Chris K Designs

In the age of Professional Blogging, there are many ways to make money with your words. The most common is through advertisements. Some of the easiest way to make money are through targeted ad networks such as Google’s AdSense and Adbrite. You can guess, with the advent of advertising, came WordPress advertising plugins. I’ve got a winning combination of plugins and networks that you can use to help fund your blogging habits.
Continue reading “Pro Blogging Tip: Advertising with WordPress” »

As I have mentioned before, one of my favorite plugins for a WordPress site is W3 Total Cache. This plugin offers you the ability to user a myriad of caching options to best suit your needs. Well with WordPress 3.1, the Admin Bar was introduced where logged in users (administrators) get a gray bar with options to manage commonly used areas of the WP-Admin interface. Well, W3 Total Cache updated to use this menu for clearing your cache at any time.

W3 Total Cache adding options to the Admin Bar, brilliant!

I love this idea and I’m going to explore using this menu as a quick admin bar so I never need to visit the wp-admin dashboard if I so desire. I’m going to write up a ‘hack’ or possibly a quick plugin that will let us use this menu for making our administrative life easier as an admin.

Cheers!

One of the least commonly used features of WordPress that I didn’t start using until way too late in the game is the ability to schedule posts. That’s right, you don’t have to publish immediately or leave a post as a draft. You can specify the exact date and time a post will go live. Why would you want to do this? I’m glad you asked.

Free your mind…
It’s no secret that one of the hardest parts of blogging is typically coming up with content. Some days it flows out of you like, well, you get the idea. Other days you sit there with a blank compose screen just waiting for the words to come to you. When you are having a day like the former, write up as many posts as you can, and schedule them to come out later. This way you aren’t blasting a ton of content at once, and you know you will have content coming to your visitors later. It really takes the load off when you get another chance to sit down and write.

Consistency is key
Once you have built up a few posts ahead of yourself, you now have a consistent stream of content coming to your users. The more often you post, the more viewers will come back to read your content as you are now a reliable source. What would have been a struggle to write, edit, and post all at once, is now a continuous set of posts coming out a day or two after you have written them, without you having to remember to publish them. There is something satisfying about hitting that ‘Schedule’ button on the post and knowing that you will have a post go live while on your drive to work, or while you are still sleeping even.

Continue reading “3 Reasons to Schedule Blog Posts” »

The battle at hand (plugins versus performance) doesn’t usually become a concern until it’s too late. However, with a little preparation, research, and knowledge you can have the functionality you want out of your WordPress site, with as little impact to performance as possible. With the ability to extend the functionality of your WordPress site at a moment’s notice using plugins, it’s no mystery why WordPress and it’s plugins have become so popular. From the perspective of a publisher, using the platform is a dream come true. Unfortunately, as with all things, the more complexity you put into the mix, the greater possibility of complications.

How Does a WordPress Plugin Work?
You may have quite a few plugins already installed on your current WordPress site. But, do you know what exactly is happening for those plugins to work? Breaking it down into the simplest form, a plugin for WordPress works by taking advantage of what are called “Hooks.” A Hook is a predetermined point in the WordPress framework at which a plugin developer can add new functionality or modify and remove current WordPress functionality. Some WordPress plugins use settings to determine the output it creates. These settings are stored in the database table, containing all of the settings for WordPress, called wp_options (or in a multisite environment wp_sitenumber_options). As WordPress goes through it’s standard process to deliver content, it stops at each one of these Hooks and checks to see if a function has been associated with it, and if so, runs the function.
Continue reading “Plugins vs. Performance: Fight!” »

If you have been using WordPress for quite some time, no doubt that you have built up quite a collection of tags and categories. If you’ve ever wanted to clean a little house with your tags, you can do it quick and easy if given access to your MySQL command line interface. The following command will remove all tags that have a post count of “0″ (meaning no posts are using these tags).

DELETE t.*, tx.*
FROM wp_terms t, wp_term_taxonomy tx
WHERE t.term_id = tx.term_id
AND tx.taxonomy = "post_tag"
AND tx.count = "0";

Want to remove any tags that are only being used in 1 post or less? Simple, use the following:

DELETE t.*, tx.*
FROM wp_terms t, wp_term_taxonomy tx
WHERE t.term_id = tx.term_id
AND tx.taxonomy = "post_tag"
AND tx.count < "2";

Now go to your Post Tags management screen and look on in amazement as you now have a manageable number of tags. Keep in mind that this is irreversible, once you run this query...those tags are long gone and will have to be recreated.