wordpress

FREE: How to Start a Gossip Blog

February 21, 2009 By Travis Leave a Comment

Are you thinking of starting your own gossip blog, but just don’t know how to get started? Do you think you could be funnier and more entertaining than those other sites? Want to earn some serious cash?

BlogCraving is offering our 6 Part Mini-Course for FREE for the first time. That’s a $199 value!

Sign up above and get instant access to the course. If you sign up now, we will send you Lesson 1 instantly. Then each day, we’ll send you the next lesson.

Here’s what you will get:

Part 1 – Your plan of attack. How to pick your killer category, and crush it. INSTANT!
Part 2 – Designing your gossip brand. How to design your site to match your voice.
Part 3 – Site hosting. How to pick the best web host that can grow with you (cheap).
Part 4 – Getting noticed. How to get the first eyeballs on your site, plus your next 10,000.
Part 5 – Show me the money. How to generate advertising money without doing any work.
Part 6 – Tracking your growth. How to track how fast you are growing, and keep it going.

You can unsubscribe at anytime. We hate SPAM as much as you do. Personally, we get thousands of unwanted emails a day, and we hate it. That’s why we will never send you spam, and we will never sell your information. Your email address is safe with us.

So sign up today, and get started on your new blog right now!

Filed Under: How to... Tagged With: blog, celebrity gossip, How to..., wordpress

WordPress 2.6 Beta 1 Released

June 24, 2008 By Travis Leave a Comment

Geeks across the land rejoice.

Why just the geeks? Well this release is expected to not have many visible changes. A lot of those were made with the 2.5 release, so it’s time to catch our breath.

Instead, a lot of changes “under the hood” are being made to improve the usability and experience. Here’s the list.

Caching of static files with Google Gears. Speeds up the backend for admins. It’s cool and complicated at the same time. In a nutshell, Google Gears is a little application you install on your computer. It will then fetch the static files and information from WordPress that rarely (if ever) changes. That way your browser doesn’t have to download the item, object, or function every time, thus speeding up the performance. You may have noticed in WP2.5 that the “Link” and “Add Photo” buttons can take a little time to load. Well, after the first time it loads, each subsquent load will be instant because Gears will have saved the functionality to your local machine.

Drag-and-drop sortable galleries

Post Revisioning. WordPress will now save all of your individual post revisions so that you can compare them side by side. Red highlighted text will indicate text that had been removed. Green highlighted text will show what was added. You can then restore any older or previous version of a post from within the system. Works great for group edited blogs. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: avatar systems, beta, google gears, photo buttons, previous version, wordpress, wordpress 2.6

Increase Sociability WordPress Plugin Trial Run

June 16, 2008 By Travis 1 Comment

I was browsing ShoeMoney today, and I saw a post about a new (or maybe just newer) plugin called Increase Sociability.

I had seen it in action before on the front end of a different website, but didn’t know that was what I was seeing.

Basically, the idea is to plop a special line of text at the top of your blog post when a user comes to your site through Digg, Stumble, etc. The plugin knows when people came to your site from one of the social voting sites, and it knows which one. It then, for example, will remind the Digg user to digg your post.

However, users that just browse your site the good old fashioned way won’t see anything.

The idea is to give the reader just a little reminder to give you a vote. As a result, you should get more social votes.

So, I’m going to test it on a few other sites and see how it goes.

Filed Under: Site Traffic, Strategy Tagged With: Increase Sociability, plugin, shoemoney, wordpress

Image Upload PageURL and Image

May 13, 2008 By Travis Leave a Comment

Many people are sill experiencing issues with the image upload function in WordPress 2.5.1.

The issue centers around placing images into posts with links to the image itself or to a page with the image on it.

After uploading in an image, you are given the option to place it with None, File URL, or Post URL. File URL links right to the full size image by itself. The Post URL links to a stand alone page with only the image on it. None does exactly what it sounds like.

Well, in IE7, that doesn’t always work correctly. As a matter of fact, it rarely works. However, in Firefox and all Mac browsers, it works just fine.

It is a known issue: http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6469

It apparently will be fixed for WordPress 2.5.2

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: 2.5, 2.5.1, firefox, ie7, image upload, images, mac browsers, uploading, wordpress

WordPress 2.5.1 Released

April 26, 2008 By Travis 1 Comment

WordPress 2.5.1 is now available for immediate download and install.

WordPress and iCast Limited highly recommends upgrading your install immediately due to the discovery of a serious security hole associated with open registration. The vulnerability will be published soon, so it is in your best interest to upgrade as soon as possible.

The full upgrade also has over 70 bug fixes! So a lot of the little buggy issues we have been dealing with have been fixed officially, including image upload problems in 2.5 associated with Internet Explorer (IE).

Other updates:

Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
Better performance for those who have many categories
Media Uploader fixes
An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
Widget Administration fixes
Various usability improvements
Layout fixes for IE

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: 2.5.1, bug fixes, fix, image upload, internet explorer, performance improvements, released, Security, security hole, serious security, upgrade, usability improvements, vulnerability, wordpress

Right out of the box, it comes with all the most popular social networking sites and bookmarking sites. In about 5 minutes, you can have this configured and launched on your blog. It also comes with a handy little plugin for WordPress that makes the implementation slightly easier. However, you don’t need the plugin portion if you are compfortable with it on your own.

You are left with a clean, small button on the bottom of your posts that says ShareThis with a little icon. That’s it. Nice and clean. When clicked, it pops open to reveal your sharing options.

For you as the site owner, you can track the usage of these networking tools through the ShareThis website. That way, you can see if people are actually using it!

Filed Under: Site Traffic Tagged With: blog, blogs, bookmark, configured, email post, email to friend, implementation, networking tools, sharethis, social networking sites, tagging, traffic, wordpress

WordPress 2.5 Image Upload Problem

March 31, 2008 By Travis 12 Comments

The newly released WordPress 2.5 does have one small bug in it related to image uploads. The new version takes advantage of some Java and Flash to run the image uploader that doesn’t place nice with Internet Explorer 7.

It seems to work fine with Firefox and on Macs, but PC’s running IE 7 are having issues.

To fix the issue, do the following:

1) Clear your browser cache more than once, then reboot your whole computer.

2) Download these files, and upload them where they belong in your install on your server.

3) Make sure you have the newest Flash plugin for your browser.

Then you should be all set until then next update.

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: images, install, installation, new, problem, servers, update, upload, uploader, wordpress, wordpress 2.5

WordPress 2.5 is Here!

March 29, 2008 By Travis Leave a Comment

The brand spanking new WordPress 2.5 “Brecker” is here, and just hours old.

The crew over at WordPress just cut the newest stable version loose, and of course we installed it immediately. It is awesome.

There’s a ton of new features, bells, and whistles. However, I must say, my favorite thing is the new design of the back end from a cosmetic point of view. It is very clean, simple, and easy to navigate.

It’s also very BRIGHT! You actually feel lighter when you write. A very airy feel to it that makes it enjoyable to work.

The new “Write” screen also has built in tools for adding media such as YouTube videos, you own images, pdf’s, audio clips, and other media. You can even toggle to full screen mode, which makes the writing a little easier when you are working on those big posts. It blows the writing area up to the full width of your browser, which then makes it look/feel like you are working inside MS Word or similar word processing software.

After typing in your headline, you also get a preview of what your permalink will look like for that article. It is placed in a clear area for you to see. I’m hoping this encourages users to think about their slugs and urls a little more. The smarter you write your slug, the better your SEO will be.

If you write a blog with more than one person, there’s new features for you too! Now, you don’t have to worry about being inside a post and having your partner save over your edits. Once you open a post, it will keep other editors out while you work on it. That way you aren’t both working on it at the same time and saving over each other.

Tons of great features. iCast Limited is offering our professional services for this upgrade. If you would like to have us upgrade your WordPress blog for you, it will cost you just $29.95. Contact us if you are interested in this offer.

Don’t have a WordPress blog? It is very easily to migrate your current blog over to this platform. We offer those services too.

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: blog, blogging, blogs, design, icast, install, installation, new, savings, seo, upgrade, wordpress