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WordPressGarage.com

wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips


WordCamp Israel 2008 part 2: my presentations on WordPress.com and Social MediaNovember 20 2008

As you may have seen, Rebecca already wrote up a great review of Sunday’s 2nd WordCamp Israel event. I was privileged to present two short presentations at the event, which I have finally uploaded for all to see. Note that the images and titles of plugins or sites are all links, and you can click on them to get to the actual sites in question.

Setting up a blog with good foundations for the future on WordPress.com or Blogli

Many people prefer to start their blogging career on free sites like WordPress.com, or the Israeli version called Blogli. These sites take away the headache involved in installing the software and managing technical issues. They also allow for a soft start with little financial investment.

However, if you are serious about blogging, then you will want to see your blog grow. As it grows, you may find that it outgrows the limitations of WordPress.com, where you can’t upload plugins or completely customize the appearance of your blog. So while using WordPress.com for your blog is a great choice, you should make sure to implement a few things to ensure that if you do decide to move to a self-hosted blog in the future, it’s not too painful. The most important thing, in my opinion, is to use your own domain name from the start on WordPress.com by upgrading your account. It costs about $10 a month, and is worth it.

How to rename widgetized sidebars in WordpressNovember 20 2008

You can manage multiple sidebar widgets in WordPress. To do so, you go to the Widgets page in the Admin, and select the Sidebar you want to manage. If you have 1 widgetized sidebar, the name “Sidebar 1″ is not a big deal for managing it. But what if you have 5 or more, and they’re named Sidebar 1, Sidebar 2, etc. Ah yes, now what was that wily sidebar 3 for?

Why would someone have so many sidebars to begin with? Well, remember that you can also add widget-ready sidebars to Wordpress footers or anywhere in your design, to give extra content management options to clients.

Recently, we had a client with way too many widgetized sidebars to keep track of, so we had to find a new solution to change the standard widget sidebar names like “sidebar 1″ or “sidebar 2″ to something more meaningful like “Left sidebar” and “Right sidebar” in the admin area. I dug around the web and found 2 very helpful posts:

Here’s what I learned:

Review of Wordcamp Israel 2008November 16 2008

wordcamp

Being that Wordcamp Israel was a bloggers conference in Tel Aviv, I’m sure there will be tons of people writing up their reviews in Hebrew. But maybe not quite as many in English, so here goes. This year’s Wordcamp was in the ZOA house in the middle of Tel Aviv, a schlep for Jerusalemites, but a great location for everybody else.

The Shmoozing

And they’re off, let the shmoozing begin. Instead of sitting in a corner, hoping someone would come talk to me, I started standing and sitting strategically next to people who looked friendly. The first guy I met was Eyal Sela, who plans to write about productivity on his brand new Wordpress blog, still in its Kubrick diapers. Throughout the rest of the day, I met Itzik Edri of Wikimedia(trying to get more people to use Wikipedia), Eyal Gura, CEO of PicApp (a legal image solution for bloggers), Eyal Beit-On, of Suntrader (online marketing consultant), and Amir Uval(new He

Is there an alternative to Feedburner?October 30 2008

We all use Feedburner to track our RSS subscribers. It’s not just to feed that egotistical need to know how many people are hanging onto our every word, but the number of RSS feed subscribers you have is an important metric for indicating the success (or failure) of your blog. It seems that the number of subscribers has a connection with the number of visitors to a site since I’ve found that the number of people visiting a site seems to rise in relation to the number of feed subscribers, but this metric also indicates the stickiness of your content.

But recently Feedburner has not been behaving. We have one client whose feed consistently showed a page that said something like “Kraaak bork, your Feedburner feed is not working,” a stressful site to say the least for a guy who wants to make sure his feed subscribers are getting his content. Many people have been complaining about problems with Feedburner in the last while: ReadWriteWeb reported that Feedburner was slow on pinging feeds, and over here at WordPress Garage I had the pleasure of watching our readers plunge from 1030 to 380. The next day the number went back up, and I can’t imagine it’s because 700 of you unsubscribed and then regretted your decision and resubscribed.

(And may I just take this opportuni

Revolution themes enters next evolutionOctober 30 2008

You’ve probably heard the news, but I’m going to join the echo chamber anyways: Brian Gardner has taken his “Revolution” into a new Open Source evolution over at Revolution Two. Now he has a bunch of partners, and the themes are released under Open GPL license, which pretty much means you can use them any way you like and for any (legal) purposes. The business model is that people can buy membership packages which gives them access to advice and guidance related to the themes, as well as custom design services and hosting .

The premium Revolution themes will be available until tomorrow, and at midnight they will turn into a pumpkin. But no worries - the new themes look fantastic, and really add to the WordPress commu