Today I logged into my blog dashboard, got to notice that I have done 1000 posts on my blog. I started this blog with a different domain name (KishoreAsokan.Com) which I had registered about 9 years back. 3 months back I registered this domain and transferred my blog to this domain. I had been writing very irregularly for the past few years mostly on my daily experience related to Technology, My Travel, India and Maldives, mobile phones, Wordpress, etc.

Akismet has done a great job, catching 15,981 spam comments. Can’t imagine how my blog would have been if there was no akismet.

Wordpress has changed a lot from the time have been using this great tool. I thank the Wordpress team for their regular updates, thanking the plugin authors. I have written a few plugins during this time. In fact I developed these for my use and thought of sharing with others.

I would like to thank my visitors and sponsors to keeping my blog live.

I was playing with the Twitter Plugin and thought of implementing a twitter search page for twitter. I just added this function to my Kish Twitter Plugin which many of you are using. This search feature is very beta, so I have not included in the plugin for public download. I will do that as soon as I feel its working fine. You can check this on my Twitter Page. You will find a search box on this page, just enter some keywords and search. You can also create a twitter search engine using the Twitter Search API.

Implementing Twitter Related Tweets for Wordpress Blog Posts

Like the related posts plugin, just thought of adding some related tweets to my post. I used the tags as keywords to search Twitter and display the results. You can re-tweet the posts or reply to the author of the posts (Links Provided).

I checked the performance, I don’t find any change yet. If you find, please let me know. I will post the implementation after a few days if you are interested in testing on your blog.

The idea behind this is to show your visitors related tweets (Latest Ones). Could be interesting to see what’s going around the world related to the topic.

Search Engine Optimization for Wordpress blog is not a big deal as Wordpress is search engine optimized. I had done some posts in the past, just thought of sorting it out and posting the links for you.

Recommended Reading

1. 11 Ways to customize Wordpress for your needs
2. SEO for Wordpress
3. Google Trust
4. Optimizing your blog for Search Engines
5. Pagerank FAQ’s
6. Search Result Analysis
7. Analysis of Search Results with top keywords – SERPs
8. Pagerank importance for SERPs
9. Fall in Pagerank – Reasons
10. Search Results for SEO Tips on Google [Case Study]

Search Engine Optimized Themes

1. WP Remix
2. Studiopress
3. WooThemes 
4. Elegant Themes 

SEO Wordpress Plugins

1. All in One SEO Plugin
2. Platinum SEO Pack

Other Resources

1. Complete Guide for Wordpress SEO
2. SEO for Wordpress
3. SEO First steps
4. Wordpress SEO

 PhotoPressPro

View Demo

WP Remix

View Demo

StudioPress 

Agent Theme

Steamline

Black Canvas

Corporate Theme

Metro Theme

There are many professional themes available like WooThemes, WPRemix, Elegant Themes, etc which will really enhance the look and feel of your blog and give a professional touch.

If you are a user of Yahoo Messenger and want to chat with your blog visitors, you can add the Yahoo messenger on your blog. Login to your Yahoo account and go to Yahoo PingBox and create your PingBox according to your blog template.

If you are a plugin developer, you can join this contest. The contest is to create a plugin, widget, mash up, hack, or other variety of web application that helps people find and share opportunities to take action. You can find more information about the contest here.

Full Information

Wordpress is the most popular blogging platform. If you are looking for a tool which can create custom pages with different sidebars, then you need to have a look that this tool, WP Remix which is totally different from regular themes. WP Remix 2.0 is completely coded different way with many more functionalities than the original theme. Infact, this is a completely different approach in WordPress themes that offers complete flexibility over your page templates.

You will be provided support for any problems that you come upon. Some of the highlights of this tool are color schemes, grid based layouts, theme admin option, plugin compatibilities, clean design, SEO ready and many more.

You can also get PHPBB3 template that you can use to create a Forum on any topic for your site. The template has been designed to match WP Remix theme so you can have overall integrity in the looks for your site.

You can watch this video to learn how to create a page using WP Remix.

[media id=32 width=585 height=360]

Find out more about this tool

Wordpress is the most popular blogging CMS used among the bloggers. By default Wordpress comes will more that what you need, but you have the option to customize your blog according to your requirement. There are tons of extensions which are available at the Wordpress extension directory which can cater your need. You should make sure that you have your Wordpress Installation Updated to the latest version. Recently search engines have introduced a new tag called canonical tag which is used to tell the search engines about the URL of the post to avoid content duplication. You can use this tag using a plugin without any pain

1. SEO – Search Engine Optimization

   Search engine optimization is something very important as you should be aware that  search engines are the best traffic and free source of traffic for any blog or website. You need to make sure that your blog complies with the Webmasters Guidelines. Google is the most powerful and widely used search engine. There are a number of tips that should help you in optimizing your Wordpress blog for search engines. Pagerank is important for a blog or website, so you need to look into the SEO factor seriously. There are some good plugins like All in One SEO which takes care of most of the SEO requirements of your blog

2. Subscription

   RSS feed subscription is something which you should concentrate on. You should have some option for your readers or visitors to subscribe to your posts using the RSS feeds. There are many ways to increase the number of your RSS feed readers. There are two options for subscriptions, one E-Mail subscription and other is through the RSS feed reader like the Google reader and many others are available.

3. Newsletters

   Other than subscribing using the RSS feeds, you can run newsletters where you send something special to your subscribed readers. I would recommend Aweber which is one of the most popular newsletter system. Newsletters can help you in boosting your traffic and even help in selling offers.

4. Theme

   Having a professional theme is something very important. I use a theme from Brian Gardner called Revolution Church which I feel is having a professional look and I have made some customization looking into my needs and taste. A good theme is very important to impress your visitors. There are also lots of free Wordpress themes available which can be used when you start your blog and later you can change it to a professional one when you feel that you can afford to pay for your blog theme.

5. Advertisements

   Blogging is done as a hobby by some, as a way to make money and some do it for both. To monetize your blog, you need to get advertisers. Google Adsense is the best for the starters and if your blog has some decent traffic, you can go for private sales of Ads slots. I have been using Oiopublishers for some time now which takes care of the entire process from telling the visitors that I have ad slots for sale or rent, they can check the prices, buy it, make the payment, create their ads and view the reports. Make your advertising system automated, that will really help you. You can display your affiliate banners till you sell your ad slots and make money from your affiliate sales too using this plugin.

6. Fighting Spams

   Protecting your blog from spam is very important. If you are using Wordpress, then you do not need to worry much because Matt has developed an excellent plugin called akismet.  You will find this plugin available by default, all you need to have an API key with Wordpress and you have to update it into the settings of this plugin.

7. Guest Post from Users

   Getting your visitors to register and do guest posting will help you in getting good content for your blog. I have some paid content writers for my blog who help me in adding good content to my blog. You can encourage your visitors to register and submit content and offer Guest posting  option. This works well for popular blogs as this would help the authors to advertize themselves as well and market their blogs. I would suggest to use the register plus plugin which has some security features and some additions features than the default user registration in Wordpress. To motivate your visitors to write for your blog, you can offer some rewards which is done by some bloggers, but some offer to add a link to the authors blog which is also very much useful for the authors.

8. Translations

   Offering translation of your blog or website is one of the best way to get readers from non-English speaking countries. I have written a  translation plugin which I was using, but now I do not use because I find Google translation banning the site temporally very often. I need to work on this plugin and find a solution for this.

9. Social Networking

   You need to build your presence in different social networking sites like twitter, stumbleupon, facebook, digg, etc to advertize your blog and make it popular. Many use social networking to gain traffic and sales. Traffic is very important for your blog and social networking sites are something which can help you in branding your blog and get loyal readers.

10. Auto Blogging

    I have come across an excellent plugin which will fetch and update your Wordpress Blog with posts from different RSS feeds. You can run a blog without spending time in doing posts.

11. Hacks

    There are many hacks that I use on my Wordpress blog like displaying the upcoming posts and adding the meta custom fields for thumbnails for themes which use thumbnails like the Revolution Themes, showing a welcome message to your visitors coming from search engines

I have written written this post for Wordpress CMS because I have been using this for my blog and I find Wordpress is the most widely used open source tool for blogging. I would suggest to make customization for your blog using plugins rather than making any changes in the core files. Reason being, when you upgrade your Wordpress installation will overwrite all you customization.

In you Wordpress blog, you may want to hide unwanted pages in the menu. To do this, you can use the include parameter in the Wp_query.

Suppose you want to show only the  pages with ID 4, 5, 842,2412, then you can use the include parameter. You can even exclude the pages using the exclude parameter. If you use the include parameter then only the pages that you have asked for will be displayed, but in the case of exclude all the pages other than the pages in the exclude parameter will be shown.

<div id="navbarleft">

        <ul id="nav">

            <li><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>">Home</a></li>

            <?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=2&include=4,5,842,173,2412&sort_column=menu_order'); ?>

            <li><?php wp_loginout(); ?></li>

        </ul>

</div>

I use videos on my blog very often and have tried different video hosting services and players. I was using Blip.TV for long time now as I get some revenue out of it. Earlier I was using Revver, Vimeo which also pays for the ads displayed. Recently I installed a useful plugin called wordtube which manages the JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER 4.2 and makes it easy for you to put music, videos or flash movies onto your WordPress posts and pages. The player used is the JW Player for playing the videos. You can use different skins available to suit your blog taste. You need to download the mediaplayer.swf file from longtailvideo website and place it inside the plugin folder before you start using this plugin.

Hosting your Video Files

As far as my experience is concerned, I would recommend to use video hosting sites like blip.tv or YouTube to host your videos rather than saving it to your server. If in case you need to move your hosting, you will have tough time downloading all the bulky video files. Other reason is that your hosting charges may go up or you may even need to change your hosting package as for video viewing the bandwidth usage is high. You also will not have to take the pain of converting your AVI files to FLV and compress it if  you are using video hosting services.

About the WordTube Plugin

This is an excellent plugin which can be used to customize your Video Player, add your logo, set default sizes or custom sized video’s etc. You need to first need to add the video like you add media files. You can select custom thumbnail for your videos also. You can even use the videos from YouTube or Blip.TV by entering the URL of the video. In case of YouTube, its simple, just enter the URL of the YouTube Video, but in case of Blip.TV, you need to enter the Flash file download link which you can find towards the bottom of each video page. Once you add a new video, that video is assigned with a unique media ID which you need to tag inside your post like [ media id = 1 width = 585 height = 320 ]. You can assign every video to a playlist or create new playlists also. You can add information likes the title, description, tags etc for each video. This plugin also has a widget which can be used to display the latest video or some playlist.

Video adds flavor to your blog, you can talk to your visitors much better when you use Videos or pictures. If you use Video’s on your blog, I would suggest to use this plugin and discover your own ideas and spread the message to the world.