WordPress | Blog Design Studio

11 ultimate resources to help you become WordPress champ!

19 Feb, 2010 | mayank

One of the core reason for the popularity of WordPress is the community around it. There are thousands of fans and supporters who have created free wordpress themes, free wordpress plugins and most importantly thousands of tutorials, documentations to make it simpler for you to understand and use WordPress! A simple search will ensure that you’d get answer to most of you problems, so we though of listing the best resources about WordPress for you – don’t forget to subscribe them in your feed reader!

Official Channel for news & updates about WordPress

1. WordPress Development blog – Official blog about the latest development happening around WordPress open-source application.
2. Latest news about WordPress.com – Official blog about the latest happenings around WordPress.com (i.e. the hosted service).
3. Planet WordPress – An aggregator of some of the handpicked blogs by the Automattic team. It aggregates posts from various blogs owned by Automattic, core WordPress developers and some community blogs.

Blogs from WordPress community

1. Weblog Tools Collection

A multi-author blog that has been delivering high quality content from long time now. The focus of the blog is to talk about tools that help bloggers in running their blogs. It mostly covers plugins, themes and tools related to WordPress since WordPress has become the synonym for “best blogging software”.

2. Pro Blog Design

Another multi-author blog that has been getting extremely popular and has a thriving community around itself. This blog publishes lots of WordPress related articles. Although, its just not about WordPress. This blog also tells you that how you can design a better blog yourself. There are various resourceful posts that ensure that you will always pointed to the best of the best stuff!

3. Cats Who Code

A blog by Jean-Baptiste Jung that features super quality posts every now and then. Blog’s primary focus is web development, however it features posts on WordPress more than often. The blog is so good that it is part of Smashing Network and I’m sure a quick look by you at the content quality will convince you to include it in your feed reader. You may also want to follow WP Recipes, a WordPress focused blog by the same person.

4. WPHacks

Unfortunately, this blog hasn’t been updated since December 2010. However, it has got some of the best WordPress hacks that you’d ever come across. We even designed and customized this WordPress based blog with Kyle Eslick, owner of WPHacks. In simple words, WPHacks’ archive is a true gold mine when it comes to WordPress.

5. WPscoop & WPVote.

WPscoop & WPVote are digg like services for WordPress related stuff. If you have a blog that is about WordPress or if you have written a tutorial, hack or a post related to WordPress then feel free to submit the links to these niche bookmarking services. This will not only help generate traffic for your blog but they also act as a great resource to find out what all you can achieve with WordPress.

6. WP Beginner.

WP Beginner is one of my favorite blogs when it comes to WordPress. Its constantly updated and has been truly focused on making WordPress easy for the beginners to adopt. The guides in the blog are very simple to understand and have been written to ensure that even the new users won’t find it difficult to follow the instructions.

7. WP Tavern.

We’ve already featured a great interview by Jeff Chandler, WordPress Guru behind WPTavern. Even though, we’ve listed this as 7th blog in this list, I’m sure if you’d ask from any WordPress lover – they’d easily place this blog as number one resource at the moment. Jeff ensures that you get all the scoop and information around WordPress on this blog and thats why it becomes one of our favorite destination as well.

8. WP Engineer.

WPEngineer is yet another blog that rocks. It features pretty neat articles on how to customize WordPress according to the way you want. This blog will definitely be liked by budding developers as the posts are focused towards editing themes. So if you have a brave heart and love to play around with tech stuff, then you’d surely fall in love with this blog.

If by any chance you think we’ve missed a worthy blog on the topic of WordPress – please let us know about it and we’d happy to include it in this list. If you liked this post, then don’t forget to share it with others!

23 Comments / Add yours

7 Tools from Google that save life of business owners!

13 Feb, 2010 | mayank

Topics: web design

[image credit : LTSeo]

For hundreds and thousands of businesses, the term “Google is God” is true. It helps business owners to generate their living-hood and the best part is that they ensure that it can help in every possible way and that too with ease! Google provides various tools that help webmasters in ranking your website well in Google’s search engine index. Here are some of them -

Google Adwords

To start with a commercial product, Google Adwords is the program that helps you in generating targeted traffic for your website. It lets you target the visitors from every possible manner. You can target visitors specific from a city, state, country and who are searching for specific terms. This is now considered to be de-facto of getting the most targeted traffic!

Google Adsense

If Google Adwords is for business owners to get targeted visitors, Google Adsense is the program that helps business owners in making money from the visitors they get on their website. I’m sure that there would be no one on the internet who wouldn’t have seen those ads. Well, there are business who’ve made millions out of it!

Google Analytics

How many people are visiting my website? Where are they coming from? Whey are they going to? Well, there are whole lot of questions like these that get answered by Google Analytics, one of the most powerful tool given for free by Google! It integrates with Google Adwords & Google Adsense to give us the overall picture of the traffic of the website!

Google Webmaster Tools

GWT is one tool that tells you if there are any broken links on your website. If Google is able to crawl your website to include in the index or not. It gives the ability to control the speed of Google Bot’s visit, finds out if your website is infected from malware. It also tell you that if your website is loading slow for users. Isn’t that a must have a tool?

Google Keyword Tool

Google keyword tool is a true gem! As a business owner, you can find out that what exactly visitors are searching for. With the correct strategy, a business owner can easily get their website ranked for the right keywords and thus can reap the benefits easily!

Google Ad Planner

This tool from Google can help you in digging out some very useful information about the competing websites. Not only that, it can certainly help in finding out that what all keywords one should target. After all, choosing the right keywords means eliminating maximum competition!

Google Traffic Estimator

This little nifty tool will help you find out that how much traffic will you get for the keywords that you are eying on. Of course, this is integrated with Google Adwords and thats why you see Google Adwords Logo on top of it. But does that matter when they aren’t charging a single buck from you?

There are other fantastic tools that will surely help you in one way or the other. I’m sure that you’d find them equally useful – Google Zeitgeist, Google Trends, Google website optimizer and Google Insights for search. If you know any other tool, please share it with us and I’ll include it over here.

3 Comments / Add yours

Use beautiful fonts for typography on your blog!

9 Feb, 2010 | mayank

Topics: web design

Typography definitely plays an important role in enhancing or diminishing the overall look of any web design. And all the web designers/developers were stuck with certain font families, even if they wanted to use the font of their choice, they couldn’t do it freely without compromising on various aspects. Of course, there were other ways too and I would love to include all those methods along with their pros & cons.

siFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement)

Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) is an open source JavaScript and Adobe Flash dynamic web fonts implementation, enabling the replacement of text elements on HTML web pages with Flash equivalents. sIFR embeds a font in a Flash element that displays the text, preempting the need for a font to have been manually pre-installed on a user’s system. [via : wikipedia]

In even simpler words, instead of showing the normal text – it is replaced by Adobe Flash’s text and the font embedded in that flash file is used to display the text. You can add shadow, effects to the text and the best part is that its cross-browser compatible and thats why its loved. However, siFR is often criticized for making the pages load slower and is not supported by iPhone.

Cufon

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to siFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use [This is not the case, if you are using WordPress]. Some of the benefits of Cufon over siFR are that it loads faster, no plugins are required. [Via - Github]

Of course, nothing comes with cons. Cufon comes with the inability to highlight and copy/paste, not all fonts are supported. However, still its one of the preferred methods of using other fonts. We are using Cufon on this blog, so it can be a good example for you to look at.

There are other ways as well like Typeface.js, FLIR (Face Lift Image Replacement), however as browsers are getting better in supporting CSS3 – the better its becoming to improve the typography of the webpages. Although, with this method, copyright issues often come into play. In order to avoid these issues, few web services have come up with a model where by paying some fee, web designers will be able to choose various fonts (without worrying about licenses) for their website and the fonts will be served from their servers. Here are these services -

Typekit

Typekit is one such service that has partnered with type foundries and have taken care of the legal issues. They let you choose the fonts using their web based editor. They have a plugin for WordPress, that lets you integrate this service with ease. There is an option of free plan and if you have one blog, you should definitely try this service.

FontMeUp

FontMeUp is another service that allows you to use any font on your website. They have a similar concept and have hundreds of fonts to choose from. They also have a free plan and a WordPress plugin.

So after, looking at the benefits of these services, I’m tempted to use these service for this blog. I’ll notify as soon as this will be applied and will try to post the results as well. Personally, I see no reason for not trying these services and why any one else shouldn’t. Will you be using these to improve the typography on your blog or will you be going via existing ways?

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Use Content Delivery Network to load blog faster!

5 Feb, 2010 | mayank

Topics: Wordpress Customization

In last post, I told you about Content Delivery Networks and how to use them along with WordPress. Although, now I can suggest that one should certainly use Content Delivery Network as I’ve experienced the change in speed myself! Yesterday, I implemented CDN on this blog and the notice is considerable. The pages that used to take around 9 seconds to load are now loading in about 5 seconds. That’s a decent amount of difference! Now, I would tell you some of the questions that I had in my mind and I’m sure that you will be having them too -

Is it a costly affair?

Content delivery networks are considered to be costly, however surprisingly they are not. Most of the CDN providers run on Pay as you go pricing model and that lets you take control of things. In order to run the test, I signed up with MaxCDN, they have a fantastic offer – they are giving away 1 TB for $ 10. Of course, this is a trial run and a customer will be charged near about $100 for the next 1 Tb. Anyway, I’m not trying to promote any CDN provider, I went for MaxCDN for couple of reasons -

1. It was cheaper than other CDN providers.
2. It has been referred by Mashable, Joost de Valk, W3 Total Cache and I think that was more than enough for me.
3. 1 TB will run for months, there is no monthly payment, so I don’t have anything to lose.

Is it really hard to setup the CDN?

I wasn’t sure about this answer because there wasn’t anyone to tell me that how should I go about it. However, while playing with it – I realized that it is way to simple to setup the CDN. Of course, it would have been a nightmare without the W3 Total Cache. I just don’t have enough words for the praise of this plugin, still I would try to sum up in 2 words – Simply Marvelous!

So what’s the procedure?

I did the setup on MaxCDN and therefore, I would mention the steps for MaxCDN and W3 Total Cache settings only. If you plan to use any other CDN then you may have to refer to their support. I’m assuming that most of the CDN providers will have similar options only. Anyway, here’s how I completed the task -

1. Create a Pull Zone on CDN provider. In this (screenshot) most of the settings are generic, the only place where I got confused was Origin Server URL section. Anyway, I used the following settings and created the pull zone.

2. Asked WPWebhost to change the CName record as asked by MaxCDN. In many cases, Cname can be changed by you only, however WPWebhost doesn’t give the direct option to its users. However, support team was pretty quick in making the change. After the change, I waited for about 10-12 hrs for propagation. I tried to check http://cdn.blogdesignstudio.com and once I saw the whole website load without issues, I thought that it must be the right time to make changes in W3 Total Cache settings.

3. In the General Tab of W3 Total Cache, make sure that CDN should be enabled and the type should be selected as Origin Pull (mirror) [as shown in the screenshot]

4. In the CDN Settings tab of W3 Total Cache, you can configure various options related to what you want to use through CDN and what exactly you want to serve using your own web host. What I changed was just one value; ensure that you need to just put the value of Custom CDN Domain (of the first screenshot) in “Replace Default Hostname With”. Here’s the screenshot of what I have -

That’s it! I just saved the settings and everything was working neatly for me. If you get decent traffic and want to ensure that your blog loads faster than others, then you should surely use a CDN. In the end, I can say that I’m happy with what I’ve achieved – I’ll be posting more optimization techniques to ensure that we also contribute in making the web faster!

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What is Content Delivery Network & how to use it with WordPress?

1 Feb, 2010 | mayank

Topics: Wordpress Customization

What is Content Delivery Network?

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as to maximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server, so as to avoid bottleneck near that server. Content types include web objects, downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications, real time media streams, and other components of internet delivery (DNS, routes, and database queries). [via Wikipedia]

Well, I’m sure it sounds alien to some of you. However, I can try and simplify this for you. Let’s take an example – You upload a 2 Mb file on a server that is located in United States, one of your visitor comes to the website from UK and at the same time another from US only. Who’ll get the faster download speed of that file? Of course, it’ll be the US guy. That is how a normal scenario runs. In CDN, a normal file is replicated on multiple servers (shown as middle servers in the image below) placed across the world. So, if a UK guy will be trying to access the same MP3 file, then he’ll get it delivery through UK server only and that will considerably reduce the page load speed.

[Image credit - netdna]

Should we use CDN for a blog?

As we found out that CDN helps in reducing the speed. However, the question is that is the speed difference considerable enough? There have been many bloggers who have done their tests and found huge difference in the speed. Joost de Valk found out that his blog pages started loading in 2 sec. as compared to 7 seconds prior CDN’s application.

Well, that certainly sounds effective! Other than that, Dave Ward gives us a tip where we should use Google’s CDN based hosted javascript libraries to improve the blog page load speed. Other than that, Yahoo also suggests website owners to use CDN to improve the page load speed. Well, this only means that it makes sense to use CDN. Now, the big question arises -

How to use CDN with WordPress?

Of course, if you just want use the Google’s CDN based Javascript library then Dave Ward’s link will be more than enough for your help. However, if you want to make proper use of CDN, you’ll have to shell out some money from your pocket. Thankfully established companies like Amazon, MaxCDN, RackSpace and various others offer CDN services, you can always choose the one that suits your pocket.

Once you’ve decided the CDN provider, then you can use its power with the help of W3 Total Cache -

W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

[Click the image for bigger version]

So, as you can see with the help of W3 Total Cache you can easily make use of power of CDN’s and it should certainly help in improving the page load speed. Are you going to apply CDN on your WordPress blog?

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Best plugins to fight comment spam for WordPress!

25 Jan, 2010 | mayank

Topics: Wordpress Plugins

Spam In Blogs

I am sure, I don’t need to explain anything about Spam over here. Blog spam is nothing new and there have been already many articles written about it. However, I still get questions like “What is the best strategy to avoid spam comments?” Just to kick start things, I would like to mention the definition that has been given in everybody’s favorite website i.e. WikiPedia -

Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.

How to fight comment spam

There are various plugins although in my four years of experience as professional blogger, I’ve come across only handful of plugins that have done wonderful job for me. They have been shared by lots of experienced bloggers over and over again and here I am, who would like to share it with you one more time!

1. Akismet – This wonderful service from Automattic has been consistently helping thousands of bloggers in fighting blog spam. Not only it is available for WordPress, it has been extended for various other platforms like Movable Type, Drupal etc. There is no reason, why I would not suggest this plugin to any person who is using WordPress.

2. WP-Spam Free – Scott Allen has rightly described it as an Extremely Powerful Anti-Spam Plugin! Its so powerful that it literally makes your blog secure from all the comment spam. Although, this plugin is infamous for using extra resources from server. If you have a high traffic blog and get lots of spam comments, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t be using this plugin. Personally, its my favorite among all the plugins that I’m listing over here.

3. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam – Another wonderful plugin for fighting spam on blogs. It not only helps to fight blog comment spam. It also can be extended to fight automated registrations and automated contact form submissions. This plugin uses a familiar trick of fighting comment spam i.e. CAPTCHA verification. It has lots of configuration options and if you don’t want to rely on automatic anti-spam plugins like Akismet & WP-Spam Free then this plugin will easily serve the purpose for you. [Plugin Homepage]

[Photo Credit - ScoopDog]
4. Bad Behavior – This wonderful script has been developed to fight against spam bots. It’s not specific to WordPress and is available for other content management systems. Its pretty light on servers and has been made available on plethora of CMSes. It has done a wonderful job in keeping this blog spam free from long time and will continue to do so!

5. reCAPTCHA – reCAPTCHA is a service that is used by thousands of popular websites to fight spam bots. The service can be easily integrated in a WordPress blog with the help of this plugin. I like this service/plugin because it definitely has proven its effectiveness to fight the spam bots and also because it helps in digitizing various books. Here’s what they have to say about digitizing the books part -

While the world is in the process of digitizing books, sometimes certain words cannot be read. reCAPTCHA uses a combination of these words, further distorts them, and then constructs a CAPTCHA image. After a ceratin percentage of users solve the ‘uknown’ word the same way it is assumed that it is the correct spelling of the word. This helps digitize books, giving users a reason to solve reCAPTCHA forms.

I hope that you’ll find these plugins useful enough (just the way I have) to keep you blog spam free!

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bbPress should be a plugin for sure!

22 Jan, 2010 | mayank

Topics: bbPress

Looks like most of the Automattic team is busy playing around with WordPress and of course, thats good for the future of WordPress. However, as WordPress has started to become popular as CMS, its limitations as compared to other enterprise level CMSes are coming up. Although, most of limitations are easily countered with the huge list of Plugins it has!

Forums are important part of any website and bbPress fills the gap that has been left in WordPress CMS. bbPress is one of the decent projects from Automattic team, however its future looked pretty gloomy as there was hardly any development on it. Lesser development on bbPress doesn’t make it the favorite choice for all the clients. As a design agency, we prefer to use WordPress and would love to stick to solutions provided by Automattic team. Good news is that from last few months, talks have been going on to ensure that bbPress project lives and that talks have been going on where Matt himself thought of converting it in a Core Plugin.

Reasons for making bbPress as Core Plugin

Why make more plugins for bbPress – Making bbPress as a plugin for WordPress will ensure that in the forums (plugin one), webmasters will be able to make use of the existing plugins of WordPress. For e.g. if I want to show blog’s popular posts in the forums, then I won’t have to worry as there are plugins that show popular posts on WordPress and they can be easily used in the forum too. However, it’ll be a pain to achieve the same result when it will be stand-alone bbPress.
Easier Theme interoperability – Of course, when we’ll have one theme developed for WordPress, it’ll work with bbPress (plugin one) too. In short, this all will result in lesser development time.
Use of powerful features of WordPress – There are many features of WordPress that are not part of bbPress and all of that will become simpler if bbPress can be converted as plugin. It’ll be easier to upgrade bbPress with WordPress automatic plugin upgrade feature. Media library is also a powerful feature of WordPress, that can be utilized in bbPress (plugin one).
Integration will be easier – bbPress as plugin will integrate pretty easily with WordPress and there will be no extra configurations required. Same users will be able to post in the forums and will be able to post on blog as well. This will surely help in creating better communities.
Better role management – Role management system will also improve tremendously. All the user management features required for the plugin will eventually make WordPress more powerful as CMS too. This will certainly help in establishing WordPress as the top choice for small to medium businesses.
Solid foundation for TalkPress – TalkPress, a hosted service for online forums (powered by bbPress). If bbPress as core plugin becomes success then embracing TalkPress for the world will be far more easier. It surely will act as stepping stone for TalkPress’ success.

What are you thoughts about bbPress and what it should really come out as. Will you like to see bbPress as stand-alone software or would you like to see it as a core-plugin for WordPress? Please share your views with us.

3 Comments / Add yours

Official Channel for news & updates about WordPress

Blogs from WordPress community

1. Weblog Tools Collection

2. Pro Blog Design

3. Cats Who Code

4. WPHacks

5. WPscoop & WPVote.

6. WP Beginner.

7. WP Tavern.

8. WP Engineer.

siFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement)

Cufon

Is it a costly affair?

Is it really hard to setup the CDN?

So what’s the procedure?

What is Content Delivery Network?

Should we use CDN for a blog?

How to use CDN with WordPress?

Spam In Blogs

How to fight comment spam

Reasons for making bbPress as Core Plugin

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