Guide 29 - Tutorials | Articles

What is a feed?
If you’re used to surfing the internet and viewing blogs, you probably already know what a feed is. If you don’t, then read on. A feed is basically way for a blog’s or website’s visitor to subscribe to the site using a web page, feed reader or email to subscribe.

New posts are automatically delivered to the chosen subscription method so that the user can read new posts from their favorite topics whenever they are updated, without having to surf from site to site looking for new posts and updates.

What is an RSS feed?

RSS is the most common feed type. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.
It is a text-based XML format. The feed content is delivered to your favorite RSS feed reader. The most popular web-based RSS feed readers are Bloglines and Google Reader. Here’s a list of Windows based RSS feed reader software.

Apart from RSS, the most popular feed type is Atom. It also uses XML to deliver the feeds.

Subscribing to an RSS feed

Subscibing to a feed is pretty simple. Let’s walk through the process together.

Step 1: Find the RSS feed. Most blogs have their feed icon at the top right area of the page, look for the orange feed icon or RSS. On this blog, I have a custom, blue RSS feed icon.

If you can’t find the feed icon on a blog (90% of blogs have it) don’t worry. Most feeds are at http://www.example.com/feed so try adding the /feed to the end of the blog’s adress. (My feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/Guide29-Tutorials For blogs at blogspot.com, add feeds/posts/default to the end of their domain to find the feed. Example: http://example.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

Step 2: Subscribe. Click the feed icon and you’ll be taken to the feed page. From here you can choose which feed reader to use. I recommend Google Reader. Choose your preferred reader and continue.

Step 3: Read. Now you are subscribed to the feed. You should be redirected to your RSS feed reader and you can start reading feeds.

If You Like This Post Do Share This With Ur Friends .

Simple Music is a new plugin that makes it extremely easy to add an MP3 to your sidebar with a drag and drop widget. Setup and configuration can be done in under a minute.

Features of Simple Music:

• Bulletproof Functionality – Just enter the song URL and go!
• Easy Settings – Upload a file or find one online, choose to autoplay the track, repeat, and more!
• Fast Customization – Changing the options, such as picking a new song or adjusting the settings, is a snap!

This is a great way to add a personalized welcome message to your site or share music with your readers.

As you probably know the loading speed of your site is a very important factor. Not only it affects the user experience, but it is also used as a search ranking parameter by Google now.

In the past I talked about some tools you can use to test and optimize the loading speed of your site, but a couple of weeks ago I came across a new one that is worth a mention, too.

You can find it on WebPageTest.org. First of all you need to input the URL of your website, choose a geographical location to perform the test, select a couple of options and then click on “Submit.”
It takes 30 seconds or so to complete the test, and then you’ll see a results page like this one:

You’ll get the loading time of your website on the first and second visit (these numbers will be different if you use caching. The tool also gives you a grade on 6 areas (Keep-alive, text compressions, image compressions, caching, CSS and JS combination, CDN), and detailed graphs explaining what optimization steps you failed at and what elements make most of your page’s size.

Calculators are often overlooked as a simple utility, but you might be surprised by how much they increase user interaction on your site. If a user finds your calculator extremely useful, he’s likely to bookmark your site so that he doesn’t have to search for it the next time. You may not be aware of the variety of calculator plugins available for WordPress, so here’s an excellent sampling of recently updated plugins that will perform calculations on your website.


If your site depends on being able to provide some sophisticated calculations for your visitors, then WordPress has the calculator for you. Many of these can be used in combination with a BuddyPress site to promote a community that’s based on mutual interests and goals, such as running, losing weight, or getting out of debt.

Mortgage Calculator Sidebar Widget

A Mortgage Calculator sidebar widget that enables your visitors to calculate their monthly payments towards their mortgage.

Download Plugin

Mortgage Loan Calculator

This is a sidebar widget that calculates your principal and interest mortgage loan payment. You insert the loan amount and interest rate (pop up tells you to insert a number if you put anything other than a number in), choose the length of the loan from a drop-down, and press the calculate button. Your payment information is displayed.

Download Plugin

Financial Toolbox

The financial toolbox includes a news ticker for the latest financial news along with an integrated credit calculator.

Download Plugin

Net Worth Calculator

This plugin helps you keep track of your monthly assets, liabilities, and net worth. You can mark any asset or liability value as private if you do not want it to displayed.

Download Plugin

Debt Reduction Calculator

This plugin displays functional debt reduction/debt payoff calculator. It shows people how they can pay debt faster or how much they need to pay extra each month in order to be debt free after choosen period of time.

Download Plugin

BMI Calculator Widget

This plugin will let you add a fully customizable BMI calculator widget to any widget enabled space. Both standard & metric input options and full color customization to match your theme exactly are available.

Download Plugin

Zodiac Calculator

This plugin provides sidebar widget that displays your visitors’ Chinese and/or Western zodiac signs based on their date of birth without reloading the page.

Download Plugin

Runner’s Log

This plugin let you convert your blog into a training log and let you track your distance, time, calories and calculate your speed, time per km(or miles), and let you have advance statistics. It includes a Training Zones Calculator, VDOT calculator, V02maxulator Calculator, Race Time Calculator, Training Pace Calculator, Body Mass Index Calculator, Calculate Predicted effect of change in weight.

Download Plugin

Blog or Website Value Calculator

This is a plug-in that gives you a nice tidy widget to display your blog’s current estimated value in dollars. This information is displayed to you and your visitors to demonstrate just how much hard work you have put into your blog.

Download Plugin

Math Calculator

This is a simple calculator can be used for quick on site calculations. Check http://www.calculator.net/math-calculator.html for a demo of this calculator.

Download Plugin

NACC WordPress Plugin

This is a WordPress plugin implementation of the N.A. Cleantime Calculator. When you use the shortcode for the plugin, it will calculate and display cleantime.

Download Plugin

Time Zone Calculator

This plugin calculates, displays and automatically updates times and dates in different timezones with respect to daylight saving. The calculator uses AJAX and is based on the PHP timezones database.

Download Plugin

Overweight Calculator

This plugin displays functional overweight calculator / BMI calculator. It can be used to check the user’s Body Mass Index and suggest the recommended weight range.

Download Plugin

Love Calculator

This love calculator evaluates the compatibility of two people based on names. The score range from 0%-100%. The higher the score the better. This calculator can be inserted either to the sidebar or into the post, but not both. Check http://www.calculator.net/love-calculator.html for a demo of this calculator.

Download Plugin

Countdown Timer

Countdown Timer allows you to setup one or more dates to count down to or away from. Events can be inserted into the sidebar, either manually or as a widget, or within posts and pages.

Download Plugin

GeneralStats

This plugin counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, tags, link-categories, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages with AJAX functionality.

Download Plugin

Post Stats

This plugin calculates and displays total number of words in blog posts, minimal and maximal post length, shortest and longest post (title and permalink), and estimated reading time of the blog posts. It can be displayed in the dashboard, on a sidebar widget, or before and after each post.

Download Plugin

Price Calc

This is a plugin that shows a n inter-active price calculator form on any post, page or widget content. Let your customers view automatic bids and cost estimates for your products and services. You can set up a set of product variations and freely define a price structure.

Download Plugin

Calculators are often overlooked as a simple utility, but you might be surprised by how much they increase user interaction on your site. If a user finds your calculator extremely useful, he’s likely to bookmark your site so that he doesn’t have to search for it the next time. You may not be aware of the variety of calculator plugins available for WordPress, so here’s an excellent sampling of recently updated plugins that will perform calculations on your website.


If your site depends on being able to provide some sophisticated calculations for your visitors, then WordPress has the calculator for you. Many of these can be used in combination with a BuddyPress site to promote a community that’s based on mutual interests and goals, such as running, losing weight, or getting out of debt.

Mortgage Calculator Sidebar Widget

A Mortgage Calculator sidebar widget that enables your visitors to calculate their monthly payments towards their mortgage.

Download Plugin

Mortgage Loan Calculator

This is a sidebar widget that calculates your principal and interest mortgage loan payment. You insert the loan amount and interest rate (pop up tells you to insert a number if you put anything other than a number in), choose the length of the loan from a drop-down, and press the calculate button. Your payment information is displayed.

Download Plugin

Financial Toolbox

The financial toolbox includes a news ticker for the latest financial news along with an integrated credit calculator.

Download Plugin

Net Worth Calculator

This plugin helps you keep track of your monthly assets, liabilities, and net worth. You can mark any asset or liability value as private if you do not want it to displayed.

Download Plugin

Debt Reduction Calculator

This plugin displays functional debt reduction/debt payoff calculator. It shows people how they can pay debt faster or how much they need to pay extra each month in order to be debt free after choosen period of time.

Download Plugin

BMI Calculator Widget

This plugin will let you add a fully customizable BMI calculator widget to any widget enabled space. Both standard & metric input options and full color customization to match your theme exactly are available.

Download Plugin

Zodiac Calculator

This plugin provides sidebar widget that displays your visitors’ Chinese and/or Western zodiac signs based on their date of birth without reloading the page.

Download Plugin

Runner’s Log

This plugin let you convert your blog into a training log and let you track your distance, time, calories and calculate your speed, time per km(or miles), and let you have advance statistics. It includes a Training Zones Calculator, VDOT calculator, V02maxulator Calculator, Race Time Calculator, Training Pace Calculator, Body Mass Index Calculator, Calculate Predicted effect of change in weight.

Download Plugin

Blog or Website Value Calculator

This is a plug-in that gives you a nice tidy widget to display your blog’s current estimated value in dollars. This information is displayed to you and your visitors to demonstrate just how much hard work you have put into your blog.

Download Plugin

Math Calculator

This is a simple calculator can be used for quick on site calculations. Check http://www.calculator.net/math-calculator.html for a demo of this calculator.

Download Plugin

NACC WordPress Plugin

This is a WordPress plugin implementation of the N.A. Cleantime Calculator. When you use the shortcode for the plugin, it will calculate and display cleantime.

Download Plugin

Time Zone Calculator

This plugin calculates, displays and automatically updates times and dates in different timezones with respect to daylight saving. The calculator uses AJAX and is based on the PHP timezones database.

Download Plugin

Overweight Calculator

This plugin displays functional overweight calculator / BMI calculator. It can be used to check the user’s Body Mass Index and suggest the recommended weight range.

Download Plugin

Love Calculator

This love calculator evaluates the compatibility of two people based on names. The score range from 0%-100%. The higher the score the better. This calculator can be inserted either to the sidebar or into the post, but not both. Check http://www.calculator.net/love-calculator.html for a demo of this calculator.

Download Plugin

Countdown Timer

Countdown Timer allows you to setup one or more dates to count down to or away from. Events can be inserted into the sidebar, either manually or as a widget, or within posts and pages.

Download Plugin

GeneralStats

This plugin counts the number of users, categories, posts, comments, pages, links, tags, link-categories, words in posts, words in comments and words in pages with AJAX functionality.

Download Plugin

Post Stats

This plugin calculates and displays total number of words in blog posts, minimal and maximal post length, shortest and longest post (title and permalink), and estimated reading time of the blog posts. It can be displayed in the dashboard, on a sidebar widget, or before and after each post.

Download Plugin

Price Calc

This is a plugin that shows a n inter-active price calculator form on any post, page or widget content. Let your customers view automatic bids and cost estimates for your products and services. You can set up a set of product variations and freely define a price structure.

Download Plugin

As you might know, the default login page in WordPress is  domain/wp-login.php.  Almost every other person in the world knows that it is the login page of a WordPress blog. So if someone gets yourpassword, it is easy for them to login to your WordPress dashboard and change the default password.  Trial & error and  brute force attacks by bots on a particular page would also lead to password theft. Stealth Login is a WordPress plugin that can be used to change WordPress login URL to custom URL and prevent such incidents.


Stealth Login is a WordPress plugin :

Stealth Login WordPress plugin options:

Download the plugin here, upload to the  WordPress plugin directory and activate. As you can see from the screenshot, there is a simple option to customize WordPress login slug. First, turn the plugin ON and enter the required login URL slug in the login slug box. Now enable stealth mode and save changes.  Plugin will start working from the next login.

 Welcome BuddyPress Humanity, the latest plugin on the scene to help you combat BuddyPress signup spam.
As you can see from the screenshot, this plugin will add a customizable security question to the BuddyPress signup form. You can write your own question, change it as often as you want, and assign the correct answers to verify the user’s humanity.

This plugin currently works perfectly when WordPress Multisite is enabled, but if you want it to work with single user WordPress, you’ll need to do this one small switch:
Find this in the buddypress-humanity.php file:

add_action('bp_after_blog_details_fields', 'bph_show_input_field');

and replace it with this:

add_action('bp_before_registration_submit_buttons', 'bph_show_input_field');

I’ve notified the plugin developer about this and perhaps he’ll change it, so make sure to test the plugin to see if it works for you before changing the file.

Please note that BuddyPress Humanity will not completely eliminate spam, but it will definitely deter some bots and help you spend less time deleting spam users. If you’re suffering from more spam than you can keep up with, give this plugin a try and see how much it can cut it back for you.

Looking for other, more effective methods for stopping the onslaught of BuddyPress signup spam? Check out Anti-Splog, the most comprehensive spam-killing plugin currently available for WordPress, Multisite and BuddyPress. It’s powered by our new Anti-Splog API service that effectively learns as it kills spam across thousands of blogs connected to the service. You won’t find any other solution out there that can rival Anti-Splog.

If you’re someone that manages more than one WordPress blog you’re going to love ManageWP. It’s an amazing tool that lets you manage all of your blogs from one centralized dashboard. Signing up and getting started is a simple as 1, 2, 3; first setup your account, then add your WordPress blogs, finally manage them from the dashboard.

In their own words:

“ManageWP is a WordPress service offering modern technology to manage multiple WordPress blogs from a centralized Dashboard.”

So whether you’re someone who just has a few blogs, or you manage WordPress blogs of several clients, ManageWP will be a tool that you’ll want to keep close at hand. ManageWP is actually built on a WordPress blog itself. So, when registering you’ll just need to enter your username a email; a password will be emailed to you.



Next you’ll need to add your blogs. To do this you’ll first need to add the ManageWP Worker plugin to the blogs that you want to manage. Then you’ll have to enter your URL, username and password into the ManageWP dashboard area. If you’re worried about the security of your account, be sure to check out their privacy page.

The control panel will show you which plugins on are up to date. You can upgrade all the plugins (on each of your blogs) at once with the click of a button. This is a definite time saver — rather than having to go to each blog separately. From the control panel you can also upload new themes and plugins, create new blog posts and pages, import/export, clone blogs and backup/restore.

Under the sites area, you’ll have options that you can perform on each blog individually (instead of all together). You can manage posts, pages, categories, tags, comments, plugins and themes. If there is a new version of WordPress available, you can even upgrade the blog right from here. When you click on a button/action, it actually opens up a new tab (along the top of the dashboard). Then you can simply click the X on the tab to close it out when you’re done.



The company is also planning to offer a self hosted version of ManageWP for companies and individuals out there that want to run their own dashboard. It’s still in the works but you can sign up to receive notifications about its release. This is great if you do have numerous clients and want to use your own domain to manage them all in one place.

ManageWP is a lifesaving tool that will save you lots of time and effort. It’s such a convenience to be able to login to just one WordPress blog and manage all of your blogs from there. I have 6 sites that run WordPress and this plugin has really made my day. How about you?

It had been so long since I’d signed up for the Reinvigorate beta that I’d practically forgotten what it was. – and the name didn’t give it away. As it turned out, Reinvigorate is a web-based analytics program (it also has a desktop reporting program) so I promptly accepted my invitation to test it and downloaded and installed the WordPress plugin, entering my site ID to enable it to start tracking.  (If you’re not on WordPress, don’t worry, as you can simply use the tracking code.) I’ve been down this route before, trying out many analytics programs before settling on one I liked. Would Reinvigorate be the program that could seduce me away from my beloved Cliky?

Getting Started

The first page you see on Reinvigorate is the overview page, which features two large boxes showing the number of active visitors and active pages. This is similar to the Spy view in Clicky (but without the map). Click on the small report link on each button and you can see more detail, such as the page title and when it was last accessed. Reinvigorate has a ‘name tags’ function that is supposed to tag visitors and commenters by name to make your reports more reader friendly, but this does not seem to work very well, though it did tag me once. Also on the home page is an indication of how long visitors have spent on your site that day, how many visitors there have been, how much of that is referral traffic and what the bounce rate is.

What’s On The Tabs

A number of other options appear next to the summary tab, but these are setup options (name tags, snoop, tracking code and preferences). If you want more stats, move to the top row of tabs and click on one of the options, each of which has further sub-tabs:

• Traffic (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, referred, visit length, bounce rate, entry pages, page summary)
• Visitor Detail (browsers, platforms, screen, regions, languages, time zones)
• Session (visitors, activity, detailed activity, active pages, heat map)
• Search and Referrer (referrers, referred visitors, referred searches, top referrers, keywords)

In-Depth Analysis

Click on any option or sub-option and you get a couple of graphs and a table for varying periods. You can change these via a drop down menu. Most of tabs give the information you expect, so I won’t outline those in detail, but here are the functions I thought were pretty cool:

• the pie chart showing top pages on your site
• the heat map showing the areas of a page or post that attracted most attention from visitors
• the detailed activity listing showing you how long a particular visitor spent on a certain page
• the table showing when your top referrers last sent you traffic
• the map showing which time zones your visitors are in (trust me, this is cooler than it sounds!)

A Promising Start

My first impressions of Reinvigorate are that it’s promising, offering some of the same real time functionality as programs like Clicky and Woopra. However, there are still a few things to be improved, such as the ability to exclude your own visits to your site. Its visitor figures also differ from those recorded in Clicky (so one of them has to be wrong). I’ll look forward to seeing what else Reinvigorate has to offer.

It has been almost 5 months since blogger released the Template Design Tool. Blogger is working on adding more and more features to this innovative Design Tool. The design Tool allows you to change the Blog Background in a few Clicks.Blogger has got a huge collection of images from iStockPhotos which you can use on your blog. Blogger has now gone a step further by allowing users to Upload their on photos and use it as the Blog Background. This feature is not available on your Regular Dashboard..

How to use your Photo for the Blog Background?

Requirement

1. You should be using a Template Designed using the Blogger Template Designer

The Background may not look good on all of the Templates in the Template Designer

Steps
 
1.Login to your Blogger in Draft Dashboard at http://draft.blogger .com
2. Go to the Design Link  and Click on the Template Designer



3. Click on Background Image under the Background Tab


3. In the Overlay Window you can upload your own Image


4. Once the upload completes, click on the uploaded image and you will be able to see a live preview


 5. Click Done and Apply these Changes to the blog.