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Save Time and Get More Done With This Second Batch Of Shortcuts

Earlier I posted on the Wordpress Hotkeys, which are shortcuts that you can use to do things like Bold, italicise, Blockquote, or add a link.    Well it seems that I missed some of the shortcuts, and there are actually another whole set of things you need to know to speed up your blogging.

 You can pull up a second row of hotkeys in the WYSIWYG editor with “Shift + Alt + V”.   This row of hotkeys is extremely useful and quite time saving.  It allows you the options of doing things like underlining, changing color, inserting a custom character, and more all with just the click of a mouse, so you don’t have to muck about in the html

What else do you get?

• Header Pull Down Menu - instead of adding your <H1></H1> headers by hand you can simply highlight the text and use a pull down menu to select it.
• Full Alignment - Although I think it is ugly, if you want to use full alignment instead of left you can quickly get at it with this submenu
• Paste as plain text - If you are copying from another webpage, and you don’t want to carry the formatting with you, the paste as plain text can be a huge timesaver.
• Paste from Word - Although I don’t use word much any more, using this will allow you to keep your Word formatting intact when you paste into Wordpress
• Clean Up Messy Code - If your html is messy, and full of tags that you don’t need and aren’t being used, using this icon can clean it up and save you some space, helping your page load faster.

So check it out if you haven’t already.  I personally think that the color changing will be extremely useful.  I have avoiding using other colors just because I don’t want to get into the html and insert the tags.  But with a option in the WYSIWYG editor, I can use the colors to make my posts more scannable.

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Here are some useful newly released wordpress plugins that you might want to look at

AdSense Manager - This plugin allows you to manage your adsense from within Wordpress.  You no longer have to go to Google Adsense to create a new ad block, you can do it from your options page.

Skypi - Show a skyp button for direct dialing on your side bar.  Handy if you want to let your readers call you.  (Why you would want that… up to you)

TinyMCEComments - Turn your primitive comment box into a WYSIWYG editor with this plugin

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Here are some of the better new plugins available for your wordpress blog

Easy Ban - Gives you the ability to easily temporarily or permanently ban users from your site based on their ip address.  It allows you to redirect them to the site of your choice.

Rank Plugin - Give your commentators rankings based on the number of comments they have left.  After they reach each level, they will automatically ascend to the next.

Social Services Plus - Much like wp-notable, allows you to add social bookmarking links to the bottom of your single posts.  These links come in as text rather than icons.

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This Is High On My List Of Wanted Applications - Hint Hint to plugin authors

As Daily Blog Tips wrote, and their commentators seemed to agree, checking your links before you post is an essential bug catcher in blogging.  How often have you made an annoying typo while linking, or mis-pasted a link and never even noticed.  However this is easily said than done.    There is no good method of checking links on even a post level.  When you create a link in the Wordpress editor, you can’t follow it.  Pretty much all you are reduced to is publishing your post, and then checking the links and editing them.  There must be a better way.

Two great features of wordpress - or ideas for plugins would be

1) Follow Links as you Post - Microsoft word lets you Cntrl-click on links in order to follow them in a document.  If Wordpress could do similar it would make checking for broken links an order to magnitude easier.  No longer would you have to wait to publish to double check.  You can fix your mistakes on the fly.

2) Site wide link checker - Webpages change all the time.  Sometimes a site you have linked too gets taken down.  A site wide link checker, which periodically followed all the links in your blog and reports 404 errors, or any other errors it finds, would be a incredibly useful tool.  If you have old posts with broken links, you can quickly go back and edit them to either point somewhere else, or simply not display a link.  This will save your users from the frustration of clicking and having the page not appear.

This may seem to be ambitious plugins, however I think they would be very useful.  I sure don’t have the PHP nor Wordpress skills to do them myself.  Any developers want to tackle the challenge?

 What do you think?  Would you use these features?  Are they worth doing?

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Day 5 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

If you have decided to start a blog, and decided to use Wordpress as your blogging software, which I recommend then it is time for you to get set up with your wordpress site.  Luckily getting set up with wordpress is easy.  You can have a basic site up and running in 1/2 an hour, and be blogging 5 minutes after that.

Here are the steps that you will need to take to get going

1) Download Wordpress - Its a free download.  Go to that site, download it to your computer and unzip it and you are ready to proceed with the next step.

2) Installation - The next step is installing wordpress.  In order to install wordpress correctly you need to verify that your host has PHP and a mySQL database.  If you are using Godaddy as your host, then you need to make sure that you are on Linux host plan not Windows hosting.  The windows host plan uses ASP not PHP and will not work with Wordpress.

    2) Free Installation - Can’t get Wordpress going for you?  These guys will set up your blog for free within just a couple of days of e-mailing them.

3) Using Wordpress - Once you have wordpress installed you are well on your way to blogging.  To login go to yourblogaddress/wp-admin    Once you are there the interface is fairly intuitive, but we’ll walk you through what some of the things mean.

Your wordpress user interface will look like

What you can Do at each tab -

• Dashboard - Use the dashboard to get caught up on the latest activity in your blog.  You can quickly link to moderate new incoming comments, you can see recent blogs who have linked to you, and you can get caught up on some of the latest wordpress news.
• Write - This is pretty intuitive.  You can use this to write your posts or your pages.  It has some options like Post Excerpt - where you can write an excerpt that will appear in Google and other places, Post Slug - where you can give each post a unique path if you don’t want it to default.  Post TimeStamp - Where you can edit the time that you want a post to go up on your blog if you want to delay posting it. (which is a really good idea)   Categories - Where you can define what categories the post is grouped with.   There are many other options in the write page, but those are the most important
• Manage - Manage will be a clutch tab that you use all the time.  It allows you to search for and manage your posts and pages.  It lets you handle your uploads and categories.   If you install plugins like Wordpress Database backup you will manage your automated backups from here as well.
• Comments - From here you can allow comments, edit them, delete them and view all the comments on your site.  You will want to use this frequently to make sure you are interacting with your readers
• Blogroll - Have some blogs that you really like?  Do you have another page of your own you want to give some link love to?  Use the blogroll and the links will appear on every page of your site.
• Presentation - If you get sick of the default wordpress theme (and you will quickly) you can go here to switch between other themes that you have uploaded.  You can quickly switch between several different themes to find the ones that you like.  You can get some free themes here.
• Plugins - Plugins are one of the things which make wordpress great.   By using just a couple of the Best Plugins, you can vastly increase the functionality of wordpress.  You can make it easier to catch comment spam, get backlinks, and refer visitors to other parts of your site.
• Users - You can define other people who can log into your site and what their access level is.  You can limit people to only being able to read the site and make comments, being able to write posts, being able to edit and moderate the site, and to having full control   You probably want to keep the number of people who have full control of your site to a minimum.
• Options - A few random options like your tag line and the address of your blog.  You will want to go here as soon as you set up your blog and make sure everything is correct.

Something that you should do immediately upon setting up wordpress is get Pretty Permalinks  going.  It is very ugly having a ? in your file path.  Set up pretty permalinks so that you can have permanent path to each of your posts.   Search engines prefer this for their rankings.

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By now most bloggers are sure to be familiar with the fact that Wordpress has released version 2.2   However you might consider waiting a little while before upgrading, (i.e. version 2.21) as some bloggers I’ve read have reported bugs.

I haven’t upgraded my blog yet.  I am still operating on good ole reliable 2.13.   However from what I have read it appears that most of the problems are with Widgets.   So if your blog makes heavy use of Widgets you might want to wait until they get that sorted out before you upgrade.

If you don’t use widgets you will probably be ok

Have you upgrade yet?  Experienced any bugs?

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Save Yourself Time, Spend It On Content, This Will Do The SEO

All In One SEO pack is a must have plugin for any Wordpress user who is trying to climb in the search engine rankings.  (Read, every wordpress user)  It is incredibly simple to use and takes care of many different search engine optimization tasks automatically.

Here is some of the things this tool can do for you

• Help You Avoid Duplicate Content - This tool will automatically put noindex tags on your archives and category pages.  This will ensure that your page content isn’t indexed twice and you aren’t penalized for having duplicate content.
• Create Better Page Titles - This tool will help you create better page titles.  Instead of having your blog title and the word “Archives” appear at the front of every page title, you will know have your post title as your page title.  This will help enable searches to know what your page is about, and make more people click on your site.
• Optimize Your Excerpts - All in one SEO forces your self written page excerpts to become your search engine excerpts.  You are much more able to summarize your page than search engines are.  A better page summary will result in more visitors coming to your site.
• Pick Your Keywords - All in one SEO allows you to put your target keywords at the bottom of your post.  If you are targeting specific keywords, and you should be, this will enable you to get even more exposure to those keywords
• Plus It Is Easy To Install - Like all good wordpress plugins, this is very easy to install and use.  The plugin author is active in supporting the plugin and fixing troubles and bugs, so give it a shot.

Have you used this plugin?  How did it work for you.  If not, do you do anything to optimize your SEO?  What do you do?

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Some of The Best New Plugins

Spotback Plugin- Allows you to easily integrate a rating component in each of your posts.  Your users can rate your posts, or they can rate something you talk about in your post

Who Said That- Injects the URL of a person who commented on your blog into the comment feed

Widgetize Anything-  Allows you to call any other plugin from the sidebar widget. 

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New Version, With Some Nice New Upgrades

Wordpress has just released Version 2.2.   This version includes some nice new features such as

• Wordpress Widgets - Wordpress widgets used to be a plugin.  It is now standard on Wordpress 2.2.  Wordpress widgets allows you to rearrange and customize different areas of your blog.  You can drag and drop the features easily
• Blogger Importer - Wordpress 2.2. allows you to import all of your blogger posts just by entering your blogger login.  Now there is now reason not to switch to wordpress
• Blog Protector - Wordpress claims that it is now virtually impossible for you to break your blog by activating the wrong plugin or editing the wrong feature.  I doubt it is impossible to break, but robustness is always nice
• 244 Other Tickets Closed - Although the three above are some of the cream of the crop of the new upgrades, there are 241 other bugs fixed and features added.

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