Blogger Tools

Wordpress 2.5 Released - drastic changes

Blogger Tools — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:14:49 +0000

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

Wordpress Web2.0 Themes

Blogger Tools — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:30:35 +0000

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.

More visitors to your Blog

Blogger Tools — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 18:09:34 +0000

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!

Good luck and Happy Blogging !

Embed youtube videos in wordpress with KLM Flashembed plugin

Blogger Tools — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 19:05:15 +0000

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 - Include PHP in your wordpress blog posts or pages

Blogger Tools — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 12:18:38 +0000

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 theme - WP Colors

Blogger Tools — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 23:43:10 +0000

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.

Welcome to Bloggertools.org

Blogger Tools — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 12:59:48 +0000

Welcome to my newest Blog. On this weblog I want to write about the many blog tools that are available. Personally I find it very interesting to extend wordpress with plugins and addons.

Currently I am working on my own wordpress templates which I will release soon. I have been designing websites since 2005 and it became an addictive hobby to publish content on the internet and making attractive designs. So far I have been creating only static html designs, but ever since I discovered the power of blogging I have been focusing on the many dynamic content management systems. The wonderful blogging community has inspired me to launch bloggertools.org

I hope this weblog will be useful for those of you seeking for information and resources about the wonderful world of blogging. Be sure to visit again soon as more content will be published from today on.

Thank you for your visit