Wordpress by Examples

We may have already familiar with Wordpress functionality as a blogging platform or to a lesser extent - a content management system, but do you know that you can write a book with Wordpress?

Producing a book using blog is not a new thing in the internet as the first blook (as it is called) was produced by Tony Pierce in 2002 when he compiled a collection of blog posts as a book.

Since then Blook has been recognized as a way of producing books using blogging platform. The first blook award was sponsored by Lulu.com (Lulu Blooker Prize) in 2006 to encourage quality written blooks from bloggers.

You can refer to the links below for more information on how to write books using blogging platform :

• How to write a book - Wordpress.com
• Making People Read - Novelr

Blog comments isn’t always the best way for a reader to contact you. This is because the nature of blog comments itself that available for public viewing. Readers sometimes like to contact you directly in private to ask questions or gives feedback about your blog.

There are two ways to do this,

1. Lists your email address and hope that it doesnt end up in the hand of spammers
2. Put a professional looking contact form

The choice is obviously no 2,

In order to do that, you need to download Wordpress Contact Form plugin and install it on your blog.

After that, create a Wordpress page titled “Feedback” or “Contact” and click “Insert Contact Form” in your wordpress editor.

Save it, and you’ll have a professionally looking Contact form on your blog, just like the contact form in Wordpress By Examples.

Darren Rowse the problogger has written an article about the importance of making your RSS feeds pops out.

This is vital because an easily identifiable RSS feeds can quickly catch the eye of a casual reader, effectively increasing your readers base.

What makes RSS feeds pops?
RSS feeds that pops is a syndication feed which has extra bling on it, such as extra styling and images achievable through the use of clever css/xsl stylesheet and images.

These will sufficiently make your RSS feeds different from others and will be one of the factor that attract them to subscribe your feeds, which will increase your readers.

Here’s the link to the related howto make your Wordpress RSS feeds ‘POP’ :

• How to Make your RSS Feeds Pop in Wordpress
• WordPress Feed Styler
• how to make your RSS feeds POP

Hope you will find it useful…

Do you know that you can make more people appreciate your blog by optimizing it to load faster?
Here’s a quick way that can make your blog loads faster by instructing Wordpress to use gzip compression to reduce your blog output size.

1. Go to your Wordpress Administration Panel
2. Select Options, then Reading
3. Check the box that reads “WordPress should compress articles (gzip) if browsers ask for them”

This will ensure that browsers supporting gzip-encoding (Mozilla, Internet Explorer) will get the compressed version of your webpage faster.

This trick is also beneficial in SEO aspect too, as some advance webcrawler supports gzip-encoding to reduce bandwidth utilisation and at the same moment saving precious crawling time.

I like using Wordpress as my personal blogging platform mainly because it has loads of convenient features for a blogger like me.

You don’t have to worry about Wordpress not offering certain features that you like, because it is extensible via plugins modules. Below is my Top 5 favorite Wordpress plugins that I use on most of my blogs :

• Spam Karma 2 - useful for controlling comment spam. I prefer this compared to Akismet because It doesnt rely solely on external service for spam analysis, thus making my site more responsive.
• Google Sitemaps - Creates Google xml sitemap for googlebot easy indexing automatically each time you posts your blog. Tips: Don’t forget to turn off debug comment for this little beastie!
• Related Posts - Not so important for a new website, but it will become an asset once your blog has more than 100 posts. This plugin makes it easy for your visitors to find posts that are related to each other, spending more time on your blog appreciating your posts.
• Subscribe to Comments - Easy way for your blog readers to follow up about their comments and questions on your posts.
• Smart Update Pinger - Reduces your chance of accidently getting blacklisted when your blog sends xml-rpc pings rapidly to blog update service.

Hopefully you may find those plugins useful for your blogs too