Yeepage

WordPress 2.6 is live…

Simon — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 07:09:58 +0000

WordPress 2.6 is out, almost one month ahead of its planned release date, named “Tyner” after the jazz pianist McCoy Tyner that makes the new WordPress release a more powerful CMS. Other features have been added including fixing over 194 bugs from pevious version.

Matt has prepared a brief video tour of 2.6, if you have 3 minutes and 29 seconds to spare, it’s worth a watch:

Here’s a brief write up of the video.

Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits

WordPress previously added auto-save and now gone a step further by allowing you to view who made what changes when to any post or page through a super-easy interface, much like Wikipedia or a version control system.

This is handy on any blog in case you make a mistake and want to go back to an older version of a post, and it’s super handy for multi-author blogs where you can see every change tracked by person.

Theme Previews: Test your new theme befoe others see.

Now WordPress will display the theme you like try in a pop up window instead of activing it, great for testing out new themes or developing a new theme yourself.

Here are some of the smaller features and improvements in WordPress 2.6:

Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
Bulk management of plugins.
A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
Plugin update notification bubble.
Customizable default avatars.
You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

Upgrading

Matt mentioned that WordPress 2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be sweet and simple for all us amateurs out there.

Homepage Excerpts Wordpress Plugin

Simon — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:38:16 +0000

David from Dailyblogtips has released a WordPress plugin called Homepage Excerpts, the plugin has two main objectives. The first one is to make blogs that use full posts on the homepage more search engine friendly. The second one is to give flexibility to people that want to use both full posts and excerpts on the homepage.

Homepage Excerpts for SEO

Most of us are aware that search engines including Google will penalize websites that contain duplicate content. Ideally, therefore, the content of your posts should be displayed fully in one location only, and that is the single post page and no where else.

Where as most of u display full posts on the homepage as well, and the posts remain being displayed in full even when they slip out of the homepage even on others pages.

Davids Homepage Excerpts plugin can be used to reduce this duplicate content while keeping full posts on the homepage. So you can set your homepage to display full posts and then other pages will only display excerpts of the posts. An exmaple is shown below:

As our websites take a week plus to get indexed by search engines it means our only full article will be on the single post page and all othere will be displayed as excerpts and hence remove dupliate content.

Another plus point is it will make the experience of your readers as the contetn is simpiifed on pages 2 onwards and makes it more manageable to read.

Homepage Excerpts for Layout

Here you have the control on how you would like your layout, you may choose to have full homepage using full posts or have the option to have 50% split between full and excerpt posts on you homepage, you have complete control over this.

Notice that you can also select if the plugin should extract the custom excerpt from Wordpress (the one that you insert manually when writing an entry) or if it should automatically grab the first X words of each post, where X is a number that can be specified on the options panel.

Installation

Download and unzip the plugin
Uploade the file homepage-excerpts.php to your plugin directory. (Usually
located in wp-content/plugins/)
Log into the Wordpress control panel, then go into “Plugins” and activate the
plugin
Still inside the Wordpress control panel go into “options” and then “Homepage Excerpts”
Update the plugin options as appropriate

Click here for my other Recommended WordPress Plugins

If I started again would would I do differently?

Simon — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:09:01 +0000

So now i have been logging for over a year now, and having the time off recently i had time refect on what I should of done instead of what I have done. I have learnt a thing or 2 about blogging, wordpress and socializing and have identified some things that I would change.

If you’re reading this thinking to start a blog or just started, your in for a ride of your life. I remeber the days I started on yeepage.blogspot and it felt great, the design and content was pretty crapy but at the time I was enjoying it. Don’t think many people get it right first time so enjoy and learn from your or other peoples mistakes and enjoy!

So here’s what I would do again with a little hindsight on my Yeepage Blogging tips:

WordPress - I started my first blog with blogspot then went to another platform, before landing on WordPress and have not looked back. It’s a bloggers best friend as there’s thousands of themes and plugins to pimp your WordPress blog.
Have a clear plan for your blogs theme - when I started I was vague about my blogs direction and wanted to write about everything and anything on blogging. So if you looking at being an authority on your niche stick and focus to your topic, this can be critical if you want monetize your blog. Of course if your doing a personal blog then this will not apply to you. If I could turn back the time I would refocus on one topic.
SEO strategy - This one I never really never put in the effort at the start as I was not clear when I started. When we decided our blogs theme or topic we need to select a few keywords or phases and add them as much as we can within our site. It’s not the end all of SEO but it’s a good start and from there you can built on.
Control your enthusiasm - When we all start we write 5 to 10 articles without stopping and we normally published them on that day too. Facts are your first month only your family will probably read them. So use the timestamp and spread them out. Nothing looks worse than 60 posts in first month then 3 posts the next month.
Monetization overkill - Most people start to blog in the hope of earn a dollar or two for it. But as readers we ‘ like seeing adverts everywhere. Try reducing the adverts and lose a few cents and build up your loyal readership. Money can be earned over time and will never be made on day one so focus on quality content and build your readers.
Comment on other Blogs - this sounds a wired one, but you can compare it handing out cards. Work on commenting on blogs within your niche and let peope know your blog exists and over time you may see them visiting your blog and commenting too.

What would you do if you was given that chance again on your blog?

Revolution Theme- Now Free!!

Simon — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:43:44 +0000

We all heard abour Brian Gardner- top notch Revolution themes which normally come with a fee to get your hands on them. Now Brian’s opened up the theme for FREE! The theme is a 3-column and widget ready vesion of the popular Revolution series.

The theme has us in mind and not so much web designers, so theres a wide range colors used and theres talk of adding other stylesheets with more choice of colors, so life just became easier.

Here is a screen shot of the free revolution theme

As you can see the theme is close to the premium version, if you to upload the theme As you can see above, Brian stays true to the Revolution series with this theme.

I liked the theme so much it was used on my other two my blogs, which you can see as a demo at saltwater aquarium guide or pellet stove guide, if you like to download it click here.

WordPress Plugin: Show125 ads

Simon — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:41:20 +0000

Like many other people I display the 125×125 ads on my blog to earn some extra money with it, and every month we need to amend my template to display the relevant ads.

What the Show125 widget can do for your blog

We all love the concept of widgets: drap n’ drop, easy to edit, easy to place, easy to remove and most themes can handle widgets.

In addition to the basic widgets advantages, Show125 gives you many option and a true control over your ads. Some features lsted below:

Display from 1 to 8 ads
Available in English (default) or French
Easy to install
Clean code
Display all your ads together, or in an eye-candy Mootools slideshow
Optionally add the target=”_blank” attribute to links, if you want ads to open in a new tab.
Show (or not) a title for your ads block
Add custom css class to links for styling it your way

Installation

First download the widget, then unzip the file and upload the entire directory to your wp-content/plugins directory. Then, go to your Wordpress administration panel and activate the plugin.

Enter Design » Widgets, you’ll be able to drag n drop the Show125 widget to your sidebar and set the options.

Once you filled the fields like example above and saved your changes, you’ll see your ads in your sidebar. Managing your ads with Show125 really makes money earning easier!

If you want to see a “live demo”, just have a look at x-or’s blog, where you’ll be able to see the slideshow mode of the widget.

Click here for my other Recommended WordPress Plugins

WordPress 2.6 and Beyond

Simon — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:04:30 +0000

WordPress 2.6 is in the works right now and is scheduled for release in August this year, and some new cool new features are expected.

Tracking of WordPress 2.6

1. Test Run WP 2.6 - Wordpress 2.6 is still in very early stages of development, but you can still try it out without messing up your blog. You can check out the WP 2.6-bleeding version using username admin and password demo at http://wp.chrisjohnston.org/wp-admin.

2. Wordpress Trac - If you really need to keep track of bugs, features and development of Wordpress 2.6, visit the Wordpress Trac here you find out the latest. You can check the “enhancements” in Open tickets and closed tickets where you get the latest completed and in progress enhancements.

3. WP Development Updates - Check out the Wordpress development updates which will inform you about whats new in Wordpress. Like the wp-config.php can be located one-level up from the rest of your WP install if you want to move it out of your doc root.

Take note that Wordpress 2.5.2 might be out soon and what is planned for WordPress 2.7. Keep tracking developments in Wordpress 2.6 and more information will keep leaking via the WordPress blog and Wordpress Planet.

Where have you Been?

Simon — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:00:59 +0000

As the heading says “where have you been?” this may have been your question of the last few months, so it’s time to update you guys on whats happened to Simon. I have been pretty busy with several projects online and offline too, so today i finally got back into looking at adding a few articles and get back into blogging on yeepage.com.

Firstly offline, after i took 3 weeks leave to go scuba diving though out South East Asia and when i arrived back in Singapore was given a huge promotion which has sucked up most of time, maybe i should of took that leave early in my career. LOL…

So with my little spare time I have been developing many new online projects to spread my money making adventures and not focus on one site again.

It all started when I got inspired with Courtney Tuttle articles on keyword sniper and how to develop blogs for money making online, so I went along with his ideas an started my second blog called ultra light wheelchairs back in January 2008. Went along an added my articles and be honest forgot about the blog but in May 08 bingo! i seemed to have a PR and off i went.

Since that with my passion for divin and a few other topics and some ideas on making money making online I developed scuba gear review and Scuba Classified Singapore, dive-n-log and Diving-Malaysia with a friend. With these two pesonal websites called Saltwater Aquarium Beginners Guide and lately Pellet Stove Guide.