3. Submitting to Blog Directories
Submitting your site to Blog Directories is usually free, however in some cases you are required to link back to them somewhere on your site or in a post. But let me briefly explain how submitting to Blog Directories could benefit your weblog. First of all, your listing would of course generate some degree traffic for your blog. But also, a relevant link is seen by the search engines as a recommendation, a “vote” if you will, for your site. By gaining more “votes”, your rankings in the search results of these engines would improve, which could mean they would send you even more traffic.

I will end this post with a long list of blog directories to which you may submit your link for free. I will keep this list updated so be sure to visit back once in a while. Furthermore I wish you all the best for the new year!

• Powered by Wordpress Directory
• Blog Catalog
• Blog Hub
• BlogFlux
• Blogarama
• Blog Toplist
• Top Blog Area
• Best Blogs
• We Blog Alot
• Best of the Web Blog Directory
• Total Blog Directory
• Bloggeries
• Blogoozle
• Blog Rankings
• Search 4 Blogs
• Blogging Fusion
• Blogadr
• Blog Announce
• Bloggapedia
• Bloggernity

Good luck and Happy Blogging !

In this post I’m going to show how to embed flash into your wordpress blog posts. This will allow you to show youtube videos directly from your blog. KLM Flashembed is a plugin for wordpress that will do the trick. Download the latest version and upload the files to your plugins folder, then activate the plugin in your wordpress administration panel.

When writing a post or page, you can embed the youtube video with the following code:

[*kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/jZULGg9kfCo" height="350" width="425" /]
(remove the asterisk *)

“jZULGg9kfCo” is to be replaced with the video ID. Width and height is optional and can be adjusted to fit in . The output of the above code would look like this:

RunPHP by James van Lommel, is a Plugin for WordPress that enables bloggers to embed PHP code directly into their posts.

How to use:

• Download the plugin from the author’s site, and upload the files to the plugin directory of your wordpress weblog (/wp-content/plugins).
• Activate the plugin by logging into your WordPress administration panel, going to ‘Plugins’ on the menu bar, then clicking Activate at the end of the RunPHP row.
• Now add php codes in your posts and pages, by simply checking the new option box that says ‘run PHP code?’

The code executed by runPHP is not in the global scope. It is executed as if it were inside a function block and so you’ll need to declare your globals accordingly.

Note: The plugin doesn’t work with few badly written WordPress themes. This is most likely caused by a missing wp_head() call in the theme’s header template (often called header.php). If that is the case, fixing it is simply a matter of inserting.

Wordpress adsense themes are the easiest way to place your adsense or other contextual ad codes on your blog. All you have to do is to replace the publisher code in the appropriate template files of the adsense theme.

This SEO Friendly Wordpress Adsense Theme was made by Coleen Chard and it’s called WP Colors. The theme is available in both fluid and fixed width, and four different color combinations. click here for a demo

WP Colors is adsense ready, with three locations for optimal exposure of your ads (728×90, 300×250 and 120×600). Instructions on where to replace your publisher ID are included in the download. The theme is also compatible with widgets

This adsense theme is SEO friendly, it’s making use of negative margins and the sidebar content comes after the main content in the source code, so your main content is spidered first, which is generally important to search engines.

The strategic placement of the ads in this template has proven to increase the clicktrough rate on your contextual ads, as as they are integrated around your content, complying with Google’s quality guidelines.