Stats

If the thought of Google Analytics and it’s mountains of variables and cross-analysis over trends over time gives you a headache, the simple WordPress Stats plugin may be perfect for you. Previously only available to WordPress.com hosted accounts, they decided to open it up for any self-hosted WordPress install too – though you do still need a login for WordPress.com as thats where your stats are collated and stored. As well as the basic visitor count and top content, you also get top referrers – useful to see which of your inbound links is worth the most to you. I do think Analytics is worth taking the time to learn though, so if you think you might want to move on up to what the big boys use at some point, it may even be a good idea to install both WordPress and Google Analytics stats codes so you have a good archive of data building up.

Gravatar Hovercards

I really like these, and it’s a great way to encourage user interaction and commenting on your site. WordPress uses Gravatar images by default if commentators leave their linked email address, and this plugin expands on that by making their profile images clickable – which reveals a little pop-up box (a hovercard) with personal or social links for that user and a little bio. I’ll certainly be adding this feature to my blogs as it really adds a little bit of “wow factor”.

Shortcode Embeds

WordPress tends to strip a lot of HTML codes by default, and often this includes the embed codes from various video sites. Avoid the hassle and do everything automatically with this simple plugin. Once installed, you just need to write [youtube http://URL ] replacing the URL, and it will all be done for you – no messy embed codes, no frustration. The plugin works with a quite a few of the most popular video sites too, not just WordPress.

Mobile Blogging WordPress App:

The latest version adds a quick photo button for those times when all you want to do is post and photo, but sadly it literally only uploads and inserts the images and doesn’t actually set the featured image (I showed you how to MakeUseOf this functionality a few weeks ago as well as make your own widget out of them) – which is a little disappointing. It also fails to categorise the post, so you’ll still need to do a little editing on the PC side at a later date if the idea of uncategorised posts infuriates you as much it as it does me.

Perhaps the only really impressive feature they’ve added is to view your stats, assuming you installed the WordPress Jetpack plugin and enabled the stats component of it. Is it worth it for that alone? I doubt it, yet this app is the best out there for mobile blogging. I’d suggest you keep it for those moments of textual inspiration on the go, but don’t expect to be able to write fully formed blog posts from it. As long as you’re willing to do a few edits later, uploading photos while you’re on the go too removes a middle-step of having to get the images off your phone then upload them using your browser, so I guess we can all appreciate that.

Trouble adding your blog? Make sure you remember to add the http:// part of the url, and that you have XML-RPC remote publishing enabled from the Writing options on the Settings sidebar.

That’s all folks. Do you use any incredible WordPress plugins you think the world should know about? Let us know in the comments, and be sure to follow along with all our WordPress tutorials and features.

While the process might have gone from lines of codes to series of buttons, everything is still stuck within the realms of computers. Nobody would have thought of building websites on a mobile phone. Not until the appearance of Zapd, a free iOS app that allows you to get your beautiful website up and running in 60 seconds – or less.

Tinkering With Templates

Everybody would agree that “the ability to build a beautiful website in less than 60 seconds” is a hard promise to keep – even for a powerful desktop web builder. So Zapd must have a few tricks up its sleeves.

The first trick is the template-based approach. Similar to iWeb, Zapd provides users with a number of beautiful web templates. They are professionally designed and ready to use. The only thing missing from the templates is the content. The second trick is the simple method of adding content. Zapd makes it very easy to add content – all users need to do is upload photos and write short sentences. In my opinion, Zapd is like the mobile phone version of Tumblr.

Since experience is the best teacher, let’s start by downloading and installing the app to your iOS device. Tap “Start a Zap” to start. Note: “Zap” is a website created using Zapd.

The first thing that will greet you is the collection of templates. There are currently 20 mini web page templates that you can choose from. The basic layout is a page title at the top, followed by an image and the caption, a text block, and a link.

Here are several other examples of templates.

The themes are quite various, from the minimalist look, to the artistic photo gallery. From the cute and girlie look, to the dark and formal.

Building & Publishing Your Zaps

After choosing one of the templates, you’ll go into the edit mode. Tap the “Settings” tab to enable/disable the profile sidebar, to change the theme, and to delete the Zap.

Tap the “Edit” tab to give a page title, and add content in the form of text, photos, and links. Photos can be taken from the device camera or from the photo library, and they can be resized and moved around before chosen.

Add a caption to a photo and tap “Done” to add it to the page. You can rearrange content by tapping, holding and dragging the right bar of any item.

After you finish adding all the content you want, click the orange “Next” button at the top right corner of the page to publish your Zap.

First time users need to sign in using their Facebook or email account before they can publish their zaps.

Other than publishing the zaps, you will also have the option to share your creation via Facebook, Twitter and Email. Zapd will generate a short URL for every page you create and host the results on its server.

All the zaps/pages that you’ve created will appear on the library and you can quickly access a specific item by tapping on it.

The results are in the form of mini sites and are accessible from both the desktop and the mobile web browser.

In case you are wondering, I built each of the examples above in less than a minute.

The Future Of Mobile Web Building

It’s true that Zapd’s 60 second mini sites are not in the league of professionally built full-scale personalized websites. But if you are looking for a quick way to publish your photos and stories, Zapd is the answer.

Even though (as far as I know) Zapd is the only mobile web builder available today, and it’s only available for iOS devices, the concept opens up broader possibilities. You can bet that the combination of mobile clients, solid templates, and web publishing will find its way onto other mobile platforms in the near future.

What do you think? Will people embrace mobile web publishing? Is there any other method to build quick websites from a mobile phone that you know of? Please share your thoughts using the comments below.

If you have an iPhone, sharing and posting just got even easier. The new Posterous app [App Store link] helps you upload photos, video and text and post it to your social profiles. You don’t even need to have an account to use it.

What Can I Do With This App?

The Posterous mobile app gives you power over everything in your account. Here’s what you can do with this app:

• Your posts can include any mix of text, photos and videos. You can also add geolocation and category tags.
• Share posts automatically with over 25 of your social profiles, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, Tumblr and Flickr.
• Use your other iPhone apps while your uploads to Posterous work in the background.
• Image galleries and videos are automatically resized for mobile viewing.

All of this can be done without taking the time to create a Posterous account. If you opt to go ahead and register for one, you can:

• Manage multiple sites, including private sites.
• Create group sites on the fly so anyone around you can contribute.
• Post to your online site via email or with the Posterous web editor.
• Update existing posts and manage comments.

Posterous’ future plans for their iPhone app include direct post editing, landscape post viewing, multiple photo selection and displaying attachments as thumbnails. You can find out more about this app on Posterous’ mobile page.

You can view a tour of the Posterous iPhone application by watching this video:

Source: Tech Crunch

That data might mean nothing to most of us, especially if we are on the passive side of information. But if you are a blogger or web publisher, you should already realize that the urgency of making your site mobile friendly is also growing along with that number.

The extra labor of re-designing the interface and re-adjusting the lines of codes to fit mobile viewing needs might make most web owners moan in frustration. Luckily, if you use self-hosted WordPress for your blog, the problems can be solved easily – and in style – by WPtouch.

Seek And Install

WPtouch is a WordPress plugin that will convert your blog interface to fit the (touch) screen interface of your visitors’ mobile phone. It was originally developed for the iPhone interface only and we’ve covered the old version of this plugin back in 2008. But it has grown so much since then, and now it’s already compatible with many other kinds of phones, that I think it deserves another look.

Let’s start at the very beginning: the installation. Installing WordPress plugins is not as troublesome as it used to be. All you need to do is search for the plugins that you want from within the WordPress plugin menu. No need to mess with FTP anymore.

After the results appear, click “Install Now“, wait for the process to finish, and activate the plugin.

WPtouch comes with a bunch of adjustable settings, but let’s see how it looks on a mobile screen before the tweak.

Touch The Blog

The following example was done on the iPhone. I don’t have access to other devices to experiment on, so if you can try it on other types of mobile phones, please share your experiences in the comments below.

The front page consists of boxes of available articles with dates, titles and some information about those articles. You can tap on the small arrow at the top right hand corner of one of the boxes to reveal a short opening passage from the article and the option to read more.

Each post is formatted with a readable-size font, scaled-down images, and screen-wide borders. At the top right of the screen, there’s a drop down menu with the RSS feed, email button, tags, categories, and login.

Visitors can turn off the mobile theme by going to the bottom of the page and sliding the switch off. A confirmation pop-up window will appear, making sure that the request is not accidental. To turn the view back to mobile mode, go to the bottom of the regular view screen and slide the switch on.

Clicking the log in button will reveal the username and password fields. You can log in and access all the menus that will only normally appear from within the WordPress admin area.

Adjusting The Settings

The options are located under the “Settings – WPtouch” menu. The first one is “General Settings” which deals with everything from “Regionalization” to “Footer Message“.

The “Advanced Options” also deals with many things, but the most notable one is the ability to add user-agents for unsupported phones.

WPtouch has the ability to send push notifications to your iDevices and Growl-enabled Mac or PC with the help of Prowl, but you are required to generate a Prowl API before the feature can be activated. We’ll discuss more about Prowl in a future article.

“Style & Color” Options deals with font styles and colors of WPtouch elements. You can also choose one of the available background styles from here.

The “Icon Pool” collects icons that can be used later to customize the look of the mobile version of your blog, There are already many available icons on the list, but you can add your own icons to the pool.

And if you are an Adsense publisher, you can add your Google AdSense ID so that advertisements can be displayed via the mobile interface.

So, it doesn’t matter whether your WordPress blogs are at an amateur or professional level, WPtouch can help you to easily transfer the interface to be more mobile friendly to cater to those mobile visitors.

Have you tried WPtouch for your blogs? How was the result in your mobile devices? Share your experiences in the comments below.

The default writing tool of the iPad is its Notebook. It’s a basic text tool useful for what it is named for. But one of the features most of us writers need is a way to export our documents from the iPad to another computer and word processor. With the iPad’s Notebook you can only export documents via email. A better and faster way is to wirelessly sync your writing between your iPad and an online account, which can then be accessed from any computer.

The free ad-supported iPad app, SimpleNote (iTunes Store link), works well for automatically syncing straight forward text documents between your iPad and your online account. SimpleNote has no tools for formatting text, embedding images, or saving documents in different formats. But wireless syncing capabilities are required in my view for writing production on the iPad, especially since the device lacks a traditional Finder for saving documents beyond apps or even to a USB drive.

For extended writing, Apple offers an iPad version of its desktop application, Pages, which is similar to Microsoft Word. However, Pages comes with a $10 price tag.  Although it includes lots of advance features not found in SimpleNote, I believe Page’s wireless syncing feature also comes at a price, for you have to upgrade to the Pages ’09 in order to wirelessly sync documents between the iPad Pages app and Apple’s iWork.com site. Your SimpleNote account, on the other hand, is totally free.

SimpleNote works as a word processor on and offline, and it saves your writing automatically. Once connected, SimpleNote immediately syncs to your online account. You can also type in both portrait and landscape positions.

Another big plus for using SimpleNote is that it actually works with the mobile version of Textexpander (iTunes Store link), the commercial automatic text expansion application. When downloaded on the iPad (or iPhone/iPod touch), Textexpander actually seems to work in the background when you’re typing in SimpleNote – just as you would when using the desktop version of the app. The ability to use Textexpander with SimpleNote is yet another reason, from a productivity perspective, that SimpleNote is in many ways a better option than Apple”˜s Pages.

Also, the online syncing feature of SimpleNote means that your documents will sync to your iPhone or iPod touch. While you might not want to do heavy duty typing on the iPhone, you will be able to read your documents and perform simple edits which will get synced back to your online account.

You can get a premium SimpleNote account for $8.50 per year that includes disabling ads, frequent automatic backup and the ability to set up an RSS feed for your documents. However, the free basic features are sufficient for your regular writing needs.

If you’re an iPad user, let us know which word processing tools you use, and the features you would like to see added to the iPad for getting writing done on the device.

Karl recently covered how to mobile blog with your Windows Mobile phone using Windows Live Writer Mobile, and Daniel covered how to post to WordPress blog with your iPhone, but Android users need solutions that are just as useful and functional.

One of the problems I had with most of the Android mobile blog applications that I found to post to WordPress from your phone was that they were severely lacking in functionality. Sure, you could email text blog updates or use scaled down mobile blogging platforms to send a few blocks of text to my blogs, but what if you want to include an image, post to several blogs or manage your blog comments? I was very happy to discover WpToGo (WordPress for Android), because it allows you to do all of these things with your Android phone.

An Android Mobile Blog App That Does It All…Almost

One thing I’ve noticed with almost every mobile app that I use is that they rarely have the extensive functionality that you would hope they have. You can’t really blame developers, because they’re limited by the device resources, compatibility issues and of course screen size limitations.

With that said, there are sometimes those applications that come pretty close. For me, WordPress for Android is one of those apps. It does just enough so that I can post high-quality blog updates without wasting time, and using the application is intuitive enough that you’ll be blogging within ten minutes of installing it on your phone.

As you can see, WpToGo can handle multiple WordPress blogs. To post to or manage any one of the blogs, just select it from the main screen and you have immediate access to your live blog posts, your local “drafts” stored on the phone, and all of the new comments that are on that blog and not yet managed. Each of these three functions are featured on their own tab.

When you add a new blog – setting it up takes this one, single screen – that’s it.  Type in your ID and password, and my favorite part – configure how the image that you upload from your phone will be displayed in your post. While I prefer aligning my image first image to the left and wrapping text around it, the option to center and place the image above your article isn’t a bad format either. By the way, before you’ll be able to post updates from your phone using WpToGo, you’ll need to go into your blog settings, under the “Writing” section, and enable XML-RPC.

Once that’s done, and you’ve configured your blog login settings into WpToGo, you’re ready to start viewing, editing, posting and responding to comments on all of your blogs, straight from your mobile phone.

On the first tab, you can view all of your live posts. If you’d like to review or edit the post, just long-click on it and choose from the options that come up. I’d advise against doing much online editing of the live articles, because the process of saving edits before you’re done takes a bit longer. Ideally, this app should be used for creating new blog entries locally on the phone.

As you’re typing, you can quickly save and the local copy will be updated and stored on your phone. This takes just seconds. You can close the app or turn off your phone and your local saved drafts will be ready for you the next time you turn on your phone and you’re ready to finish up your blog entry.

At the bottom of the edit page, you’ll find the features that make this Android mobile blog app so much more feature-filled than most other mobile blogging programs. Bold, italics, block quote and add links to your post to add variety to your update. Best of all, this is where you can add a picture to your post, and it’ll be inserted in the format that you defined when you set up the blog on your phone. Choose your tags and category and you’re ready to roll.

The publish option is what you’ll select when you’ve finished your final draft and you actually want to flag the post to be published the next time your phone syncs up with the blogs. You can also force it to publish before then by long-clicking on the title in your local drafts list and selecting to upload the post draft to the blog. If “publish” is selected, it’ll get posted live.

The most important feature of this app, for me, is the third tab for Comments. In this area, you can scroll through the most recent visitor updates and manage all of them. Just long-click on each individual comment and either mark as approved, unapproved or as spam. Now you don’t have to get on a computer or even try to track down Internet access, just open up your phone and manage your comments for the day while you’re riding the bus or waiting in the dentist’s office. You will never have another unproductive moment in your life, now that you have constant access to your blog with your Android phone – wherever and whenever you want.

Do you post to WordPress from your phone? What app do you use? If you use WordPress for Android, what’s your feedback? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Yahoo! Meme has a similar story on display. Or hasn’t, rather. There is no official mobile app available yet.

In these cases, we would turn to third-party (preferably) freeware. And we would be positively stunned. Reader, meet Pixelpipe.

Pixelpipe :: 100+ Sites Supported

Pixelpipe is an application for your Android, iPhone, or Palm Pre that allows you to post to social network sites and blogs. So what? Pixelpipe currently supports far over 100 different ‘pipes’, including WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, Facebook, Twitter, Meme, Flickr, and pretty much anything else that comes to mind. Here’s a list dating back five months, and it’ll still blow your mind. So that.

You can Twitter, blog, share family snapshots, and even upload to a batch of ‘pipes’ by using one predefined @tag. Amazingly, Pixelpipe manages to retain an overview of the horde. Prepare for dumping your old mobile applications.

What work needs to be done for the switch, you ask? Just follow the steps below.

Step 1 – Create a Pixelpipe Account

Quite obviously, you’re going to need a Pixelpipe account. Otherwise signing in would be one hell of a job. The basic sign up progress is hardly even a bother. Just enter your name, email address and password.

If you’ve already got an account on Twitter or Ovi Share, you can even skip the signup progress, and link those accounts together by simply logging in. However, do note that in the future you will always need to sign in with that Twitter or Ovi Share account you used, so there’s an unnecessary online dependence.

Step 2 – Add Your Pipes

Once signed in, you’ll need to start adding ‘pipes’. These are simply blog or social network accounts that you can later use to throw some interesting content online. Apart from Facebook, Meme and Twitter, not all these accounts are so obvious. It takes some time, but I’d advise you to scan through the entire list.

Know that you can also perform this step on your mobile phone. But repeatedly entering usernames and passwords goes a lot easier on your computer.

Perhaps you’re already sure what you want to use Pixelpipe for. In that case, you might only want to add a very specific branch of online accounts, and leave the rest for your desktop internet use. Luckily you can also filter the available ‘pipe’ accounts by their capabilities.

After authorizing Pixelpipe with the selected account, you’ll be asked to enter a few additional details as well. Noteworthy is the Routing tag. By embedding this tag in title or body, you can override the default pipes and have a message sent only to that service. Routing tags are also used when you post by email and MMS.

Step 3 – Profit! (Mobile)

And that’s pretty much all you need to do before you’re able to start using Pixelpipe for you mobile phone. If you log in with your Pixelpipe account now, you’re all set to go. Post text, pictures, and video to all of you’re favorite sites.

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can still select non-default pipes every time you post. Where supported, you can even include your Geo (graphical location).

Know any mobile applications that top this? Be sure to let us know what mobile services you use, and why!