When your blog is bare and you feel pressured to create content, there are a number of ways you can brainstorm for ideas, like hitting photo sites, your RSS readers or review your notebook. Or… you can use these four tools. They are fun to use and you’re going to come away with more than one idea. Upworthy Generatory This is not owned or affiliated with the real Upworthy but they do have sensational headlines that make you want to click. Very cool but sadly most of those titles don’t work for my current blogs. It could for you and so Upworthy Generator is in the list. Portent’s Content Idea Generator This is a simple tool but I love the way it is presented. Each title also gives you hints why this title works and funny quips. Also nice that you can keep hitting the generate button and get a new title. Linkbait Generator This is the first tool I ever found way back when but forgot about it. Very similar to Portent’s and they all sort of work on the same idea. Topical Brainstorm Perhaps the most comprehensive of all, once you enter a keyword, you’ll get this long list
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Among the dreaded things when moving web hosts is waiting for your domain to resolve. If you’re new to all this – it simply means it takes time for all the networks around the world to catch up to this change. It could be almost immediate for you but may take up to a day for someone else. The problem is, you can’t tell by visiting your site – if you are indeed viewing pages served by the new host or the old host. This is particularly true if you have not made any change whatsoever to your site. After moving hosts several times for myself and clients, I’ve gathered a few tricks up my sleeve. Small Changes After successfully moving the site, I would go into the site’s cPanel and manually edit the theme or a page with a small inconspicuous image or text. Nobody really knows or sees this unless they are looking for it. If this image/text is not present when I visit the site, I know I’m still being shown the site on the old web host and need to wait before working on it. This is simple and easily done but sometimes you want more
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Beginning with WordPress 3.7, new installations are shipped with automatic updates. This news strikes terror in many of our hearts. After all, who can forget all the failed update horror stories? I’ve got a few to tell myself so I understand and am uncertain for the time being. However, because WordPress is very much part of my business, and this can potentially help shave a ton of my time, including outsourcing costs – it would be naive to reject automatic updates wholesale without first understanding what is involved. Like anything new and somewhat major, this took me some time to digest. Some of this stuff is rather technical so I thought I’d help you understand what it all means to you. Improved Verification Before Updates When you click update, WordPress doesn’t simply update willy nilly. There are checks happening in the backend that you never see (that’s a good thing). With automatic updates, the developers have improved these backend checks to reduce update problems. Update: I forgot to include this in the initial post. From what I read and understand, the automated minor updates only replace the changed files not the entire WordPress core as you would a major update.
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What’s the best WordPress theme? That’s a question that you see thrown out regularly. Before you go further, know that there is no such thing as the best theme (or plugin) for that matter. However, there are best themes or plugins for the context of what you want to do. When you choose your themes, be mindful of these and make sure you don’t follow them. Use An Unsupported Theme This is rather tough. All theme developers start somewhere, but your business (or money making blog) is not the place to experiment with unproven themes. Security is an issue yes but also, if few people know about and use it, the tougher it is for you to get help, especially on a free theme where support is never guaranteed. Choose Themes That Are Too Feature Rich There’s a reason WordPress has plugins and themes. Some things are better left for plugins and others for themes. For example, a theme for food sites. There are plenty of gorgeous themes that do this well. The moment the theme includes ways for you to create recipe pages, it’s entering plugin territory. This can be done using custom post types or custom meta content.
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You’re trying to update your blog but something is not right. Maybe you can’t upload an image or your posts won’t save. You log in to your cPanel to find out you are out of web space. How can that be when you host all your heavy audios, videos and downloadable files on Amazon? Here’s what you should check. How many themes? It’s so easy to get carried away test driving themes – especially when you’re getting started. You settle on one and as time goes by, forget the rest. Individually they are not very large but upload many and watch your disk space fill up. All you need is your existing theme, it’s parent and one default theme as a fallback. Everything else is unnecessary. Unused plugins Same thing with plugins. Time to do some housekeeping of unused plugins. Catchall email, also known as default address Some hosts these days have this disabled but it’s still a good thing to check. I remember when I was a rookie webmaster, my web hosting account was full to the brim and there was nothing huge in my files. There wasn’t even any database or WordPress. The culprit was the catchall email.
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It’s true. In general, humans simply don’t do well with change. Though I’m OK with change, somehow, when Aweber rolled out their new editor sometime ago, it just stuck in my craw. Maybe it’s because I’ve been with Aweber almost 10 years. Maybe because I take so long with Email already I just want to get in, out and be done. Who knows? Having said all that, there’s one thing about me that has served me very well. I won’t let tech kick my butt. I’ll dig in and wrestle till I can pin it down good. Good thing always come out of that – usually, but that’s another story for another day. This time, my effort and time spent understanding Aweber’s editor pays off every week. This is why. A Better Editor for Email Sometime last year, I was hired to create an HTML email. I’ve never been too keen on doing them because it is easy clients who aren’t familiar with HTML to mess it up. It doesn’t help when most email systems don’t come with a good HTML editor customized for emails. I did it anyway – something about challenges that’ll be the death of me one
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This is a tip I’ve shared with BlogEnergizer subscribers – among many others – if you like it, go get on the list . Every week, an email comes in from SlideShare with the week’s hottest presentations. I always look forward to these because they’ve done a ton of the content curation work for me by narrowing down the popular ones. This way, if I share one from this list, it’ll resonate because it’s proven to be popular. I’ll review to see what is topping the charts. 90% of the time, I find the top presentations relevant to our audience. I suppose because SlideShare is rather business-centric, but there are also a lot of general life stuff there so don’t let this turn you away. Also, if you go to the home page of SlideShare, they tell you what is Hot on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These are ripe for picking. Once I zero in on the one that is relevant to our audience, I’ll grab the embed code. Then, I’ll create a post, paste the embed code, add a paragraph with key thoughts of my own and voila! Blog post in about 2 minutes. Then came the problem. You see,
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Once in a while, you will find yourself on a blog where you are immediately attracted to the content. I’m not talking about how good the title or content is although that is essential. I’m talking about those sites where the design helps to make your consumption of the content a thoroughly enjoying and satisfying experience. The great news is, you don’t have to do a complete re-design with a new theme to make your content attractive. All you need to do is implement some of these techniques. Use Pull Quotes Pull quotes are phrases or a sentence that is set apart using design. Some people call them side bars and you’ve seen them in books as well. These are great for quoting people, featuring a key thought, tip, challenge or highlighting a parallel idea. Take Advantage of Typography These days with Google Web Fonts, Typekit and the like, you don’t have to settle for what your web designer or theme gives you. You can get really fancy with fonts. Use them for quotes or featuring a sentence. Just don’t go crazy with multiple fonts per page or it’ll look really bad and slow down your page. Icon Magic Icons
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The .htaccess file, it is a small text file that holds commands that tells your website to do or not do certain things. These commands can be super helpful for example if you want to move all your affiliate links into a new directory, you could write a command to do it instead of manually changing links. And the more common task when it comes to WordPress, it is the file that holds the commands to make your URLs nice and readable. Beyond that, on many WordPress installs, I also have a list of other commands running to help with various tasks. Here are some of them. Close WordPress Site This is great so you can work on it or keep people from snooping on a new project. There are plugins that you can use to shut down your site but many of them only create a mask. They don’t really shut off access and people can still login. This keeps people out by IP and show everyone else a message (see the reference to Upgrade.html) in there? You’d need to create a page, name it Upgrade.html, save it in the same folder, and enter your message there. View the code
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For whatever strange reason, sometimes when you are writing or editing your WordPress post or pages, you might find certain options missing. This could be anything from the Categories options Tags Options and even some plugin options that all should be there. It’s frustrating. Especially the built in ones you know have got to be there right? This very problem drove me up the wall once and I spent countless hours trying to fix and once I found the solution I kinda felt silly. Turns out the screen options for that metabox (that’s the WordPress term for these boxes of options) were turn off. So if you find something missing in your post editing screen, check your screen options first. It is located on the top right corner of every screen in WordPress.
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