What is a Gravatar

The meaning is Globally Recognized Avatar and is an image that you define and appears on your comments or a post on a blog. They help to identify your identity on the internet.

You can sign up and get a Gravatar for free.

Wordpress Gravatar Code

By default, Wordpress doesn’t include Gravatar support so it needs to be added. Also to note this code only supports WordPress 2.5 and above.

Locate your local themes/NAME/comments.php file and place the highlighted code into your location, anywhere within the foreach and endforeach (the comments loop) will work. I also set my own default avatar in case a poster doesn’t have their own, this is useful to continue with the balance/control of my site:

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About Link Juice

Each site created has it’s own “value”. The more links you have, especially from well-linked places, the greater your visibility and web page rankings become – hence passing on “juice”. A recent trends is to give away link power from people that ping certain articles or from people who leave a comment (via CommentLuv, Dofollow links and so on).

The best way to not pass “link juice” to a site you are linking to is to add rel=”nofollow” via HTML code and inserting no spider links in the Meta Head tag area, but this involves site editing and is also time consuming. My link juice plugin fixes these problems and more!

Using the Link Juice Plugin

The plugin is designing to place noFollow tags on Category pages, external links in the Sidebar and also stops the problem of duplicate posts by removing the ability to self-ping own posts.

Download the Wordpress Plugin

1. Unzip the downloaded package
2. Upload the folder with all files to the “/wp-content/plugins/” directory
3. Activate the ‘WP Link Juice Plugin’ plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress

• Download WP Link Juice Plugin 1kb

What are the benefits of using this Plugin

By restricting where link juice is following, the spiders should place more emphasis on following your actual post pages.

Why restrict Categories

In placing nofollow tags to category pages, we are removing the ability to duplicate posts. The site already duplicates content via sitemap, monthly archive pages, tag pages and if you’ve got it installed, related posts.

Why restrict External Links in the Sidebar

In Wordpress, this is called Bookmark links. Perhaps they contain links to friends or favourite sites, but again like the Category pages, they’ll be on every page of your blog posts…again filtering down link juice when it could be used on your own site.

Why restrict Self Pinged Posts

The ability to ping is useful, but if you refer to your own posts in another article, chances are you’ll get a ping back. Google looks down on too much “self promotion”, if you ping too many of your own internal posts it could effect your Page Ranking. *Note, once the plugin is installed it will only cover any new trackbacks/pings, previous trackbacks and pings will still be on the site.

Where should my link juice be going?

I’d personally make a “Tags” section on your site and/or promote the site’s internal sitemap. This way spiders can see exactly what content is on the site, how much is there and has a location to check for new site additions.

I also wanted to add to the plugin to take into certain Pages on sites, such as “About Us”, “Privacy Policy”, “Terms and Conditions” or “Contact Us”. These pages do not need to be spidered as they give no real valuable content, the most valuable section of your site are the posts.

How did you get on?

I’ve tested this on versions 1 of WP to the latest version and it works fine. Site owners shouldn’t expect instant results, but will see long term benefits later on.

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Funk Shui Theme

Feng Shui is all about the way that we live in harmonize with the nature, benefiting from the ‘positive’ energies in our living environment.

About the Funk Shui Theme

I thought I’d design a Free Theme for Wordpress only, called the Funk Shui. It’s a very simple site, with a simple layout but has a unique twist of integrating the flow of positive energy or “chi”. My wife is a Feng Shui practitioner in Hong Kong, so she was an advisor on this project.

The Theme

• SEO friendly, fast loading and HTML Compliant.
• Ability to change code, without touching the Wordpress php files. (via the change/ directory)
• Version 2.7.1+ compatible.

Download Funk Shui Theme

• Download the Funk Shui Theme 70kb

Flow of Chi Energy

The screenshot shows the entrance/exit points of the flow of energy around the site.

Note how the energy flows:

Past the top title.

Enters into the main content on the left.

Directs into the sidebar on the right.

Exits at the bottom of the page.

Wordpress Setup

• Download the theme archive and extract the files it contains. You may need to preserve the directory structure in the archive when extracting these files.
• Using an FTP client to access your host web server, create a directory to contain your theme in the wp-content/themes directory provided by WordPress.
• Upload the theme files to the new directory on your host server.
• Log in to the WordPress Administration Panel.
• Select the Design subpanel, then Themes.
• From the Available Themes section, click on theme title (or theme screenshot) for “Funk Shui”.
• A preview of the theme will be shown to activate theme click the Activate “Theme Name” link in the top right.

How did you get on?

I’d like to know if anyone using the theme felt positive effects, such as perhaps an increase in visitors, revenue or anything else?

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What does Add URL to Feed do?

It is designed to make sure all feed readers know where the feed post content has come from. All too often feed content is scraped, re-used and then distrubuted on other sites without acknowledgement to the original author.

This plugin fixes that problem by automatically adding your URL and Site Name to each feed post, which should result in more positive backlinks to your site but also declare where the original content came from. It works with Feedburner also and other feed parsers.

Screenshot in Action

Download the Wordpress Plugin

• Unzip the downloaded package
• Upload the folder with all files to the “/wp-content/plugins/” directory.
• Activate the ‘Urls Feed’ plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
• Check your feed at the bottom of each post.

• Download Add URL to Feed 1kb

How did you get on?

Let me know how you got on with it.

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Note: The PHP code below should be

Improving Your 404

There’s two ways, you can edit your 404.php page so that any mis-directed traffic is automatically redirected to your homepage, for example add this at the top of your 404.php page and enter your url instead:

< ? php
header ('Location: http://www.bestblogs.asia/sitemap );
 ? >

The other way of improving your 404 page is by listing your popular posts, related posts, tags or even display a sitemap.

Permalinks Structure

Change is your permalink structure, you’ll find this page under Settings -> Permalinks. The default permalink is ?p= , but I prefer to use either /post-name/ or /category/post-name/ this is displayed as:

/%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/

To get into Google News, your permalink should look like:

/%postname%-%post_id%

.htaccess Changes

Use .htaccess to tell google, and force everyone to use the www. version of your site example:

#Force www domain
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
#End force www

Edit the Robots.txt File

By disallowing spiders to certain sections of your WP Blog, you are giving more link juice to other pages.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /cgi-bin

Turn off Post Revisions

Post version tracking mechanism has been introduced in WP. For example, every time you “Save” a post, a revision is written to the database. If you do not need this feature you can easily turn it off by adding one line to your wp-config.php file, found in the installation directory of your WordPress site:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

If you have run a blog with revisions turned on for a while, chance is you will have a lot of revision posts in your database. if you wish to remove them for good, simply run this query (for example using the mentioned WP-DBManager) plugin.

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = "revision";

This will remove all “revision” posts from your database, making it smaller in the process.

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Optimise Database Tables

Database tables should be periodically optimized (and repaired if necessary) for optimum performance, an example would be manually optimizing and repairing your table through a tool like phpmyadmin.

Reset a WordPress Password from phpMyAdmin

If you’ve managed to lose or want to change your Wordpress Password in a hurry, then the tips below will help greatly.

• Open up PhpMyAdmin, a simple application that controls your database’s.
• Locate your Database, then look for a table called wp_users.
• Select Browse, then click the pencil icon on the left side within the wp_users line.
• Go to the field called users_pass.
• Select MD5 in the Function column and type the password in plain text, then click Go.

When you save the record the password will be stored after the MD5 hash algorythm was applied. You can do this not only for Wordpress passwords but for other CMS applications, forums and other software.

UTF Databases

Your database might not actually be set up to use UTF8 and instead may be using the server default, which in many cases is Latin1.

• Make a copy of your Database first.
• Find a table with garbled characters, choose a column to edit – example I’m converting the Wordpress category name to unicode.
• Make a note of the current datatype (usually varchar / text / longtext) and length.
• Set the datatype to blob.
• Choose to edit the same column. Now flip it back to the datatype and length that it was set to originally AND set the collation as unicode.

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Wordpress Category Tags

Post Category
Label: the_category();
Code: <?php the_category(’arguments’); ?>

Displays a link to the category or categories a post belongs to. This tag must be used within The Loop.

Post Category in RSS Format
Label: the_category_rss();
Code: <?php the_category_rss(’arguments’); ?>

Displays the name of the category or categories a post belongs to in RSS format. This tag must be used within The Loop.

Page Category Title
Label: single_cat_title();
Code: <?php single_cat_title(’prefix’, ‘display’); ?>

Displays or returns the category title for the current page. For pages displaying WordPress tags rather than categories (e.g. “/tag/geek”) the name of the tag is displayed instead of the category.

Category Description
Label: category_description();
Code: <?php category_description(category); ?>

Displays or returns the category title for the current page. For pages displaying WordPress tags rather than categories (e.g. “/tag/geek”) the name of the tag is displayed instead of the category.

Category Dropdown
Label: wp_dropdown_categories(’arguments’);
Code: <?php wp_dropdown_categories(’arguments’); ?>

Displays a list of categories in a select (i.e dropdown) box with no submit button.

Category Link List
Label: wp_list_categories();
Code: <?php wp_list_categories(’arguments’); ?>

The template tag, wp_list_categories, displays a list of Categories as links. When a Category link is clicked, all the posts in that Category will display on a Category Page using the appropriate Category Template dictated by the Template Hierarchy rules.

If In Category
Label: in_category();
Code: <?php if ( in_category(’category_id’) ): ?>

Returns true if the current post is in the specified Category. Normally this tag is used within The Loop, but the $post variable must be set when using this tag outside of the loop.

Category’s Parents List
Label: get_category_parents();
Code: <?php echo(get_category_parents(category, display link, separator, nice name)); ?>

Returns a list of the parents of a category, including the category, sorted by ID.

Category Array
Label: get_the_category()
Code: <?php foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) { echo $category->cat_name . ‘ ‘; }?>

Returns an array of objects, one object for each category assigned to the post. This tag must be used within The Loop.

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Wordpress setup:

Click on your ‘Settings’ tab (or ‘Options’ if you’re running an older version). Click on ‘Writing’ and then scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Note:
I found that pinging too often can make sites like Google query your site and make lead to deranking/removal from their directory.  This also applys to the sites you are pinging to also. 

Wordpress Ping List

http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping.php
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.blogg.de/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.britblog.com/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.imblogs.net/ping/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.rssfwd.com/xmlrpc/api
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

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Comment Template Tags

Comment Count
Label: comments_number();
Code: <?php comments_number(’zero’, ‘one’, ‘more’, ‘number’); ?>

Displays the total number of comments, Trackbacks, and Pingbacks for a post. This tag must be within The Loop.

Link to Post Comments
Label: comments_link();
Code: <?php comments_link(); ?>

Much like an RSS feed for your WordPress blog, this feature will display a link to the RSS feed for a given post’s comments. By implementing the feature, your readers will be able to track the comment thread for a given post, perhaps encouraging them to stay connected to the conversation.

JavaScript for Pop-Up Window
Label: comments_popup_script();
Code: <?php comments_popup_script(width, height); ?>

Outputs the JavaScript code for a comments popup window. Used in tandem with comments_popup_link(), this tag can be used anywhere within a template, though is typically placed within the <head> portion of a page.

Link to Pop-Up Window
Label: comments_popup_script();
Code: <?php comments_popup_link (’zero’,'one’,'more’,'CSSclass’,'none’); ?>
 
Displays a link to the comments popup window if comments_popup_script() is used, otherwise it displays a normal link to comments. This tag must be within The Loop, or a comment loop, and it does nothing if is_single() or is_page() is true (even when within The Loop).

Comment ID
Label: comment_ID();
Code: <?php comment_ID(); ?>

Displays the comment author name; that is, the one supplied by the commenter. If no name is provided (and “User must fill out name and email” is not enabled under Discussion Options), WordPress will assign “Anonymous” as comment author. This tag must be within The Loop, or a comment loop.

IP Address of Comment Author
Label: comment_author_IP();
Code: <?php comment_author_IP(); ?>

Displays the comment author’s IP address. This tag must be within The Loop, or a comment loop.

Email of Comment Author
Label: comment_author_email();
Code: <?php comment_author_email(); ?>

Displays the comment author’s email address, not linked. An email address must be provided if “User must fill out name and email” is enabled under Discussion Options. This tag must be within The Loop, or a comment loop.

Website URL of Comment Author
Label: comment_author_url();
Code: <?php comment_author_url(); ?>

Displays the comment author’s URL (usually their web site), not linked. This tag must be within The Loop, or a comment loop.

Mailto Link to Comment Author
Label: comment_author_email_link();
Code: <?php comment_author_email_link(’linktext’, ‘before’, ‘after’); ?>

Displays the comment author’s email address, as a mailto link. An email address must be provided if “User must fill out name and email” is enabled under Discussion Options. This tag must be within The Loop, or a comment loop.

Link to Website URL of Comment Author
Label: comment_author_link();
Code: <?php comment_author_link(); ?>

Displays the comment author’s name linked to his/her URL, if one was provided. This tag must be within The Loop, or a comment loop.

Type of Comment
Label: comment_type();
Code: <?php comment_type(’comment’, ‘trackback’, ‘pingback’); ?>

Displays the type of comment (regular comment, Trackback or Pingback) a comment entry is. This tag must be within The Loop, or a comment loop.

Comment Text
Label: comment_text();
Code: <?php comment_text(); ?>

Displays the time a comment was posted. This tag must be within The Loop, or a comment loop.

Comment Author’s Name Formatted for RSS
Label: comment_author_rss();
Code: <?php comment_author_rss(); ?>
 
Displays the comment author’s name formatted for RSS. Typically used in the RSS comment feed template. This tag must be within The Loop, or a comment loop.

Comment Text Formatted for RSS
Label: comment_text_rss();
Code: <?php comment_text_rss(); ?>

Displays the text of a comment formatted for RSS. Typically used in the RSS comment feed template. This tag must be within The Loop, or a comment loop.

Comment Link Formatted for RSS
Label: comment_link_rss();
Code: <?php comment_link_rss(); ?>

Displays the URL to an entry’s comments formatted for RSS. Typically used in the RSS comment feed template. This tag must be within The Loop, or a comment loop.

Comment Permalink Formatted for RSS
Label: permalink_comments_rss();
Code: <?php permalink_comments_rss(); ?>

Displays the permalink to the post to which a comment belongs, formatted for RSS. Typically used in the RSS comment feed template. This tag must be within The Loop, or a comment loop.

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