What’s A Trackback?

June 8, 2008

In a nutshell it’s a type of linkback. It’s a process for bloggers to send a notification and demand for linkback once they write something in one of their documents that directs to other blogger content. Once a weblog author publishes a post, the other blogger receives a notification, and through moderation process can permit or refuse the trackback. They moderate it just like a regular comment. If they permit it, trackback will show in comment sector of their post, with linkback to the first blogger.

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Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment

Optimize Your Images Like a SEO Professional

June 3, 2008

I have decided to switch to revolution theme and will do that next week because this week I will have limited access to the internet. And this excellent WordPress theme is nice intro for my post, because its area is much smaller than xmark theme which I am using in this moment. So, my large images do not fit in the new weblog theme, and I will need to adjust them. I’ve already done that with few of them and will continue with the rest.

The point is that I need to reformat my blog images. And I want them to fit in nice, and I found that general rules (which will not cause problems in any theme) are:

For images, only use .jpg or .gif file formats;

Images on the site should be no larger than 400 x 400 pixels at the most. Even better size would be 200 x 200.

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Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Blogging | 1 Comment

Trackback Now, or You’ll Hate Yourself Later

May 20, 2008

Getting adequate image related to a blog post can be time consuming. And also, we all want more traffic.

Here I have created a video showing how to get more potential traffic to the WordPress blog using simple extension for Mozilla Firefox.

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Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Blogging, web 2.0 tools | 7 Comments

What is RSS?

May 18, 2008

I will explain RSS very quickly. If you don’t know what is RSS and what is RSS Reader, it can sound and look like bogy. Actually its not so hard and I will keep it simple. You can also watch a video with explanation.

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Posted by Sloba | Filed Under RSS | Leave a Comment

WordPress back up

May 16, 2008

Just a quick reminder on securing a WordPress blog. I think its important to back up the blog from time to time. And there is no need to prolong it, because backing up WordPress is so easy and it takes only few seconds, with just three clicks: manage-export-download export file (see picture below). And that’s it. Save it to comp, and if something unpredictable happen, your all blog posts are on your comp. Especially do this before upgrading to newer WordPress version.

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Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment

blog anonymously, hide your identity and stay safe

May 8, 2008

Image via Wikipedia

Why would you blog anonymously, hiding your name and anything what relates to you? This is for some special occasions.

Let’s say you live in the country with autocratic political regime, and authorities are pretty ruthless to every type of resistance and everyone who has bad words to actual regime. And you do not want to expose too much private data while blogging.

Above all, you really want your country to become better and opened to the world with more freedom for people. And the truth is that you persistently want to help people who are fighting against brutal regime. Regimes can be more or less brutal, but lets say you are dealing here with considerable ruthless one, and further more you are sick of watching glutton and lust people who are close to government and regime, and on the other hand people leaving hard in agony and even poverty.

And reality is that you are a blogger, and your weapons are your computer, blog platform and content of what you have to say. With blogging you want to help resistance and to expend the word and that way include more people in fight. Blogging for freedom. But, lets just for example, say that you have a friend who also was blogging about corruption and regime evilness, but few posts latter police came on the door and took him away. Few months later he is out of jail but he has changed drastically, don’t talk much, and he don’t want to fight anymore and blogging on that subject is not an option further. You are angry.

So let me ask you, are you the one who will persist here? But the bottom line here is how to blog anonymously.

I have read an interesting article on this subject which shows you how to hide yourself on the internet, outlining several methods for blogging anonymously:

using pseudonyms

public computers

anonymous proxies

MixMaster, Invisiblog and GPG

This list is an extract from Zuckerman’s article on this topic. And i suggest you read it and find how is hard to stay anonymous online. Even applying this you have to be more technical to be sure you hide yourself if you want that. The article is showing through example where character Sarah who works in a government sees deputy minister is stealing large amounts of money from the government. She was afraid to reveal that. Even if she hide her name on blog they can find her IP adress. And to the difference of my example it can happen in any country.

web 2.0 Tools and Resourses

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Blogging | 1 Comment

How to convert blog articles to audio files?

May 2, 2008

Image via Wikipedia

From today you are able to play articles in audio format on web2whizzing or to download podcast. It is very simple. Just click on the button “listen” under the title, and computerized voice will loudly and clearly read articles from the blog. You can even try with this article. Go on, don’t be shy.

You can subscribe to my podcast via iTunes, by clicking “listen” and then “to iTunes”, or by clicking odiogo icon in the right sidebar (under subscribe to podcast). Then from your iTunes you can transfer to your ipod, cellular phone, or other 3^rd party devices.

This blogging tool is synchronized with RSS Feed, and the system is based on converting feeds to audio files. And depending on what number of feeds you have selected on the WordPress options page, your RSS feeds will be podcasted, that is converted to audio.

Actually this is called podiocasting, instead of podcasting, because text is not converted by real human. The whole process is automated by service odiogo. It is easy to implicate it to WordPress, because it is based on plugin, and you can very easily implement it to your WordPress, like any other plugin. This plugin automatically renders podiocasts from organic textual content in RSS feeds.

To put it in your blog or even website visit odiogo here.

Web 2.0 tools and Resources

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Podcast | Leave a Comment

Which WordPress Theme to choose?

April 30, 2008

WordPress.com 3 Million Blogs The best course of action to take sometimes isn’t clear until you’ve listed and considered your alternatives. The same is when you are choosing WordPress theme. The best platform for blogging, in my opinion, is WordPress. WordPress with its themes can give you professional looking site, and there are so many different free WordPress themes to choose from.

The best way is to choose blogging theme which is frequently updated. That way you are sure your theme will respond to all your requirements. I can say there are few free WordPress themes which are excellent, and you can find decent help. For instance, cutline WordPress theme is very popular, and that is not accident. It’s free, support is strong with even forum, so users can that way change and adjust cutline WordPress theme to own needs. Recently they have released new update.

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Posted by Sloba | Filed Under Blogging | 5 Comments

Implicating Adsense in the post

April 14, 2008

I found a great video on tubetorial site explaining how to implicate Adsense in the posts, using Adsense Deluxe plugin.

Its a great plugin which enable displaying Google or Yahoo Adsense integrated in text post, instead of sidebar or header.

If your focus is on Adsense advertising this is the excellent way to display ads directly to the posts.

So here is the link to watch short video on tubetorial.

And if you want to find more great plugins, you can read my post more-than-10-great-wordpress-plugins.

Posted by Sloba | Filed Under plugins | 1 Comment

More than 10 Great WordPress Plugins

April 9, 2008

The following article is showing the list of WordPress plugins that will help you have a better experience with your blog. Most of these are must have plugins for WordPress.
Besides Akismet, which is automatically installed on WordPress, here are the plugins I found useful:

All-in-one-seo-pack – Plugin for Search Engine Optimization

Google xml Sitemaps -The Google Sitemap Plugin automagically pings Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search at regular intervals, notifying them of new content and/or changes to your site.

Optimal Title – optimize your post titles for search engines

Smart ping – Protects you from over pinging. When you edit your post, it prevent pinging so you are proteced from being considered as spammer

Another WordPress meta plugin - This plugin allows you to specify META information, that is keywords and descriptions, for your posts and pages. Additional META keywords are derived from your categories.)

“What Would Seth Godin Do?” – This plugin will definitely help you get more RSS subscribers! It’s called “What Would Seth Godin Do“

WP-Contact Form – Great contact form plugin with security question. Here is an example on my contact page.

Darren’s Related Posts plugin or Wasabi Related Entries – As your blog grows you will certainly like to have one of these plugins which will help you to detain your readers on the blog, by showing related posts at the end of your post.

ADD This- for social bookmarking
Favicon manager – manage favicon image.

For tagging:

UltimteTagWarrior – for tagging

Tag sugest Thing - Tag Suggest Thing uses the Yahoo! term extraction API to find tags to suggest.

Embedded Tag Thing - To display a word in a post as a tag, wrap it in markup (with square brackets!)

For ads:

Adsense-Deluxe – Place Google AdSense ads inside your WordPress Posts

Ad Rotator – Rotate adsense, and any other kind of ad, graphic, etc. wherever you place the code

MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad - displaying a single line of advertising message, a special note or other information right at the top of your blog

For translation:

Global Translator - translates a blog in fourteen different languages. Hmm, its not so accurate translation, but you may want to have this for your blog.

It never hurts to be well informed with the latest on WordPress plugins and you can always explore more in this area, because you want to plug in your blog to higher level!