1. Find a domain and hosting provider

If you did not have your own domain, then you will need to find a domain provider. Find one that also has hosting plans (we recommend Hostgator), so you don’t have to look around for another service.

2. Setup the WordPress database

Create a new database for your WordPress. If you use a Macbook, then you can use this guide to install and test WordPress. If you need a more general guide, then check out the one the WordPress team put together. Some of the services actually have a way for you to press one button, and they will install WordPress for you. With the popularity of WordPress, many of them should be jumping on the bandwagon.

3. Export your blog out of Blogger

You always want to protect your blog, just in case something doesn’t go right. Therefore, I recommend exporting your Blogger blog, if something doesn’t go right. You do this by logging onto Blogger, and you go to your blog’s settings, you will see Basic tab. You will see the Export blog link.

When you click the link, you will be able to download your blog after pressing the Download Blog button.

4. Import your blog into your self-hosted WordPress

After exporting your Blogger blog, log into WordPress.  Click on Tools -> Import. All the blogging platforms that can be imported into WordPress are shown. Click on the Blogger link.

Press the Authorize button to start importing your posts, comments, and users from Blogger into WordPress.

You will be taken to a Google window where you have to press the Grant Access button

You will see all your Blogger blogs. Select the one you want to import, and press the Import button.

After your Blogger posts and comments are imported into WordPress, you will be able to import the authors by pressing the Set Authors button.

You can map your Blogger name to your WordPress one.  If there is a new author, then there is an add users link that will allow you to create a user in WordPress that you can map to the new Blogger one.

Have you imported your Blogger blog into a self-hosted WordPress? How did it go for you?

How to Migrate From Blogger.com to Self-Hosted WordPress originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

The latter option is not recommended as it will increase database size and the resource loading time. Hence, you have to find and fight your way to prevent spam comments in Wordpress. This article describes some of the proven techniques which can be used to reduce Wordpress comment spam.

Before we go any further, let’s understand what exactly is a spam comment.

A spam comment is a comment which is posted automatically in blogs, websites, forums etc by automated bots, scripts or software. Some people use scripts and automated bots to target high traffic websites for posting comments. Typically, a spam comment is full of irrelevant keywords and hyperlinks and does not care about the discussion or article where the comment is posted.

In short, a spam comment is an evil form of shameless self-promotion and trying to get quick links for traffic or SEO.

If you are getting lots of spam comments in your Wordpress blog, here are some techniques which can help:

1. Install Akismet Wordpress Plugin

Akismet is considered as the best Wordpress plugin to reduce comment spam. The plugin checks each and every comment, pingbacks and trackbacks submitted in your blog and runs critical checks on the Akismet web service to determine whether the comment is a spam or not.

In addition to blocking spam comments and bad links, Akismet shows a stats page where you can see more details on the amount of comments blocked, accuracy, dates etc.

2. Close comments on Older Posts

Using Akismet is good but overtime you will find that Akismet is blocking hundreds of spam comments every week. You have to delete those spam comments manually, which is really a boring job. If you want even more control over the spam comments, consider blocking comments on older posts.

Spammers target posts which receive good traffic and you can automatically close comments on posts which are certain days old. Login to your blog’s administration area and go to Settings > Discussion. Next, select the checkbox “Automatically close comments on article older than” and enter the number of days in the text box (for example 90).

This ensures that the comments are closed on any article which is older than the number of days specified by you.

3. Ban Spam IP Addresses

Wp-Ban is a useful Wordpress plugin which can be used to blacklist IP addresses who try to post spam comments in your blog. The plugin checks the IP address of the commentator and if you have already specified the same IP address in plugin settings, the commentator is shown a custom banned message.

Once you activate the plugin, keep an eye on the IP addresses of the spam comments. Next, add the IP addresses in the plugin blacklist and bingo! You will find that the number of spam comments are reducing as IP blacklist increases.

This plugin should be used with caution. If you blacklist an IP address, any visitor coming from the same host name would not be able to view your blog. Use this plugin to blacklist certain IP’s if they appear too frequently and post vulgar comments in your blog.

4. Use a Custom Wordpress Function to Ban Empty Referrers

On most of the occasions, spam commentators never visit your blog and you can use this principle to drastically reduce comment spam.

Log in to Wordpress administration area of your blog and go to “Theme Editor”. Select your blog’s theme and open the functions.php file for editing. Paste the following code:

<?php
function verify_comment_referer() {
    if (!wp_get_referer()) {
        wp_die( __('You cannot post comment at this time, may be you need to enable referrers in your browser.') );
    }
}
add_action('check_comment_flood', 'verify_comment_referer');
?>

The above function checks the “referring source” of the page on which the comment in posted. In case of spam comments, if the referring source is found to be empty the comments are never allowed to be posted and thus you do not receive any spam. Thanks to Internet Techies for the tip.

5. Use Recaptcha Wordpress Plugin

As mentioned by Google in their Webmaster central blog, the Recaptcha Wordpress plugin is one of the best ways to prevent Wordpress spam comments in your blog. The concept is really simple – anyone trying to post a comment have to see a graphic and type the words matching the graphic. The spam bots do not have eyes and mind and thus can’t see and read those graphics. Hence they can’t post those intrusive comments.

The recatcha plugin serves the purpose well, but it has a major disadvantage. The regular commentators of your blog would have to fill up the catcha when they try to post a comment. This may appear discouraging or confusing to the visitor and he may refrain from posting comments altogether. Many popular blogs use Recaptcha, but I am not a fan of this plugin as this may offend the regular commentators.

Switching your comment system to Disqus or IntenseDebate (From the editor)

In MakeTechEasier, we have switched our comment system to Disqus and I guess it is worth a mention here.

Disqus is a third party comment system and moderation tool for your site. There are several benefits in using Disqus. First, they integrate closely with Askimet to reduce spams. Secondly, it help you to reduce your database size as all the comments are stored in their server. Thirdly, it integrates with Facebook, Twitter and OpenID so your readers can easily log in with the minimum hassle. Last but not least, it is free.

When you have a site with huge traffic counts and spam counts, you will appreciate how easy Disqus makes your life.

Those were some (if not all) of the techniques which you can use to prevent spam comments in your Wordpress blog. What techniques do you prefer? Do you use any Wordpress plugin which I may have missed out? Please share your ideas in the comments section.

5 Ways To Reduce Comment Spam On Wordpress Blogs originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Using the Web Site

When you log in, you will see a search page like you would see for any search engine. It has the current trending topics, if you wanted to check out what is popular on Twitter.

When you search for something, then the search results are shown in the image below. On the left-hand corner, you can decide what timeline you want to choose from. Also, you can select if you want to search the web, photos, or actual tweets. However, viewing the web allows you to view the tweets as well because the listing has the tweet below.

If you decide to log in with your Twitter user ID and password, you will see a home page that shows all of the things that you have posted on social media networks, how many times people have tweeted the same link, and information, like your web site, that Twitter account is associated with.

On March 3rd, Topsy introduced alerts. You can get search results right to your inbox.

Adding a Topsy Button To Your WordPress Site

Like Tweetmeme, Topsy allows you to place a retweet button on your site. If you are using a WordPress site, there are two ways to add their button on your site: WordPress plugin and Javascript version.

The Topsy WordPress plugin is easy to install. After installing the plugin, you will go to Settings to customize the button. One thing that I like about Topsy, that I haven’t seen with other retweet buttons is that it gives you a wide range of options on where to display the retweet button. If you don’t want it on all your pages, then you can pick-and-choose which ones you want to place them on. You can also add your own CSS.

I like the fact that you can change the color scheme to fit your site/blog. Also, that if you delete or update your blog, you are able to notify Topsy, and they will be sure to reflect that on their end. Very useful.

The trackback feature is pretty nifty because you can create trackbacks if someone leaves a comment. Not sure if I like this “Only create trackback comments from influential tweeters.“ How can they know that? If I have a technology-type site/blog, the people I find influential are going to be different if I had a fashion site/blog. This is what it states on their site: “On our website, roughly the top 0.2% most influential of all Twitter users are tagged “Highly Influential”, and “Influential” tags appear for the top 0.5% most influential Twitter users.” I would love to hear from Topsy creators to figure out their calculation.

Topsy is an interesting search engine and application. I like the layout and the search display on their web site. It’s also great that they have a user profile that allows you to see how your tweets are doing. However, with Google and Yahoo! partnering up with Twitter and having tweets as part of their search results, Topsy has to find a way to keep things interesting. Their WordPress plugin is one of the most flexible ones that I have seen when it comes to retweeting buttons. However, this “influential” tweeter trackback feature kind of threw me off. Overall, Topsy has potential.

Have you used Topsy retweet button on your site?

How To Integrate Topsy Into Your WordPress Site originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Simply said, PubSubHubbub (aka as PuSH in short) is publish/subscribe protocol addon to the current Atom/RSS technology. It enables your RSS subscribers to instantly receive your feed as soon as you publish your content.

What exactly does PubSubHubbub do?

Previously, when you publish a content, it doesn’t get push to the feed aggregator automatically. Instead, the feed aggregator poll your site (RSS feed) at regular interval and check if you have new content. If yes, it will then broadcast to your subscribers. With this push technology, there is often a delay in syndication and it could be several hours after your content went live before your RSS subscriber can read it on their RSS reader software.

PubSubHubbub aims to get rid of this time-delaying barrier and make everything real time. This means that as soon as you publish the content, your end subscriber will also receive it instantly. The technology is simple. Instead of the feed aggregator constantly polling your site for new content, it will now act as a hub. Whenever you publish a new content, you notify the hub, which in turn send your update to the end user.

You can watch the interesting video below for better understanding.

Sound simple, but how do I implement it in WordPress?

Feedburner way

Now, if you are using Feedburner to manage your feed, your site is already PuSH enabled. You just need to turn on the service in the Feedburner Dashboard.

Go to Feedburner and login to your account (most likely is your Google account).

Click on the Publicize tab at the top.

On the left, click Pingshot.

Click the Activate button to enable the service.

That’s it.
(You may also want to ensure that http://ping.feedburner.com is in your ping list)

Custom feed

If you are using the default WordPress feed rather than Feedburner, there are several plugins that you can use to PuSH-enabled your blog

1. PuSHPress

PuSHPress is the plugin used in WordPress.com. There is no configuration required. Simply activate the plugin and you are good to go.

The big difference in this plugin compared to the other PuSH WordPress plugins is that it includes a PuSH hub built in.

Download PuSHPress here

2. PubSubHubbub

Another simple plugin that requires minimal configuration.

This plugin does not implement a hub, but it allows you to select which hubs you want to ping. The default is Demo hub on Google App Engine and SuperFeedr.

Download PubSubHubbub here

3. WP Pubsubhubbub

This plugin is functionally similar to the PubSubHubbub plugin mentioned above. It allows you to specify the hubs you want to ping as well, so choosing this or the other is really dependent on individual preferences.

Download WP PubSubHubbub here

Have you started implementing PubSubHubbub in your WordPress blog?

What is PubSubHubbub and How to Implement It In WordPress originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Firstly, in your theme folder, open the functions.php file and insert the following function to the end of the file.

if(function_exists('add_theme_support')){
    add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
}

Save and upload the file back to the server.

Now in your Post/Page edit section, you will find a Set thumbnail option in the rightmost column (just below the Categories section).

Click on it. The image uploader window will appear. You can either new image (or select from Gallery) the picture to be used as the thumbnail. Once you have uploaded, click on the use as thumbnail option.

Save the post.

Getting the thumbnail to appear in the front end

To get the thumbnail image to appear, you need to insert the function

if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) {
	    // the current post has a thumbnail
	} else {
	    // the current post lacks a thumbnail
	}

in your theme files. The most likely place is index.php, single.php and page.php

Check out Mark Jaquith’s article for more detail on the usage of the thumbnail function.

Snippet: Adding Post Thumbnail in WordPress 2.9 originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Take this as my letter to WordPress (and Matt Mullenweg) and I seriously hope they can add the following features to the core in the future.

Let’s begin!

1. Database Backup/Export/Import

Being a database driven CMS, I am surprise that the default WP installation does not come with a way for you to backup your database. The Export feature is almost useless as it contains only contain your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags and none of the database settings that you have painstakingly set up over the years. And if you have a big blog (with tons of content), I can assure you that the Export feature is not going to work very well.

With a native database export/import function, it will be easy for the end users to backup their database and also to migrate to another server without any loss of settings.

Currently, the plugins that allow backing up of database include WP-DB-Backup and WP-DBManager

2. Contact Form

Contact form is a simple, yet essential component for every website, yet WordPress doesn’t think it is important enough to include it in the core. End users who need to create contact forms have to resort to plugins like Contact Form 7, cFormsII to create contact form for their sites. Most CMS come with this contact form creation capability, so why not WordPress?

3. Disable display of wp version in the meta tag

Everyone knows the risk of placing your wp version in the <head> tag, except for the WordPress team. Instead of removing the versioning from the meta tag, they make it appear automatically (whether you like it or not) since WP2.5 and does not provide an easy way for you to remove it. Can you imagine installing a plugin just to remove the wp-version tag? What a waste of resources.

To remove the wp version from your meta tag, you can add the following hook to your theme’s functions.php file

add_filter( 'the_generator', create_function('$a', "return null;") );

or use the following plugins: WP Security Scan or Secure WordPress

4. Changing of wp table prefix during installation

WordPress uses wp_ as the default database table prefix and we all know how dangerous that can be. Most people don’t change the table prefix simply because they don’t know how to, or they are not able to (if installed via Fantasico). Yes, I know, you can change the table prefix in the wp-config.php file before installing, but how many people really do that? In my opinion, during the installation process, there should be a field for the users to specify their preferred table prefix.

For those who wanted to change their current wp table prefix, here’s how you can do it.

5. More control over the user roles/capabilities

Have you ever wondered what is the differences between an Editor, Author and a Contributor role? I would appreciate if there is a small paragraph within the User section that explains the capabilities of each role, or a simple link that points to the WordPress documentation site.

In addition, there are plenty of time when we need to limit (or expand) the capabilities of a particular role and there is no way to do that in the native WordPress installation. Users have to use the role-manager plugin to change the capabilities of each role.

6. Choose your own admin username

The default username for administrator is, as you have guessed it, admin. Is it so difficult to let the users choose their own administrative login name during the installation process?

7. Support for mobile devices

WordPress.com realized the importance of mobile visitors (more than 60 million page views come from mobile phones per month for WordPress.com blogs) and have activated a mobile theme (to be more precise, the WpTouch plugin) for mobile users. The mobile support feature is integrated into WordPress.com and users can choose to enable/disable the mobile theme in the settings.

Isn’t it time for the users of self-hosted WordPress to get the same treatment too?

Those who want to activate mobile support for your WP blogs can install the plugins: WPTouch, WordPress Mobile Pack and wp-pda

What’s your say? What other features do you think should be included in the WP core?

Image credit: Peregrino Will Reign

7 Important Features That Should Be Part Of WordPress Core originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How to Find the CSS file of your blog template

If your blog is on Wordpress then the CSS file is placed ideally in the themes folder under wp-content/themes/yourtheme. To know the exact location, open your blog and check the page source. You will find a link to the CSS of your theme as shown below

If your blog is on Blogger, open the Blogger dashboard and go to the “Layout” tab. Select “Edit HTML” and the checkbox “expand widget templates”. Next, copy the CSS code in a notepad file defined just after the opening body tag.

Download a copy of that file and do the modifications described in this tutorial. It would be better if you take a backup of the stylesheet for if things go wrong, you can restore your site’s design by using the backup.

Optimize the CSS code

Format your CSS code

The first step towards optimization of any CSS code is proper formatting. You should carefully format the style elements and the attributes so that they are easy to understand. Moreover, the code should be written so that they do not overlap with other classes or ID’s. Formatting the code manually is a tough job and you can use the Format CSS tool to get started.

Copy the style sheet which you want to format and paste it in the text box. Next, select the preferred rules of formatting from the right panel.

For example: You may want to insert a new line after the CSS property of each div tag. You may also want to remove all the white spaces placed after a semicolon. Set all the rules which you want the program to perform and then hit the “Format CSS” button. All the specified rules would be applied and the code will be formatted as shown below:

Optimize CSS to remove redundancies

Now that you have formatted your code for readability, it’s time for some optimization. Go to Online CSS optimizer and paste the entire code in the text box provided. You may also enter the URL of your CSS file, if you want.

This tool can be used for the following purposes:

• convert all the RGB color values to hexadecimal thus reducing overhead and increasing efficiency.
• remove all the comments and white spaces.
• optimize the border values to modern metrics. For example: the attribute border: 2px 5px 2px 5px is changed to border: 2px 5px;.
• convert absolute values to relative ones. For example: the attribute font-size:18px; can be changed into font-size:2em;
• converts multiple background, font, margin, padding, list attributes into a single attribute.

Clean Your CSS File and reduce Size

Now it’s time to clean your CSS code for errors and reduce the file size. Reducing the size of CSS is important as it affects the load time of your blog’s pages. Go to Clean CSS and paste the CSS code which you optimized in the earlier step. Select the compression mode as highest and select the options shown below

Clean CSS is based on CSS Tidy and can be used to merge shorthand properties, compress colors and font weights. A similar tool for compressing CSS code for faster loading is CSS Drive.

Some Tips

Following are some tips and tricks you should keep in mind while writing the CSS code for your blog’s template:

1. Always use external stylesheets rather than pasting the entire code before the </head> tag.

2. Use universal classes to avoid repetitions. For example: you can use a simple class div.floatleft{float:left;} to float any element to left rather than using the same attribute on multiple classes.

3. Use browser specific CSS files for fixing bugs. That means, if you spot a bug which occurs only in a particular browser ( generally Internet explorer 6 or older versions), use a separate style sheet to fix that bug. This keeps your main style sheet neat and clean.

For Wordpress bloggers: Apart from optimizing the CSS code, you must check out how to reduce blog’s page load time and how you should clean up the Wordpress database.

Have you optimized the CSS of your blog template yet? What are your favorite tools for optimizing CSS code? Share your ideas in the comments section.

3 Useful Tools To Optimize your Blog’s CSS originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Although most blog services and blogging content management systems allow users to post directly on their websites, there are many advantages to using client software on a local computer, such as the ability to work offline. In past years, KDE had no full-featured blogging client.

Then, along came Kblogger, which was originally a panel applet and began to slowly morph into a full client. Another project called Bilbo finally emerged as a true full-featured client and working in conjunction with the Kblogger developers, managed to develop a blogging client that is now included in KDE releases.  Due to trademark issues, they changed the name to Blogilo, and will release it with KDE 4.4.

Blogilo featurs a WYSIWIG editor and support for Blogger 1.0, MetaWeblog, MovableType, Wordpress, and Google GData APIs. With it, users can create, modify, schedule, and delete posts. The right column is called the “toolbox” and includes tabs containing the most recent blog posts from a user’s blog, post categories, options such as whether to enable comments, and local entries not uploaded to the blog.

Because the main editing window is WYSIWYG, the toolbar includes typical word precessing-like features: bold, italics, font size and color, and spell check. Users can also add images directly from their computers (uploaded with the blog’s API) or from the the Web.

Despite the outstanding features, Blogilo does have its limitations. I could not find a way to use the graphical interface to set some styles, such as floating an image to the left or right. Its alignment tool seems to work on text, but those users who insist on following XHTML standards will find that Blogilo is a little loose in this area.  Fortunately, it also includes an HTML editor if users need to add styles rather than using the client’s own formatting tools.

Getting Started

Setup is very easy with Blogilo. Simply click “Blog” in the menu, followed by “Add Blog…” This will open a dialog asking you for four things: A title for the blog, your blog’s URL, your username, and your password.  If you click “Auto-configure” Blogilo will magically seek out your blog, login, fetch the latest posts and categories, and have you ready to start posting. You can also manually specify the settings and then click OK.

Typing a post is a pretty natural experience and normally goes without a hitch. If you need to stop in the middle of a post, you can click the “Save Locally” button or save a draft on the server by clicking submit and checking “save entry as draft”. Once you are finished, you can preview your post within Blogilo and view it using your blog’s own CSS styles.

Since Blogilo is a native KDE app, you can manipulate widgets like the Toolbox, moving it to the left side or even detaching it, forming its own separate window. It also supports KDE’s auto spell check to correct your spelling as you type. Furthermore, it allows you to open or create multiple posts, which are all conveniently tabbed and easily accessible.

Overall, I have found the blogging client very reliable and feature-rich. I have corresponded with the developers on more than one occasion and found them to be easily approachable and willing to quickly fix any of the early bugs. With this official KDE release, Blogilo seems more than ready to take on any new tasks that come its way, even if that includes changing its name a second time.

Blogilo: KDE’s blogging client originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

I recommend that before you begin, you familiarize yourself with the WordPress file structure by analyzing as many WordPress themes as you can (Note: You need to have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS.)

Getting Started

Begin you begin coding up the theme, you must understand that the WP theme is just like any other HTML webpage, except that it is coded with PHP. Even so, you don’t need to be a PHP expert to do up a WP theme. My advice is:

1. First get a working pure HTML page up and running (You can easily do this with a WYSIWYG webpage editor).
2. Open the HTML webpage in a text editor and slice it up to different portion (we’ll explain more on that later)
3. Insert in the PHP code

WordPress File Structure

The basic file structure of a WordPress theme is as follows:

1. Style.css – The stylesheet holds all the formatting and styles of the theme
2. Index.php – This is the main WordPress theme file that ties all the other files together
3. Header.php – Holds all the header information. Also, if all the files were lumped together, this would be the beginning of the WordPress theme
4. Sidebar.php – It has all the code for the sidebar
5. Footer.php – Holds the footer code

Other files that you will also find in a WordPress theme are:

1. Single.php – A single blog post code
2. Comments.php – This is where you place the code to control the behavior of the blog comments
3. Page.php - Controls the behavior of your individual pages
4. Search.php – This is if you want to add search capability to your WordPress theme
5. Searchform.php – Controls the way the search box behaves
6. 404.php – Customize the landing page if your readers get an 404 error
7. Functions.php – A way to further customize your WordPress theme
8. Archives php – How to display the archive results

A simple layout of the theme

Once you have got your HTML webpage ready, you can begin to slice up using the above layout as a guide.

To begin, you can either use an existing WordPress theme as a starting point (the WordPress default theme is a good one to start with. You don’t have to code it up from scratch, just amend the necessary stuff will do). Or, if you are adventurous, you can just start coding without one.

Main Index Template (index.php)

I suggest that you begin with Index.php because this is the file that ties all of the other WordPress files together. The first step is to call the header file. This is done by adding

<?php get_header(); ?>

The next essential piece of code you should add to the main index file is to tell WordPress how to behave if there are blog posts. This is accomplished by entering

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

You will then enter code on how way the page will be structured. This will vary according to how you want your page to look like. For instance, magazine-type look is going to be different than a blog-type one. After entering your code, you will have to add the following lines that will tell WordPress what will happen if there are no posts:

<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php else : ?>
<?php endif; ?>

After entering the behavior of the page, you need to call the sidebar and the footer. This is done by adding the following lines of code:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

On the whole, it should look like this:

<?php get_header(); ?> <!--grab the header, part 1 of the layout-->
 
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?> <!--displaying the main content area,  part 2 of the layout-->
    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
        Your HTML code here for displaying individual post.
    <?php endwhile; ?>
<?php else : ?>
        Your HTML code here when there is no post available
<?php endif; ?>
 
<?php get_sidebar(); ?> <!--display the sidebar, part 3 of the layout-->
<?php get_footer(); ?> <!--display the footer, part 4 of the layout-->

Stylesheet (style.css)

The cascading stylesheet includes all the formatting and styles for your WordPress theme. This will provide more flexibility to your theme instead of hardcoding them into each individual file. It is created just like any stylesheet. If you need a refresher, check out the W3 Consortium’s CSS style guide.

Header File (header.php)

The header file is like the beginning of an HTML file. Most of the time, you can just copy and paste from the default theme. The basic code that will be in the header file is as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />
<title><?php wp_title('&laquo;', true, 'right'); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="pingback" href="<?php bloginfo('pingback_url'); ?>" />
<?php wp_head(); ?>
</head>
<body>

Sidebar (sidebar.php)

The sidebar is how you want the sidebar to look like. You can have more than one sidebar. However, we are creating a simple WordPress theme, so we will stick with one. People usually like placing widgets on the sidebar, so you should add code to ensure that your WordPress theme supports widgets. You can also have any standard sidebar items that you want without having to use a widget. Sidebar basic are as follows:

<div id="sidebar">
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>

The code above will check if the theme supports widget. If yes, it will load all the widget content onto the template. else, nothing will show up on the template.

To widgetize your theme, simply add the following code to your functions.php

<?php  if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
    register_sidebar(array(
        'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
        'after_widget' => '</li>',
        'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
        'after_title' => '</h2>',
    )); ?>

Footer (footer.php)

The footer file will close the WordPress theme. You can place anything you want in the footer. You will usually see the copyright information here. The basic code to create the footer file is:

<div id="footer" role="contentinfo">
        Place whatever footer information you want to place here
</div>
<?php wp_footer(); ?>
</body>
</html>

As I stated before, if you have never created a WordPress theme, but are knowledgeable in CSS and HTML, then check out the structure of existing and various other WordPress themes, and begin creating your own WordPress theme.

If you need help on customizing/creating your WordPress theme, feel free to contact us to ask for a quote.

Understanding WordPress Theme: The Basics of Creating Your Own WP Theme originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

What are pingbacks and trackbacks?

Pingbacks and trackbacks are very similar, but other than using different communication technologies (Pingbacks use XML-RPC; Trackbacks use HTTP POST), there are only minor differences. Pingbacks are a way of keeping track of other blogs who have linked to your blog posts within their own blog posts. In order to do this, external blogs have to use your blog post’s hyperlink. Trackbacks work the same, except the blog post’s hyperlink is not placed within an external blog post. They are usually placed in an area specified for trackbacks. Additionally, pingbacks automatically will find the URLs; while trackbacks are done manually.

What are comments?

Comments are responses to a particular blog post that readers have written. Usually, comments are located right after the blog post. People have the ability to reply to one another’s comments directly on the blog without having to go to an external site.

Separating Comments and Pingbacks

If you have noticed, the MakeTechEasier comment system has separated out the pingbacks and the comments for better readability.

So how did we do it?

WordPress Plugins

There are three WordPress plugins that you can use to separate comments from pingbacks/trackbacks:

1. BM-TrackPing

What this plugin does is to strip out the trackbacks from the comment list and then add a single new comment with all the trackbacks in a list at the end. This plugin has not been updated for more than a year, so there is no guarantee that it will work well for the latest version of WordPress.

2. Separate Comments & Pings

This plugin removes pings and trackbacks from comment pages and place them in a new variable $pings. You will have to do further coding to insert the pingbacks separately.

3. Trackping Separator

Remove your pingbacks from the comments and provided you functions (to use in your theme) to list pingbacks/trackbacks separately.

Manually Changing the Code

By far, this is the best (and most effective) way to separate pingbacks/trackbacks from comments. You might get your hands dirty, but I assure you it will be easy. Just follow the instructions below:

Note: The following instructions assume that you are using WP2.7 and above. It will not work for any WP version less than 2.7

In your WordPress theme folder, download the comments.php file from the server.

Open it with a text-editor

Find the following code:

<ol class="commentlist">
    <?php wp_list_comments(); ?>
</ol>

Change the code to be as follows:

<ol class="commentlist">
    <?php wp_list_comments('type=comment'); ?>
</ol>
<ol class="commentlist">
    <?php wp_list_comments('type=pings&callback=list_pings'); ?>
</ol>

What the above code does it to first display all the comments in an ordered list, followed by all the pingbacks/trackbacks in a second ordered list. You can play around with the code to style it up or to change the order of the display.

Once you are done editing, save it.

Rename the comments.php file in the server to comments-old.php and upload this newly edited comments.php to your server theme folder. Now go to your site and see the magic happens.

WordPress: How to Separate Pingbacks From Comments originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

There was a time when web pages had to be written specially for mobile devices and most devices available in the market just couldn’t display regular web sites designed using HTML.

The Safari browser on the iPhone and iPod touch devices is responsible for more than half of the world’s mobile Internet usage and it doesn’t look like that uptrend is going to change soon. The reason behind this popularity is that, unlike other smart phone browsers, mobile Safari can display regular webpages as well as desktop based web browsers.

But, while the iPhone and iPod touch browsers display almost all websites perfectly, using a mobile specific theme you can offer a lot of advantages to your visitors.

For one, the mobile optimized pages will load a lot faster. The fonts will be optimized for reading on a device with a small screen and last but not the least, the user won’t have to scroll and zoom just to read the content.

But, if you’re worried that you’ll have to do a complete rewrite of your blog’s theme to make a mobile optimized version, don’t worry, WPtouch is here to your rescue.

WPtouch is a wordpress plugin that completely changes the way your blog looks on a mobile device like the iPhone, iPod touch or the Android. In that sense, it acts more like a theme for your blog rather than a plugin.

If you’re using wordpress version 2.8 or above, the easiest method to install WPtouch is to login to the admin panel and click on the “Add New” link under Plugins.

Search for the term WPtouch and when the WPtouch plugin shows up in the search results, click on the Install link to install it automatically.

Once the installation is completed, you can activate the plugin by clicking on the Activate link on the same page.

The plugin will now be installed and activated, ready to start serving a mobile version of your blog to your iPhone totting visitors.

If you want, you can just leave it at that and WPtouch will happily keep serving your visitors as long as you want, but if you’re like me and like to customize each and every part of your blog, I’d suggest that you give the Settings pane a look and customize certain aspects of WPtouch to better match your blog.

Click on the WPtouch link under Settings.

This is where you can change the theme’s style, colors and the icons used. When you’re happy with your custom changes, click the Save Options button.

If you use the WP Super Cache plugin on your blog, like I do, then you need to make some more changes to the your setup.

Click on the WP Super Cache link under Settings and check the tick box that says “Mobile Device Support” and click the Update Status button.

Scroll a little further down the page and you’ll find the Rejected User Agents text box. You need to add the following user agents to the list that is already there.

• phone
• ipod
• android
• dream
• cupcake
• webos
• incognito
• webmate
• opera mini
• blackberry9530
• blackberry9500

Save the list.

That’s it. You can now happily declare your blog as the most mobile friendly blog in the neighborhood.

Make Your WordPress Blog iPhone Compatible Using WPtouch originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

1. Database settings

define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere');
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere');
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

This is the first thing that you need to configure in order for WordPress to work. In most cases, you only need to change the database name, username and password. For the DB_HOST, ‘localhost’ should work most of the times. If not, ask your server administrator for details.

2. Changing the database charset value

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

You won’t have to change this value 99% of the time. Change this only if you are very sure that your database is using a different charset.

3. Changing the database character set sort order

define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Once again, change this only if you know what you are doing. If not, leaving it blank is the best option.

4. Authentication keys

define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('NONCE_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');

The authentication keys are used to insure better encryption of information stored in the user’s cookies. Go to https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/ to generate a new set of keys and copy/paste them into your wp-config.php file.

If you are using WPMU, you will see three extra sets of authentication keys:

define('AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_SALT', 'put your unique phrase here');

5. Table prefix

$table_prefix = 'wp_';

This $table_prefix settings allow you to change the default wp_ prefix before your WordPress installation.

Note: If your existing database is already using the default wp_ prefix, changing this value will not change the database value, and it will also cause your site to break. To change your existing table prefix, refer to this tutorial.

6. Language and Language Directory

define('WPLANG', 'de_DE');
define('LANGDIR', 'mylanguagedirectory');

If you are using a language translation file for your blog, this is where you define the language that you are using and the location of the translation (.mo) files.

Defining of LANGDIR is optional. If it is not specified, WordPress will first look up the wp-content/languages folder, follow by wp-includes/languages for the .mo file.

7. Defining the Home and site url

define('WP_SITEURL','http://your-site-url.com');
define('WP_HOME','http://your-site-url.com');

The SITEURL refers to the actual installation path of WordPress (the file path where the wordpress files are located) while the HOME refers to the URL that you want your visitor to access. There are several uses for this

1. For security measure. Install your wordpress in subfolder and have your visitors access them from the root directory
2. Migrating to new URl. When you are moving to a new URL, you can easily restore your database by pointing the WP_SITEURL and WP_HOME to the new URL. No editing of the database is required.

8. Revision count

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', FALSE);
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3);

Change the number of post revisions for WordPress to record. Giving it a value of FALSE (without the quote) will turn post revisions off.

9. Modify AutoSave Interval

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 160 );

When editing a post, WordPress uses Ajax to auto-save revisions to the post as you edit. You may want to increase this setting for longer delays in between auto-saves, or decrease the setting to make sure you never lose changes. The default is 60 seconds.

10. Define new wp-content location

define( 'WP_CONTENT_DIR', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/blog/wp-content' );
define( 'WP_CONTENT_URL', 'http://example/blog/wp-content');
define( 'WP_PLUGIN_DIR', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/blog/wp-content/plugins' );
define( 'WP_PLUGIN_URL', 'http://example/blog/wp-content/plugins');

Since WP2.6, you are allowed to move the wp-content folder to other destination and still get it working. You just need to specify the filepath of the new location in the wp-config file.

11. Access external configuration files

require_once(‘FilePathToConfigurationFiles’);

For developer, if you need to access external configuration file from within WordPress, the place to define it will be within the wp-config.php. This is useful when integrating another software with WordPress. For example, to integrate bbpress with WordPress, add the following

require_once(‘filepathtoforums/bb-load.php');

to access to the bbpress functions in WordPress.

12. Managing your cookies

define('COOKIE_DOMAIN', '.yoursite.com');
define('COOKIEPATH', preg_replace('|https?://[^/]+|i', '', get_option('home') . '/' ) );
define('SITECOOKIEPATH', preg_replace('|https?://[^/]+|i', '', get_option('siteurl') . '/' ) );
define( 'ADMIN_COOKIE_PATH', SITECOOKIEPATH . 'wp-admin' );
define( 'PLUGINS_COOKIE_PATH', preg_replace('|https?://[^/]+|i', '', WP_PLUGIN_URL)  );

The cookie definition is meant for sites with unusual domain setup. If you are using sub-domains to serve static content, you won’t want WordPress to track the cookies for the static sites. Simply define the COOKIE_DOMAIN option to limit the domain tracked by the cookie.

13. Debug

define('WP_DEBUG', true);

The WP_DEBUG option is especially useful when you are developing a WP site. It allows you to see what went wrong in the code. In actual production site, this option should be turned off (FALSE) as it can affect the performance of the site.

Additionally, if you are planning on modifying some of WordPress’ built-in JavaScript, you can enable the following option:

define('SCRIPT_DEBUG', true);

This will allow you to edit the scriptname.dev.js files in the wp-includes/js and wp-admin/js directories.

14. Configure Error Log

@ini_set('log_errors','On');
@ini_set('display_errors','Off');
@ini_set('error_log','/home/example.com/logs/php_error.log');

This option allows you to turn on php error_logging and logs them to a specific file. This is especially useful for those who have no access to the php.ini file.

15. Increasing memory allocated to PHP

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

Specify the maximum amount of memory that can be consumed by PHP. This setting may be necessary in the event you receive a message such as “Allowed memory size of xxxxxx bytes exhausted”.

16. Cache

define('WP_CACHE', true);

Activate the WP_CACHE for better site performance.

17. Custom User and Usermeta Tables

define('CUSTOM_USER_TABLE', $table_prefix.'my_users');
define('CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE', $table_prefix.'my_usermeta');

Save the user data to other table instead of the default wp_users.

18. Save queries for analysis

define('SAVEQUERIES', true);

The SAVEQUERIES option allows you to see all the queries made to the database. You can then analyze those queries and see the function that called it, and how long that query took to execute.

NOTE: This will have a performance impact on your site, so make sure to turn this off when you aren’t debugging.

To view the queries, place the following code in the footer of your theme:

<?php
if (current_user_can(‘level_10′)){
global $wpdb;
echo “<pre>”;
print_r($wpdb->queries);
echo “</pre>”;
}
?>

The code above uses the level_10 capability so only the administrator will see the query results.

19. Override of default file permissions

define('FS_CHMOD_DIR', (0755 & ~ umask()));
define('FS_CHMOD_FILE', (0644 & ~ umask()));

The above two options allow you to override the default file permissions. You won’t have to define this in most cases. However if your webhost uses restrictive permissions for all user files, then this is the way to go around it.

20. FTP/SSH Constants

define('FS_METHOD', 'ftpext');
define('FTP_BASE', '/path/to/wordpress/');
define('FTP_CONTENT_DIR', '/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/');
define('FTP_PLUGIN_DIR ', '/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/');
define('FTP_PUBKEY', '/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa.pub');
define('FTP_PRIKEY', '/home/username/.ssh/id_rsa');
define('FTP_USER', 'username');
define('FTP_PASS', 'password');
define('FTP_HOST', 'ftp.example.org:21');

WordPress allows you to upgrade the core version and plugins from within the backend. However, some of you might not be able to enjoy the benefits due to the FTP connection issue. Simply update your wp-config file with the necessary FTP credential and your WP upgrade function should work fine.

21. Control Proxy Access

define('WP_HTTP_BLOCK_EXTERNAL', false);
define('WP_ACCESSIBLE_HOSTS', 'api.wordpress.org');

The above options allow you to access external hosts from your domain. This is useful if you are in a restrictive environment (such as your comapny’s intranet) and you need to access an external host.

Protecting wp-config file

With so many information in the wp-config.php file, the last thing that you want is for hacker to see your wp-config file and gain access to your database.

Add the following code to your .htaccess file to prevent hackers from accessing your wp-config file.

# protect wpconfig.php
<files wp-config.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>

Did I miss out any tricks? Leave it in the comments

Useful WordPress wp-config Tricks That You May Not Know originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

For all it’s simplicity, a lot of people still shy away from using Wordpress because installing and maintaining it requires a certain level of technical knowhow. Specifically, the knowledge of installing and managing a PHP/MySQL stack and dealing with all the problems that can happen with a botched Wordpress installation.

So, without further ado, we’ve written this post that’ll not only teach you how to install a complete PHP/MySQL stack on your Mac but also teach you to install and configure a fully functional Wordpress install, all without leaving the comforts of your own computer.

MAMP, which stands for Mac-Apache-MySQL-PHP and is an all-in-one solution for people who do not want the hasle of installing and configuring the individual components on their system.

Follow the download link on the MAMP site to get hold of the latest DMG image and double click the image to mount it in the Finder. The download is a bit heavy at about 170 MB but it will be totally worth it … trust me.

One of the best things about OS X is the ease with which software can be installed. To install MAMP in your system just drag the MAMP icon to the Applications folder.

Double click the MAMP icon to launch control panel.

MAMP will automatically start the Apache web server and the MySQL database server and also launch an instance of your default browser to tell you that everything is working fine.

Keep this window open – We’ll need it in a while.

MAMP also bundles a version of phpMyAdmin along with the complete PHP/MySQL stack.

phpMyAdmin is a web based software to manage MySQL databases and we’ll use that to create a database for our Wordpress install.

Click on the phpMyAdmin link in the browser, and when it loads up in your browser, give a name for the new database and press the Create button.

That was probably the easiest MySQL install I’ve ever done.

Now that we have all the infrastructure in place for Wordpress, head over to the Wordpress website and download the latest version of the software.

Unzip the file that you just downloaded into the htdocs folder inside the MAMP folder – /Applications/MAMP/htdocs.

You should now see a wordpress folder inside htdocs. Browse to this folder and open the file named wp-config-sample.php using a text editor.

In this file, find the lines which say:

‘DB_NAME’ – replace ‘putyourdbnamehere’ with ‘the name of the database that you created’
‘DB_USER’ – replace ‘usernamehere’ with ‘root’
‘DB_PASSWORD’ – replace ‘yourpasswordhere’ with ‘root’

Save the file and rename it to ‘wp-config.php’ from ‘wp-config-sample.php’.

Now, open this address in your browser – http://localhost:8888/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php.

Follow the wizard and at the end of it, use the temporary password that the wizard created for you to login to your shiny new Wordpress Install. That’s it ! You now have a fully functional Wordpress install on your computer to play with all the themes and plugins that you want.

How to Install and Test Wordpress on Your Mac originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

If you are new to blogging and are looking to install your first WordPress blog, then it is easy. Simply change the $table_prefix entry in wp-config.php file, upload the file to the server, then proceed on with the famous 5-mins installation.

For those who have already been blogging for sometime, follow the method below to change your table prefix.

Preparation

Download the following two plugins, install and activate them in your WordPress blog.

WP-DBManager (plugin download page)

Wordpress Table Rename (modified version,  original download page)

Note: I have make a slight modification to the WordPress Table Rename plugin to include changes in the later version of WordPress, but credit must be given to SEO Egghead for creating such an useful plugin.

Get started

Before you do anything to your database, first perform a db backup.

On the left pane, go to Database –> Backup DB. Do a backup of your database.

Next, go to Settings –> Table Rename

Enter a new term for the table prefix.

Click the Create New Tables button to generate new tables with the new prefix. If you have a big database, this process will take a long time.

When it is done, you will see the success message.

If you have a big database, the page might issue a timeout and show a blank page.

Verify your new database tables

Now go to Database->database. You should see the new tables in place.

Migrating your blog

While the plugin provides a way to change the table_prefix value in wp-config.php file, it won’t work in most cases unless you have set the wp-config.php file readable/writable (which I strongly advised against). The best way is to change the value manually.

With your favorite FTP program, download your wp-config.php from the root server.

Open it up with any text editor and scroll down to the section where you see

$table_prefix = 'wp_'

Change it to

$table_prefix = 'YourNewPrefix_'

Save it and re-upload this file back to the server.

Almost there

You have just completed the migration from the old table prefix to new table prefix, there are still several things that you need to do

1. Browse through your site and make sure all the pages, images and content are loading correctly. If you see errors, or that the site is not loading, change the $table_prefix back to ‘wp_‘ and re-upload back to the server.

2. Browse through the settings for each individual plugin and make sure that all the configurations are intact. Some of the plugins use the table prefix for their storage and these values were not changed by the plugin. For such plugins, you will see the settings fall back to their default values. What you have to do is to reconfigure it and re-save it. It will now store in the database with the new table prefix.

3. (Optional) Go to the Database –> Empty/Drop Tables, check the Drop button for all the table with the old prefix. Click the Empty/Drop button to remove them from your database.

Important: Do this only if you are sure that the new tables (with the new prefix) are working correctly.

Note that this is purely optional. Leaving your old table in the database will not hurt your blog and it can serve as a backup and allow you to switch back to them quickly in the event your blog got hacked into. However, if you have a big database, the extra tables could add plenty of overhead to your server. So, make your own judgement.

Last part

Once you are happy with everything, backup the new database. If you have previously schedule a daily backup, you have to reschedule it again to include the new tables.

You can also deactivate and uninstall the WordPress Table Rename plugin. There is no use for it now.

That’s it. You have successfully changed your WordPress database table prefix.

Image credit: naokomc

The Safe Way to Change your WordPress Database Table Prefix originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

1. Co-Authors Plus

Co-Authors Plus allows a blogging team to assign a blog post (or even a page) to more than one author. It has a search-as-you-type input box that makes it easier to find the authors. This is a great tool because you do not have to know how to write their full name. After installing the plugin, you use template tags to allow the listing of the multiple authors. These are the allowed template tags:

• coauthors()
• coauthors_posts_links()
• coauthors_firstnames()
• coauthors_lastnames()
• coauthors_nicknames()
• coauthors_links()
• coauthors_IDs()

These posts will appear on the authors’ posts and feeds. It’s great because it provides blogging teams with many authors to have an easier way to find the desired authors. However, it’s a little difficult for people who do not know how to code.

To find out more information or download the Co-Authors Plus plugin, please visit: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/co-authors-plus/

2. WT Co-Authors

WT Co-Authors allows multiple authors in a different way than the previous plugin. It uses WordPress custom fields to show more than one authors. The custom name field to use is “coauthor.” The value will be the user’s name. There is no maximum in the amount of authors used. You have to ensure that the WordPress theme that you are using has “the_author()” function. If it doesn’t, you will have to manually add

if(function_exists(wt_the_coauthors_link)):
wt_the_coauthors_link();
endif;

It’s an easier way to show collaboration; however, it does not fully use the WordPress role functionality, so Administrators and/or Editors can assign Authors to one blog post.

To find out more information or download the WT Co-Authors plugin, please visit: http://anime2.kokidokom.net/all-team-blogs-attention-the-ultimate-mega-super-awesome-co-authors-plugin-is-here/

3. SP Authors

SP Authors provides a simple way of allowing multiple authors to be assigned to a blog post (or a page). After installing the plugin, you will se a new area that provides a way to manually enter the author’s name. It also has a drop-down menu of all the authors, if you are not sure how to spell their names. Another great feature is if you place the short code [sp-authors], you are able to show a list of the particular’s authors links of other blog posts that he/she has written.

SP Authors is the simplest plugin to use to collaborate among multiple authors in a single blog post. However, the drop-down menu might be overwhelming if you have many authors.

To find out more information or download the SP Authors plugin, please visit: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sp-authors/

If you have a blogging team, one of these plugins will really give you the flexibility of allowing multiple authors to colloborate on a single blog posts. This is especially useful in a complex post that allows you to assign different sections to various authors.

3 Useful Plugins For Multiple Authors Collaboration originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Desktop blog editors provide bloggers additional functionalities that are missing in your blog’s default editor (e.g. WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, etc.). Additionally, you are able to write and edit your blog posts offline, which provides a way to save your work on your computer’s hard drive while also not having to be connected to the Internet. One of the best desktop-based blog editors is Qumana.

What is Qumana?

Qumana is a desktop-based blog editor that allows you to create and modify blog posts for more than one blog. Additionally, it provides you access to blog posts offline and without a need of a browser. It eases editing and insertion of various types of media that is usually a headache in your default blog editor. One unique function is the integration with its own keyword-drive ad system, which is very much like Google AdSense. It also allows you to add basic Technorati tag that is usually only able to work with other blog editors if you install a plugin. Furthermore, it rivals fee-based blog editors that have the same or less functions that Qumana has to offer. It can be installed on Mac, Windows, or Linux.

What Blog Platforms does Qumana Work With?

Qumana works with a variety of blog platforms. They are the following:

• Angelfire
• Blogger/Blogspot
• BlogHarbor
• Blogware
• Bryght
• DiaryLand
• Drupal
• LiveJournal
• MovableType
• MSN Spaces
• Tripod
• TypePad
• Roller
• SquareSpace
• Wordpress.com
• Wordpress.org
• Plus most platforms that support the Blogger, MovableType or MetaWeblog API’s

Can I edit blog entries that I didn’t create using Qumana?

Yes, you are able to import your blog entries you created outside of Qumana. You can also import your blog categories. Tags are the only items that you are unable to reuse. You have to continue retyping them for each new blog post.

Can I ping services to know that I updated my blog?

Yes, Qumana provides you the ability of adding different ping services, so you can alert them after you publish a new blog post.

Does it support plugins?

At this moment, they do not support plugins.

Can I reuse what I write?

Yes, with Qumana’s DropPad. You are able to drag and drop images, texts, and links to your posts. The DropPad allows you to copy+paste information you find while browsing without having to open another program to contain what you collect.

Can I insert ads in my blog posts?

Q Ads is an advertising network that works within Qumana to insert keyword-driven ads into your blog posts. It provides an easy way to make money on your blogs without having to create an affiliate or Google Adsense account. Q Ads is easy to sign up for and use within Qumana.

Qumana provides a blog editor for all systems.  It still lacks some functions that other blog editors have.  However, it makes up with it by being user friendly and low maintenance.

What blog editor do you use to write your posts?

Qumana: An Easy-to-Use Alternative to Desktop Blogging originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

However if you’re blogging to a Movable Type or Wordpress platform blog, the best solution is Pocket Sharp MT  for touchscreen “Professional” Windows Mobile devices (or Phone Sharp MT for non-touchscreen WinMo handsets). Pocket Sharp MT is available from www.randyrants.com.

Once the installation is complete, you can configure Pocket Sharp MT to connect to and publish to your Wordpress or Movable Type blog, and comfortably blog from the comfort of your Windows Mobile device, employing basic formatting, assigning categories and even uploading images.

Setup Your Blog Connection

To begin, you need to make a connection to your blog. This first of all requires that your Windows Mobile deice is connected to the Internet, either directly via your network operator or via a WiFi connection. Note that prolonged use of Pocket Sharp MT can result in a high data usage charge.

When you first launch the blog software, you will need to setup the connection to your Movable Type or Wordpress blog. This can be done by going to Tools -> Options.

The options screen requires:

• Web Server
• CGI-BIN Path
• Username
• Password

You should already know your blog username and password; you should also know the URL of your blog, which is entered as the Web Server. (Enter the full path, including the ‘http://’)

The CGI-BIN part can prove to be more difficult. The default is set in Pocket Sharp MT for Movable Type blogs – /cgipath/mt-xmlrpc.cgi – so if you’re using Movable Type as your blogging platform you’re laughing at this point.

Wordpress platform users need to change this entry to refer to the Wordpress version of this linking gateway script. Thankfully it’s a lot easier to type in: /xmlrpc.php

With a correct username and password entered and a connection to the Internet established, click on refresh. The Blog List drop down will now display your blog, so you can click OK to continue or if necessary update the Proxy tab with any relevant information you need to connect to the web and try again.

Note that this guide is written using a Wordpress blog connection. The Pocket Sharp MT software functions remain the same for either platform, however.

Writing a Blog Post

Once the connection to your blog is setup, you can go straight into entering the text for your blog post.

Enter a title, select a category and enter the body text – it’s all straightforward and can be entered either by a hardware device-mounted keyboard or a software keyboard.

Longer entries can continue over onto the Extended tab, while Tags (Keywords) and Excerpts can be entered on the Advanced tab, along with a list of URLs to Ping. The status of the post (Draft or Publish) can also be set here, as well as allowing or disallowing comments.

The Authored on tab lets you set the date and time of writing – alternatively you can sync Pocket Sharp MT with your server time.

Save Drafts

It’s always good practice to save as you go, particularly when blogging from a device that doubles as a phone. This can be done via the File menu, simply select Save Draft or hit the Save button on the menu bar. The saved post will be stored as a text file with the .MT file extension.

The Format menu will apply any of the preset formatting (bold, underline, italics, URL link) to the selected text, while copy and pasting can be achieved via File -> Edit.

Finally, use the Tools > Upload Media category to upload images to the specified uploads location on your server. Using the standard <img src=”[filename]”> you can enter the image into the blog post, or simply use let Pocket Sharp MT insert it into the post on your behalf.

Submitting Your Post

Submitting your blog post is a matter of deciding whether to change the status from Draft to Publish, and then hitting Post to Server.

You can check the resulting post on either your mobile or your desktop browser to check the outcome, and I think you’ll agree the results – while limited – are very good indeed.

Pocket Sharp MT is one of the most functional Windows Mobile blogging clients available, but there are other solutions that operate on similar principles.

image credit: ittsai

How to Use Windows Mobile for Wordpress Blogging originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

This tutorial is applicable only if your Web host is using phpMyAdmin to manage your database.

Log into your Web host account and go into the phpMyAdmin admin page.

Search for the database that you have configured for the WordPress account.

If you have no idea what is the name of your WordPress database (probably because you used the auto installation script in cPanel) or forgotten the database name, download the wp-config.php file from the WordPress server (using SFTP). You should find your database information there.

On the left side of the phpMyAdmin screen, you should see a list of the table used in WordPress. Scroll down until you see the entry “wp_users“. If you are using a different table prefix other than “wp_“, you should see something like “yourprefix_users”

On the right, click on the Browse button. This will get it to display all the user information. The userpass column is the password field. Note that it is of an unrecognizable format, definitely not the same as the one that you have set for your WordPress. Don’t worry, this is the exact same password that you have set, except that it is encrypted with MD5 Hash.

Now, open a new tab in your browser and head on to MD5 hasher. Enter your password and and click OK to create a md5 hash of that password. Copy the hashed string to your clipboard.

Back to your phpMyAdmin, check the box beside your username and click on the pencil icon to edit the entry.

Replace the password with your newly generated md5hash password.

Click on Go to save the changes.

That’s it. You should be able to log in with the new password now.

Image credit: Tomás Rotger

How To Easily Reset Your WordPress Password via phpMyAdmin originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

If you are really concerned about the security of your site, this is something that you really need to avoid.

In place of FTP, you can use SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) to create a secure network connection instead. When you are connected via SFTP, all your data are encrypted. Even if they are intercepted, they will only show up as garbage text on the hacker’s computer.

This tutorial teaches you how to connect to your WordPress account (or any other Web server) via a SFTP connection.

A point to note: Not all web host supports SFTP. Do check with your Web host before carrying out the steps below. If your web host does not support SFTP, maybe it’s time to consider another web host that does. Hostgator does the hosting for MTE and they support SFTP.

While there are many FTP clients that support SFTP, the one that I find it the easiest to use and is available for all platforms is Filezilla.

Download and install Filezilla client for your platform. (skip this step if you are already using Filezilla)

Open up Filezilla. Click on the first icon on the Toolbar to access the Site Manager. Alternatively, you can find the Site Manager at the menubar File->Site Manager.

Click the New Site button on the left bottom pane to create a new account.

On the right pane, enter your host name (this is usually the IP address assigned to you by your Web host). In the Port input field, enter 22 (Different web hosts have different ports for their SFTP connection, Hostgator uses port 2222. If you can’t connect with port 22, you may want to ask your web host for the port number).

Under the Servertype dropdown field, select SFTP – SSH File Transfer Protocol.

Enter your login username and password. Click Connect at the bottom to connect to your account. If everything is fine, you should see a popup window prompting you to accept the server’s public key. Click Ok to continue (You may want to save the key in your cache so that it won’t prompt you all the time). You should be connected to your account via SFTP now.

Bringing it a step further

If you are really paranoid about your security, you can use a public/private key authentication to connect to your SFTP network instead. A public/private key authentication allows you to login to your account without any password and also eliminates any chance of a brute force SSH attack.

Once again, not all web hosts allow you to generate public/private key certificate. The following example is based on Hostgator cPanel.

Log into your cPanel. Scroll down until you see the SSH/Shell Access icon.

Click on the Manage SSH keys button.

Click on the Generate a new key link.

Enter your key name and give it a password. Make sure that your password is a strong one. Click on the Generate key button.

You should now see information about your public key.

Back to the main screen, you should see that your public key is listed as not authorized. Click on the Manage Authorization link to toggle it.

Back to the SSH key management screen, download the private key to a secure folder in your computer.

In your Filezilla, go to Edit->Settings. On the left, click SFTP. On the right, click the Add KeyFile button. Navigate to where you store your private key and select it.

Once you have added the private key, click Ok to close the window.

Back to the Site manager screen, remove the password that you have saved previously. Click the Connect button. Filezilla will now authenticate the session with your private key and allow you to login to your account without any password.

That’s it.

Image credit: beefranck

How To Connect To Your WordPress Account Via Secure FTP originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

If you have not been doing regular housekeeping and database maintenance, either because you don’t know how to do or you are just plain lazy, here are 8 useful tricks that you can use to clean up your WordPress database easily and quickly.

1) Turn off/delete post revision

While the post revision is a good way to make sure that any changes to a post is documented, it can be a waste of database and server resources if you are the only user of the blog and does not collaborate with other authors for article writing.

To prevent the post revision from cluttering your database, it is best to turn it off once and for all.

You can easily turn off post-revision by adding the following line to the wp_config.php file

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);

If you want to keep the post revision for record purpose, you can limit the number of revisions saved per post. In your wp_config.php file, add the following line instead:

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, no_of_revision);

and replace the no_of_revision by the number of revision copy you want to keep.

Removing existing post revisions

Turning off the post revision feature only restrict WordPress not to keep any revision for future posts. It does not delete the existing post revisions in your database. To delete all instances of post revision and all its related entries), we will make use of the delete-revision plugin with some simple modification (the plugin only delete the post revision. It does not delete all other unused entries that are related to the post revision).

Download the plugin delete-revision to your desktop.

Extract the zip file. Open up the delete-revision folder and load the delete-revision.php file in a text editor. Scroll down to the line 140 where you see

$sql = “DELETE FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_type = ‘revision’”;

replace it with

$sql = “DELETE a,b,c FROM $wpdb->posts a LEFT JOIN $wpdb->term_relationships b ON (a.ID = b.object_id) LEFT JOIN $wpdb->postmeta c ON (a.ID = c.post_id) WHERE a.post_type = ‘revision’”;

(Code adapted from Lester Chan)

Save the file. Upload the whole delete-revision folder to your blog plugins folder.

Activate the plugin. Go to the Delete-Revision page under the Setting section. Run the application to scan your database for all instances of post revisions and delete them from your database.

If you are keeping copies of post revision in your database, you should run the Delete-Revision manager once every few months to clean up your database.

2) Delete unused images

Everytime you upload an image, WordPress automatically create duplicate copies of that image and resize them to thumbnail and medium size. Most of the time, these images are not used. In addition, there could also be some images that you have uploaded, but did not use them in the post. These unused images could easily add up to a massive size and cause unnecessarily burden to the server and database.

The DUI (Delete Unused Images) plugin scans your WordPress blog and find those images that are not used or referenced to by any of the posts/pages. It then proceeds to delete them from the database/server.

To use the plugin, you have use a FTP program to chmod the Uploads folder (the folder where images are stored) to 777. Once you have deleted the unused images, chmod the folder back to 755 again to prevent access from other people.

Similarly, you should run this plugin every few months to clear up your database.

3) Optimize database

As you add or remove entries into the database, pocket of spaces are created. These are useless space and could cause your database to swell quickly. You can easily free up these spaces by running a SQL optimize table query in myphpadmin.

If you are not technically inclined or find it troublesome to log into your myphpadmin, the best way is to use the plugin WP-DBManager to manage your database.

Install and activate the plugin. Under the Database -> Optimize Database options, select the table that you want to optimize and click the Optimize buttonto start the optimization. It should take less than a minute.

You can also schedule it to optimize the database every few days/weeks/months

Go to Database -> Database option. Scroll down till you see the Automatic Optimizing of DB. Set the frequency for it to auto-optimize your database.

4) Delete unwanted plugin

If you have decided that you have no use for a particular plugin, deactivated them and delete them from your server. The more (unused) plugins you keep in your server, the longer it takes for WordPress to generate the plugin list and the higher tendency that it will slow down the loading time of your blog.

5) Uninstall plugin completely

When you deactivated/uninstall a plugin, the options or the tables that the plugin created are not removed. As you install and uninstall a lot of plugin, there will be more and more orphaned options and tables that are taking up precious space in your database.

For plugins that have created table entries in the database, you can use the abovementioned WP-DBManager to drop the respective table from your database.

For those plugins that have created options, you have to use the Clean Option plugin to hunt down the orphaned options and delete them from the database.

6) Remove unused themes

Similarly, if you have plenty of unused themes in the server, delete those that you don’t use.

7) Check your site for deadlinks

While it is an usual practise to link to other posts/blogs/domains in your articles, you should check frequently that the linked post/domain still exist and you are not left with a dead link. It can be very frustrating for your reader to follow your link only to find that the destination page is no longer around. In addition, too many dead links can also affect your search engine ranking. I am sure this is not something that you want to see.

The broken link checker plugin checks your new article for broken links as soon as it is published. It also scans your old posts when you are logged into the Admin page. Any broken links found are reported to you and you can choose to edit or unlink them from the posts.

8) Delete spam comment

It is common to receive tons of spam comments, sometime as soon as you post the article. Even though these spam comments are not shown in your blog, they are still gathered in your database to educate “intelligent” anti-spam plugins. If you received plenty of spam every day (or every hour), this could be taking up a lot of valuable database space. To erase the spam, either go to the Comment -> Spam page, check all the spam comments and select Delete from the dropdown box.

Alternatively, you can use the WP-Optimize plugin to clean up all spam and unapprove comments

The WP-Optimize plugin also comes with other features such as delete revision, optimize database table and change your username. Personally I would prefer to use the WP-DBManager to optimize my database table as it allows me to schedule the optimization task on a regular basis. In addition, the WP-Optimize is only tested for WP2.7, so if you are still using a WP version less than 2.7, you have to use it at your own risk.

What other ways do you use to clean up your WordPress database?

8 Useful Tricks To Clean Up & Streamline Your Wordpress Database originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)