Archive for the 'Wordpress' Category

You can easily add Adsense units to a WordPress blog by editing the template files. But the problem with this approach is that you will not get any control on the individual posts. For example, sometimes you may need a referral ad to be inserted in a specific post.

Now if you directly insert Adsense tags in your post, you will find that they are changed to garbage by tinyMCE editor. Even if you turn off tinyMCE, Adsense units won’t work! This is due to the post content processing by filters.

There are numerous Adsense plugins for WordPress available out there which lets you add Adsense units inside a post. But in this post, I will look at a different plugin. It is called “Script Enabler”. This plugin allows you to embedd script tags inside a post by disabling filter processing on script tags. The advantage here is that after enabling this plugin, you can simply copy paste the Adsense ad unit code into your post!

Download Script Enabler plugin for WordPress.

I have a special attraction towards 3 column Wordpress themes. These themes are very efficient in making use of the screen space. Here are some of my favorite 3 column WordPress themes. Most of these themes are simple and elegant without too many images.

1.Cleaker 2.1 | Preview - This is a clean and pretty theme. It has a sophisticated look and you can easily customize the header logo. There is a widgetized version as well.

2. Prosense | Preview - This is dream come true for all the adsense based bloggers. Neat and professional look with built in adsense units. But don’t forget to change the publisher IDs There are various color variations available for this.

3. Blue Zinfandel 2.0 | Preview - This is a text heavy theme which simple and elegant. A two column version of this is also available.

4. Downtown Java theme | Preview - This is a different variation of Blue Zinfandel style. Content on the middle, a top navigation bar and a soothing color scheme are the things that makes this good.

5. Andreas theme | Preview - This probably qualifies as the most experimented 3 column theme. This blog is based on a variation of this theme. Simple, but very mechanical feel without any Web 2.0 look.

6. TypoXP reloaded | Preview- There are many variations of this simple and elegant 3 column theme. One advantage is that second and third columns can be merged if needed. Ideal for a text heavy blog. Remember, if you want uniqueness you will have to tweak it as it is a commonly used theme.

7. Qwilm theme | Preview - This is one of the most used 3 column themes. So use it if you are not very particular about your blog theme being unique. This can be used as a 4 column theme as well.

8. PlaintxtBlog theme | Preview - If you want your blog to be text centric, this is a good theme to use. But in order to be different, I suggest you to change the default color scheme.

9. Sosuechtig theme | Preview - I like this theme due to its uniqueness. Obviously you need to customize the header image. Clean theme with contrasting colors.

10. Digg 3 column | Preview - As the name says, this is a digg like theme. It has a smooth and Web 2.0 feel. It is also Widget ready.

Obviously I could have missed some great 3 column themes out there. What is your favorite?

You can encourage blog readers to subscribe to the FeedBurner feed by providing auto discovery mechanism and also by providing a linked Feed icon.

But even after modifying auto feed discovery to point to FeedBurner feed, sometimes visitors will still be using the default Wordpress feed. This happens when they directly type in the Feed URL or when the feed reader uses the default Wordpress feed URL.

Now this is something which you want to discourage. There are mainly two reasons. First, you want to see the actual subscriber count. Secondly, you may want to leverage FeedBurner monetization.

What you need is a Wordpress plugin which will redirect default Wordpress feed traffic to FeedBurner feed. FeedBurner plugin written by Steve Smith (Ordered List) is the best one I think.

Installation is as simple as copying the plugin and then configuring your FeedBurner feed URL. You can also customize your comment feed URL.

Wordpress by default provides search functionality out of the box. But instead you may want to use Google site search. The reason is simple, Google search can be monetized. If the user clicks on ads displayed after search you get paid!

Integrating Google site search is simple provided you are OK to have the search results on a different page. Just copy and paste the code generated by Adsense. But if you want to integrate Google search inside Wordpress, things become a bit complicated. Initially I tried creating a Wordpress page and then tried integrating Google search inside it. It didn’t work.

Then I came across this cool plugin called MightySearch. Using it is pretty simple,

Installation: Upload mightysearch.php to wp-content/plugins/ directory and activate it. Go into your Google account and get the form & search result code. Paste both code into MightySearch.

How to use it: Just create a new page, for example “Google Search”, so that the post slug will be “google-search”, and reachable at URL for example: http://yourdomain.com/google-search/ . Then type either one of the following text anywhere in your page to call the search form or/and search result;


<!--mightysearch--> - to call both search form and search result on the page <!--mightysearch_form--> - to call only search form on the page <!--mightysearch_result--> - to call only search result on the page.

I have a blog which is hosted on dreamhost and I recently upgraded it to version 2.1. The dreamhost advantage is that you can upgrade Wordpress with a single click (ok, two clicks if you consider database upgrade click also).

Everything went smooth. But when I looked at the blog I saw some database errors on the archives section! Surprisingly everything else on the blog was working. So I thought this must be a problem with the theme I was using. So I changed the theme to one of the defaults and voila! there was no error.

So the moral of the story - Check the codex Wordpress 2.1 theme compatibility list before you upgrade your blog!

Still with all the following cool features, Wordpress 2.1 upgrade is worth the hassle.

• The essential spell checker. This basically means that built in editor is better than using w.bloggar!
• The draft status for pages. This should have been there much earlier!
• Content Management Tool? - Pages can be the front page!
• Switch between plain editing and rich text editing. A must have!
• Auto saving. This is a life saver when you are writing long posts!

So what are you waiting for? Go and download Wordpress 2.1

Wordpress has released another upgrade within 10 days of 2.0.6 release. They had no choice since 2.0.6 had serious problem with FeedBurner. Also now people are trying hard to find security issues, so I think we can expect fixes frequently like we see Microsoft patches!

Also I recommend waiting atleast a day or two before applying latest Wordpress patches. You never know whether upgrade itself will cause serious issues like the FeedBurner problem!

Wordpress 2.1 release may happen sometime in February 2007. Official site says that 2.0 series will be supported for many years. I doubt that statement since years in the age of internet is like centuries

Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform out there. One of the things that made Wordpress so popular is the availability of hundreds of cool plugins and themes(most of them free!).

But plugins come with a price. Since plugins are developed by third parties, not all are very reliable. A single bad behaving plugin can bring down your entire blog! So install only necessary and useful plugins on your Wordpress installation.

I have a very limited set of plugins installed on this blog. To me, one of the most important plugin is the Related Posts plugin. Whenever you write a blog entry, this plugin automatically finds related previous posts which you can display anywhere. In my blog, you will find related entries on the right side.

Installing related post plugin is simple,

1. Download Related Posts plugin from here. If the site is down (500 error on his Wordpress installation!), direct download is here.




2. Upload the plugin file (related-posts.php) to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory and activate it.




3. Once you have activated it, a new option “Related Posts Option” will appear under plugins tab. In that you need to click on “run this script” link at the bottom. This modifies Wordpress table wp_posts to enable FULLTEXT indexes.

This should setup the Related posts plugin. But on certain Web hosting platforms I have found that “run this script” fails. This is because of the MySQL engine settings.

Following is the error I got on Globat host (on dreamhost it works fine),

#1214 - The used table type doesn’t support FULLTEXT indexes

This means that wp_posts table is NOT using MYISAM engine which is needed for FULTEXT indexes. To solve this problem run the following SQL on your PhpMyAdmin SQL console.

ALTER TABLE wp_posts ENGINE = MYISAM;

And then you can run the following SQL to configure FULLTEXT indexes.

ALTER TABLE `wp_posts` ADD FULLTEXT `post_related` (
`post_name` ,
`post_content`
)

Now you are all set. To display Related entries you can put <?php related_posts(); ?> . You can also control how the related entries should appear on your blog (For more details see Related entries readme file).

If you still face any issues, feel free to write to me.