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6 Ways to Optimize Your WordPress Blog

Posted December 12, 2011 By Ganesh Babu
Twitt

WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms in the world. You can customize WordPress to a great extent. But you should be very careful while customizing, because you may end up increasing the page load time of your blog by customizing it too much. People hate slow loading sites.

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So, we’ll see a few ways using which you can optimize your WordPress blog to increase its efficiency.

#1 Upgrade Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. Latest versions have optimized code and would reduce the load on your CPU.

#2 Caching Plugin Use a Caching plugin for your blog. Install any Caching plugin. I recommend using the W3 Total Cache. It will reduce the load on the server and increase the page load speed.

#3 Permalink Structure Change your permalink structure to something less complicate. Do not start with the category, tag or authorfields. Instead try /%year%/%postname%/ or /%post_id%/%postname%/. Also don’t worry about 301 redirects as wordpress will automatically handle that after the permalink change.

#4 Themes There are many themes which are CPU intensive. If your theme has dynamic image resizing than it’ll increase the load on the server. If possible disable it. Make sure that your theme is not generating any page load errors.

#5 Plugins If you are using CPU intensive plugins like WordPress Related Posts, YARPP, StatPress and other wordpress statistics software may increase the load on the server tremendously if your site is big. Instead use Google Analytics for statistics.

#6 Spam Bots Managing Spam Bots is very important. Otherwise Spam Bots would increase the load on your site. Use a captcha plugin like SI Captcha.

Hope that these tips helped you to optimize your WordPress blog. If you have any troubles, feel free to share with us through the comments.

Happy Blogging.

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Top 5 Useful Video Plugins for WordPress

Posted December 3, 2011 By Arun Sathiya
Twitt

WordPress, one the world’s best open source blogging platforms, has a huge collection of plugins to enhance the blog’s functionality and looks. If you are a WordPress lover or WordPress user, you would probably know what a plugin is.

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Now, as you read in the title, here we bring 5 useful plugins that will help you to embed videos in your WordPress, with ease. You no longer need to embed the video code that YouTube or any other video service gives you. Just by entering the URL of the video, the video will get itself embedded in your blog.

Well, it’s not only YouTube. These below mentioned video plugins have the capability to embed videos from other video services like Metacafe, Google Video and more.

[stextbox id="info"]#1 Smart YouTube – 1M+ users[/stextbox]

As the name denotes, with this plugin you will have the capability to embed only YouTube videos. With over 1 million WordPress users using this plugin, Smart YouTube is one of those best plugins available out there for video embedding purposes. Smart YouTube’s mail functionality is to make users add videos to their posts, comments and RSS feeds with ease. The customizing section is in your hands. You will have the option to give looks to your embedded videos. By just pasting the URL of the video in this format, “httpv://…”, the video will pop in your post.

Download : Smart YouTube

[stextbox id="info"]#2 Viper’s Video Quicktags – 784K+ users[/stextbox]

In our list of top 5 useful video plugins, we could not decline giving this one the second place. Viper’s Video Quicktags works similar to Smart YouTube. When installed, you can find a new button in your post editor page. On clicking it, a pop up box opens up where you can paste the URL of the video and voila. The video will get embedded in your post.

Like Smart YouTube, Viper’s Video Quicktags allows you to fully customize your video settings. Want to increase the width and reduce the height? Want to change the border colors? Everything is in your hands.

Supports YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Metacafe and a lot more!

Download : Viper’s Video Quicktags

[stextbox id="info"]#3 Embedded Video – 169K+ users[/stextbox]

This plugin makes it easy for users to integrate  videos from external sources like YouTube, Google Videos and a lot more. Or users can upload the video to a remote server or web server and then integrate it. Also, a corresponding link to the video portal page can be generated automatically, if demanded.

Works well with YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe and a lot more. Supports flv, swf, mov, qt, wmv, mpg, mpeg, mpe, asf, asx, wax, wmv, wmx and avi. For all these formats to work, Embedded Video demands a corresponding media supporting plugin on the client browser.

Download : Embedded Video

[stextbox id="info"]#4 Video Widget – 66K+ users[/stextbox]

To embed videos using this plugin, the parameters required include only the video id. No other things are required. This plugin supports 25+ types of videos. Can embed videos in the sidebar too.

Download : Video Widget

[stextbox id="info"]#5 Interactive Video Plugin – 47K+ users[/stextbox]

Well, this plugin does a better job than the above four. It does the job of not only embedding videos, but also you can export, record and import videos. With this plugin in your hands, you can now track the video content and also remix content with an online video editor.

Download : Interactive Video Plugin

Hope you liked all the above mentioned plugins. Make sure to share these with your WordPress buddies. And also don’t forget to drop in comments below.

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WordPress Facts and Figures [Infographic]

Posted October 1, 2011 By Arun Sathiya
Twitt

WordPress is by far the best blogging platform I have known. WordPress is used by over 130K+ biggest blogs in the blogosphere. Though Google’s Blogger is one of the best blogging platforms for beginners, WordPress ranks first. The reason is that WordPress has got a lot of plugins, a large number of themes to choose from, best commenting system and much more. All these reasons put together, get WordPress the title “The best blogging platform”.

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Yesterday, we saw the iPhone facts and figures infographic and now here we bring another awesome infographic – WordPress facts and figures – by Website Monitoring.

As we can see below, WordPress has got over 14K plugins which have been downloaded over 177M times. Among all the coolest plugins available for WordPress, the plugin named “Contact Form 7″ is downloaded 3.8M+ times. All the versions of WordPress.org is included in this this infographic along with their release date and updates.

Also to check : Which Blogging platform to use?

As much as 20M websites are powered by the free and popular WordPress.com platform. Started in November 21,2005 , WordPress has gained a huge popularity among the blogging community in a very short period of time. A lot other WordPress facts and bundled up inside. Have a look at it and enjoy.

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Which Blogging Platform To Choose? [With an Infographic]

Posted October 1, 2011 By Arun Sathiya
Twitt

When it comes to blogging, most of the beginners are generally confused with things like where to start one, how to start one. A few advanced bloggers suggest the beginners to go for Google’s Blogger and a few others suggest to use WordPress. WordPress, in my view, is by far the best platform I have ever known.

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WordPress and Blogger, both are free blogging platforms that can be used by anyone. But the thing that makes WordPress the best is that, it has got a lot of features and plugins for the blogger’s use. A lot of professional bloggers and top tech companies use WordPress as their blogging platform. A few tech sites like TechCrunch, ProBlogger use WordPress to blog. Let’s dig in better to know more about these two blogging platform giants.

[stextbox id="info"]Blogger A.K.A Blogspot[/stextbox]

This was the first blogging platform ever on the internet. It was first created by Pyra Labs and then it was acquired by Google in the year 2003. The new ones to blogging can first go with this and then move on to other platforms. This is the easiest one to create a blog. With a few clicks, you can end up with a clean and neat looking blog. It offers you templates that can be used by you to give an attractive look to your new blog. When it comes to the domain part, you can select one with the extension “.blogspot.com”. This is one of the main reasons to choose Blogger as the blogging platform. This one doesn’t have plugins that can be installed within clicks. Rather, you have to add codes to your template to design it.

And when it comes to money making, Blogger is certainly not the best option. Most of the bloggers go with this just for pure fun and for creating personal blogs.

[stextbox id="info"]WordPress[/stextbox]

WordPress, as I told earlier, is the best blogging platform available right now. Lots of business companies use this to host their sites. This one is mainly chosen for money making and for profession. WordPress has got two versions. One is WordPress.com and the other one is WordPress.org. WordPress .com is a free blogging platform like Google’s Blogger. But among those two versions, WordPress.org, the open source blogging software, is the better one out there. Creating a blog ain’t free in WordPress.org. You will have to spend a few bucks to host your site and to buy a domain.

Starting with WordPress can be a little difficult. The usage of plugins is entirely an alien concept if you have tried Google’s Blogger earlier. But the thing is that WordPress has got a lot of themes and plugins that you can choose from. This makes WordPress the best one to choose.

[stextbox id="info"]A study showing which blogging platform to choose[/stextbox]

Also, there are many other platforms like Drupal, Joomla, TypePad, MovableType, Tumblr and much more, as you have seen above. You can give them a go too. So, are you new to blogging? Going to start one now? Which one have you chosen? Share all your views with us. And by the way, we here at Axleration use WordPress to blog.

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How To: Create a WordPress Theme

Posted August 2, 2011 By Ganesh Babu
Twitt

Most of us use WordPress as your blogging platform, if you are going to self host your blog. WordPress is the most used independently hosted, blogging platform in the world. The abilities of WordPress are countless. It excels in various ways to call it the perfect script.

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Themes are used in WordPress, which decides how your blog looks to your user, you might have searched for free downloads of WordPress themes a hundred times, but most of the good looking ones are premium. If you can’t afford much for a theme, then it is better to create one for yourself.

When you create a theme for yourself, you can get the look and feel that you are expecting, also you will be learning a lot about the structure of WordPress, which will be lot useful for you to turn WP to match your needs.

Displayed below is an infographic, that showcases the important terms and terminologies that you must know before getting into creating a WordPress theme. The infographic titles Anatomy of a WordPress theme, will walk you through the structure of an WordPress theme.

After you get an idea about how a WP theme look like, you can set out to create your own theme. First you need a framework for this purpose. Go to this page to see the list of theme frameworks available.

Theme Frameworks are basic themes on which you can build your own one. Choose the one that suits you and start creating your own theme.

This guide is only for expert users, since not much detailed tutorial was given on creating a theme. If you are a novice user and want to create your own WP theme, then stay tuned, A step by step Tutorial to create an WP theme is coming soon.

Till then, Just play with your Theme Framework. Hope this guide would have helped a few.

If you have any doubts, drop a comment below, I’ll be glad to help you out ! :D

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How To: Add Facebook Like Button To Your Blog

Posted May 20, 2010 By Ganesh Babu
Twitt

Facebook launched it’s like feature a few months back, as a part of making facebook more interactive from around the web. Shortly, you should have seen like buttons popping in many websites asking their users to like the article and spread them. The Like button from facebook allows you to like a web page which will be posted to your profile, so others too can read it.

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Now to the point, how do you add this Like button to your WordPress powered blog ?

when you search for a Facebook Like plugin for your WordPress blog, you will find lots of plugins to do the job.
the best among those is the WP Facebook Like . This plugin really works out of the box and provides you with many options and features. This plugin is highly customizable and easy to use.

This plugin is created by Johnny Chadda, This plugin is the highly customizable among those available.

How to Install

1. Go to your Admin panel.

2. Go to Plugins  -> Add New.

3. Search for “wp facebook like” .

4. Click  the install button and then activate the plugin.

5. Go to Settings -> WP Facebook Like to change your settings

Features

1. Can change the layout, language, color scheme, button text, width and height

2. Select the position of the button (either before or after posts)

3. Can choose between iframe or xfbml embedding methods

4. Can link with you Facebook app

5. Enable or Disable facebook SDK and open graph

6. Use our custom css style.

7. Custom settings available, including a shortcode and template tag

and many more…

Johnny Chadda is really a friendly guy and helped me a lot when i had troubles with facebook like, if you have doubts in implementing this plugin notify Johnny Chadda at his website.

Update: There are numerous plugins that does this task as of now. Even Facebook has it’s own plugin for WordPress. We recommend you to use it. You can download the official Facebook plugin from the WordPress Plugins repository

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