wordpress plugins

How to Add Your Face Next to Your Blog in Google

February 12, 2012

Have you noticed lately that sometimes the author’s face will show next to a blog post?  This post will show you how you can have your own lovely face show next to your website or blog! We’ve talked about the importance of Click-Thru Rate in the SERPS and Rich Snippets in SEO before, but this is the [...]

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How to Eliminate Spam When You Can’t Use Akismet

February 12, 2012

We are lucky in the US that we are able to use Akismet to help cut down on comment spam and contact form spam.  Yesterday, I had an email exchange with a German citizen who isn’t able to use Akismet because of German privacy laws [Correction: This is not against German law, but is a sticky [...]

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Grab your latest tweet with PHP without File_Get_Contents()

February 28, 2011

Updated Code Here! Many thanks to Nick Heer and his code for using php to pull your most recent tweet. Unfortunately my host does not all File_Got_Contents() so that left me with curl:

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Echoing phpBay in Your WordPress Template

February 17, 2011

I had a hell of a time trying to figure out how to call phpBay from a theme file rather than by using the shortcode.  After sending a quick email over to the developer, he eventually gave me this code which works like a charm: I hope this helps anyone else who is trying to [...]

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Protecting Contact Form 7 from Spam

January 17, 2011

Contact Form 7 is my favorite free WordPress plugin for making (you guessed it…) Contact Forms.  It’s a very popular plugin, and that means that spammers have decided it’s worth their hassle to write some scripts to spam you through Contact Form 7. Assuming your viagra need are sufficiently filled, you won’t be needing to [...]

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How to Manually Insert the WordPress Sociable Plugin into your Theme

November 5, 2010

It took me forever to find this code which allows you to manually insert the Sociable Plugin for WordPress directly into your theme.  This helps when you want to place the plugin in a place that isn’t one of the options in the Sociable settings panel. Hope that helps!  And if you need more info [...]

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5 Surprising Lessons Learned by User Testing

August 30, 2010

‘It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear.’ -Frank Luntz Last week they were running a deal at AppSumo that made the cost of user testing low enough that it would be silly not to try it.  So I decided to give it a go and I learned a lot about how people use [...]

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What WordPress Problem Do You Have?

August 12, 2010

Today marks the launch of a refined and updated WordPress Consulting Service specially tailored to quickly and painlessly answer your questions.  You can see more about that service here. I’ve been doing phone consults with folks for a couple of years now, and have figured out what most people want is really down to earth [...]

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How to add a Hacker News Upvote widget to your WordPress Site

July 7, 2010

First of all, I’d like to thank Ryan W. for his help in showing me how to do this.  Considering he has had articles on the front page of HN for the last two days in a row, I’m thinking this little widget helps get those HN upvotes ‘on the reg’. Nothing will help get [...]

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How to Use WordPress for an eCommerce Store

July 6, 2010

Next up in our 30 Days of WordPress world series, we have Kai asking about using WordPress for an ecommerce store. Kai’s Question I’m curious about using WordPress as an e-commerce store. Are there e-commerce plugins out there other than WP e-Commerce? Outside of SEO and analytics, what areas do you recommend focusing on for [...]

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How to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

July 1, 2010

Wondering how to speed up your WordPress-powered website?  As part of our 30 Days of WordPress fiesta, we are taking a look at Somone’s question about how to speed up her site. From Somone: Once a self-hosted WordPress site gets a decent amount of traffic, the use of plugins and other scripts that run to [...]

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Using WordPress for a Password-Protected Membership Site

June 30, 2010

As the kick-off question for my 30 Days of WordPress Questions, Christina asked a couple of questions.  One of them jumped out at me right away and that’s the question I’ll be answering first. Christina Asked: I’ve stayed away from WordPress because in the past, the CMS didn’t seem to measure up to corporate or [...]

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Got a WordPress Question? Ask it here and get a PR5 link and an answer… all for free!

June 28, 2010

So I’ve been really slacking on the blog posts lately.  If you check out my archives, you’ll see that it’s been about 2 posts per month (except for a few months where I’d do 5 or 6).  That’s just not enough posting. Part of the reason that it’s hard to post is trying to think [...]

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VaultPress: WordPress’ new security suite is recruiting beta testers

March 30, 2010

Well what a great idea the folks at WordPress(/automattic) have come up with.  It’s called VaultPress. Let’s take a step back for a sec. Crap happens.  And when your blog gets hacked you don’t want to be wishing that you’d been making backups.  Not everyone that uses WordPress is a WordPress consultant and shouldn’t be [...]

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Video: Controlling Thesis Theme’s Columns and Width

March 24, 2010

As easy as it can be to adjust your number of columns and widths of columns in Thesis Theme once you know how to do it, it’s not always easy to figure out how to do it the first time. And there is a best size that isn’t easy to figure out either but that becomes [...]

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Video: How to Make Your Thesis Theme Background Darker

March 23, 2010

There is a post on diythemes.com (the site where you get Thesis Theme) that helps explain how to change your default Thesis Theme background, add a border, and do some other cool stuff. One of the examples from the article on diythemes that I always really liked was the ability to make your background a [...]

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Video: How to Install Thesis Openhook

March 22, 2010

Thesis Openhook is one of my favorite plugins.  Below is a quick video showing you how you can install Thesis Openhook. It really only takes about 10 seconds to actually install the plugin, so the other 57 seconds is basically me stalling.  Enjoy… If you don’t own thesis yet, Buy Thesis Theme Here, or get [...]

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Scribe SEO Freebies: Get 2 Free eBooks with Purchase (Just Released)

February 16, 2010

SEO for WordPress will never be the same with Brian Clark’s new ScribeSEO plugin. This plugin has just launched, so if you haven’t heard of it you really have to check it out now. The brains behind Thesis Theme and Copyblogger is the founder of this new plugin, so you know it’s going to be [...]

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The Lazy Bloggers Guide To: Knowing If Your Site Gets Hacked

February 14, 2010

Learn how to use Google Alerts to monitor your website for hidden hacks.  This 5 minute video could save you weeks of agony. Have you heard the news about link injections in websites, especially WordPress, lately?  If not, let me tell you a bit about it. There is a very common worm going around the [...]

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New & Improved: WordPress Landing Page Theme

February 13, 2010

The hardest part of making code for WordPress is that the code is always changing.  It can be hard to keep your plugins current with WordPress because code you wrote one day will change next month when the new version of WP comes out. This is also true of The Thesis Theme because the folks [...]

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