Flame Scorpion

Blogs are everywhere so you must seen blogs who shows full posts on the blog front-page, and others who shows only a summary of the post and a link saying “Read more” or “Read the rest of this entry”.

There is a lot of debate on this subject, but the type of display depends of the type of your blog, the type of your visitors. For example, if all your blog posts are related one to each other, or if you are post them as a series, as capitols of a book there is no reason to show only summaries on the front page. Your readers will read all of them anyway so why to get them to do another click ?

If you post about a subject, but the article are not like a story and the are not related, and you also publish long posts it is a pain for visitors to show them the full post. [Read the rest of this entry...]

It is impossible to not notice that on many blogs some commentators have a photo and others don’t. You may think that the respective authors have users registered on that blog. That is not true, the current version of wordpress don’t support author photo.

They have photos on their comments because they use gravatar service. Gravatar allows you to make an account with your e-mail address and you can upload a photo. When you post a comment to a blog that have avatars enabled, the respective blog will try to get the photo from Gravatar. Cool, huh ?

If you change your photo it will be changed on all blogs you commented on.

So, go to http://www.gravatar.com and build your profile now. Comment on this blog post to test if your photo is showing.

If  you are the only one who post on your blog it is still good to have an about author box somewhere. People will consider your articles more valuable if they know who wrote them ? This is happening because they want something to see to consider it worth reading. There are so many spam websites with articles written only for search engines or with comment stolen from some other website.

If they see an author box with an image they will think there are more chances that the content in original and is not spammy. Visitors tend to subscribe to a blog where they see the author name and face. Not every article from your blog will be an excellent piece of work, but from time to time you will write a very compelling article that your readers will remember or will bookmark it to read again some other time. They will want to associate that article with a human, with a face. Your visitors will come back more and you will have more subscribers. [Read the rest of this entry...]

When a plugin that you installed has an upgrade available, wordpress will notice you by adding a red small circle near the Plugins admin menu item. When you browse installed plugins you will see a link to upgrade under each plugin that has an upgrade available.

If you go away for a week, to holiday or something, when you come home you can see a lot of plugins that have upgrades available. Going trough each and clicking on upgrade links may take some time.

Well, the guys at wordpress taught at you time and they made a tool to upgrade all plugins at once. Scroll down into your administration panel menu and find Tolls -> Upgrade. There you can upgrade both the wordpress core and all plugins all once.

I bet that over 90% of wordpress sites are using google analytics for tracking. It gives complete statistics and you can figure out many things just by looking at values there. Some people are saying that analytics are not working well because they don’t track users who have javascript disabled, or they are counting the same person as 2 unique visitors because he deleted his cookies.

Maybe the data is not 100% accurate, but it gives more than enough information for you to deal with it. [Read the rest of this entry...]

In the last few weeks i was looking for ways to make wordpress editor better. The main problem that i was to be solved was to stop wordpress editor to auto remove <p> or <br> html tags that i enter trough the HTML editor. The other aspect was the posibility to be able to work with some advanced features of  content editing, such as tables and other features.

For the first problem i found some plugins to quick fix that and i was happy. For the second issue i’m still looking for the perfect solution.

The tinyMCE advanced is a plugin that adds new functionality to wordpress RTE editor. The most notable parts are the option to stop the editor to strip <br> and <p> tags added trough the html editor, and the posibility to work with tables, styles. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Social networks are very important nowadays if we think about a  good marketing strategy. It is necessary to connect your visitors in social networks. They read one of your posts and they like it, most of them are too lazy to use a RSS reader or e-mail, but there is something that they are not lazy to do: talk and share stuff on social networking sites. If you give them the option to connect with you trough one of their favorite networks they will respond very well, They like what you write so they won’t mean if they have to click a button to get your articles closer to it’s environment: the social network.

Social bookmarking sites are a little different than social netwoking, they are focused on sharing links with their friends, while social networks can do many other things and link sharing is only a part of it.

In both cases, you would like your visitors to share what they like with their networks. If they like your post, they will want to share it, but if they find it is so hard to do it they won’t. Well, give them the opportunity to share your posts. [Read the rest of this entry...]

The wordpress CMS is the best user friendly content management system around here. You can get your website up and running in 15 minutes with wordpress. The wordpress administration panel is very easy to understand, but there are people that still having some problems using it.

After wordpress installation, if you want to maximize the wordpress potential, you have to know what administration panel can do. Here is the easy way to do it, i wrote a complete article with all wordpress admin panel features. Let’s start! [Read the rest of this entry...]

There are a lot of things that can be changed in Wordpress from the administration panel: themes, plugins, content, links, widgets to appear on sidebar, and so on.  Wordpress has also the options to edit plugins and themes directly, by editing the template or plugin files. But this feature is probably used very rarely because everything you see there is code, and the code is a problem to many people.

Let’s say you have only a minor issue to change, like the copyright footer text,  or the tag for the page title, but you have no clue how to do this. I will explain you how wordpress use template files to render different pages of your website. [Read the rest of this entry...]

I’ve seen many people that ignore tags on blogs. Tags are used to describe what the post or page is about. Wordpress creates a page for every tag you use, when an user goes to a tag page he will see all articles that contain that tag. It is something like keywords.

Even if you use very descriptive categories for your blog, you can still take advantage of using tags. For example a visitor reads one of your posts, he likes it and he want to read more about that subject, at the end of you post you have related articles shown, but if you follow a link from related articles, you read that post but the related articles in the next post are the same as the first article. So can read max 6 articles on a subject using related links navigation. [Read the rest of this entry...]