Entries Tagged 'Wordpress' ↓

You must have often seen in feed readers that RSS feeds are devoid of any styling. They will be missing the bling that you see in the actual post in the blogs. Wordpress Plugin Feed Styler aims to correct this.

Feed Styler is a WordPress plugin for WordPress users who are comfortable with CSS and would like to be able to style their feeds. Feed Styler enables you to keep your existing class and ID style declarations in your content, but allows a different style to be applied to the feed of that same content. No longer do feeds have to be stripped of style and color.

Setting up Feed Styler is easy. Just upload it to your plugins folder. But if you want to use it, you need to have some knowledge of CSS. Then activate it in your Wordpress dashboard. Now you are all set to start styling your RSS feed.

Go to Options —> Feed Styler and start writing the CSS code for the feed. You can even have a look at the sample screenshots on the plugin page on how the feed will look after styled.

Tips for styling your feed

• Keep it simple. Do not make your feeds jazzy and stylish. If you do that you may end up losing your readers.
• Style your images as they are the first to lose their styling in feeds.
• Use a light background and dark text color.

Download Feed Styler

Did you like this plugin ? Will you use it or are already using it ?

After reading the simple SEO tips at Pearsonified , I was impressed by the fact that we can actually help Google index our blogs better by simply creating a XHTML Sitemap which links to all the internal pages in our blog. The XHTML sitemap also allows a visitor to see all posts that are there in your blog allowing them to explore further.

In short, a XHTML sitemap will be a great addition to your blog both in terms of usability and functionality.

Including a sitemap is easy, it’ll help your users, and it’s a great way to ensure that all the pages of your site are interlinked.

Chris Pearson has even provided a XHTML Sitemap Page Template which we can directly download and use in our blogs. The only problem is that the sitemap needs to be styled for the Wordpress theme you are using. There is also a super easy styling tutorial on Pearsonified on how to do this.

But if you are the one who is :

• Not too willing to delve into the PHP coding.
• Using the awesome Cleaker Wordpress theme.
• But still wanting to use this Sitemap feature

then here I come to your rescue. I have downloaded the XHTML sitemap and have now styled it so that it matches your Cleaker theme just perfectly. All you have to do is use it in your blog.

How To Use the XHTML Sitemap in your Cleaker wordpress theme

1. Download the XHTML Sitemap for Cleaker Wordpress theme.
2. Extract & Upload sitemap.php to the Cleaker directory inside the Cleaker 2.0 theme directory.
3. In your WordPress administration panel, go to Write —> Write Page.
4. Fill in the post title as Sitemap.
5. Do not enter anything into the text area of the post.
6. From the Page Template dropdown box, select the template as Sitemap.
7. When you’re done, click on “Create New Page”.

All done, now visit your blog to see a brand new Sitemap page with links to all your internal pages, blog post pages, category pages, monthly archive pages and feeds available for your blog.

This page will not only help Google index your blog better but also help your visitors in navigating your site better.

Requirements

• A Wordpress Blog
• Lots of friend bloggers and favorite websites
• Wish to share the above addresses with your readers

End Result

• A extra large sidebar with no more space to keep other items

Do you have similar requirements? Then this post is just for you.

So what is the solution to the above problem. Simple, just move the links to a separate page so that the sidebar becomes free. Though you can create a page in Wordpress and manually add links to it, by doing that you will not be able to use the the inbuilt Blogroll management functionalities in Wordpress.

So the best solution will be to create a page which automatically grabs the links from Wordpress Blogroll, something like my Links page. This will also enable you to use the Blogroll management feature from within the Wordpress dashboard.

How to create a links page in Wordpress

1. First, you need to create a links page template. For that download the archives.php file of your template to your computer.
2. Open it in Wordpad or any other text editor of your choice. It will look something like below.
   

   <?php
   /*
   Template Name: Archives
   */
   ?><?php get_header(); ?><div id=”content”><h1>Browse the Archives</h1>
   <div class=”post”>
   <p>By Date:</p>
   <ul>
   <?php wp_get_archives(’type=monthly’); ?>
   </ul>
   <p>By Category:</p>
   <ul>
   <?php list_cats(); ?>
   </ul>
   </div>
   </div><?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/sidebarRight.php’); ?>
   <?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/sidebarleft.php’); ?>
   <?php get_footer(); ?>

3. Now edit that file to look like below.
   

   <?php
   /*
   Template Name: Links
   */
   ?>
   <?php get_header(); ?><div id=”content”><h1>Links</h1>
   <div class=”post”>
   <ul>
   <?php wp_list_bookmarks(’arguments’); ?>
   </ul>
   </div>
   </div>
   <?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/sidebarRight.php’); ?>
   <?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/sidebarleft.php’); ?>
   <?php get_footer(); ?>
   </ol>

   What I did was replaced everything that was inside the <div class=”post> and </div> tags with
   <ul>
   <?php wp_list_bookmarks(’arguments’); ?>
   </ul>.
   Also I changed the the template name in the third line from Archives to Links and edited the page title inside the <h1> and </h1> tags from “Browse the Archives” to “Links”.

4. Now save the edited file as links.php and upload the file to the location from where you downloaded the archives.php file.
5. All set, now go to your Wordpress Dashboard —> Write —> Write Page. Fill in the “Page Title” as “Links” and then select the “Page Template” on the right hand side as “Links”.
6. Click “Publish”.
7. Now visit your blog to see a all new “Links” page with all links pulled straight from your Blogroll.

Now you can make your sidebar free of that extra long blogroll and utilize it for something else.

In case of any difficulties, drop me a comment..

A website or a blog can usually be accessed either through http://www.url.com or through http://url.com. Most people do not think there is any difference between the two as both of them always direct to the same place.

But search engines see the two addresses as two different sites. This can harm your blog’s ranking in search engines in the future. For example, the number of incoming links to your blog is one of the parameters used in calculating the Google Page Rank of your blog. And some people link to your domain with the www prefix while some link without the www prefix. This leads to the same blog having different number of backlinks for the domain with the www prefix and the domain without the www prefix and hence different Page Ranks for both.

Practically, I do not think there is any advantage whether or not you use www in your domain name. But the point is you need to pick up one and stick to it. It will help your blog in the search engine rankings in the long run. Normally what you need to do is edit your .htaccess file so that all links get redirected to either the domain with the www prefix or the domain without the www prefix.

But Wordpress users are at ease, there is a plugin for doing that.

How to solve the www problem in Wordpress Blogs ?

What is the need to fiddle with .htaccess when there is a plugin for setting your www preference. The plugin is WWW Redirect.

The continuous plague of several pages being indexed using numerous variations of the same domain name has definitely been experienced by most of us. In an attempt to remedy this extremely aggravating issue; WWW-Redirect was born. WWW - redirect allows users to opt for different redirect settings. This plugin allows bloggers to have more control over the uri in which their users access their blog. By doing so, you’re giving search engines and users a consistent link for accessing your content.

In simple words, what this plugin does is that it directs all traffic from http://manast.com to http://www.manast.com or vice versa according to the preferences you have set.

Update : As Harsh points out in the comments, you can also set your preferences in Google Webmaster tools as to whether or not, you want the www to be prefixed to your domain name in Google’s search index.

Download WWW Redirect Plugin

By default, the search function in Wordpress searches only inside the post body not the comments. This in my opinion, is a serious limitation as comments are a valuable part of a blog. Also sometimes there are very useful comments in some posts which are helpful to a visitor.

Wordpress plugin “Search Everything” attempts to eliminate this loss of functionality in Wordpress.

This plugin enables the searching of Pages, Comments and more. No Hacking or modifications necessary, just upload the downloaded folder to your wp-content/plugins directory, make sure to activate the plugin and then configure it under Options > Search Everything.

Apart from comments, there are also options to search pages, attachments, drafts,  and custom fields (metadata). To install this plugin, just extract and upload to your plugins directory. Then go to your Wordpress dashboard and activate the plugin.

Now in your dashboard, go to Options —-> Search Everything. Configure what pages you want the plugin to search and save your options. Now the search box in your blog will search inside comments and other things you set in your options.

Download Search Everything Wordpress Plugin