Awesome Twenty Ten Weaver

I have been quite busy with doing a few new builds and recently was turned on to the Twenty Ten Weaver Wordpress themes. Everyone has seen the new default Wordpress theme, Twenty Ten, well the Weaver child themes makes easier than ever to customize. The theme extends the Twenty Ten theme by offering much more functionality such as customizing design colors and inserting code into the head area of your site as well as other areas. The best thing many of you will like is that it is easy to use and free. The video below does not do it justice, but the Weaver system is great for a newbie or advance webmaster. I have always liked themes with easy to add headers and this theme will let adjust sizes very easily. You need to play with this as it includes several child themes that look great and are easy to change colors on as well. Try it, you will love it too.

Joost de Valk Video: Making Sure Your Content Is Found

I try to keep my eyes open for so many things and stumbled across a great video by Joost de Valk below from the WordCamp in Bulgaria back in October. The audio is a bit hard to hear and it is a long video, but I think you will enjoy it just the same. Joost or Yoast as he is commonly known is one of the people I follow closely in regards to SEO and Wordpress usage. He is the master at both. Enjoy.

Affiliate Recruit Wordpress Plugin

I have not quite formulated a plan yet for this free Wordpress plugin I have stumbled upon, but I have a few ideas. The free plugin is called the Affiliate Pro Plus plugin and lets your registered users get credit for new users they recruit by sending people to any url on your wordpress site with ?affid=username appended to the end. This could be for a contest perhaps via Twitter or Facebook and might be a great way to have a traffic promotion. I think you can probably come up with several uses for it. I have not used it yet, but the description claims members can be redirected to any page you want when logging in while admin users will not be redirected. You can also see who has been referred by whom and how many new members have been referred by each user on the user list. Of course this will not be a practical plugin for every site you run, but it is worth bookmarking and playing with should the need ever arise.

Critical WordPress Update

Happy New Year everyone. I hope everyone is hard at it already. The 2010 Christmas season was FANTASTIC. If you use Wordpress as a CMS, and I suspect many of you do, many are suggesting to update as soon as possible to version 3.04 that contains the fix that founder Matt Mullenweg calls critical. Supposedly there was a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that can be used to steal login information or other sensitive information from visitors to a particular site. The XSS vulnerability is similar to the one that affected Twitter users recently. You should get updated to version 3.04 as soon as possible.

Antivirus For Wordpress Plugin

Sorry for the late post, but I am sure you know how holiday unannounced company can be. I stumbled across a Wordpress plugin I had not tried before and it is called the AntiVirus for WordPress plugin. In a nutshell, the plugin scans your Wordpress template files for potential hazards and it does a good job as I tried it non a theme I know had an exploit from long ago and it caught it. If you are hacked and they inject code into your PHP files, one of the first places to be infected is your theme. This early warning system will monitor and clean your theme files for you. The plugin was last updated 10/27, so that is refreshing. I consider it a piece of mind plugin especially if you use a theme off the beaten path that you are unsure of.

Michael Gray Updates Wordpress Plugin List

Michael Gray has updated his Wordpress plugin list and while you will find many on my Top 40 Wordpress plugin list, he has several that I do not list. You can also see he has become a fan of the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast that I have talked about quit a bit recently. The WP-Print I have used before and forgot about. Also the WPtouch plugin I have used but do not think I have ever touched on. 2011 will surely be another banner year for even more great Wordpress plugins. I am teaching an out of work friend how to build and develop with Wordpress as he is an old html guy. These plugins I show him blow his mind. Make sure to bookmark his site or add his feed to your reader as he writes great stuff.

MaxBlogPress X-Mas Deal: - 70% Off

I have advertised MaxBlogPress Subscribers Magnet, Ninja Affiliate, Wordpress Wizard 2.0, $365K Blog Traffic Formula and the Daily Traffic Blueprint for some time and own every single one of these. I bought these on a special discount sale like is being offered now by MaxBlogPress. The MaxBlogPress Christmas Deal is for a very limited time and you, can grab all five of these great products and get instant access for less than a $140, one-time investment. That is a savings of $338 and 70% of retail. This deal will expire on the 14th December at Midnight [EST]. If you have it in your budget, I highly suggest this deal. It has never sold near this low.

Guideline To Finding The Perfect Wordpress Theme

Someone emailed yesterday and asked what makes a perfect Wordpress theme. I think that is a broad question, but I do know what to look for in a theme as far as functionality thanks to this older post by Joost de Valk. Yoast walks you through 10 of the most important things in his eyes for a Wordpress theme to have. Most themes usually abide by these, but you will run into some that don't and often times you can fix it yourself. As far as looks and layout goes, there is more than one type of layout and color scheme that works. As usual, I always say the less cluttered and the cleaner the better. If you are not good with graphics, do not pretend to be. All text themes can be just as good as those with top notch graphics or logos. The key is good SEO and great content.

Image Hotlink Protection In Wordpress

There are certain hotlink Wordpress plugins that do the job of hotlink protection of images on your site. If you are using Wordpress, you can simply create a .htaccess file from the code below and upload it to your uploads folder which is in your wp-content folder. Make sure the filed is named .htaccess In the code below make sure to change the yourdomainname.com to whatever your domain is. Also add any other file extensions you might want to prevent being hotlinked. to this group jpg|jpeg|png|gif in the code below. Usually though it is just images that folks want to protect. After you upload it. Clear your browser cache and test that an image can be hotlinked at a site like this. There are many of these sites all over the net. No matter how busy or slow a site is, it would not be surprising to see an image of your hotlinked every now and again. This htaccess folder can also be used in any other folder where you might use images as well.

# BEGIN HotLinkProtection
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?yourdomainname.com [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ - [NC,F,L]
# END HotLinkProtection

Post To Wordpress By Email

I just came across this video today and thought I would pass it along on how to post to your Wordpress blog by just writing an email, from your desktop, the web, or even your cell phone. Many of you this is not new news, but to some of you it may be. This comes courtesy of the great Wordpress.tv site. Great video tutorials there.

Cosmetics Last On A Site Rebuilds

I am all ready for the meat of the holiday shopping season on most of my sites and am now turning most of my attention to a few more sites that need rebuilds from the old BANS days. I plan these out, but try to move very methodical on them so I do them right. I don't like it to eat of large chunks of my day either. The biggest urge I have to fight is trying to play with the looks and cosmetics first instead of functionality. This is a big no-no, because the site needs to function right and all links, plugins and addons taken care of first. It is better to have a site working right using a base default Wordpress template, instead of having a pretty site that is half done. I tell you this from experience. Doctoring up your look, headers and CSS styles can get time consuming if you let it. Make this the last thing you do on a rebuild. There are many times when I wish I would of followed this very advice. Of course if you have the time and means, you can have EVERYTHING ready and done on a test domain or subdomain. This way you just move the theme and etc over to the rebuild. However you do it, make sure this site is down as little time as possible.

Cpanel Operations Wordpress Plugin

I came across the Cpanel Operations Wordpress plugin today and tested on a site with no problems. The plugin is billed as a quick solution to creating an email account and/or ftp account on their cpanel from within their WordPress site. You can see the screen shots here. Now this is not a plugin you of course will need on every site, but I have had a few in the past that I needed to have multiple email addresses for and this makes it easy to do. Also having the ability to create a FTP account on the fly might come in handy some day, especially if you needed help from someone and wanted to quickly get them access to the server. This too is not an everyday need, but you can tuck this away or bookmark it should the need ever arise. I would be tempted to disable it when not in need though.

Easy Wordpress SEO & More On The Yoast SEO Plugin

Often times it is good to go back to the simple things to refresh what we do or do not know and what we may have forgotten. Such is the case with this post from Siobhan on the Wordpress & Multisite blog. This post is another great basic and easy to follow SEOing of Wordpress. You will also notice several plugins from Yoast included in this post as well as the WordPress SEO Presentation at A4UExpo London that he did a year ago. Also included is a video on how to setup the WP Super Cache Plugin For WordPress.

You may remember the new SEO plugin I posted about a couple of days ago that is in beta, well Daniel Haim has a flattering review of as well. He goes in further detail how that plugin eliminated 7 different plugins that he uses and you will definitely recognize them. GET THIS PLUGIN NOW!!! I do not know how much clearer I can be on this. Go over the SEO post as well.

Are you Ready For WordPress 3.2 Using PHP5?

When WordPress 3.2 comes out it will be dependent on your host running PHP 5.2 in order to install or upgrade to WordPress 3.2. Now is the time to make sure you know for sure if your host is with the times or not. I came across this PHP 5 testing tool that is designed to help you find out whether or not a certain site is ready for WordPress 3.2. The tool simply looks at the information returned by your server. If the server you test doesn't identify the PHP version being run on it, instructions for an alternate method will be provided. This tool is more of a point and click type tool and if you have any real concerns, you should contact your host to ask them the hard questions. If the server is not ready for the new version of Wordpress, you should consider switching host as by now, most should be able to accommodate this. HostGator is currently running either PHP version 5.2.13 or 5.2.14 and is fine for lower volume sites that are not auto blogging.

Yoast SEO Wordpress Plugin Now In Public Beta

The day has finally arrived as Joost de Valk has released his long awaited SEO Wordpress plugin to a public type beta. I have followed Joost (known as Yoast) for a long while as he is an authority on making Wordpress dance and optimized to it's fullest potential. I highly suggest using this on a site of your own and read all of the post on it. This should become the end all, do all plugin for Wordpress heading into 2011. Get it downloaded and going today and make sure to subscribe to the Yoast blog and follow him on Twitter. He has helped me tremendously over the years as I have learned so much from him.

Free Arras Magazine Wordpress Theme

I like to pass along good clean Wordpress themes I find and found one last night that happens to be a magazine type Wordpress theme as well. The name of the theme is Arras and this theme comes in brown, blue, green, red, orange, violet and legacy. It features top and main navigation with full menus support. Also it offers custom post types and taxonomies support which means multiple selection of categories. It has an improved thumbnail system and a few theme options you can customize. The thing I like about it is how clean and simple it is and it's ease of use. You may not need it now, but be sure to bookmark it and give it a try down the road.

Your Are Probably Going To Fail If You Do Not Do The Work

I hate to be harsh, but every now and again I have to remind readers that this is a business and it requires work as I get some crazy emails. It also is not quick results more times than not. I know most of you get bombarded with the same emails that I do, that promise quick money and quick results, but if you do not have a good firm basis and solid work ethic in this business, you can forget success. Can you make money with auto blogs? Absolutely, but you have to learn the wrong and right ways to do it. Also what may work in one niche does not necessarily carry over to another niche. The purest type of site still is the product review /catalog type site. If you want the simplest way to build these, just refer back to the tutorial that Adam and Kelvin released some time ago with the Build A Niche Store Guide except use Wordpress as the platform. Do not get caught up with backlinks and all the other type stuff, learn to build a damn good site first. 200-300 words per product is super. A 30 page site should take you no more than 30 days. You can't write or pay someone to write 30 product reviews/descriptions in 30 days? If you can't, you need to find something else. These types of sites do not have to display eBay products either. Try Amazon, ShareASale, Commission Junction or the Google program if you are bugged about the EPN program. Build a good site, then SLOWLY backlink to it. They make money. Some more than others. Some less than others. Do the work, learn what a great site looks like a learn to study the traffic. There are 365 days in the year. That equates to 10 great sites you can build with 65 days off just writing one page a day. If you can't do that, yes you will fail. Wordpress is free, there are even a few free Amazon Wordpress plugins to get you started if you are broke. Hosting is cheaper than ever. Get off your ass and do this. One foot in front of the other. Put your blinders on and do the work. Let the others fail.

WP Robot 3.20 Released & The New WP Robot Control Center

The new WP Robot 3.20 version has been released and contains (besides a few bugfixes) many new features that were suggested by users including the possibility to save all images in WP Robot posts to your own server and a new option to have posts from certain campaigns be created as "drafts". In addition there are three cool new modules with WP Robot 3.2, to get some fresh and unused content to your websites! The new modules are:

Linkshare Module - one of the largest affiliate networks besides Commission Junction. More content and another way to earn money from your sites!

Eventful Module - using the huge database of concerts, musicals and other festivals on Eventful.com to provide targeted content.

iTunes Module - access all the content in the Apple iTunes store, no matter if you want apps, videos or music.

Finally the new WP Robot Control Center has been released and you can see the details in the video below.

Greg's High Performance SEO Wordpress Plugin Reduces Server Load

I was recently turned on to Greg's High Performance SEO Wordpress Plugin to help speed up a few sites and reduce the site load on several very high traffic sites of mine. I will admit that I have been using the Light SEO and the All In One SEO plugins for quite a while and it took a while to weed my way through all of the settings. One plus is that Greg's High Performance SEO also provides built-in support for titles and keywords left behind by alternative SEO and other legacy plugins such as All in One SEO Pack among many others, but I suggest you learn the settings going forward and not to rely on this. I have seen it reduce the load already by 5% on one site and have some more playing to do. Read up on it and see if it fits your needs or at worst, throw it up on a test site.

WPBeginner Blog - Tutorials For Beginners To Wordpress

I came across the WPBeginner Blog today that features tutorials and post dedicated towards beginners to Wordpress. This business is constantly seeing new influx of people and i like to be able to point them in the right direction every now and again as well. Make sure to really browse around there and try the search feature they have for specific tutorials. I also remind you of my top 40 Wordpress plugin list that I recently updated and you will see several on the WPBeginner Blog as well. Also not to be lost in the shuffle is the great Wordpress.tv site. Wordpress is easy to learn and I suggest it be the niche CMS platform of choice. Every thing else compares in comparison and you will be using Wordpress sooner or later so fooling with any other platform that you might have to pay for is foolish, especially if it does not have a long track record like Wordpress especially where security is concerned. Do yourself a favor and learn to use what the pros use.