Online business is a great money making niche. The vast exposure of the web makes it an ideal place to start of a business and the best thing is that you can work from home. No longer do you need to rush to your office, fear getting late and give up your social life completely. You can work whenever and however you want to. No wonder people all across the world are quitting jobs to start their own home business and of course making lots of money. Apart from that web can be used for various purposes such as promoting, advertising and expanding your business.

Your website is actually your e-store. It determines your visibility and accessibility by your potential clients. So the first and foremost lookout should be building an efficient website. Now to let the people know about the whereabouts of your business and products you obviously need to post blogs and publish articles on your website.

When you are blogging remember that this blog will do a great deal to build up your reputation. So it better be good. Proof read well before posting the blog. It should be free from grammatical and spelling errors. When posting pictures, make sure that they are resized and can be easily opened by the viewers. Write in a single language and do keep updating posts, but only when you have a proper content. Writing just about anything could be a big turn off.

Well, these were just a list of don’ts. So what must you do to make sure your blogs draw more traffic? You sell what you show Make your blog more catchy and appealing in the eyes of the viewers. So getting a good bloggers template for your website is absolutely essential. You could even hire a web designer to design templates for you, but that can be a really expensive. Instead you can purchase Blogger themes that are available. These are best for the newbies and prevent them to end up in a mess with their website. One must choose templates that are user friendly, less time consuming and of visually appealing. Make sure you buy them from a reputed source. Themes for WordPress users are widely available too. Take your pick only after you make a thorough research.

Currently the best of WordPress Themes is the enews which is designed by Elegant Theme. This is a very user friendly and compatible theme. Elegant Themes in itself is a reputed wordpress theme company storing a wide range of quality themes for you at affordable rates. ephoto is another of their very good wordpress themes. Executive is amongst the other very good wordpress themes you could use for your blog.

There are various websites which host Free Quality Blogger Themes, Blogger Themes, Wordpress Tutorials, Wordpress Templates and Blogging tips. Go for a very reputed website so that you can ensure value for your money. Subscribe to their RSS feed or free newsletter to keep yourself updated with the latest themes and templates. Use them on your blog in accordance to your convenience and generate more traffic on your website.

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All systems built by humans are prone to fail, including the times they are editing code that shouldn’t necessarily be tampered with. When you look at WordPress as a whole, the system is continually becoming more feature-rich and secure, while the number of errors people are encountering appears to be on the incline. A large percentage of the time, the errors encountered are not the fault of the content management/blog system, but rather on the user’s end, as the result of an action that may have produced undesired results for your readers and visitors.

While no self-hosted solution can be completely error free, even managed solutions like Blogger have had its own share of problems, with widget error messages and difficulties using particular pieces of code when styling templates. However, there are some methods that you can use to make sure that everything involved in your blog works harmoniously with one another.

Do not let upgrades pass you by

This is possibly the most important step. Although some people tend to wait until the next point upgrade (ex. WordPress 2.7 to 2.7.1), there are typically few large-scale errors that occur if you upgrade immediately. Major releases do tend to inflict more harm than good, especially if you are transitioning from an outdated version to a current version, but it isn’t a reason to not upgrade.

Failing to upgrade leaves more than simply your blog vulnerable. If hackers try to issues attacks on your site, they will likely also try to target your plugins, assuming that your core code base hasn’t been upgraded either. Plugins can be even more dangerous from the security standpoint, offering multiple points of entry into your blog’s database and essential files that shouldn’t be altered.

Know what you are doing

To effectively make your theme “indestructible,” make sure that you know what you are doing before you begin customizing your template. One of the common misconceptions when it comes to editing templates by people who have previously worked with Blogger’s easy “Fonts and Colors” and “Page Elements” areas is that it’ll be just as easy to work with other systems including WordPress, which isn’t necessarily true. Many premium and advanced free themes do include an options area, but it doesn’t substitute for knowing how to customize the code in the “Theme Editor” panel.

Through some firsthand experience, changing a line in the theme’s code can prevent your entire blog from being accessible by visitors and your subscribers — extremely costly if you are profiting off of your blog. You want to prevent any and all downtime, or you’ll risk losing the opportunity to market a product to your visitors.

Spend some time on upgrading and adding plugins

Plugins, add-ons, and modules serve as the backbone of popular content management systems, once again with WordPress the primary blog system being used. Without plugins, the flexibility wouldn’t be there and nearly all blogs would still be where they were ten years ago. With the emergence of thousands of plugins, it became extremely important that they are constantly updated, with code modifications to reflect upon changes in the core files, along with security updates.

Updating and adding plugins is another primary area where bloggers face difficulties. Each plugin editor and creator strives to create the best product possible – their reputation is on the line, as a plugin that “breaks” your blog will likely cause you to write about it somewhere else, leaving you looking for a new plugin and a fix to the problem. Unless the plugin had horrible coding and would damage nearly any blog, the fault lies on you, as you used the plugin “without warranties” and (likely) with a collection of other, possibly incompatible plugins installed on your server.

A remedy for this problem lies in spending some extra time upgrading and adding plugins to your blog. The best way to do this is by disabling every plugin, then activating them one by one to find the problematic plugin. If no solution works through this method, you may need to remove the table from the database file or use an FTP client to remove the entire plugin, although these rather obvious methods may not solve the problem in every situation.

In the process of searing for plugins and add-ons that suit your blog, make sure the versions are as up-to-date as possible, as well as for the current version of your blog system. Any modifications should be noted by the plugin author, as well as documentation – changes to the coding with each version, installation instructions, license, and so on. Without this, the plugin should set off some “red flags” in your mind, signifying that the plugin wasn’t formally released, hasn’t been updated, or isn’t necessarily a plugin.

Stick with the basics

WordPress was originally intended to be the lightweight, universal blogging solution that made blogging easy for everyone. Additions over recent years have added some code to the install, but it essentially the same as its first release – a tool that bloggers use to publish their thoughts and content to the web. It’s as simple as that. Expanding upon the core file of WordPress, you will find the possibilities nearly limitless, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have to tamper with a lot of the essential files to create a true content management system, rather than a blog platform.

Think about it this way: stripped down, every website contains some form of content – whether it be text, images, or video. Blogs, from the theme to the content to the backend can be simple, but still effectively powerful, so there really isn’t a need to edit code. Although many people want to create a customized website, it becomes increasingly difficult should the blog owner not know the basics of coding.

The basic theme and admin area of WordPress currently give you enough options – from tagging, advance-published posts, Gravatars, widgets, and built-in (considering Akismet Anti-Spam) tools for basic, day-to-day blogging – plenty for the average user.

Bonus Tip: Learning the Basics Before You Begin

Like other skills that are necessary for conquering online activities, blogging does require you to learn some basics of coding (CSS, (X)HTML, and/or PHP/other) in order to customize the way you exhibit your blog to others. One of the biggest lessons that you can learn when you start blogging is that you can never have too much experience in any one field – everything is necessary for the long-term of your blogging “career.” You should start at your blog’s main website – read the help files, forums, and installation/FAQ pages to gain knowledge. Getting the basics of coding will allow you to counter attacks and solve the common problems that bloggers face everyday.

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Block advertising (125×125 ads) has become one of the most popular ways to monetize blogs. Top blogs such as Tech Crunch, DoshDosh, ReadWriteWeb all use block advertising as a method to generate revenue from their blogs. As great as block advertising is for monetizing blogs, if you use block advertising, then you know that adding new advertisers or changing out old ones can be a tedious and time consuming task, especially for the new blogger who is not very familiar with editing source code.

Time consuming practices like those are a thing of the past. With smart, easy to use features, three wordpress plugins below will help you manage the advertising more effectively than manually editing code, leaving you with more time to write new posts.

1. Show125

Features :

• Customizable title
• Show (or not) a title for your ads block
• Optionally add the target=”_blank” attribute to links
• Control number of ads ( 1 to 8 )
• Available in English and French
• Display all your ads together, or in an eye-candy Mootools slideshow
• Easy to install
• Custom css class

Author : x-or
Download : http://www.x-or.be/blog/?download=Show125

2. WP125

Features :

• One or two column ad display, and support through template tags to implement your own unconventional design.
• Show as many ads as you want, and in either manual or random order
• Keep track of how many times an ad is clicked
• When creating a new ad, you don’t have to calculate the end date yourself. Just input how many days you wish the ad to run for, and the correct date will be applied. The ad will be automatically taken down when the time comes.
• When an ad run is over, the record is archived on the Inactive ads screen, so you can check on the final click count, or revive the ad for another run.

Author : webmaster-source
Download : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp125/

3. UBD Block Ad

Features:

• One column or two columns display, with a maximum of 10 ads
• Automatically rotate your ads.
• Fully widget compatible.
• Live previews of the ads before they will be published
• Available in English and French
• Display all your ads together, or in an eye-candy Mootools slideshow
• Easy to install
• Custom css class

Author: http://www.uniqueblogdesigns.com/blog/2008/ubd-block-ad-plugin/
Download : http://www.uniqueblogdesigns.com/download/ubd-block-ad-plugin/

Conclusion

Based on my experience, WP125 is the best choice with their great features : clicks tracking, ads rotation and auto expired ads management.

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In this tutorial, I’ll be going over The Date and The Time, and how can you use it to display your posts information. Hopefully you will find this ultimate guide easier to understand and follow than what’s available in the WordPress documentation.

The Date and Time format string

• l = Full name for day of the week (lower-case L).
• F = Full name for the month.
• j = The day of the month.
• S = The English suffix for the day of the month (e.g st, nd or th in the 1st, 2nd or 15th.)
• Y = The year in 4 digits. (lower-case y gives the year’s last 2 digits)

Here are examples of the various formats for date and time:

• l, F j, Y – Friday, March 5, 2009
• m/j/y g:i A – 05/12/09 7:30 AM
• j F Y – 25 May 2009
• Y – 2009

Adding the Date and the Time to your posts

You can display your post information in the post meta data section in the form of a sentence:

This entry was posted on <?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?> at <?php the_time('g:i a'); ?> and is filed under <?php the_category(', ') ?>

The result should be something like this :
This entry was posted on 15 August 2008 at 12:41 am and is filed under Wordpress Tutorials.

Note: Even though we can use the_date() tag to display your post date, it is highly not recommended because when there are multiple posts on a page published under the SAME DAY, the_date() only displays the date for the first post (that is, the first instance of the_date()).

Display the Date and the Time your post was modified

The the_modified_date template tag displays the date your post was last modified, and the_modified_time() displays the last modified time. Note that these only work when used within the WordPress Loop, the code that generates your post content information.

Code :

This post was published on <?php the_date('F j, Y'); ?> and was last modified on <?php the_modified_date(); ?> at <?php the_modified_time() ?>


Result :
This post was published on July 4, 2008 and was last modified on December 13, 2009 at 7:30 am

This is helpful for helping update your readers so they know when your blog post was last updated. You can find more variations on using the date and time in the the_date and the_time() WordPress Template Tags, but let’s take this a little further.

Copyright Date

As you know, most copyright statements don’t need the full date, we only need the year. Many bloggers hard-code the year in their copyright statement (me too ). In my opinion, it is fine because it is not required us update regularly, just one per year. In fact we could use the PHP date commands to recreate a constantly updating year on the copyright statement.

Using the PHP date commands, you can set your copyright statement to automatically update every year

In your footer.php template file add the following code :
Copyright © <?php the_time('Y'); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>

This will display:
Copyright © 2009 ThemeLib

Conclusion

So now you (hopefully) have a better insight on the Wordpress Date and Time. Feel free to leave a comment if you liked it, hated it, couldn’t understand, whatever – I welcome all feedback. Do not forget to subscribe to my feed for all the latest updates on ThemeLib theme releases and new tutorials. Thanks for reading.

P/s: I “stole” the article title of the post The Ultimate Guide to the WordPress Loop on ThemeLab

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Pictures say a 1000 words. Adding images and style your images are important in your articles in two ways, first they add up in a good look and feel of your article and second it make you gain credibility as an author. But you should be aware of the problem with smileys …

Problem

You might use these CSS code to style images in your entries :
.entry img {
margin:10px;
padding:10px;
border:1px solid silver;
}

Yeah, it is fine. Those code make your images more beautiful, but wait … This would affect your smiley images too! Look at the image below

Your smiley images is added 10px margin, 10px padding, 1px silver border. And therefore it is not good looking

How to fix

The smiley images in WordPress are automatically given a CSS class of wp-smiley when they are displayed in a post. You can use this class to style your smileys differently from other post images.

You could add these code to your CSS :
img.wp-smiley {
margin:0px;
padding:0px;
border:0px;
}


That’s all

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Introduction

Technorati is a search engine focused on tracking blogs. According to their about page, they currently tracking 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs joined Technorati linking to a website. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has. It is important to note that they measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority.

How to add

The result after adding the code is something like the one on the right

Both Blogger and Wordpress users can add this button easily by using HTML widget. Yes, use HTML widget whenever you want to add some html code to your blog.

Paste the code below to your widget and you are done. Ah, remember change to text in blue to your link (do not use mine, it is a small number lol )

<script src='http://widgets.technorati.com/t.js' type='text/javascript'></script>
<a class='tr_authority_t_js' href='http://technorati.com/blogs/themelib.com?sub=tr_authority_t_ns' style='color:#4261DF'>View blog authority</a>

Hint: you should not add it when your authority is too low . I show my number to write this tutorial only hahaha

Bonus

It is better when we also put a button to get readers add your blog to their favourites.

The code is below (in case you want to add). Remember to change my link to yours.

<a href="http://technorati.com/faves?sub=addfavbtn&add=http://themelib.com"><img src="http://static.technorati.com/pix/fave/tech-fav-1.png" alt="Add to Technorati Favorites" /></a>

That’s it

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• Recent Entrecard droppers widget

Did you encounter this error before when using Wordpress? I did. This morning, I decided to modify and clear some lines of code of Amazing Grace theme to make it lighter and lighter. Everything was fine (as my thought). I uploaded my modified files to ftp, browsed http://themelib.com and BOOOM!!! What’s it !?! An empty page with warning text appeared (looks like the Dead Blue Screen on Windows )

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /.../themelib.com/wp-content/themes/Amazing-Grace/functions.php:293) in /.../themelib.com/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 694

Eh, what I’ve done? I can not remember! This is the time when Google becomes useful . After searching on internet, I found the solution to this problem so I thought I might as well write an entry, just in case we all encounter this in the future.

Introduction

This error happens when there are one or more spaces before “<?php” and after “?>”

Solution

The only thing you need to do is to clear all spaces before “<?php” and after “?>” and the warning will be gone (never return)

Advance

If the solution above do not solve your problem, this advanced section may useful.

Your .php file should saved under ASCII format. If you saved it under UTF-8 format, make sure the first 3 bytes Byte Order Mark (BOM) is deleted.

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It has been a half month since ThemeLib.com was created, not a long time, huh ?. Today, I decided to test how is my site in two popular Search Engines : Google and Yahoo.

Here is the result :

• Google: get 48 results returned with keywords http://themelib.com
• Yahoo: get 35 results returned with keywords http://themelib.com

All of the results in Google is fine. They indexed my posts, my tags, my keywords, … But there are some problems with my site in Yahoo. Yahoo indexed my wp-login page and download links !!! How did it happen, huh ? If you have knowledge on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), these results are not good, really. After examining ThemeLib.com a few minutes, I realized that I have not created a Robots.txt file yet !!! Oh man, how can I forget it?

Introduction

The robots.txt file is used to instruct search engine robots about what pages on your website should be crawled and consequently indexed. Most websites have files and folders that are not relevant for search engines (like images, download links, admin files, …) therefore creating a robots.txt file can actually improve your website indexation.

How to Create a Robots.txt file

A robots.txt is just a simple text file that can be created with any text editor such as Notepad. If you are using Wordpress, a sample robots.txt file would be :

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /download/

“User-agent: *” means that all the search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN and so on) should use those instructions to crawl your website.

“Disallow: /wp-” will make sure that the search engines will not crawl the Wordpress files. This line will exclude all files and foldes starting with “wp-” from the indexation, avoiding duplicated content and admin files. Similar to Disallow: /feed/, Disallow: /trackback/, …

After you created the robots.txt file just upload it to your root directory and DONE!

Further reading

Here are some good links that may useful for you if you want to know more about SEO and Robots.txt

• SEO Services
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Search engine optimisation in the UK
• Search engine optimization services program

Conclusion

You should always verify your site in Search Engine like Google, Yahoo to see if there are any problems with the indexing. Hope you do not make a mistake like me. If you need professional help, you can hire a SEO company

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As I said in the previous post, we should use Feedburner to manage our feeds because it give us lots of features that I will talk about through my posts. In this post, I will show you how to give your readers another way to stay up-to-date with your blog instead of RSS feed.

Introduce to Email Subscription

What is FeedBurner Email?

FeedBurner email is a service that allows publishers to deliver their feed content to subscribers via email.

What will it help bloggers do that they can’t do today?

Today, if subscribers want to read, view or watch syndicated online content, they typically have to go to where the content is hosted or know how to subscribe to the feed and consume the content within a reader (e.g. GoogleReader, iGoogle, Bloglines, MyYahoo!, FeedDemon, iTunes, etc.). With email subscription capability, subscribers can now receive this information in their inbox, similar to an e-newsletter. More convenience and more easier for readers !

How to active your Email Subscription service

We will go through a few steps and you will get what you want

Step 1. Login to your account and click on Feed you want to active Email Subscription service

Step 2. Click on the Publicize tab

Step 3. Choose Email Subscription on the left sidebar

Step 4. Choose your feed deliver

You can choose FeedBurner, FeedBlitz, or Rmail to be your feed-via-email service provider.

I choose Feedburner (we are using their service, heh ? ). Then click button Activate.

Step 5. Get your code

They offer us two ways to display the Email Subscription :

• Subscription Form: Copy and paste the code into any web page. Your subscription form will be automatically inserted each time the page is loaded. From there, readers can subscribe to receive daily email with your newest content.
• Subscription Link: You can also offer email subscriptions from a link rather than a form. Just copy the link code and insert to your blog. Users who click it will be prompted to enter their email address in the form that appears.

Hint : If your sidebar’s width is larger than 160px, you should use Subscription Form because a form will attract more readers than a link

Step 6. : Past the code to your blog and DONE.

If you get into any trouble, feel free to ask me here. Have a nice day

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I use my account on Photobucket to store all images for my blogger templates. That is because Photobucket is easy to use and we can organize all images easily with it.

As you know, all most of images hosting services restrict the bandwidth! What does it mean when they said that “You have 10GB monthly bandwidth” ? Supposed that you stored an image with file size is 1MB and everyday your image is viewed 1024 times. That means you used 1MB x 1024 = 1GB/day and after 10 days your image will be unaccessible because your bandwidth had exceeded it’s limit! You can not view your image the next 20 days!

If you are using my Blogger Template, that means you are using my bandwidth too. When the bandwidth is exceeded, this will affect to your blog look. All images on your template will be gone, and replaced by the background color. So it is better when we keep images ourself

There are lots of images hosting services you can choose to store your images, of course, for FREE. In addition to, some of theme also offer another services such as photo-sharing, video-sharing, image editor online, …

Here are some images hosting services for your blog I recommended.

1. Photobucket

- Fast upload speed
- Resize options when upload
- 100GB monthly bandwidth

2. GooglePages

- Ajax upload (I love this )
- UNKNOWN monthly bandwidth

3. Imageshack

- Fast upload speed
- No need to register
- Resize options when upload
- 300MB hourly bandwidth

Hope this help.

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