Monthly Archives: May 2009
15 Common WordPress Blunders
WordPress WordPress is a very easy to use and very efficient blogging platform. However, that doesn’t mean it, nor its users, are perfect. There are some mistakes that even experienced WordPress admins seem to make when setting up and running a WordPress install. Some of them are due to WordPress’ default settings, others are just easy to forget and lose track of. So, if you’re a WordPress user and want to make sure you didn’t ...
Continue readingWordPress Theme Inheritance
WordPress Coding & Design The WordPress template system has a relatively unused gem in the template system, Theme Inheritance. Theme Inheritance allows you to set your theme to inherit files from a parent theme, meaning you could create your theme in the colours you choose, but then you can create a number of new themes with just a stylesheet in them, and set each stylesheet to inherit from the main theme, and then just override the styles set. So, if we use the example ...
Continue readingSubject and Verb Agreement; Collective Nouns, Amounts, and Numbers of
Writing The last few weeks, I’ve discussed subject and verb agreement in a number of areas. You can view those from my author page: http://www.bloggingtips.com/author/pattistafford/ Up next in the exciting world of agreements and playing nice, lets discuss collective nouns, what to do about writing amounts, and working with numbers of. Collective nouns denote a group of people or things; like choir, family, herd, team, majority, etc. And even ...
Continue readingInterview With Jimmy Vee & Travis Miller From Gravitational Marketing
Interviews I recently started subscribing to The Jim & Travis Blog, a marketing blog from Jimmy Vee and Travis Miller. Jimmy and Travis are the authors of ‘Gravitational Marketing: The Science of Attracting Customers‘, a successful marketing book which you can buy from Amazon for $16.17. One of the reasons I started subscribing to their blog was their fantastic video clips. I don’t remember seeing anyone being as funny, confident or ...
Continue readingGot Unfollowed on Twitter? Don’t Take it Personally
Social Media I have a friend that uses Qwitter on a regular basis in order to find out when people have stopped following him on Twitter. He says he considers it critical feedback, as he’ll match up the time someone has stopped following him with the time of activity on his Twitter account. In his mind he’s wondering if he said something stupid, useless or offensive in order to turn people off to his Twitter stream. In some ways this line of ...
Continue readingAdding custom icons to your WordPress theme
WordPress Coding & Design If you are using a WP framework it is quite simple to modify the background images and icons set up with the theme. Some of the more powerful themes even allow you to upload new images from right inside the admin area. However, if you’re using something a little simpler, most of the time you have to go in and manually add images to your theme the old fashioned way. If your theme falls under the latter, we’ve got the quick and dirty ...
Continue readingCorrections: How to Handle Them
Writing Everyone makes mistakes. Whether you do one post per week or 50, something is going to go wrong and it is important to be prepared for those mistakes before they happen. They key to respect and trust while blogging is not to never make a mistake (though keeping them to a minimum is important), but rather, to handle the ones you do make gracefully while learning from them. So how should a blogger handle their mistakes? There are many different ...
Continue readingContenture – The anti-ad network
Making Money If you want to make money from a blog you have a limited number of options. The most popular approach is to run ads – typically using an ad network like Google’s AdSense. Many bloggers also join affiliate programs and post links and banners for those programs – but to the visitor it is just more ads. You can also charge a subscription fee – but you will have to have some truly unique content to pull that off and ...
Continue readingWriting to Persuade
Writing Remember the days of personal blogging? All the blogs you read were from a personal standpoint, the writer either shared their personal life or would write a review about the latest gadget they had found? They weren’t trying to sell you anything, they were just sharing their opinion and in effect probably did cause many people to try the product they were speaking of. Today’s blogging world is a lot different. Today we’re trying to ...
Continue readingMost Requested Features for Blogger
Blogging Back in April, the Blogger team created the Product Ideas for Blogger forum where Blogger users could offer their suggestions of the features and gadgets they would like to use. The Product Ideas forum was open for a month and closed for new suggestions on the 14th of May. During the time it was open, the forum received over 1500 different suggestions and thousands of votes from enthusiastic Blogger users. In today’s post, I’ll ...
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