• Choosing Link Partners
• 5 Elements of a winning SEM strategy
• Maximize your paid advertisements with Google
• and a two part series, Tools of the Trade, Part I , and Part II

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As some of you know I’ve moved to Taiwan since my last post, and while spending time out here I have learned that being w3c compliant is a MUST. Validation help ensure your website can be seen by web browsers of any type, including mobile users (it may not be pretty but it wont be broken).

The Firefox add-on “Developers Tool Bar ” can help you be

1. standards compliant
2. css error free
3. javascript error free

But if you really want to be proud of your work, you need to go that extra mile, spend that extra time to ensure that your site is w3c compliant. If your looking for the validation? Shoot on over to their website and test your pages for yourself.

• XHTML Validation
• CSS Validation

If your valid you can stick one of those stickers onto your site letting people know.

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Problem

I needed to add the post picture stored in a custom field to my header only on the post when its called.

Information

If you guys are already familiar with wordpress in any sort of way then you will know that the single.php will handle any calls of your posts. but it also handles categories or groups of posts that are called.

Hypothesis

My hypothesis was that i could run an if statement that would test and see if it was using single.php and if it was in the specific category i want the picture applied to (in my case the only categorized with post pictures is my blog).

my statement was something like this

<php if (is_single() && in_category(‘blog’))
echo ‘content ‘;
} ?>

Solution

Although my initial hypothesis was nearly correct or at least the logic was correct it wasn’t working for some reason, the wordpress template tag for in_category was pulling no results at any time. And I believe this was because this statement was completely out of the loop being in the header and all it didn’t quite know what post it was suppose to call to be in a category or not. Any ways after trying to take a nap later that day the simple solution came to me and ended up as such.

<?php if (is_single()) {
if (!is_category()) {
echo ‘content’;
}
} ?>

Instead of testing if it’s in a category I only needed to test to see if it was displaying a category page or not, This would eliminate my border on category pages, but keep them on all my post pages, the next and last step would be to create a default image for the categories where there is no post image. Ill post on this later.

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Creating and Styling our first theme from scratch.

CSS Styles

In order to get our new style to accept and read our new css style sheet we have to configure just a few comments.

like below

/*
Theme Name: cssOrigins.com
Description: the second iteration of the cssOrigins website
Author: Hunter  Brelsford
Author URI: http://www.cssOrigins.com
version: 1.0
Tags: Design, WordPress, Css
Optimization: Css Optimization done by Hunter  Brelsford 4/23/09
*/

Make sure at this point we save our style sheet. The style sheet fortunately is ready to be read in by our new blog, even though it does not contain any kind of actual style information. All plugins, and stylesheets in wordpress are detected this way, and auto generated into their respective themes, and plugins sections under the admin panel.

If we go on over to see our new theme, we can see that unfortunately that its listed as a broken theme.

Index.php

The reason we have a broken theme is because we have no files other then the style sheet associated with our theme, wordpress needs at least one for it to recognize its theme as a valid workable theme. So we will indulge it by creating a new file and naming it “index.php ”

1. create a index.php
2. add a title
3. save the page

if you want to add your own screen shot for your theme you can additionally upload a 4×3 .jpg up to your themes directory.

Template Tags – 10:05

WordPress has many built in functions that you can use on your site. the ones used in this screen cast are covered and defined here.

1. bloginfo(‘name’)  – Uses the name of your blog thats been defined in your wordpress settings
2. bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’) – Uses the current URL where your activated themes stylesheet is located
3. language_attributes(”) – Gives the default language and type direction of the wordpress instalation
4. bloginfo(‘html_type’) – Gives the page content type
5. bloginfo(‘charset’) – Displays the character set of the page

Template tags are nothing more then php functions in wordpress, these tags are available to access functions and variables from within wordpress.

More information on template tags can be found on the wordpress codex

This article was originally brought to you by Drew Douglass at ThemeForest

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1-Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

2-Twitter Sharts

‘Shart’ your twitter status anywhere within your wordpress blog posts or pages!

3-Twitter for WordPress

Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog.

4-Twitter Widget

Adds a sidebar widget to display Twitter updates

5-Elegant Twitter Widget

A WordPress widget that displays twitter updates in yummy valid semantic XHTML code. The code is heavily commented and the output is in template functions so everything is fully customizable.

6-Twitter This

Allow to your readers sharing your blog post at twitter .

7-Twitter Widget Pro

A widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link .

8-Twitter Swell

You coult post message to your Twitter and show it.

9-WP Twitter Pitch

WP-TwitterPitch is all about getting the pitch delivered to you in the form you want to get it delivered – in other words in Twitter format. If you’re like me, then your Twitter direct message box is a lot like your email inbox.

10-Twitter Blaster

allow your visitors to post to your Twitter account. Once installed your users can update .

11-Twitter style links

This plugin allows you to add Twitter style links to comments.

12-Twitter Feed

The control functions such as connecting to a Twitter account and storing information on the tweets/blogs, can be accessed through the “Twitter Control” GUI in the WordPress admin panel.

13-Twitter updater w/ TinyURL

com status with the latest post that you’ve made. It also has the option of including a link back to your post so can people can easily click on it to view the post.

14-Twitter To TTF

displays it in a TTF Simple. Asks you for your Twitter ID. Grabs your latest tweet.

15-Kish Twitter

This plugin is using the Twitter API to get and post the updates. You need to have a twitter account to post updates.

16-Post to Twitter

Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post

17-WP to Twitter

The WP-to-Twitter plugin posts a Twitter status update from your blog using the Cli.gs URL shortening service to provide a link back to your post from Twitter.

18-Twitter Links

This plugin will convert valid Twitter usernames mentioned in comments into a link to their Twitter profile page.

19-Twitter Status

Twitter Status is a very simple no-fuzz plugin that gets the current Twitter message from the Twitter ID specified

20-Latest Twitter Sidebar Widget

Creates a sidebar widget that displays the latest Twitter update for any given user.

21-Twitter To Wire

This plugin allows your twitter posts to show up in your buddypress wire.

22-Top Twitter Links by Twitturls

Widget that displays currently popular links from Twitter .

23-Thread Twitter

fetch your tweets and display them in thread style.

24-Twitter

Customizable twitter widget for your sidebar. Twitter Widget displays your tweets on your sidebar.

25-Twitter Link

Converts @username mentions in posts and pages into links to Twitter .

Find out more, and read the rest of skyje’s top twitter plugins for wordpress on his blog below

Via  107 Twitter plugins for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog

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WordPress is no longer just used to power blogs . It has become the CMS of choice for many web designers. It’s always interesting to see how it’s flexibility provides web designers with the freedom to design sites with no limitations. Here are 15 beautiful web sites all powered by WordPress.

Creative Depart

Big Spaceship

Ecoki

20 jours pour la retrouver par Kevin Polof

Search Inside Video

UGSMAG

App Storm

IconDock

ANidea

45royale

Alpha Multimedia Solutions

the Art of Catalin Bridinel

EightHourDay

ESPIRA

StopDesign

via 15 Impressive and Beautiful Uses of WordPress | Web Design Ledger .

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The series will be separated into days, starting with day two… ok lets get started.

Day 2 : WordPress Admin panel.

Introduction

In our video here we quickly reviewed all the necessaries that we would be using in order to use and edit our new WordPress install. He quickly went over the WordPress file structure. The necessary changes that needed to be made to the wp-config.php file when we upload, and the location of our all important theme files.

www.example.com/wp-content/themes/theme1

Body

Moving on through the video the main bulk of this video was getting the understanding of the different template files in your wordpress theme, what they do and how they work, so lets move through a few of them.

As described in our video if we go to APPEARANCE | EDITOR we will be able to see all the template files included in the wordpress theme currently activated.

If we start by importance usualy index.php would come to mind in a wordpress site. We can see there’s no doctypes or much html data in our file at all, but rather many simple php requests to header and footer and sidebar etc.. These are essentially statements that calls in those files from you directory. So header.

In our header.php we find our doctypes and titles tags and start of our html elements. This is loaded at the top of every page or post that calls get_header(). Pretty easy to understand.

Similarly our files typically end with out get_footer() call and our footer.php contains all the closing tags for information contained within our document.

Single.php – used for individual post pages.

404.php – used when a page within your wordpress blog cannot be found.

Sidebar -  calls widgets and other custom information into the 1 or more sidebars in your wordpress theme.

Conclusion

After looking through and familiarizing yourself with the themes directory withing your wordpress install you should be able to identify the different files and what they more or less accomplish. With this basic knowledge we will be able to simply identify where and what files we need to be editing in the future while we move on to developing our own theme, in the new few videos.

If you’re having problems understand the videos or information please comment and we will see if we can help you out.

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Automatically Retrieve The First Image From Posts On Your Home Page

The problem . Many WordPress users use custom fields to display a thumbnail on their blog home page. Of course, this is a nice solution, but how about automatically retrieving the first image from a post and using it as a thumbnail?

The solution . This hack is quite easy to implement:

1. Open the functions.php file in your theme.
2. Paste this code in. Don’t forget to specify a default image on line 10 in case a post of yours does not have an image.function catch_that_image {
   global $post, $posts;
   $first_img = ”;
   ob_start;
   ob_end_clean;
   $output = preg_match_all’//i’, $post->post_content, $matches;
   $first_img = $matches [1] [0];
   ifempty$first_img{ //Defines a default image
   $first_img = "/images/default.jpg";
   }
   return $first_img;
3. Save the functions.php file.
4. On your blog home page index.php, call the function this way to get the URL of the first image from the post:

<?php echo catch_that_image() ?>

Code explanation . The function uses the global variable $post to parse the post’s content with a regular expression. If an image is found, its URL is returned by the function. If not, the default image URL is returned.

via 10 Exceptional WordPress Hacks | Developer’s Toolbox | Smashing Magazine .

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First SEO Quake found at seoquake.com

Seo quake is both for Firefox and IE, and its primary function in is to help quantitatively define the information presented on a website or page being viewed. The main feature I would point you guys too is the keyword density ability, basically it can read through your pages and find out how many times a word or group of words appears on your site. VERY HANDY if your going for SEO optimizations this is a must, try and get your good key words between 5-20 density for maximum effect on your home page.

Next we have the all powerful Developers toolbar from Chris Derick

The toolbar can be downloaded from addons.mozilla.org

Developers tool bar is a multifunction toolbar allowing users to view style information, edit css, outline styles, edit their browsers width and height and so much more. Just with those key features makes the developers toolbar the #1 Firefox extension any kind of web personnel should have. Being able to specifically target a browsers width and height is something I think we all have had to do at a specific time, and with 2 clicks boom you can view the site in that exact resolution.

Being able to edit css on the fly even on another website and save it off also a helpful or potentially a time saving feature. and of course most praised feature in my opinion is the ability to highlight hovered objects, and see their css roots. See what div, what class and what id they came from, makes editing your styles that must faster.

Umm lets see, Colorzilla downloadable over there colorzilla.com !!

Colorzilla is simple, it places an icon down in the lower left hand corner status bar and  you just select it to get an eye dropper in Firefox, thus allowing you to retrieve any color on the firefox screen. Oh its sOo handy.

Finally we have Firebug available addons.mozilla.org

Firebug has some similarities with the developers toolbar but its a lot more complex. In other words it can be used to help diagnose css related issues and help you dig deep to find what id or class your having trouble with, but where this thing has shined for me in the past is with the development of dynamic sites, the ability to track what files are specifically slowing down the loading or display of my site.

My list of Firefox plug-in’s again are

• SEO quake
• Developers toolbar
• Colorzilla
• Firebug
• and of course Firefox is the browser.

Do you  have your own plug-in you think should be included in this, feel free to comment and let everyone know about it.

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