Now you can start blogging from anywhere. The new facility of ‘WordPress for iPhone’ allows you to access this advanced blogging tool using your iPhone. WordPress for iPhone assists you in accomplishing a number of tasks. You can write posts, upload photos, edit pages, make a comment on any blog you visit and manage comments on your blog as well.

This move of WordPress offers a great experience for all those who are familiar with the functions of iPhone as well as the WordPress tools.

The ‘WordPress for iPhone’ uses an open source programming so anybody can provide his/her inputs in the development of this plugin. It is launched under GNU, the General Public License. This tool is available in 2.5.1 or higher version. If you are still not aware of this feature, you can check out Wordpress official site for the tutorials and guidelines which are important to learn this advanced tool.

Till now, many people have used this feature and gave a positive feedback. What are you waiting for? Start blogging today with the help of your iPhone.

The link advertising in the footer/sidebar of the Wordpress themes has proven to be an effective way in promoting your sites in two ways. Not only will you get direct traffic from the blogs’ visitors who click on your footer link, it’ll also increase your site’s link popularity, hence your search ranking.

When you sponsor (you buy a footer/sidebar link) a Wordpress theme, the more users download a theme, the more sites will have your links. Currently, there are 3 advertising models available in the market.

Model 1
You sponsor a theme and your links will be permanently placed on the theme. The theme will be promoted via submission to forums and theme directory sites.

Model 2
You sponsor a theme and your links will be permanently placed on the theme. The theme will be promoted via submission to forums, theme directory sites as well as the website of the theme owner.

Model 3
You sponsor a theme and your links will appear on the theme until a certain number of downloads have been fulfilled.

Now the question is: how do you know if your investment returns good results? To answer that question, you need to know 2 things.
1) How many times the theme have been downloaded?
2) How many websites use the themes?

The first question is actually redundant because ultimately, you want to know the answer to the second question, which is the end results! Therefore, when a theme owner tells you how many downloads you’ll get by sponsoring their theme as compared with others, think beyond the number of downloads because the big downloads don’t necessary mean that more sites are using the theme.

You’ll be surprised it is extremely easy to know how many domains use the theme that you sponsor. There is a catch, however, that you need to keep in mind before taking up a sponsorship. Just follow the steps below…

Read on for the full details…

Here is a unique way to increase traffic to your blog. It is called Entrecard. It is defined as an advertising platform for blog owners that are offered for free.

Bloggers and Entrecard users place advertisement of the Entrecard ad on any blog within the Entrecard network that is good for a certain number of days. The Entrecard ad placements on any blog as paid through Entrecard credits of the blogger or website owners who make the ad placement. We can treat this Entrecard credits as some form of a currency used for ad placement within the Entrecard network.

Bloggers place their ads by dropping off their cards at their selected blogs through the Entrecard widget. This Entrecard widget appears on every Entrecard member blog in the network.

Does this new craze deserve the attention that it is getting from a lot of people? Probably, the answer is yes. Entrecard is considered as an effective tool especially for the new and beginning bloggers in generating more traffic to their blogs.

In an apparent sales pitch for Entrecard, the following are declared benefits for those who join the Entrecard network:

• Another way to Earn Money
  Bloggers who come to drop off cards may click the ads on your blog, which translates to additional money earned. Besides monetizing from the traffic via Entrecard network, Entrecard recently announced a credit-buy-back program where you can sell your credits back to Entrecard.
• Build your followers
  Entrecard is one great way of bringing more traffic to your blog. Once they visit your blog to drop off their cards, they might see something that might be of interest to them and become a regular follower of your blog.
• Maximize word-of-mouth Marketing
  You gain warm body endorsers once you get positive feedback from Entrecard members who visit your blog to drop off their cards. It is essential that you keep your blog as interesting as possible to visitors.
• Improved Google, Alexa and search ranking
  As more and more visit your blog to drop off their cards, this translates to more page views that can boost the ranking of your blog in search engines. This would in turn bring in more targeted traffic to your blog.
• Increased traffic to your blog will easily attract more direct advertising opportunities. As you experience increased traffic as a direct result of being a member of the Entrecard network, your blog will become more attractive for paying advertisers. This would mean extra dollars to fill your pockets.

With these benefits of Entrecard, it is essential that you are knowledgeable of the nooks and crannies of the network to derive maximum benefit from it. Here are some practical tips to set you off as a new Entrecard member:

Click here to read the Top 10 Tips

WordPress 2.7 introduces a lot of enhancements and one of the major improvements of this new version is the new comment functionality. In WordPress 2.7, comments can be paged, threaded, etc. All of these functionalities are built-in but your theme must support it.

Before we proceed with the topic, it is important that you understand that enhanced comments are optional and its default is in the off mode, even after you have done the changes. In order to change the setting, you have to go to Settings –> Discussion panel to turn the feature on.

Strictly speaking, the word “compatibility” is not an appropriate term. The old themes will still work in the new version. The only issue here is that you will need the theme to support the threading, paging and the javascript enhancements.

This makes it important that your theme’s comments be compatible with WordPress 2.7. In order to unlock the potentials of WordPress 2.7’s comments, a couple of theme modifications are needed.

The first step would be to save the file as legacy.comments.php in the theme directory. After this, you have to create a WordPress 2.7-only comments file and save it as comments.php.

The procedure is to check the version of WordPress that has been installed.

In the theme’s functions.php file, add the following code:

add_filter('comments_template', 'legacy_comments');

function legacy_comments($file) {

if(!function_exists('wp_list_comments')) : // WP 2.7-only check

$file = TEMPLATEPATH . '/legacy.comments.php';

endif;

return $file;

}

?>

This completes the entire procedure.

Twitter has taken the blogging community by storm. A lot of people are now hooked to it and are now active Twitter users.

Twitter is a free service that allows people to stay in touch with each other through the exchange of quick and frequent answers to simple questions.

It is some sort of micro-blogging service that allows users to send a little 140-character messages out to “followers” and exchanging bits and pieces of information and potentially exposing that conversation to the larger grid.

A lot of practical tips are provided to potential and active twitter users or twitterers. This article has generated a list of 15 top pick tips that are essential in increasing twitter traffic to your blog.

These 15 tips revolve around major performance goals. The 15 tips shall be presented under the relevant performance goals.

BE A BRANDED TWITTERER, EXPRESS YOUR IMAGE

TIP #1
Exert effort at customizing your Twitter profile by providing it with your picture. A lot of people don’t like to send tweets to faceless twitterers. Include in the profile your blog URL and description. Most of twitterers check profile before they decide to follow you or not.

TIP #2
Generate interest and strong and positive impression by treating your tweets as your article headline. You should also avoid making your background look like some sort of an advertisement as it will definitely turn people off.

TIP #3
Monitor everything that is happening within your blog field and exert effort to be perceived as an expert twitterer on a subject related to your blog. Link to quality resources and people will surely look at you as an authority on whatever interest you are espousing in your blog.
Read all other Twitter tips

Why do people blog? Through blogging, people can express their thoughts and ideas. Wordpress serves as the bridge that links bloggers to other Internet users. Thousands of fervent bloggers from all over the world flock around Wordpress. And since Wordpress is an open-source platform, the community has created tons of useful plugins that allow bloggers to do almost anything you can imagine. There are many plugins available for download, each having a unique assignment yet they all have one common goal: to make your blog interesting so that you will receive more clicks.

Beginners and even expert bloggers all want to include plugins in their Wordpress blogs. If you are not sure what plugins suit you, here are the top 15 most popular ones that you might want to consider adding to better enhance your blog account. Please note that I do not provide support for my themes pertaining to the plugin issues. However, due to the strict coding standard that I always adhere to, my themes should work well with most of the popular plugins.

• All in One SEO Pack - This great tool optimizes your blog including the titles and the META tags so that search engines will find your site easily. This plugin also helps you avoid duplicate content found in blogs. With this pack, you can easily modify and tweak everything.
   
• NexGen Gallery - This is an image gallery plugin, which provides uncomplicated administration for those who have multiple albums and galleries. This allows you to add custom themes, new short codes, set your own collection of photos and use them in the Flash slideshow selection.
   
• WordPress.com Stats  - With this tool, the statistics about your visitors are provided. Just input your API key and let this plugin do the work.
   
• WP Super Cache - This plugin produces static html files from your Wordpress blog.
   
• Google XML Sitemaps  - This tool is generally helpful especially when you have updated your blog, your sitemap will be edited and the search engines will be informed about the change.
   
• Contact form 7  - It can manage your multiple contact forms and you can also customize the mail and the form contents with just a simple markup. The form supports CAPTCHA, Ajax-powered submitting and Akismet spam filter
   
• Lightbox 2 - It is used to overlie images on the current page
   
• Akismet  - It will check automatically your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not.
   
• WP-DB-Backup  - This will allows you easily backup your main WordPress database tables.
   
• FlickrRSS for WordPress - This plugin will let you display Flickr photos on the weblog. It will also support set, user, group, favorite and community photo streams, plus it is easy to configure and setup.
   
• WP PageNavi - This plugin will add more advanced navigation for you WordPress blog.
   
• WordPress Post Ratings -  A wonderful tool where you can be able to see or post ratings on your WordPress blog.
   
• Twittle tools  - This is a plugin that will create a complete addition between your WordPress blog and the Twitter account.
   
• WP Polls - A plugin to insert your polls by customizing via templates and CSS styles and there are lots of other options to ensure your polls look the way you want it. 
   
• Simple Tags  - Simple yet a wonderful plugin to your blog where you can customize your admin features.

This article comes a bit late as Wordpress 2.7.1 has already been released and I have written about it a week ago. However, many of you aren’t so sure about what ver. 2.7 has in store for you and why you should upgrade to ver. 2.7 and above. Let me do a brief review of this powerful Wordpress version.

Bloggers from all over the world were all eyes and ears on December 10 of 2008 because version 2.7 was released. This was named after the legendary American jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane. Lots of attention was received because it has several new features and the Wordpress team claims that this version comes with a great user interface rearrangement. The Administration Panel interface is said to make Wordpress more accessible and utilizable. With quite a lot of significant new elements and designs added, many avid bloggers ask, “Is this updated version worth a try?” Let us find out.

The first thing that people noticed on this newly available WP 2.7 Coltrane is its plain and faster environment. Publishing your blog will only take a few clicks compared to the earlier versions. The Dashboard Panel has also changed. Now, it can be easily arranged. Using your mouse, just drag and drop the things you want to organize and position your favorite on top of the others. Aside from this, you can also customize every screen through clicking the “Screen Options.” Same thing applies with the dashboard modules or the write screen. For instance, if you want your posting area to be in full screen, just click the arrow on the screen. This will minimize the arrow to an icon. You can go to the write page and start dragging and dropping every module from the right column to the main one. In addition, the once-top navigation has been changed to side navigation, which will eventually allow numerous amounts of plugins. This ingenious side navigation helps users to collapse and expand sections or reveal submenus without opening a new page.

Regarding themes, several bloggers may have found that their themes do not work the way they used to when they were still using the older versions of Wordpress. Unfortunately for some, there are themes that may have been broken and will no longer work for the 2.7 Coltrane version. Do not worry, though. It is still possible that you can patch them up and use them again through updating a few settings and editing things a bit. There are also features from this new Wordpress that rely on the theme you are using. Examples are the threaded and paginated comments. The paginated comments feature is especially useful for those sites that have several comments. You can define how many comments you want to appear on every page instead of displaying hundreds of them and disinterest those who will visit your blog. This feature was already available in Wordpress but you have to download a plugin first. With this version, it is constructed into the core. The threaded comments element is for you and your blog followers to track conversations easily. Here, you can adjust the levels of those nested replies.

Many bloggers have found the new features of Wordpress 2.7 very valuable especially Sticky Posts on the write screen. This “sticky” feature enables bloggers to permanently fix a post on the front page of the blog. There is also a QuickPress module that is added to this new version. This permits bloggers to create posts or drafts quicker. If you have created a draft, it will appear in your Recent Drafts section. This will save you a lot of time as well as the Automatic Upgrade option found in the Tools menu and a plugin browser, which will enable you to install or select your choices of plugins without leaving the Wordpress site. Another big time-saver is the Mass-edit feature of Wordpress 2.7. Here, you can edit multiple pages or posts through clicking the Posts menu. You can check the boxes for the posts or pages you want to edit and then you can save the changes afterwards.

Click here for the FULL WP 2.7 review

Blogging is one of the new innovations of the Internet world. It is the new instrument or method for the general online population to convey their thoughts, ideas, products and services to the community at large.

Blogging, interestingly can be viewed in the same mould as cake baking. When the cake tastes good but is not attractive – smudged, no fancy decorations and designs, the cake will inadversely be passed off. Without the physical attraction of the cake, no one would know that the cake tastes good. The design of a blog can be viewed the same way. Without a good design, the visitors and subscribers will be kept at a minimal level.

Below are some handy tips to maximize your blog subscribers:

Make it short and simple
This is one of the best ways on how you can capture readers’ attention. Write descriptive headings for your blog post. Your content should be relevant and very timely. When posting articles, it should be within 1000 words because the more text you enter, it is possible that your visitors will be turned off. The keywords should be relevant and more usable to what is being conveyed to the readers.

Comments and Suggestions should be encouraged
A well written blog or post requires comments or suggestion as this will help to maximize the visitors. They will be interested in subscribing to your blog if it is an interactive blog that they can interact with you. Suggestions from the readers are also important because you will be able to connect with them and they can share their ideas and opinions about your blog. 

Catch readers’ attention
When you post topics on your blog it is important that you create a catchy topic. It is akin having a conversation with a friend. Use only simple and understandable language so that the readers will not be bored reading when they find words that are alien to them. Do not use jargons or big, deep words.

Build rapport with your readers
You must create a rapport or build trust with your readers. For example, if the readers leave comments on your blog, it is important that you reply them. By doing so, you are creating an online community. This is important to maintain and maximize subscribers to the blog.

These are among some of the tips that you should bear in mind when you want to increase the number of your subscribers and visitors. There are hundreds and thousands of blogs that are born all over the world everyday. The most important thing is that you must make a difference and show your readers that they are important. Constructive criticisms and feedbacks should be welcomed with opened arms. Use it to correct the flaws on the blog. With all these mentioned, you will be on your way to maximizing your blog subscribers.

The design and appearance used is one of the mainstays of a blog. That is why Templatelite has the redesign. Just admit it – an attractively designed blog will have more pulling power rather than a plain and dull blog with no graphics, pictures and so on. These will result in the blogs gaining followers and increased readership. There are several pointers and tips below for those intending to design their blogs to make it attractively appealing to others :

• Adding Extras - a redesign will give you more opportunity on how you can extend the functionality of your blog by allowing adding extra features such as social bookmarking buttons, Subscriber Stats, RRS buttons, Portfolio Showcase, Chat Windows and many more. An extra feature that will make your subscriber stay and they will even invite their friends to join the blog.
  Previously, I didn’t have any posts about design resources. Since this site is about theme design, it would be appropriate to include the resources. In future, I’ll also include more advertising options and probably do custom theme design and SEO work for others.
• Rearranging your Blog – if you have a messy space on your blog it is not recommended that you have so many unnecessary components and elements. The best way is to remove some of the unnecessary components and retain the best parts of your blog that are neglected sometimes. Keep it smart, simple but effective.
  Take a look at this site for example, the top left is the showcase of my latest themes. The sidebar lists only important sections that include introduction of Templatelite, search feature, RSS feature, archive, about our themes, Wordpress tips and tricks, useful resources, tag cloud etc. The footer has 3 columns showing the popular themes, recent posts and recent comments. I think all these sections are necessary for my blog.

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