For SEO reasons I really wanted to make this site’s category links nofollow. The easiest way is to find and use a plugin. That’s what normal – sane – people would do. But I like to tinker with WordPress because it helps me understand the system better and a whole lot deeper too. Well, I found several threads where Otto talked about adding the following code into the theme. add_filter(‘wp_list_categories’,'wp_rel_nofollow’); Could it be that easy? I tried it but it didn’t quite work. It gave me a bunch of backslashes in the HTML. Thanks to the guidance of recordinghacks on this thread, the code below is now in my theme’s functions.php file. Works beautifully. function tbm_rel_nofollow( $text ) {     global $wpdb;     // This is a pre save filter, so text is already escaped.     $text = stripslashes($text);     $text = preg_replace_callback(’|<a>|i’, ‘wp_rel_nofollow_callback’, $text);     return $text; } add_filter(’the_category’,'tbm_rel_nofollow’);</a>

One of the things I love about new and snazzy blogs and web sites are the beautiful way the display comments with pictures of those who commented. Not only does it look good but it helps me recognize and feel connected to readers. I also find blogs that carry avatars feel warmer, like a comfortable coffee house ambiance when pictures are presented rather than just cold textual names that could be anybody. So I added this to my comments template. <?php echo get_avatar($comment, ’32′, ”); ?> Where 32 is the maximum size of the avatar. You can change this to the size that suits your design. You can also add a default image to display if a Gravatar is not found like this. <?php echo get_avatar($comment, ’32′, ‘http://yoursite.com/path/to/default/image.jpg’); ?> By the way, this is only a snippet of what is included in the Blog Theme Bootcamp lessons which is part of Blog Evangelists. If you’d like to learn how to build WordPress themes one simple step at a time, Blog Theme Bootcamp will do just that and a whole lot more too.

This is the second in a two part series how to bring in content from another web site or blog into a second blog/site. This is a great way to keep things looking fresh when building a hub site or hub-page. One thing that slipped my mind when writing the first part is the disclaimer so I am putting this up high and foremost. Please, do not use these methods to create splogs (spam blogs). You’ve seen them before, blogs/web sites set up with zero original content but filled with tons of OPC (Other people’s content) without their permission. I don’t care if you only use excerpts of OPC and link back to them or not. It’s such a bad idea – unless of course you have explicit permission from the original content provider. I sometimes call these sites soul-less because they really have no living or breathing soul who writes good content there some of them aren’t even monitored and more importantly, people don’t stay there. These are outlined here so that people who genuinely want to build a hub page for their own sites can benefit. While I can’t tell you what to do, I do sincerely hope

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I know of quite a few people who own a domain of their own names. So do I but there’s nothing on LynetteChandler.com many have struggled what to do with this domain. One approach is to use it as a hub to showcase your different sites, blogs or projects and hopefully direct people to the bread and butter of your business. This can be accomplished easily using good old fashioned static HTML. But what if you want it a little more dynamic than that, yet don’t have the time to update content there regularly which makes sense because you want to focus on your money making sites. The answer, to pull content from the different sites that you own into the hub. There are a few ways to accomplish this and it all depends on what you want to achieve. Today we will explore one method. In this method, posts are actually created on the hub site and you get the choice of displaying the full article in the hub or re-direct people to the source site to read the full post. What you’ll need: WordPress installed on the hub site RSS feed(s) from the source site(s) FeedWordPress or similar

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Since I hire a blogger on one of my blogs and its only natural that I allow her access to my Amazon Associates account so she can grab links and post them for me. The good news is, you don’t have to give them your own logins. You can provide your assistants limited access to your Associates account by simply adding their email address and inviting them to the account. You can also revoke access at any time you wish. It only took me and my blogger less than 5 minutes to have everything set up. You log in to Amazon Associates, click on Account Settings On the next screen, click on Manage account users. Then simply add the user by entering their email address and clicking send invite. Your assistant(s) will get an email with confirmation and when they log in to their Associates account next, they will be able to create links for your account. Another option if you don’t want to give a paid blogger access is to use a plugin like Yoast’s Amazon Auto Affiliate Linker that will automatically make all Amazon links into an affiliate link.

Last week, we talked about how to move your FeedBurner.com feeds into Google before they flip the switch. We touched on a related FeedBurner feature which is MyBrand. MyBrand by FeedBurner allows you to have a feed URL that is on your own domain e.g. http://feeds.techbasedmarketing.com Setting up is easy but you must have the ability to edit your domain’s CNAME. Yeah I know it sounds technical but once you see the steps it’s not all that hard. I want to talk a little bit more about this ability to edit CNAME so let’s backup a bit. If you host your blog/site on a shared web host (99%) you are, you may not necessarily have this option. If you have a reseller account on a shared web host, then there is a possibility you will have this ability, depending on your account. The real answer here is, check with your web host. This is usually something that is edited at host level. If you have a VPS, Dedicated Server or a reseller account with permissions to change the CNAME then follow these directions. Log in to your Google feedburner account. Click My Account, on the top and then MyBrand Enter

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If you use FeedBurner, by now you probably have received several notices about moving your feed to Google. The email tells you just about everything except how and when you log into your FeedBurner account, you may not see a link to transfer your feeds. I spent a few minutes tracking this link down myself. Here’s where I got mine hope it helps. 1. Log in to your Google Adsense account 2. Click the Adsense Setup tab 3. Click Adsense For Feeds 4. Scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see the “Move FeedBurner feeds to your Google Account” 5. Enter your FeedBurner login details. FeedBurner.com unless your feeds were hosted on FeedBurner.jp 6. You’ll be given a list of your feeds that will be transfered. Confirm that’s the list of feeds, click Move Feeds 7. Google will begin to transfer your feeds 8. When successful you’ll get a message like this and you’ll have to start managing your account from feedburner.google.com If you’re using MyBrand like I do, you’ll have to change your CNAME. We’ll do a follow up post on that.

Another new year – if you still consider it new in February – and I’m reminded of this post I made in January last year. You know how some of you have a Copyright (year) in your web site or blog footer? Do you hate changing it out every year? So did I. That’s why I don’t. I just let Javascript do the work for me. See this post from the past for the code how to do it. P/S: You can of course use it for anything that needs to be updated automatically every year, not just copyrights.

After some fiddling with our conferencing software yesterday, we discovered a neat little tip I thought I’d pass along. We knew the room would run on Vista but it just would not go on two computers we had that were running the Home version. After a quick search, we found this solution that worked like a charm. Right click on the setup file, select “Run as Administrator” and voila! Installed without issues. So next time you have a software that just won’t install on Vista, try running as admin.

Over at BlogEnergizer, our premium members are always welcome to submit their goodies, contests and any activities they are doing for other members to discover and blog about. We want to make posting as quick and simple as possible for them. So that when they paste a URL, they won’t have to link it. Initially, I thought I’d have to get a plugin to do it. But thankfully I found out, that’s not necessary! I don’t like to install too many plugins anyway. Thanks to Otto, the knowledgeable moderator at WordPress.org, I found out WordPress actually has this capability. You only need to add this code to your active theme’s functions.php file.  Yay! 1 add_filter(’the_content’, ‘make_clickable’,9);