Technically Personal! » Wordpress

WooThemes Special Offer – Buy 1 Get 4 Themes!

Raju — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:33:16 +0000

Remember the “Gabfire Themes Special Offer – Buy 1 Get 5 Themes“? That was a big hit and now, another popular Wordpress Premium theme designer – Woothemes has come out with a similar stunning offer – Buy 1 get 4 Themes!

Woothemes have just released their 50th Wordpress theme and in celebration of the same, they are doubling their regular 2-for-1 promo. In plain words, this means, if you buy any premium theme from them, you’d get 3 other themes for FREE! With this special 4-for-1 promo you will get 4 premium quality WordPress themes for only $70, making that $17.50 per theme! More importantly, you will get Free support from the WooThemes ninjas!

To grab this super cool offer, all you have to do is simply pick 1 of the themes you would like and go through the purchase process with it. You will then be prompted to specify which 3 bonus themes you want to receive. With the wide variety of themes they have, this is a perfect opportunity for you to grab a high quality Wordpress theme.

Hurry up! The offer is only for a limited time. Promo expires on October 31st, 2009.

Woothemes – Buy 1 Get 4 Offer

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Google Friend Connect Plugin for Wordpress

Raju — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:54:05 +0000

Google Friend Connect plugin for Wordpress has been officially released. All these days, Google Friend Connect was available as a widget, but now there’s a more simpler way to use Friend Connect for WordPress , thanks to Mauro Gonzalez who developed this FriendConnect plugin plugin to extend GFC to WordPress blogs.

This plugin allows your visitors to authenticate using any OpenID account such as Google, Yahoo, or AIM and then comment on your posts with no need to complete a registration form.

When a visitor authenticates as described above, a WordPress account is automatically created for them. You can later add or remove permissions for the visitor from the WordPress site administration pages. If desired, WordPress comments can be replaced by Google Friend Connect comments gadgets.

The idea behind Friend Connect is to have a unified presence across any number of blogs and sites hosted by various services. This eliminates the need to register and manage multiple, separated accounts on different sites. It can be seen as a Facebook Connect competitor of sorts, though the two tools have different target audiences and goals. The main draw of Friend Connect is the ability to leave a comment that is connected to a real account, as opposed to just leaving an anonymous one, without having to create a new one.

Installing the plugin is as easy as any other WordPress plugin and requires you to sign up your site with Friend Connect and then download and install it. Detailed instructions can be found here.

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5 Reasons To Create A Mobile Site For Your Blog

Raju — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:06:46 +0000

This is a Guest post from S.Pradeep Kumar.

Your blog design might be perfectly optimized for the Desktops. But lot of people out there frequently checks your blog for new content using their mobile. You can track that using Google Analytics.

Readers are not interested in the sidebars, navigation part and other sections. When a title is clicked, a mobile friendly version of that page should open on the screen of their mobile phone. Mobile sites are gaining popularity now-a-days. You can easily create a mobile site using Google Reader. Below I mentioned five reasons why you should consider mobile-friendly version of your blog.

1. Increase the mobile traffic : Browsing through mobile is common now-a-days. Most of the mobiles released today have Internet facility. You can access it anywhere and also at any time. When people use the mobile web they are there for a specific reason. They don’t have time to search aimlessly. If your site is optimized for mobile users, they are more likely to click on the links instead of a regular blog designed for PC.

2. Targeted advertising : You can easily hit the mark when choosing right market for your product or any service, since people visit for a specific and targeted reason. With the variation in screen size, choose an advertising platform that offers different ad sizes to accommodate all mobile phones. Get right to the point in ads, telling the user what you want from them. It allows you to reach out to a new group of potential customers.

3. Extra Revenue : Mobile ads will provide you with an additional revenue channel from your blog. Also, your ad is the only one that will appear since only one page is shown at a time. It is not like the PC where you can switch between pages any time that you wish. In Mofuse, you can also integrate your mobile optimized site with Google AdSense and AdMob if you have a Partner ID.

4. Increase Popularity : Yes it increases popularity of your blog. Keeping a mobile site for your blog helps to increase its popularity. Your readers will think good about it, since you have created a mobile friendly site for them to access when they are in mobile web, at anytime and anywhere.

5. Make Your Readers Happy : You can make your readers happy by helping them to read your blog on the go. They may think less of you and your blog if you don’t have a mobile site of your blog that they love. Nobody finds enjoyable to read a PC-optimized blog in Mobile. Most of the PC optimized blogs are unnavigable.

Are you thinking your readers expect cool and attractive design of your blog in their mobile? Think once again! All they need is a decent design of your blog. That’s all. And the posts and articles should be in reverse chronological order.

Editor’s Note: Optimizing your website for mobiles is very important, since many users who access your website via mobiles might still be accessing it through GPRS or other low-speed and low-bandwidth technologies. One should consider this point and optimize their websites exclusively for mobiles. We will see different ways to make websites “mobile friendly” in coming days.

This guest article was written by S.Pradeep Kumar, a technical blogger and writer specializing in blogging tips, product reviews and tutorials. You can also share your tips by writing a guest article on TechPP.

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Easy Comment Firefox Plugin – Blogs Commenting Made Easy

Raju — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 06:18:09 +0000

Easy Comment is a simple firefox extension which helps you fill out blog comments form by entering a prefilled name, email and web homepage address on blogging platforms like WordPress, Movable Type and Dotclear among others. It is designed specifically for users who leave lots of comments on other blogs.

Using Easy Comment add-on for Firefox is really easy to use. Once you install the add-on, click on the Easy Comment text in the status bar and fill up the information to prefill your comments, the comment setup will only have to be done one time, the next time you want to prefill comments, simply click on Easy Comment and it will do the needful.

Easy Comment may not work on certain blogs, which change the default parameters for the comments forms, however pretty useful if you comment a lot and want to save yourself sometime doing it.

Commenting on others’ blogs is really important, not just for SEO purposes, but to build the network and trust amongst fellow bloggers, especially those in the same niche as yours. As a blogger, encouraging the readers to comment on your articles is equally important as it commenting leads into discussion and discussion brings in new ideas to blog about!

If you are convinced that commenting on blogs is important, then go ahead and install Easy Comment extension for Firefox. Make sure you checkout this nice contest on TechZoomIn where you stand to win hard cash every month just by leaving quality comments over this blog!

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Gabfire Themes Special Offer – Buy 1 Get 5 Themes

Raju — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:23:53 +0000

This is a great offer from Gabfire Wordpress themes. Gabfire Themes Special Offer : Buy 1 Get 5 Themes (aff). Yes, you read it right. This time They are going to give five themes for the price of one. You can basically buy any of their themes, and get any 4 themes of your choice completely free.

Gabfire have some amazing Wordpress themes like BlogNews, Wp Advanced Newspaper, WpNewspaper, Suvi Magazine and WpShowcase.

Gabfire Wordpress themes offer – Buy 1 Get 5 Themes

After placing an order, you will receive a download link for the ordered theme. You are needed to reply on that email along with the name of themes you would like to get for free. Gabfire will immediately email you the download links for the themes that you have selected.

This offer is available from 21 to 26 August 23:59 (GMT +2) and will not be either backdate to previous purchases or extend past the 26 Aug.

Just about a day left for the offer to end. Go ahead and grab this amazing offer. Visit Gabfire for more information.

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10 Reasons Why SEO is Important for Your Blog

Raju — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 03:19:20 +0000

This is a Guest Post from Amit.

So you have a blog and you are wondering how to get more people read the blog. You have done your best to write the quality posts but somehow the traffic is not picking up. After reading lot of success stories you must be checking your adsense/analytics account every 20 mins or so just to find that not much traffic has trickled down to your blog. You know something is missing but then it is difficult to digest that how such beautiful articles can be ignored by people.

Many people fail to understand that the problem is not with their articles but the problem is how they market their articles. Lot of great ideas in this world has failed miserably just because they were never sold in a proper manner. Likewise if you are only concentrating on writing good stuff without any effort of marketing it, there are chances that success may be delayed by long time.

There are three ways to attract traffic – Referrals, Direct Traffic and Search Engines. Of all these forms Search Engines is the best way to drive the traffic to your blog. In layman terms the mechanism to draw traffic from the search engines to your blog is achieved through a technique called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. It is an ability to write and present your articles to search engines in a manner that it finishes at top of results for your specified term or keyword. Users generally search for a keyword and look for articles listed in first few pages of the search engine and if your article is amongst those, there is high probability that user would come and read it.

Many people don’t put much efforts to learn SEO techniques thinking it to be very difficult. Many times they rely on their luck to attract traffic. Whenever they even try to read about it, they feel lost just because much has been written about SEO related to Business Websites rather than Blogs. Practically it is 10 percent of your effort which gives you 90 percent of results (how to do it would be covered in next series, it is important first you get convinced that it is must for you).

Apart from Traffic there are very important uses of SEO which are largely ignored. However these are things which you learn by practice but once mastered it helps you to becomes wise and attract traffic in multiple numbers. Below are 10 myths and uses of SEO which has the potential to enrich your blogging experience as a whole. Concentrate on each one of them and you would find good results in coming days. Also if you think that you know much about SEO, below points would help you to provide an extra perspective.

1. SEO is not a Hack

SEO is of two types. White hat SEO and Black hat SEO. White hat SEO is something which is recognized by search engines and they publish the guidelines for it also (Yes, there is a guidelines from Google too). Black Hat SEO is basically a way to cheat search engines and if you get caught there are huge penalties. Hence SEO (always White Hat in this article) is not a hack but recognized standard. You master it and search engine would be much happy to present you at the top of the results.

2. Traffic

SEO has a potential to draw tremendous traffic to your blog. Forget everything, if your articles are at top of search results you need not care about other forms to draw traffic. The opportunity to draw traffic is so huge that people have literally made huge bucks in short amount of time.

3. Search Engine Fodder

It is a term used when your articles are never found in top pages of search page and it seems that search engines has digested and forgotten about it. This is primarily due to competition for specific terms and implementation of poor SEO techniques. Remember, if SEO is done in a right manner, the article stands a chance to compete in top results irrespective of competition.

4. Aligns Your Thinking

Once you start to think from SEO perspective, you start to approach an article in terms of keywords searched by users. This provides an interesting perspective from the angle of demand in the market. Once you know about the demand there is every reason to satisfy it by writing SEO enriched articles. Wordtracker, Overture, adwords etc. provides important tools to help you get feel of the demand.

5. SEO helps generates Ideas

Once traffic starts flowing to your blog, you can monitor the flow through sites like hittail, mybloglog etc. The insight into what people use in terms of keywords (short and long tail) at times helps you generate lot of ideas. Many times you would find that title of your next post comes from terms searched by the user, something which you haven’t ever thought of.

6. Competition

An insight into SEO would help you to look at competition from entirely different angle. Not only would you know what strategy they are using but also what keywords are bringing them traffic. You would read their articles and would be in a comfortable position to comprehend their strategy. Additionally there are sites like alexa, compete.com etc. which lists the keywords that brings them traffic. Once you have knowledge of this you can definitely eat into their market share.

7. SEO Takes Little Time

SEO takes little time and is not all that complex. It is a myth people have in their mind because whatever they have heard till now is in terms of business websites and not blogs. Remember, business website needs a concentrated approach in one direction while in blog an approach changes with every post.

8. Validation

The results from SEO show up on your face. So if any blog post is not attracting traffic you have an opportunity to change it. While a minimum of about 4%-5% articles normally contribute to traffic in your blog through search engines but if you not achieving this figure than you should re-look at your strategy. SEO helps to validate your efforts in terms of results that show up in form of traffic.

9. Check Mistakes

Every bit of incoming or no traffic provides you an opportunity to check mistakes. The steps in SEO can be changed time and again till the time you achieve desired results. The effort spent in first few posts would make you knowledgeable enough not to commit the same mistake in subsequent posts.

10. Helps You Grow

SEO has this uncanny habit to not only make you slog but also make wise with time. Soon you would find that your way to approach content and market has changed. You would find yourself more aligned to needs of your readers than fictitious thoughts in your mind. This is an essential step which would help you gain a rightful entry into blogging world (the place which is full of competition).

Are you convinced now that SEO is must for your blog and at any time it should not be ignored? How you do it would be covered in next series of articles but you must be signed to work hard on it. It is always advisable to spend more time in one SEO oriented post than write plenty of posts. The logic – “Your content would be of no use if there are not enough people to appreciate it.”

This is a guest-post by Amit, who is a blogging enthusiast and has interest in everything that relates to it. He currently own and maintains a blog Mystic Madness which concentrates on Personal Development related to Professional Life. His main areas of interest are Personality Development and Job Hacks. You can also share your tips by writing a guest article on TechPP.

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Ultimate Resources to Help Secure Your Wordpress Blog

Raju — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:18:34 +0000

Wordpress is undoubtedly one of the most popular publishing platforms. But unfortunately it is prone to attacks from hackers or web intruders who get in and cause havoc with your blog. Securing your Wordpress weblog is the most important thing that you must do after you have set it up on your server. Today, I will share some tips, tricks and resources which will surely help you to secure and lock down your WordPress site and to fortify it from unwarranted attacks.

Checklist to Improve Wordpress Security

1. Prevent directory listing
2. Update Wordpress to the latest stable version.
3. Drop the Wordpress version string in your Meta Tags.
4. Encrypt your login
5. Use a strong password
6. Change the default admin username
7. Take extra measures to secure your wp-admin folder
8. Encrypt your WordPress-related cookies
9. Change your WordPress database table prefix from default settings
10. Use correct file permissions on your WordPress files
11. Limit what search engine spiders can index
12. Use SFTP instead of FTP
13. Take regular backups of your site and Database

All these points are explained in great detail in the articles below. Check them out

Wordpress Security plugins

There are many Wordpress Plugins which help you in securing your Blog. The below list of articles talk about these plugins in detail.

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Reducing Bounce Rate via News Ticker – Suggestions Invited

Raju — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:18:06 +0000

If you have been following Technically Personal, you might have observed that there is a small change in the theme layout over the past 2 days.

Yeah! I have added a small news ticker on the right topbar (next to the logo). Technically, I can’t call it a ticker, since it “flashes” and doesn’t “tick”. Anyway, this small Wordpress Plugin was custom built for TechPP by Stratos, who is so wonderful with Wordpress, PHP, MySQL, jQuery and other related things. I gave him out the requirements and the idea, and he handed me the plugin within half a day!!

The idea is to utilize the prominent space which was going waste to advertise other “Related” posts on my blog and thereby reduce the bounce rate. Currently, the bounce rate of TechPP is not alarmingly high (it’s around 45-50%), but still there is a lot of scope to reduce it to say 35 – 40%. I thought a good way to do that is to have a News Ticker which keeps flashing the related posts at regular frequency.

I do not want to go into the details of the plugin, but would like to know the opinion of you guys. I request all those who are reading this post via RSS reader or eMail to visit the website, have a look and give some valuable inputs.

Is it serving the purpose of advertising other related posts?
If you had observed it before reading this post, was it catchy enough for you to click?
The static text “also @ TechPP” is configurable. Can you suggest anything better?
Any suggestions on improving the look and feel of the ticker?
Any other place it can be put for better visibility and looks?

Your inputs will help us improve the plugin and if I see it being useful for others as well, I might even release the Plugin under GPL.

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[How to] Fix – PHP Fatal Error: Out Of Memory

Raju — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:17:49 +0000

Last night when I was moderating some comments on TechPP, I was shocked to see an error page instead of the admin panel dashboard. The error read something like this -

PHP Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 49545216) (tried to allocate 77824 bytes) in /home/xxxxx/public_html/xyz/admin.php(1758) on line 40

The first thing I could think of was to restart the Apache httpd service. This immediately solved the issue. but I knew this is not a permanent fix for the issue. When I researched further, I got to know that the error comes when certain PHP scripts require more memory than PHP was allowed by default.

So the solution is to increase the memory allocated for PHP. How to do that? There are 4 possible ways -

1. Try looking for the php.ini file. You might find some redundant php.ini files, so make sure you have got the one which is actually being read by PHP. o be sure, create a new php file in your root folder, say “check.php” and have phpInfo(); within the php open and close tags. Execute this file to get the information on where the php.ini is residing. Normally it will be in /usr/local/lib/php.ini

Open the php.ini file in a text editor like TextPad (not in Notepad) and change the values for memory_limit. By default you should see memory_limit = 8M. Try changing it to 12M. If it doesn’t work, increase it to 16M or even 24M and so on.

2. In case you can’t find the php.ini file or do not have access to it, then open up the file which was throwing the error (admin.php in my case) and add a line below just after ini_set(’memory_limit’, ‘12M’);

3. You can even consider adding a line in .htaccess file which will resolve the issue.
php_value memory_limit 32M

4. Or else, Try adding this line to your wp-config.php file:
Increasing memory allocated to PHP
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '32M');

If none of the above things solve your issue, then talk to you host. If you have a host like Knownhost who is fast and knows what needs to be done, you do not have to worry much.

Note: I am now worrying on which PHP script required an increase in memory allocation. The analysis won’t be so easy though.

Image Courtesy: Clarkandransom

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[How to] Fight Plagiarism on Wordpress.com?

Raju — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:21:39 +0000

Wordpress, as we know is arguably the most popular blogging platform currently. One can either download the open source blog publishing application and self-host it on their server and domain or sign-up for an account on Wordpress.com to get started with a pre-hosted / pre-installed blog publishing application.

What this means is, anyone with a bare minimum knowledge on hosting/domain registration etc can signup for an account and get started within few minutes. And many a times, people grossly misuse this facility by indulging in illegal and unethical activities. One of them is PLAGIARISM.

Plagiarism refers to “use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work”

There has been a steep increase in number of blogs hosted on Wordpress.com and Blogger directly copying the posts in recent times. Last month I bumped across atleast 3 blogs (2 of them hosted on Wordpress.com) who were copying the articles “as-is”. They were even hot-linking to the images hosted on my website.

How to handle Plagiarism on Wordpress.com hosted blogs?

1. First of all, try to contact the blog author and let him know that you are aware of him copying your blog posts and warn him to either remove the posts or give a proper link back to the original posts. Many a times this works out.

2. If the author is stubborn or too dumb to understand the warnings, then contact Wordpress.com directly. You can either open a thread in Wordpress.com support forums or contact the support team directly. The forum moderators are pretty active and generally start replying within a day.

3. In my case, one of the blogs was copying almost every post. This was getting out of my hands and just when I was thinking about filing a DMCA complaint, I got to know about this page on Automattic. Yes! You can directly go ahead and file a DMCA complaint by mailing to dmca@automattic.com with relevant details as given in the article. I was pleasantly surprised to get a response from the Wordpress team within half a day, informing me that the blog has been suspended from immediate effect.

Wonderful support and quick response from the Automattic (Wordpress) team. I believe even Google has this provision of filing online DMCAs, but their response time is known to be pretty bad.

Image Courtesy: ericstoller & unsw

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