October 14, 2012
Picture this: you sign into the admin page of your Wordpress blog, and your dashboard shows 15 new incoming links - awesome, you think - until you look through each of the links to find they've actually just stolen and reprinted your content, word for word, and the only reason you found out is because they forgot to strip the link, which have caused it to automatically ping you. What the heck?
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October 5, 2012
We've talked about setting up a local server before, but the process is still fairly complicated and there's lots of quirks and incompatibliities if you're trying to run it on Windows, leading to nothing but hassle when you actually upload the thing to a real website. What if you could just boot up a virtual machine and have instant access to a Wordpress install to play around with, all contained within a fully functional standardised web server setup?
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October 3, 2012
As web developers, a lot of the time we tend to work on local development sites then just upload everything when we’re done. This is fine when it’s just you and the changes are small, but when you’re dealing with more than one person working on something, or on a large project with lots of complicated components, that’s simply not feasible. That’s when we turn to something called version control.
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September 29, 2012
User engagement should be a top priority for anyone running a website, blog or any kind of online business. While there is a lot that should be done in terms of encouraging users to share your content on social networks, as well as encouraging them to leave comments, there are a few more unique ideas that can help visitors interact with your site, and in some cases keep them there for a bit longer.
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September 28, 2012
About a month ago, we introduced a new interface element to MakeUseOf – a floating navigation and search bar. The feedback we’ve been getting is almost entirely positive, internal search traffic has rocketed, and some readers having been asking about how to make one for their own site, so I thought I’d share.
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September 21, 2012
Socialist is an incredible new jQiuery plugin that aggregates your updates on various social networks and displays them beautifully in a grid similar to Pinterest. Socialist is a jQuery plugin. I’ll be giving full instructions on how to implement this in WordPress, but a working knowledge of jQuery would be helpful to identify typos or errors in your code.
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September 21, 2012
Blogging is really hard work. There's no getting around that fact. Between the technical work involved in designing and maintaining a website, producing regular content on a frequent basis, and editing the work of any writers that you have working for you, the effort is massive. That effort really starts to pay off once you have a regular, steady flow of lots of visitors every day.
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September 20, 2012
Tumblr has become more than just a blogging, or micro-blogging, platform. It's become the source of original content, with people creating graphics, GIFs, short videos, poems, haikus, and anything else you could care to mention, before posting them to the Web using Tumblr. It is also the perfect platform for reblogging other people's content, with a dedicated option to do just that. The only problem is finding content worth reblogging.
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September 19, 2012
Have you heard? Blogs are old news. I hope you didn’t jump on that particular bandwagon. Yep, static sites are the all the rage now. I’m joking, of course. There has always been the need for various kinds of sites, but the blog format doesn’t fit every requirement. However, Wordpress is more than happy to be moulded into whatever you want - blog or otherwise - and today we’ll be talking about making a basically static website with Wordpress.
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September 9, 2012
One of the great things about Wordpress is it's adaptability and ease of customization. Just download a new theme, and your entire site changes in an instant. It's powerful, yet addictive; the search for the best theme is never ending - believe me - I have been known to spend literally days trying to track down that elusive theme that will make everything right in the world. Never fear though, because we're here with a rundown of the best magazine themes.
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August 31, 2012
At some point, your WordPress blog gets popular, and then people start crying out for a community. I wrote before about BuddyPress, which is one approach to take that effectively turns your site into a social network; forums are another option. There are quite a few forum plugins out there, but I’ve distilled them down to the Top 3 to help you decide which will suit your as an admin and will be just right for your users.
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August 11, 2012
Some apps are quick to call an update huge when there is only a few new features. That is not the case with the WordPress app. Their latest update hits the app store with an absolutely staggering 180 new features and improvements. The most obvious change is the completely redesigned user interface. The new version uses a slide out menu, which will look familiar to anyone accustomed to Facebook's iOS applications. This makes editing your blog quick and efficient.
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July 27, 2012
BuddyPress gives you complete user profiles, activity streams, and groups. If you’re considering a community site, this needs to be the first free project you check out. BuddyPress is completely free and open source. Just like WordPress, BuddyPress has a thriving community with themes and plugins.
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July 27, 2012
They say that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Unfortunately, the way of the world is that books are judged by their covers. People are judged by their clothing. And websites are judged by their aesthetics. And for this reason, if you run a website of your own, the layout and design is one of the most important aspects of drawing readers in and keeping them interested.
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July 22, 2012
Nearly every client I’ve worked with on a WordPress site has wanted a slider widget for the homepage - some nice bit of Javascript that features a rotating set of pictures. There are lots of ways to achieve this but none of them are particular user friendly, easily customizable, or robust. SlideDeck 2 is here to change all that
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