Sponsor My Blog
Useful Information and Resources for Bloggers and Blog Owners
Search
Archive for the ‘Wordpress Plugins’ Category
If you are making a personal weblog where only you’ll be the author it is quite easy to embed Google AdSense Ads in your WordPress theme. But if you have a blog with multiple authors it becomes harder to track the revenues and share it among all the people. But there is a better alternative to do that with the help of a single WordPress plugin called AdShare…
By using the AdShare WordPress Plugin you can easily and quickly embed a code to show AdSense Ads from different publishers (your authors AdSense accounts) without without having to make heavy modifications to your blog. By using the AdShare plugin when a visitor opens your blog and reads a post by one author he’ll see AdSense Ads from his account and if an Ad is being clicked the revenue will go to the author. This will make it easier for you to attract new authors for your blog and at the same time stimulate all writers to improve their articles, because better articles attract more visitors and generate bigger revenue. So basically you are in a win-win situation – your authors are happy and your visitors are happier… ;)
Have in mind that the AdShare plugin requires WordPress version 2.7+ so your blog’s software should be up to date. After you upload and activate the plugin you’ll have to configure it going to Settings / AdShare. You’ll just have to define the default AdSense ID that will be used when an author cannot be determined – this should be your ID as the owner/creator of the blog. Then you need to enter the AdSense IDs for all your authors usernames and as the tird and last option you can choose to support the plugin by showing ADs with the plugin author’s AdSense ID. If you activate the support option about 2% of all show Google ADs will be to support the author so he’ll be able to continue to develop the plugin, but you are not required to.
When you configured all the IDs in the settings of the plugin you’ll need to modify your Blog’s template and to be more exact the Google AdSense code that you might’ve already placed or are going to insert. You need to change only the google_ad_client variable from it’s static value with a dynamic one that will be different according to the circumstances.
The standard value that looks like this:
google_ad_client = "pub-#########";Needs to be replaced like this:
google_ad_client = "<?php global $pubid; echo $pubid; ?>";If you are going to dynamically insert Google ads in your widgets or posts that are not going to be defined in the template files you’ll have to replace the above code with the following:
google_ad_client = "[pubid]";
Adding iPhone Support to your WP Blog
14, May 2009Apple’s iPhone mobile phone and iPod touch music player have become some of the most popular mobile devices used for internet browsing when you are on the go. The convenience of having a portable device such as the iPhone and iPhone 3G with GPRS, EDGE or high-speed 3G internet connection almost everywhere is great and the availability of a WiFi on the iPhone and iPod touch is quite useful. And when you combine that convenience with a high-resolution display and great mobile browser such as Safari along with the smooth multi-touch screen control you get the perfect mobile internet device…
And even if the iPhone and iPod touch have a great browsing capabilities for normal websites it is always a good idea to make some effort in order to provide your visitors with a better mobile version of your blog. This way the browsing can be made a lot convenient and easier not having to rely on zooming in and out and believe me your visitors with iPhone and iPod touch will appreciate that. The good news is that there are some very helpful plugins already available for WordPress that will make the addition of an iPhone and iPod touch mobile version as simple as uploading and activating them. The specialized mobile theme will be shown only to visitors using an iPhone or iPod touch by recognizing the User Agent string of these devices. This way your visitors with desktop or mobile computers using browsers such as Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, Chrome, Safari and so on will see the normal theme of the blog and not the mobile optimized one.
1. WPtouch Mobile Plugin and Theme
WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-like experience when viewed from an iPhone or iPod touch. It comes complete with ajax & effects, and all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. WPtouch also allows for near-complete customization through your WordPress admin. There’s an option in the footer on WPtouch for your users to easily switch between the WPtouch view and your site’s regular appearance. It’s that easy and there is even a piece of code added into your current theme which will be shown only to iPhone/iPod/Android visitors, giving them control to switch between the two site themes easily. WPtouch requires your blog to have WordPress 2.3 or higher version installed.
– Download WPtouch Mobile Plugin and Theme
2. iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme
The iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. It detects the iPhone/iPod touch’s User Agent and serves up the content with the special theme only to iPhone and iPod touch visitors, all other browsers will view your WordPress blog with your current theme. While the iPhone and iPod touch do an amazing job of displaying web pages the way they were designed to be seen, often visitors want quick access to your website’s content. The “iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme” displays an optimized version of your blog’s content, formatted perfectly to fit the iPhone/iPod touch’s screen – no zooming in to read the content is necessary. iWPhone requires at least WordPress version 2.0.4 in order to function correctly and an iPhone or iPod touch for viewing.
– Download iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme
3. WordPress PDA & iPhone Plugin and Theme
Wordpres PDA plugin enables you to have a Wordpres blog viewable for PDA and iPhone browsers with special and optimized formatting. It is really simple plugin which detects the browser agent and loads a simple theme on fly. The plugin comes with a theme folder which acts like normal theme with all the functionality of Wordpres theme. The plugin doesn’t have any advanced option to control, so if you want to customize you can do it with the theme files. Installation of the plugin is simple and straightforward, you need to just extract the files in you Wordpres plugins folder and then to activate the plugin in the admin section. Once you activate the plugin you will not be seeing any magic in your admin menus or any trace of this plugin. To see this plugin in action you’ll have to browse your site using a PDA or and iPhone.
- In: Wordpress Plugins|Wordpress Themes
- Tags: blog, iphone, iphone 3g, iphone blog, iphone optimized, iphone plugin, iphone theme, ipod touch, iwphone, optimized, pda, plugin, safari, smartphone, theme, wordpress, wptouch
Essential WordPress Plugins for your Blog
5, May 2009When it comes to creating a new WordPress-powered Blog the first thing you need to do after installing the software is to configure the basic settings so that they suit your requirements, then choose a new template over the default one and finally you need to upload and activate some essential plugins. So far there are quite a lot of plugins for Wordpres that do just about everything you can think of, but there are some essential ones that are a must for a good and successful blog. Here are the essential plugins you should start with along with a description what they do and why do you really need them…
1. Google XML Sitemaps
What: This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.
Why: With the help of the Google XML Sitemaps plugin your blog will be indexed more quickly and recently not only by Google, but also from other major search engines. With the help of the Sitemaps plugin every time you publish new content Ask, MSN, Google and Yahoo will be notified to come and index it as soon as possible.
– Download Google XML Sitemaps WordPress Plugin
2. WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam
What: Comment spam has been a huge problem for bloggers since the inception of blogs, and it just doesn’t seem to go away. The worst kind, and most prolific, is automated spam that comes from bots. Well, finally there is an effective solution, without CAPTCHA’s, challenge questions, or other inconvenience to site visitors. The WP-SpamFree plugin virtually eliminates automated comment spam from bots, including trackback and pingback spam. Most of the spam hitting your blog originates from bots. Few bots can process JavaScript. Few bots can process cookies. Fewer still, can handle both. In a nutshell, this plugin uses a combo of JavaScript and cookies (on steroids) to weed out the humans from spambots, preventing 99%+ of automated spam from ever getting to your site.
Why: With the help of the spambot protection plugin you’ll get rid of all the annoying spam comments, trackbacks and pings that usually you have to remove by hand. These SPAM comments annoy not only you as am author of a blog, but also all the visitors that come to read what you write… and if a visitor sees too much spam comments he might think that your blog is not maintained well enough or you don’t care. But with the help of the WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam plugin this should never happen.
– Download WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam WordPress Plugin
3. Global Translator
What: Global Translator is a free and open source WordPress Plugin which is able to automatically translate your blog in 41 different languages: Italian, Korean, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Portuguese, English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Albanian, Estonian, Galician, Maltese, Thai, Turkish, Hungarian. The number of available translations will depend on your blog language and the translation engine you will choose to use (Google Translation Engine, Babel Fish, Promt, FreeTranslations.com). The plugin is also Search Engine optimized so it uses the permalinks by adding the language code at the beginning of all your pages, making their translated versions like a real a part of your website.
Why: You can attract more visitors to your blog that are unable to speak English or any other popular language that you use for your blog by providing them with an automated translation in their language. With the help of this plugin you can also turn your small localized blog that uses a less common language to an international blog in English and other widespread languages so everyone will understand what you write about. The only drawback is that the automatic translations are not always the best and sometimes the results are not that good as you might expect, but at least the text will still be understandable after being translated in other language.
– Download Global Translator WordPress Plugin
4. StatPress Reloaded
What: This plugin is an improved version of StatPress that shows you real time statistics about your blog. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc. All the information is available on one main statistical overview page that is easy to read and understand and then you can go into deeper details about what your visitors do when they come to your blog. StatPress Reloaded also includes a widget you can add to a sidebar (or easy PHP code if you can’t use widgets!) that allows you to make public some of the blog statistics. You should have in mind that if your blog has a lot of visitors this plugin might become a problem, because it adds quite a lot additional load to the server because of a lot of communication with the database.
Why: The StatPress Reloaded plugin gives you the most important information about how many people visit your blog, where and how they come and what they do once they arrive on the website. It is not an alternative to services such as Google Analytics and other web based counters, or scripts that use the webserver’s logs to create detailed statistics, but still gives you the most important statistical information in an easy to read and simple to install an use package.
– Download StatPress Reloaded WordPress Plugin
5. Theme Tweaker
What: Theme Tweaker displays the existing colors from your current theme, and gives you a color picker to replace them the easy way, without needing to modify the CSS style. It also lets you change the colors in bulk, like invert all colors, use grey scale etc. Furthermore, Theme Tweaker allows you to preview before activating your changes. Finally, you can save the modified stylesheet locally and upload it into your blog server to deploy your new color scheme. The plugin will generate a fully functional child theme for your blog with the custom colors you selected, thus allowing you to leave your original (parent) theme untouched.
Why: This plugin is a great and very easy to use tool for all people that found a great WordPress theme for their blog, but want to change some colors in it and are not too familiar with creating or modifying templates. You don’t have to know how to use or modify CSS code anymore in order to customize the colors of any theme with the help of the Theme Tweaker plugin.
– Download Theme Tweaker WordPress Plugin