I have wrote about many WordPress plugins in the past. Here is one that could help increase your blog’s subscribers. What would Seth Godin do plugin displays a message for first time visitors asking them to subscribe to your blog’s feed (uses cookies).

By default the message shown is "If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!" and disappears after three visits.

I have been using this plugin for the past few days on my hardware review blog. Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

Installation is easy. All you have to do is upload the what_would_seth_godin_do.php file to your plugins folder and activate it. The plugin also allows you to customize the message, its lifespan, and its location.

Download the What would Seth Godin do plugin from here.

Matt Cutts recently wrote a post giving four good tips to protect a WordPress blog. Try these tips if you own a WordPress blog.

1. Secure your /wp-admin/ directory - lock down your wp-admin folder so that only certain IP addresses can access that directory
2. Make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file - it helps prevent people from finding out which plugins you use. If you use an outdated plugin, someone could hack your blog by exploiting a bug. To prevent people from viewing which plugins you have installed, just create a blank index.html file and upload it to your plugins folder.
3. Subscribe to the WordPress Development blog - you could subscribe to the development blog to be alerted as soon as a new WordPress version is released. Upgrade your WordPress blog as soon as possible or it could be hacked. I haven’t subscribed as we already get notified of a new WordPress version from the dashboard.
4. Hide your WordPress version: by default, WordPress theme’s have a line in the header.php to display the current version of WordPress you use (can be found by viewing source). Since anyone can find your WordPress version this way, your blog is prone to hackers until you upgrade to the latest version. To prevent displaying your WordPress version, just open your theme’s header.php file and look for the following line<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” /> and replace it with <meta content="WordPress" name="generator" />

Twitter is a great service that most of us use to let our friends and family know what we are doing. But as a blogger you may have also wanted to let your readers  know what you are doing.  I have been displaying my Twitter status on this blog for some time now. It’s a great way to keep readers updated on what we are doing as well as to put up something short that you don’t want to write a post on (like to ask your readers to vote for your blog post on Digg or when you want to share an interesting post on another blog with your readers).

There are many Twitter tools for WordPress blogs, but the one I use is a modified version of twitterRSS that you can download from here (found via Paul’s blog).

Continue reading ‘How To Display Your Twitter Status On A WordPress Blog’

Whenever you install WordPress on a blog, you will need to modify the wp-config.php file to define the WordPress configuration settings required to access your MySQL database. However, you will not need to modify the file whenever you do a WordPress upgrade.

Recently I have been seeing strange characters appearing on many of my posts and some of the pages on this blog. I tried many things but could not find out the reason for this. Yesterday after reading this post on QuickOnlineTips, I realized the reason why I was seeing the strange characters. During a recent WordPress upgrade I had upgraded my wp-config.php file too as I had seen some new additions to it.

Continue reading ‘Do Not Upgrade Your WordPress wp-config.php’

Got Banners is a WordPress Plugin that lets you randomize banners like you see on TechCrunch and John Chow’s blog. Unlike other banner rotators, Got Banners displays all the banners provided simultaneously. But, in a different random order each time.

Got Banners will be very useful for those who sell ads directly to advertisers as it will give all advertisers even exposure. Even if you don’t do direct sales you can still use this plugin to rotate affiliate banners from AdSense, Text Link Ads, Chitika eMiniMalls or any other affiliate program.

You can see this plugin in action on this blog by just refreshing the page (125×125 ads on sidebar). Download Got Banners WordPress Plugin from here

found via JohnChow.com

WP-Sticky is a WordPress Plugin that allows you to put up a post (or posts) before all other posts on your blog’s homepage. The plugin is a modified version of Adhesive which is currently not compatible with the latest version of WordPress.

WP-Sticky is useful when you want to make an announcement on your blog or when you want to make sure that your blog’s visitors see any particular post.

Installation of the plugin is easy, simply upload the folder ’sticky’ to the plugins folder and activate it. Once the installation is over, configure the WP-Sticky options in WP-Admin -> Options -> Sticky. You can find the post’s ‘Sticky‘ Option under ‘Post Sticky Status‘ Options in the ‘Write/Edit Post Screen‘.

Continue reading ‘WordPress Plugin: WP-Sticky’

Feed Count is a WordPress Plugin that displays the number of subscribers to your feedburner feed in plain text. The plugin allows you to customize the feed count with CSS and I am sure those who don�t like the feedburner chicklet will like this plugin.

I first wanted to use this plugin but then decided not to when it showed yesterdays feed count when tested with EasyPHP.

Update: There is an ‘Update interval’ option that will update the feed count every 60 minutes.

Continue reading ‘WordPress Plugin: Feed Count’

This is a guest post by Aseem from Online Tech Tips. If you are interested in writing a guest post too, let me know

Recently, an article of mine entitled “How to track the original location of an email address” was Dugg on Digg and got the most Diggs I’ve ever received on an article with over 1800! It was a great experience except for the fact that my web site kept crashing and displaying “YOU HAVE EXCEEDED YOUR CPU USAGE” to all of my visitors. This was not only embarrassing, but I’m sure it turned off a good number of visitors! In order to rectify the situation without switching hosting companies (that was really not the problem), I decided to try and optimize my WordPress blog as much as I could. After a few days of tweaking and fiddling, I got Dugg again and this time did not go down except for once for a minute. Not too bad for making some pretty simple changes. So here are a few tips you can use on your own blog to make it run faster than it is now!

Continue reading ‘5 Ways To Increase The Loading Speed Of A WordPress Blog’

Have you ever wanted to remove ads on posts belonging to certain categories only? Or wanted to remove ads on all your sponsored review posts?

Here’s the code to do it in WordPress:

<?php
if ( !in_category(15) && !in_category(23) && !in_category(14) && !in_category(20)) {
?>
Your ad code here
<?php } ?>

In the above code 15, 23, 14 and 20 are category IDs, replace them with the IDs of the categories you don’t want ads in.

I am currently using this code to remove AdSense and Kontera ads from my Blogging, Make Money Online, WordPress and WordPress Plugin categories. Thanks to Keith for the code.

Most blogs have their comments and trackbacks mixed, which in my opinion makes the comment area look ugly and also breaks up the flow of reader comments.

Some readers have asked me in the past how I had separated the comments from trackbacks on this blog and frankly I did not know then as the K2 theme (this blog’s theme was based on K2) had this done by default.

But after the recent redesign of this blog, I had to find out how to do this manually as I did not want to base my theme on K2 anymore.� After a quick search I landed on hackwordpress.com which had a step by step explanation on how to separate comments and trackbacks on a WordPress blog.

Now go ahead and make your blog look neater by separating the comments and trackbacks on your blog too. You may also want to style your comments to stand out from your reader’s comments.