Huzzer » Wordpress

10 Most Important things, you must know for monetizing any blog

Andrew Finch — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:45:52 +0000

Blogging is the well known money making way. You may notice that whenever you google anything, there will be more than 70% of results from sites that are actually blogs. All these blogs can give you every bit of information you want and these blogs are not only surviving but also making big bucks. Blogging is the way that everyone can adopt to make money online. But every blogger is not making money from their blogs, though most of them are trying hard.

With all my blogging experience and researches, I have managed to identify the secrets of the popular money making blogs. Here are the 10 most important things that a blogger or blog owner must know for monetizing any blog.

1. Content is King

Every reader or visitor of a blog expect some new information with each post. So it is extremely important to provide unique and fresh content with each post. This is also important to get maximum exposure in search engine results. Blog’s content is primarily responsible for blog’s search engine rankings. Google and other popular search engines are always hungry of fresh and unique content. Good Search engine positions can provide you massive organic traffic.

2. Presentation of Content

A blog can have lots of good, fresh and unique content and it will be well appreciated by search engines. But all of this will be worthless, if blog reader does not find it interesting to read. In this era of web 2.0, a page full of only text lines will look so boring. So it is very important to use other media like Images, graphs, slideshows or videos at every possible part of each post.

3. Impress the visitors, Do not irritate them

As mentioned in top 2 points, we really want to impress search engines and blog readers/visitors. Blog readers have very important role in any blog’s success. With my research on popular money making blogs , I found that each one of those blog has massive amount of regular readers of their respective blogs. They impress new visitors to make them regular reader and subscriber of their blog posts.

Placing many ads,many social media icons and many links around blog posts, really irritates readers/visitors and they feel like leaving those blogs quickly, no matter how good information you have provided in your blog posts.

4. Communicate with your readers/visitors

Replying or commenting to the readers comments, make them feel that their views are important to the post author or blog owner. Sharing thoughts and resources is extremely important in this social media dominated cyber world. This is very certain that it is impossible to attend each comment of each post but a time to time commenting from author, will make post more lively.

5. Page Breaks in every long post

Every post on the blog, should be very focused on the topic. A very long post can take some time to finish loading. Too much images or graphics can make a reader to leave that post. So, to avoid this scenario, one should always use page breaks in long posts.

Providing page breaks is very favorable for both visitors and blog owner. On the visitor/reader side, it takes very less time to complete loading of full page of blog. On other side, blog get more “Pageviews” than before . More pageviews means that ads on your blog will get more exposure which will lead your blog to make even more money.

55 Most Wanted Free WordPress Themes You Should Grab

Admin — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:42:48 +0000

It can pretty tough to decide whether to invest in premium WordPress themes or just simply stick with the free WordPress themes. It is because most of us have the perception of premium WordPress themes are always better than the free WordPress themes in terms of designs especially.

However, for today post, I’m going to proof that the perception is baseless. I will show that there are actually a lot of awesome free WordPress themes. You are going to impress with the free themes that I have found for this post.

What you need is actually a little effort to look for the free themes and you will find awesome free WordPress themes which sometimes ‘hidden’ among billions of websites out there.

No worries because I have helped to find the themes. You just need to decide which one that suits you best.

So, enjoy the 55 Most Wanted Free WordPress Themes You Should Grab!

Stunning Press

Features | Demo | Download

Berita

Features | Demo | Download

Shopping Press

Features | Demo | Download

Marangal

Features | Demo | Download

Ice Breaker

Features | Demo | Download

Appcloud

Features | Demo | Download

MiniCard

Features | Demo | Download

Wp Blue Print

Features | Demo | Download

Zexee

Features | Demo | Download

Personalised

Features | Demo | Download

10 WordPress Plugins That Can Make a Huge Difference to Your Blog

huzzer — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 03:23:09 +0000

WordPress is the most popular blogging software in the world because of its open source capabilities. Anyone can program a plugin for WordPress, so there are thousands of options out there for any budding blogger. The list has been culled, and here are ten of the best WordPress plugins that can make a huge difference to your blog.

1. SEO Smart Links

This is a great solution to interlink your blog posts, getting the most out of your SEO. SEO Smart Links will automatically take the keywords and phrases on your blog and link them to the relevant categories and tags. Increasing the number of links within your blog has a chance to boost your page ranking and page views.

2. Subscribe to Comments

Keep your readers informed with a link to subscribe to comments on your posts. Readers are notified by email about further entries to a post, enticing them to return to your page and respond to the response. Commenters have plenty of options available to them: they can block the notifications, unsubscribe to posts, and even change the email address to which they are notified.

3. Top Commentators Widget

Top Commentators creates a widget in your sidebar to show who is commenting the most on your blog. There are options and customizations for this plugin that make it even easier to use.

4. Mingle WordPress

Mingle WordPress changes your WordPress blog into a social water water cooler. The plugin allows for Profile Pages, Friending, Friend Activity Pages and a Full Member Directory. Instead of having ‘just a blog,’ you can develop a full blown community with this plugin.

5. Headspace 2 SEO

With Headspace 2 SEO, you can integrate Google Analytics, Feedburner Stats and most of the other popular tracking applications into your WordPress blog. You can also apply SEO techniques to the configuration of meta data for your site on posts, pages and author pages.

6. Akismet

Akismet captures spam and allows you to review it in the ‘Comments’ area of your administration screen. This plugin is one of the best spam fighters that WordPress has to offer, capturing at least 90% of the spam that comes to your blog. The curious can get statistics on how many spammers have been thwarted.

7. Broken Link Checker

Broken links are a thing of the past with Broken Link Checker. This plugin will immediately scan posts that are made, reviewing them for missing links. Any broken links that are found go to your dashboard for correction or removal. Editing or unlinking of the links can be directly accomplished through the plugin’s page, eliminating the need for manual link editing.

8. Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps will automatically generate a sitemap of your blog for Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask to crawl. The plugin will automatically ping the search engines when you change your content, allowing the crawlers to see what you have to offer.

9. Polldaddy

Do you want to know what your readers think about the news? With Polldaddy, you can create polls and surveys for your readers to keep them engaged. Polldaddy allows ratings on your blog so that your readers can rate your content and elevate your thoughts to the stars. This plugin also allows you to let others see what the results of the poll are.

10. NextGEN Gallery

NextGEN Gallery lets you create sortable photo albums for any images that you want on your WordPress blog. You can edit your pictures using JavaScript Effect, creating popular effects like Lightbox, Highslide or Thickbox. Plenty of features are offered for this plugin and is definitely worth installing, especially if you plan on building a portfolio.

WordPress is a powerful blogging tool that allows you to transmit your thoughts to the world. Enhancing your blog with some great plugins can change the readers’ experience from being merely okay to absolutely awesome.

James Adams is a full time staff writer at Cartridge Save where he writes about and reviews items such as HP 351 ink.

ShopperPress: Online Store WordPress Theme With 23 Awesome Design Options

Admin — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 05:46:48 +0000

For the last couple of months, I have share a lot of WordPress themes for online store as base on my observation, WordPress themes developers have started to develop more WordPress themes which outside the scope of magazine/blog styling to focus on more advanced WordPress themes such as online store, portfolio site, micro-blogging and Q&A site like Yahoo! Answers.

For example, WooThemes start to develop few WordPress themes such as Retreat and Cinch that will make your WordPress blog works like Tumblr which will come with iPhone app to make it easier for you to update your blog and share what is happening around you straight away.

And for ShopperPress which comes with the $79 price tag, has developed a really good WordPress theme for online store which I think the best among other online store WordPress themes. It is because Shopperpress is jam-packed with great features and comes with 23 great templates that come for free.

Among features that you will fall in love are:

Sales Analysis & Tracking – You can view newly placed orders and exporting sales & customer data for use in a spreadsheet or QuickBooks.
Inventory and Promotions - ShopperPress includes full inventory control, order management for viewing newly placed orders, “Out of Stock” Messages and discount coupon codes for gift certificates. It has also built in price variable options such as “buy 1 get 1 free” and a fixed cost mark-up on the entire store prices.
Security – ShopperPress is a secure online system that supports hundreds of extra security plugins for WordPress as well as HTTPS/SSL secure page.

For today post, I would like to share 14 Shopper templates which have the best look from all 23 templates which are available for you to choose from.

Camera shopper is a very popular shopping cart theme for selling electronic products online such as TV’s and cameras.

Demo

This theme is popular among the animal lovers, this shopping cart theme is ideal for selling all sort of animal and pet products online.

Demo

eBook shopper is a very popular shopping cart theme for everyone selling digital downloads online such as PSD and .ZIP files.

Demo

Wedding shopper is popular theme for selling all sorts of wedding products and services online.

Demo

Flower shopper is one of our best used themes for selling all sorts of health products, flowers and jewellery online.

Demo

Popular among the golf fans, this theme is ideal for starting your own online store selling sporting products.

Demo

This shopping cart theme is very popular among store owners who are selling home based products online.

Demo

Another popular sporting goods theme, this shopping cart theme is great for setting up your own sporting goods store.

Demo

Popular among our affiliate, kitchen shopper is a great theme for starting your own store online.

Demo

Very popular at the moment, our phone shopper theme is great for selling mobile phones and ring tone downloads.

Demo

Photo shopper is a great theme for those using our credit system allowing people to download images and digital downloads online.

Demo

This theme is popular among software store owners who wish to sell digital products online.

Demo

Very popular at the moment, this is a great theme for selling t-shirts and clothing online.

Demo

SimpleShopper is one of the mostly used themes that Shopperpress provides – its simple outline makes it a great solution for almost any type of store.

Demo

What is your choice?

Which template that you love most and do you agree that ShopperPress offers the best online store WordPress themes? Or do you know WordPress theme that is better than this?

Share with us. I am sure everybody is exciting to know about it.

30 Awesome ThemeForest Themes That Will Kick Your WordPress Theme’s Ass!

Admin — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 13:55:12 +0000

I am pretty sure that most of us have heard about ThemeForest as it is the biggest marketplace for website templates and CMS themes especially for WordPress. There are actually 610 WordPress themes for you to choose from at extremely reasonable price ($40 at most) for the quality that you will get.

However, one thing that you probably don’t know is ThemeForest is the first place you should visit if you are looking for WordPress themes that out of ordinary and have new features that most of WordPress theme developers don’t offer.

Need proofs?

One of the examples is the usage of CU3BER. At the moment, there is no other premium WordPress developers have used such great and awesome 3D slider tool except those in ThemeForest marketplace. Most of them still ‘stuck’ with the boring 2D slider.

Another example is ThemeForest is the first place where WordPress Theme with ‘one-page’ concept first introduced which I love so much. In case you have no idea what is the ‘one-page’ concept, you can check out the Shape Shifter and SOFA theme below. From these WordPress themes, you will get the idea on what is the ‘one-page’ concept is all about.

So, for this post, I would like to share with you top 30 WordPress Themes from ThemeForest from the 610 WordPress themes collection which I regard as the best among the best. I am actually impressed how great and well-built these themes. I am sure you will too.

Enjoy!

Hyperion

Hyperion is clean and stylish WordPress theme well suited for any business, portfolio, blogger, or anyone needing a beautiful website.

Features | Demo

Minimalista

Minimalista is an Ajax WordPress theme, best suited for a professional and minimalist portfolio. It comes with 6 colors skins, and one custom file to put easily your own colour.

Features | Demo

Unite

Unite is a merger of crisp design and powerful communication. It takes a clean, organized approach to presenting content so it’s easier to find what you want.

Features | Demo

ALOTS

ALOTS is professional photography WordPress theme with minimalist, unique and elegant style.

Features | Demo

Furniture Shop

Designed specifically for online shops, The Furniture Store is a WordPress theme with various widgets and features that let you have online shop in a breeze.

Features | Demo

Impression

Impression is highly flexible premium WordPress theme offering drag and drop layout editing, easy design customization, and developer friendliness. It’s suitable for any business, portfolio, blog, magazine & more!

Features | Demo

Creative Zodiac

CreativeZodiac is mainly a Portfolio and Blog theme. It’s suitable for all creatives and bloggers out there, but I can also imagine it as a stylish virtual business card

Features | Demo

Black Eve

Black Eve was conceived to be used on a wide range of online business. It’s clean style and flexibility gives you the advantage to create a powerful and rapid online image.

Features | Demo

Instant Q&A

Instant Q&A is a custom WordPress theme that can turn any WordPress blog into a robust question and answer site.

Features | Demo

Kinesis

Kinesis is a liquid WordPress theme for photographers, wedsigners and other creative company’s in mind.

Features | Demo

Morpheus

Morpheus is a beautiful and fun solution for portfolios, designers, photographers, business sites, and anyone needing a quick and easy solution to get a beautiful website at a minimal cost.

Features | Demo

Desktop Press

DesktoPress a portfolio and photography theme for WordPress.

Features | Demo

iSite

iSite is WordPress theme that uses ‘one page’ page concept and which comes with CU3ER slider. It suits for those who plan to set up portfolio site.

Features | Demo

Los Angeles

Los Angeles is a complete WordPress Theme, designed from the ground up to function first and foremost as a portfolio, then as a comprehensive WordPress theme that can be used for just about any site that needs a beautiful layout.

Features | Demo

Gateway Studios

Gateway Studio is a WordPress theme features a simple yet beautiful design, that will impress your visitors with its delicate form.

Features | Demo

Shutterspeed

Shutterspeed is a WordPress theme that is being designed to display large collections of images effortlessly.

Features | Demo

Life Platform

Life Platform uses WordPress for CMS and is best suited for small Corporate Business, Portfolio sites or showcasing products. The home page layout can be used and like a landing page.

Features | Demo

Small Business

Small Business is a WordPress theme that is perfectly suited for business or portfolio site types. The theme has classic blog features as well as special portfolio section for displaying works or products.

Features | Demo

Perspective

Perspective is a premium WordPress Theme to showcase your portfolio or as a stand alone Blog. It is equipped with Cu3er 3D flash plugin, and comes with Flash detection.

Features | Demo

Bosspress

Bosspress, a wordpress theme which is suitable for web developers, designers, photographers and small corporates.

Features | Demo

Photo and Graphic Studio

This is a WordPress theme suitable for photographers and graphic & web designers.

Features | Demo

Shape Shifter

Shape Shifter is perfect for anyone looking to launch a site right away. This WordPress theme is perfect for businesses, creatives, and individuals who want to quickly publish their portfolio or image galleries and anyone else who’s serious about having a simple, well designed website with a full powered content manager.

Features | Demo

Display

Display is a WordPress Theme, best suited for business and portfolio sites. It comes with a fantastic 3D Image slideshow that can be controlled from your backend with a custom tool.

Features | Demo

Ambition

Ambition pushes WordPress almost to its limits – With great support, comprehensive documentation, brilliant designs and a superb admin panel, this is the theme you’ve been looking for.

Features | Demo

Picco

If you are looking for minimalist and clean portfolio site for your organization, Picco can be the answer.

Features | Demo

Contrast

Contrast, a WordPress theme which is suitable for photographers, graphic & web designers, corporates with a kickass features.

Features | Demo

The Clothes Shop

Designed especially for online shops accomodating a category structure of upto 2 levels deep. (1st level -3rd level categories),The Clothes Shop comes with all layered psd files, an installation wizard, a visual help guide and is fully localized, the theme options included!

Features | Demo

Simply

Simply is a beautifully versatile and feature packed WordPress theme – perfect for anyone who needs a clean, smooth and customizable theme for displaying their artwork, photos or products.

Features | Demo

SOFA One Page Folio

Sofa One Page Folio is – just like it reads – one page WordPress theme. This theme is extremely easy to set up and maintain, there are no special requirements related to it and is fully settable via built-in theme options page.

Features | Demo

London Creative

London Creative comes with fully working contact form, awesome slider for your featured images, nasty spinning slider buttons (never saw them anywhere else, so you can call it unique), 2 message buttons under the slider and PrettyPhoto plugin (better clone of Lightbox).

Features | Demo

What is your pick?

Do you love all those WordPress themes from ThemeForest above? Which one do you think that you love most? For me, it’s Shape Shifter. How about you?

How to cloak affiliate links in your WordPress blog?

Admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 14:15:32 +0000

Affiliate program can be a great source of online income for a WordPress blog as most of online products from various types do offer affiliate program for WordPress bloggers to join. We simply have to use the links that are given to us to promote the product.

Whoever who buy the products through the given links will make us entitle for commission from the owner of the online products. If we know the best way to market the products, affiliate program can provide us decent income for out WordPress blog besides advertising.

Link Cloaking – Do not lose any money again

One of the tips that you should know about affiliate marketing is link cloaking. Basically, instead of using the given links to hyperlink words or images, you ‘mask’ those links with another links.

The importance of this tip is it will ensure that your potential buyer does not remove your ID which sometimes can easily be taken out from the given affiliate links. Another reason is it will make the links look pretty instead of filled with a lot of weird characters.

From

https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?cl=29717&c=ib&aff=44343

http://www.huzzer.com/recommends/WpClassipress- Online Classifieds WordPress Theme

For your information, there is always tendency for others, although not everybody to go straight to the online product’s website when those who are interested with the online products realised that we are using affiliate links. I also feel the same thing. How about you?

How can you cloak your affiliate link?

There are actually plenty of methods for you to cloak your affiliate links in your WordPress blog. The easiest method is through WordPress plugin such as Simple Link Cloaker and Affiliate Link Cloaker. However, through this method, it has the possibility to bring problems in future for example if the plugins are no longer been maintained by the developer.

In the end, the plugin may not be compatible with the latest version of WordPress. It will then affect the cloaked affiliate links in our old blog post as the links may probably will no longer working at that time.

Therefore, I will to give tutorial on simple way how can you cloak your affiliate links. The best part is this method will not affect your WordPress databases or systems and your .htaccess file. So, you will not have to worry as if something goes wrong, the worst thing that can happen is the cloaked links will not work. That’s all.

For your information, I learn this method from Keller Hawthorne from Fresheventure.com.

The simple steps are:

1) Open Notepad program.

2) The write below code in the program

3) Then, save the file as index.php and make sure that for the ‘Save as type’ section, you choose ‘All Files’ instead of ‘Text Documents’. In order to make it easier for the next steps, it is advisable for you to save it in Desktop.

4) You have to create a new folder in the new desktop to put in all of your index.php files as you have to create index.php file for any affiliate link you want to cloak.

5) However, to make the cloaked link to be more pretty like the one that I show you above, you have to create subfolder base on the category of the affiliate links. For example, for Huzzer Magazine, I make subfolder base on the developer of WordPress themes.

Example of the structure for the folder will be Recommends (main folder) > Templatic (subfolder) > eShop (sub-subfolder).

With this structure, you have to save the index.php file for the eShop theme under the ‘eShop folder’ and the links will look like www.huzzer.com/Recommends/Templatic/eShop.

6) After you have dove all of the steps above, you just need to upload the ‘Recommends folder’ into your WordPress blog’s folder in your hosting. If there is only one website that you host in your hosting, you simply need to upload the folder into public_html folder.

If not, you have to look for folder that you install your WordPress blog. The folder will have a lot of .php files starting with ‘wp-’ such wp-config.php and wp-register.php.

7) Then, after you have uploaded the folder, give it a try. Try to hyperlink any words in your WordPress blog and if you have properly followed the above steps, the link will bring you to the online products which you use its affiliate link in the Notepad just now.

If there is any error, please check back the link that you use and the spelling especially if there is any capital letter or ‘s’ at the end of your folders.

That’s all. Really simple right?

By the way, if you join new affiliate program in future, you just have to make new subfolder and upload it into the ‘Recommends folder’. You do not have to create another main folder again or to upload back all of the folders.

Which one do you prefer?

Which method of link cloaking that do you prefer? WordPress plugin or the method that I just taught you? For me, I prefer the above method as I find it more flexible and catchy as it is up to your creativity to make the cloaked links looks great.

What’s your say?

OnTheGo – Awesome Hand Drawn WordPress Themes by Elegant Themes

Admin — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:13:38 +0000

It can be really boring to have WordPress blogs that look like others especially in terms of design. Some of us including me can spent couple hours for the sake of looking WordPress theme that is not only looking good but unique.

One of my favorite types of WordPress themes is hand drawn WordPress theme. It is totally out of the box, looks great and creative plus it will make our WordPress blog looks more unique as compared to others.

In case you have missed my previous post, I have reviewed Left Handed, the first full hand drawn WordPress theme which is from Obox Design. However, if you have missed the post, you can check it out through below link.

Refresh WordPress Blog Design with Hand-Drawn WordPress Theme.

Now, there is another full hand drawn WordPress theme which I suspect the second of its type. However, for this time it is not from Obox Design but Elegant Themes. It is called OnTheGo.

OnTheGo comes with 5 elements that make it a great and well-functioning WordPress theme. They are:

Optional Blog Structure - Let you to use your WordPress as a normal blog as in default, the theme will be set your WordPress to be a CMS with a Page-Based structure.

Automated Thumbnail Resizing – Thumbnail plays crucial role for WordPress blog as it brings color to WordPress. With this feature, you do not need to resize your image to make the thumbnail feature to work.

In Depth Theme Option – This element is the most important thing that a WordPress should have as it helps WordPress bloggers especially those who have limited knowledge in web development to personalize their WordPress theme.

Advertising Management – There will be some point which we feel that we want to monetize our WordPress blog. With this feature, bloggers do not have to install external plugin. Your ad can be taken care from your theme option page.

4 unique color scheme – OnTheGo comes with 4 different color schemes which will give you some alternative in the color scheme of your WordPress blog.

Below are few screenshots from the theme.

My Verdict: OnTheGo Hand Drawn WordPress Theme – Yes or no?

Looks great right? The only thing that I think it should be better is the size and type of font that is being used. Personally, I don’t like the theme that uses small font especially. I love the size and the font of Huzzer Magazine. How about you?

The best part of this theme is that it is developed by Elegant Themes. That means, the cost of having one is pretty cheap as you only have to pay $19.95 per year and you will entitle to only this theme but all of themes from Elegant Themes including support.

Pretty good offer right?

If you are interested in knowing more about OnTheGo or want to buy this theme straight away, you may find below links to be handy.

Feature & Buy | Demo

Your Verdict: Left-Handed or OnTheGo?

Which hand drawn WordPress theme that you prefer? Left-Handed by Obox Design or OnTheGo by Elegant Themes? For me, I am more towards the theme from Obox Design. How about you?

How to Add Fancy Social Bookmarking Icons in WordPress Manually?

Admin — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:25:23 +0000

It can be pretty boring to have small social bookmarking icons which most of bloggers use at the end of their post. It will also not bring any excitement for our blog readers to click on them to help us to promote our blog post.

So, for today post, I would like to share a quick and straightforward tutorial on how can you use your preferred social bookmarking icons that you found in the internet and put them at the end of every blog post in your WordPress blog.

Here is the example of the effect that you will get when you use below tutorial on your WordPress blog.

If you bring your cursor on the icon, it will turn to grey.

Cool right?

The quick tutorial…

First, you have to open your CSS file and add below code into it. You can the code anywhere but it is advisable to put it after last code line in the CSS file so that it would be easier to delete if you want to in the future.

#share-container { background:url(images/horiz-borders.gif) repeat-x bottom; height:80px; padding:10px 0 25px 15px;}

#share li {display:inline;}

#share li a {background:url(images/social-icons.png); display:block; float:left; height:67px; text-indent:-9999px; }

#share li a#facebook {background-position:0 -67px; width:72px;} #share li a:hover#facebook {background-position:0 -1px; width:72px;} #share li a#digg {background-position:-72px -67px; width:81px;} #share li a:hover#digg {background-position:-72px -1px; width:81px;} #share li a#delicious {background-position:-153px -67px; width:83px;} #share li a:hover#delicious {background-position:-153px -1px; width:83px;} #share li a#stumbleupon {background-position:-239px -67px; width:87px;} #share li a:hover#stumbleupon {background-position:-239px -1px; width:87px;} #share li a#rss {background-position:-329px -67px; width:81px;} #share li a:hover#rss {background-position:-329px -1px; width:81px;} #share li a#twitter {background-position:-410px -67px; width:83px;} #share li a:hover#twitter {background-position:-410px -1px; width:83px;} #share li a#technorati {background-position:-494px -67px; width:67px;} #share li a:hover#technorati {background-position:-494px -1px; width:67px;}

For the image file that I have highlighted in red is for the horizontal grey line that you can find on the top and bottom of the social icons. While for the image file highlighted in yellow, it is the most important image that you need to have for this tutorial as it is the image of the social icons.

To personalize the social icons section for your WordPress blog, you can replace both images with your own but do make sure that the images that you are going to replaced have the same size with the previous ones. If not, you may need to adjust slightly the above code.

If you do not want to use your icons and want to use the same icons like the above, you can download the image from the link below. Then, you have to upload the image into the images folder which is located under theme that you are using. (Public html>WP Content>Themes>Your Themes>Images)

Social Icons

And for the icons, you can find the icons that you love by searching them in the internet. However, you may find the icons that you will love from the post that I have posted before.

Top 13 Perfect Designed Hand Drawn Social Bookmarking Icons

Then, after you have finished with your editing in the CSS file, you now have to open the single.php file for you to place social icons in every post of your WordPress blog.

You have to find inside single.php as it represents your blog post. Then, if you want to have the social icons on top of your blog post, you have to add social icons code that I am going to give you in a moment before the . But, if you want it after your blog post, you have to add the social icons code after the .

Download below file:

Code – Social Icons for WordPress

After you have added the code, hit save button and refresh your blog.

Now, you will have your very own personalized fancy social bookmarking icons in your WordPress blog.

The ending…

Do you have your own personalized social icons for your WordPress blog or use the icons that you get by using WordPress plugin? Which one do you prefer and will work well with you?

For me, I prefer to have my own personalized social icons. How about you?

17 WordPress Themes for Musicians Which Will Make Them Sing All Day Long

Admin — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:50:33 +0000

Internet nowadays plays a really important role for the success musicians and bands. It is because those who are the target customers spend most of their time in the internet and prefer to download songs from the internet instead of have to go to music to store to get the latest album from their favorite singers.

* For your information on how big is the market for music industry in the online world:

While consumers bought more than a billion individual digital tracks in the United States, which accounts for a majority of online sales worldwide, they bought only 65 million digital albums in 2008.

-NY Times-

Therefore, it is totally a waste to ignore this new environment for the music industry as if they (record labels and musicians) fail to cope with the change, they may lost in the battle with others who actively involved and built their present in the online world.

Among those who have succeeded to integrate in music with online world is ITunes and Radiohead.

For ITunes, in has managed to sell 9.9 billion songs from early 2003 to early 2009 which accounting for 70% of worldwide online digital music sales base on Wikipedia.

On the other hand, Radiohead switched their marketing strategy by letting their fans to set their own price they would like to pay for Radiohead’s latest album, In Rainbow through online site. Then only, the band had the physical release of the album. The result – more than three million copies of the album were distributed in the first year, in digital and physical formats plus the album still made more money than either of the band’s previous two records.

So, if you are a musician or looking for WordPress themes that will help you to build website for musician, you will definitely happy with the themes that you are going to show you. For me, all the themes below looks great and will definitely suit for those who are planning to make website for musician through WordPress platform.

Backstage

Features | Demo

Tribal

Features | Demo

Grunge Life

Features | Demo

Cold Stone

Features | Demo

Lumin

Features | Demo

Pop Life 56

Features | Demo

Pop Life 76

Features | Demo

Pop Life 84

Features | Demo

TV Elements

Features | Demo

Tubular

Features | Demo

Church

Features | Demo

BSocial

Features | Demo

Toxy Music

Features | Demo

Band Website

Features | Demo

Office Space

Features | Demo

Depth

Features | Demo

Do you have anything else to add?

Do you know if there are still WordPress themes that you think will suit for musician? I am sure that I may have missed few of themes. It would be great if you can share them over here?

And, how about the above themes? Is there any theme that you think will not suit for those who are planning to use it as website for musician?

I would love to hear feedback.

Cheers!

8 Radically Simple Ways to Make Your WordPress Blog Runs Like A Cheetah

Admin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:52:15 +0000

Ensuring our WordPress blog is at its optimum speed is crucial as it will affect the very first impression of our blog visitors as site loading is the very first thing they will have to face before they can enjoy our blog post.

If the loading time is terribly slow, it will definitely piss our readers off and most important thing if they are your ‘first-time’ site visitors. They will probably never come back or cannot find your blog whenever if they want to especially if they come from the search engines.

So, for today post I would love to share 8 really simple and basic ways to reduce your WordPress blog loading time. I have tried my best to reduce all those technical stuffs in the list so that you have no problem to understand the ways to improve the loading time of your WordPress blog.

Enjoy!

1. Upgrade to the latest WordPress version

This is pretty obvious. WordPress will never release any new version of WordPress if it will not make your WordPress blog better. Sometimes, it makes me wonder why some of us hesitate to upgrade their WordPress blog.

It is plain easy as you just need to click the update button and everything else will be done for you. It only takes less than a minute.

p/s: Have you upgraded to the latest WordPress version that has just been released?

2. Delete unused plugins

You must not used unnecessary amount of plugins for your WordPress blog and you have to deleted theme form the server. It is because it can dramatically affect the speed of your WordPress blog as it may contain tons of scripts and codes.

Remember this – blog with more features is not necessarily a blog that people will love. Sometimes, simplicity is the king.

Ask yourselves – do your blog need such great amount of plugins to be a better blog?

3. Install WP Super Cache Plugin

I am pretty sure that you have heard about this plugin as there are a lot of blogs out there that regard this plugin as a must have plugin for a WordPress blog.

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

In none technical words, it will use the ‘image’ of your site and use it each time your readers visit your blog instead of has to process same data each time your readers visit your blog. So, it will reduce the burden of your server and therefore, your WordPress blog can process faster.

Download WP Super Cache

4. Install WP CSS

With this plugin GZIP and strip whitespace from your CSS files. It allows you to confidently use @import inside a CSS file and not worry about what happens on the user’s end. It will look through your style.css file and put any @import files into it.

For those who are not familiar with the above technical stuff, may find it hard to understand. The important thing you should know is it can definitely make your WordPress blog faster.

(Tests were measured using a Firefox plugin called Firebug. Firefox was run a Mac Pro (2008) using OS X 10.5.3. Eight CSS files that were being included in this test: typography.css, form.css, list.css, special.css, skin.css, menu.css, other.css, sIFR-screen.css – all created to simulate an average size of a typical website.)

Download WP CSS

5. Rid Off Hotlinking

Hotlinking can a really huge problem if there are a lot sites hotlinked with your WordPress blog. They will drag down your WordPress blog as they will make your server load increasingly high.

For those who do not know about hotlink, hotlink is a term that is being coined when someone else/site uses data especially images from your site. So, although others are visiting the blogs that have hotlinked you, the images that come out in their blogs will be from your server. So, it will increase the bandwidth usage excessively.

Sometimes, hotlinking is called bandwidth theft.

Below is how you can prevent hotlinking in your site through .htaccess file:

#disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]
#RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ – [F]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/stealingisbad.gif [R,L]

You just need update the .htacces file and change the domain name above with yours. The last line is an image that will display instead of the hotlinked image– how about an advert for your site?

6. Turn Off Post Revision

WordPress starts to have Post Revision feature after it launched the 2.6 version of WordPress. Although it has its advantages, it also comes with disadvantages.

One of the disadvantages is whenever a post is edited, a new row will be created in wp_posts table. Hence if your posts or pages got edited 10 times, you will have 10 new rows in wp_posts table.

In no time your wp_posts table will be filled up and the post ID will be huge.

To know how you can riff off this feature, Lester Chan has covered this topic in details.

7. Reduce Image Size

Images make our blog post looks great but it can also come with cost. Images that are in high resolution will use a lot of bandwidth and therefore affect your WordPress blog’s loading time.

With WP Smush.it, it will help you to reduce the size of images in your WordPress blog by reducing its quality with no obvious impact on the images.

Download WP Smush.it

8. Optimize Your WordPress Blog Database

Just like a computer, we have to defragment the database of our WordPress blog and to ensure in to be clutter free.

This process can be done manually and automatically through WordPress plugin.

For manual process, you have to locate the database of your WordPress in myPhpAdmin, select all the tables in the Check Boxes, select the Optimise Tables Option.

For automatic process, you have to install easy to use WordPress plugin called Optimize Database by Joost De Valk of Yoast.com. After you have downloaded it, just hit the ‘Optimize Now’ button.

This is very useful for tables that are frequently updated.

Do you have any suggestion?

Do you have any suggestion on the ways that you have used to increase the speed of your WordPress blog? I am sure that I have missed some of them. How about you help me out? I would really appreciate it.