Archive for 'May, 2008'

My list of 20 things WordPress doesn’t do by default is a great checklist of items you should consider adding to your blog or WordPress site to make it more effective and easier to use!

I write so many different articles, posts, and series that I often forget when and how I might have written a particular tip. If I’m the author and I forget, I believe that you – the readers, don’t always get to read every single article I write – or even get the point the first time around. I’ve heard many times that you have to read or see something 2-3 times before you can recognize and act on it, so I make no apologies for being a little bit redundant in this post – because I’m teaching you how to make the most of your WordPress powered site. Even if you’ve read all my WordPress articles to date I suggest that you read this post in it’s entirety if you own a WordPress blog or web site.

Let me start out by saying that “I Love WordPress”. I’ve tried all kinds of other blogging platforms and Content Management Systems (CMS), from Mambo, to Drupal, Xoops, Geeklog, PostNuke, and back. By far WordPress is the easiest I’ve seen to install and setup, and the core features out of the box are (in my opinion) outstanding. Even so – WordPress can’t be everything to everyone. WordPress can’t anticipate every need of every user and then pack all those features in the default install assuming everyone will need to use them all the time. Instead it provides basic core features they believe everyone WILL use.

For new WordPress users and newbie bloggers – this kind of leaves you to find out on your own not only what kinds of things are available as plugins and hacks, but also what benefit you will get from them and which ones to consider first.

WordPress has no Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are navigation pointers that tell you users where they came from and how to get back. They’ve been around since the first days of the web, and most users expect to see some kind of navigation at the top or bottom (or both) of every page. If I click on a post on your homepage, a link back to “home” would be helpful. Also think about the fact that your users can visit your blog starting on ANY page or post, because they can come in from a page found in search, or a bookmark, or email from a friend, and much like a freeway – there are “entrances” all over the place. Make sure visitors have many, many differrent ways to find their way aroundyour blog and they will stay longer, read more, and come back more often. I recommend that you read my WordPress Hack #5: 10 Ways to Improve Navigation, specifically page 2: Adding Breadcrumbs. The page for the Breadcrumb NavXT WordPress Plugin is working fine now.

To have a unique WordPress blog home page you don’t have to create your own theme. I’ll show you 12 ways to hack your homepage without getting a new theme that will make your blog stand out from the pack!

This is installment #14 of 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days, be sure to sign up to our RSS feed or email updates at top right of this page!W

Everyone wants their blog to be different. You want it to be unique, to stand out, while remain easy to present what it is your blog is about. The same old “rolling list of posts” and obigatory sidebar can get (real) old after awhile. Out of the box, everybody’s WordPress blog looks the same, and getting a custom theme is the first stab at breaking out of that box. The next step (before creating your own theme from scratch) is hacking that theme up a bit to get more of what you want out of it. While some of the techniques I’m about to show you can be used on nearly any page in your WordPress blog, the focus of this article is “ways you can hack your WordPress home page!“

*All the plugins mentioned on this page are listed on the WordPress 2.5 Compatibility list*

1. Organize posts in 2 Side by Side Columns: Maybe you are tired of that one-column of content on your homepage, and you want more of a magazine or newspaper layout approach. If so, breaking up your posts into 2 side by side columns of content could be good for you. I can’t take credit for this hack, it’s well explained, including where to put the code and which files to edit – over on the Crea8 Design Blog: Side by Side WordPress Columns.

2. Create Custom Comment Counts: Here’s a hack that I desperately tried to figure out for months and months, and never really found the answer to all in one place. I ended up finding the answer not in a blog post, but in theme code instead. Some of the best bloggers sites that I read have some post meta-information in the title header, including a comment count. Usually it’s also a link, and sometimes it has a cool little comment bubble or a phrase like “What do you have to say?”

Normally to just get a “comment count”, you see code like this in a theme:

<?php comments_popup_link('No Comments', '1 Comment', '% Comments'); ?>

After “comments_popup_link” the text inside the three sets of quotes represents what should be printed out if there are no comments yet, only one comment, or more than one comment. You modify the text to say whatever you want here. You could change ‘No Comments’ to ‘Be the first to comment…’, etc. But, if you’re like me you probably want to spice it up a bit and add a nice little comment icon. If so, use this code:

<?php $comments_img_link= '<img src="/wp-content/themes/mytheme/images/comments-icon.gif"  title="comments" alt="comments" />';
comments_popup_link($comments_img_link .' Comments(0)', $comments_img_link .' Comments(1)', $comments_img_link . '  Comments(%)');?>

In the first line just change the path your theme image directory and copy and past the code wherever you want the comment count and icon to appear for your home page posts.

Unique Ads Between Posts: This technique can be used to place most anything in between the posts in “the loop” on your home page, I used it to display adsense ads after the 2nd and 6th posts (in the loop of 10). It doesn’t have to be an ad – it could be used to show image dividers between each post, random quotes, special links – anything.

First – I’ll show (again) what “the loop” basically looks like:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
<p class="postmetadata"><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit','',' |'); ?>  <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments', '1 Comment', '% Comments'); ?></p>
</div>

<?php endwhile; ?>

“The Loop” in WordPress is a function that retrieves from your database a series of (10) posts. It starts out with the “have_posts” line and ends with the “endwhile” line. It’s called the loop because it does the same thing over and over – one post at a time. That’s why inside “the loop” is the code to print the time, category, comment count, and whatever miscellaneous things are in your themes loop. You loop might be slightly different than my example for just that reason, different details are displayed for posts in different themes. That’s the beauty of being able to “hack wordpress” – you can easily change those details.

What we’re going to do is insert a “counter” in the loop, and then tell it to do something when it reaches certain numbers in the count. Here’s the modified code to do that:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php $count = 1 ?>

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
<p class="postmetadata"><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit','',' |'); ?>  <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments', '1 Comment', '% Comments'); ?></p>
</div>

<?php if ($count==2) { include('advert1.php'); } ?>
<?php if ($count==6) { include('advert2.php'); } ?>
<?php $count = $count + 1; ?>

<?php endwhile; ?>

You’ll notice in this modified example that on the second line we have inserted a counter that starts with “1″ the first time through. The second to the last line (count + 1) ads one number to the counter each time through so it can keep track of which post we’re on. The two lines before that say “if the counter is on #2 or #6 – include this file”. I created 2 files, both advert1.php and advert2.php and placed them in my theme directory. When the counter reaches 2 or 6 it opens those files and prints the contents to the page. For my home page, both those files contain the adsense code to be displayed in those spots. As I said – you could include anything, and you can name those file whatever you want. In addition, you can change, modify, or add lines to the counter for any number 1-10 as well.

3. Dump the Next and Previous: I’ve always hated those “previous posts” link on the bottom of every WordPress homepage. I want my visitor’s (especially the first time ones) to know that I have many pages of content they can peruse, and a numbered list (like navigation at google) tells them just that. They can easily jump back to page 3, or 6, or whatever to view previous posts, and then back again. WordPress’ pagination feature of only one page at a time is terrible at best. The WP Page Numbers WordPress plugin takes care of this seamlessly. *Note, this plugin can also be used all other templated pages where more than one page of posts are retrieved.

4. Homepage Excerpts: If you want to control how many posts on your home page are displayed full and how many to show as excerpts (without mucking in any code at all), Homepage Excerpts is the plugin you need. I use this on most of my WordPress sites, and you basically configure it with 1 click (how many posts to display full).

5. Enable Post Voting: You could enable a voting function by using Vote It Up enabling your WordPress readers to vote for your posts Digg or Reddit style, and then put a list of most popular ones at the top of your homepage like this:

6. Random Featured Post: Use your old posts and give them new life, by creating featuring a random post before your content on your home page using the Random Featured Post WordPress Plugin. You might also try Advanced Random Post.

7. Display an Accouncement: Using the Genki Announcement plugin you can display an announcement before your posts on the homepage. This is great, because you don’t have to hack any code to do this, you can turn the message on or off whenever you want, and you can even restrict it to differerent roles or users if you need to. There’s even a timer feature to turn the announcement on or off. Your message could be holiday related (Merry Christmas!), or a time advertisement (for 48 hour only), a message (to all site admins), or everyone (thanks for visiting my blog!).

8. Make a Post “Sticky”: Instead of an announcement or a random post, maybe what you want to do is make one particular post “sticky” – or have it stay at the top of the homepage (until you change it). Easy enough, Lester Chan’s Creating a Dynamic Sticky“. Basically he figured out how to create “two loops” on the homepage. The first loop gets one post from one category. Basically he created a new category called “frontpage” and assigned all the articles he wanted to “feature” for a time. Then the first loop shows one featured article at a time in a styled div box. Then, immediately following the normal loop gets the 10 latest posts from the database, but it does check to ensure that it doesn’t duplicate the featured post again. Very nice hack!

10. Edit Article Excerpts: WordPress Excerpt Editor is a unique plugin that allows you to add custom excerpts for page (something you can’t do without a plugin). Normally, if you choose to use excerpts – WordPress will take the first so many words of your posts. As far as your homepage is concerned, this doesn’t do much for “original content” or avoiding “duplicate content” at all. This plugin enables you write a custom excerpt for each post or page, as you write it. Then, if you use excerpts on your homepage – the custom excerpt will be dispayed instead of the first “x” words making your home page contain completely unique content. It also allows you to write some different linkbait enticing people to click and view that article. It has options to do the same for both archive and tag pages.

Excerpt Editor also has some advanced options for showing excerpts of “x” recent posts under each Post/Page and it can even show excerpts from “x sub pages” on each page. With all these options, it can do many things beyond custom excerpts on your home page.

11. Add Thumbnails to Your Posts Using Custom Fields: There are many, many ways to add images to posts either manually or with a plugin. Once of the most overlooked features of WordPress is the “custom field”. You have the ability to create and fill-in custom fields with every post you write, but probably don’t know it. Under every “write post” page is the “custom fields” form (this one from WP 2.5):

A custom field is nothing more than metadata that you create. You probably know metadata as keywords and descriptions for search engines, but you can make your own custom metadata fields to describe or enhance your posts. Each custom field has a “key” and then a “value”. The key is the name of the metadata (like Image or thumbnail) and the value is the content (like file.gif or picture.jpg). Just Tadlock has a pretty good Introduction to Custom Fields, and also Custom Fields: Adding Images to Posts.

12. Create a Date Button for Posts: Seems like most of the more “premium” WordPress themes (and hand-crafted ones) have a “date button” for the post, a nice image with the month abbreviation and the date (sometimes the day of the week too). Small Potato at WP-Designer wrote a great tutorial last year on How to Create a Date Button.

I hope these home page hacks helped you, and as always if you have something to add to make this post better (or a question) – please comment now!

WordPress errors a problem? Too high of a load for your web host? Worried about getting dugg, stumbled, or slashdotted? Learn now to “traffic proof” your WordPress site or blog!

This is installment #13 in 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days!

If you’ve blogging for any length of time, or if you own multiple blogs at one time or another you’re likely to have a problem with “too much traffic”. In this hacks series I’ve shown you how to keep your database maintained, but that doesn’t really matter if your starting to get 20,000 unique views per day or more. I’ve found over the that’s about the tipping point for most shared web hosts, the point at which your site reaches more than 250,000 “requests” per day or more and it starts maxing out the resources alloted to your domain. Every single time someone visits your WordPress site, it makes “calls” to the database server to retrieve the posts, and the pages, and the categories, and header, and the footer, and your archives, and on and on and on. Get the picture? One page load could mean a dozen+ “calls” to the database. That’s why 20,000 “page views” could mean “250,000 requests” for your site.

I actually got an email today after dinner about one of my sites having “very high loads” on the server, and that today requests were way over 300,000 and it was the highest traffic day in a very long time with 22,000+ pageviews. I knew it was time to enable some sort of caching on this site. The WP-Cache plugin has been around awhile (4-5 years), and I’ve used it before, but the main problem I’ve always had is you have to disable everything on your site that is either interactive or counts. This would include wp-postview (page and post counts), wp-postrating (live post ratings), etc. Even comments are a slight issue, since once they are approved it can be up to an hour before they appear on the cached pages. “Normally” all javascript things, like adsense ads or affiliate ads work just fine, since they are called live on the cached pages the same as if they came from the WordPress database.

WP-Cache hasn’t been updated in a few years from what I saw on their web site, but that’s ok because “WP-Super Cache” has come along. It’s bigger and better than WP-Cache because the PHP engine is never called and it’s much quicker. Now, for those of you new to WordPress that might not be so technical – what is a “cache?” A cache is when you have common pages stored so they don’t have to be fetched from a database every time if nothing has been updated. Your web brower has a “cache” and it uses the copy of web pages on your PC if nothing has changed on the web version. The WordPress wp-super-cache plugin speeds up pages on your blog in the same way.

I happenned along a post a few weeks back on OminNoggin – “Make Popularity Contest Work with WP Super Cache“. I thought this as really cool, because he solved the problem by making the counters and statistics work using javascript instead of PHP. I asked him in the comments if he could do the same to make Lester Chan’s WP-Postviews work on Javascript counts as all and he did! Note – his fix only works on WordPress 2.5, so first I deactivated the WP-PostViews plugin, and then I upgraded to WordPress 2.5. The I installed WP-Super Cache, and last I upgraded to the JavaScript version of WP-PostViews – and everything seemed to work fine!

Let me say, “Your Mileage May Vary”! The site I upgraded (that is now working fine with WP-Supercache AND JavaScript WP-PostViews) only has about a dozen WordPress plugins. Everything seems to co-exist there just fine so far and the pages load much, much faster. I attempted to do the same install tonight here on jtpratt.com and it didn’t go so well. I did receive some 500 errors, and the homepage didn’t seem to get any post counts for the updated JavaScript WP-PostViews. This blog is quite the exception since I use almst 4 dozen plugins, and quite a few of them are interactive – like SezWho, which enhances my comments. I disabled WP-Super-Cache here and backed out all the changes it made (to my .htaccess file) and deleted all it’s cached pages and deleted the plugin. I even had to click “update” on my “Options -> Permalinks” page to get the site to act normally again. I think most “normal” sites (that don’t have all the crazy hacks I have here) will do just fine traffic proofing with WP-Super-Cache. If you use Popularity Contest or WP-PostViews use the updated plugins I linked to. If you have other problems with WP-Super-Cache and a plugin – maybe Thaya Kareeson would be kind enough to help with this as well.

As always – if you have problems, questions, or something to add – please comment now!

BANS site suddenly dropped from google or no traffic? This article is for you…!

This is the long overdue installment #4 in the series Watch Me Build a BANS Niche Site from Scratch. First to answer a few questions – the most often asked seems to be either “why is this series taking so long” or “when is your next installment”. I guess I have muliple answers. The first is – I’m writing multiple article series at once, and the 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days series that’s almost half over had kind of taken precedent since I write for that every day. Next is, I write for multiple blogs I own. But the most important was I think that my test site for this series Used Cell Phones is a victim of the Google Sandbox Effect. That’s where a new site is placed in google’s “sandbox” (getting no traffic) becuase it’s “too new”. It’s almost like your site is on “probation”. Google has no documentation on the so-called “sandbox”, although most old school webmasters like myself can attest to the fact that it exists. It’s in place to keep someone from trying to start a brand new site based on a trend or event just to spam people for a quick profit. I was a victim of the Sandbox in January 2007 when I tried to start an American Idol site on a brand new domain, only to find I came out of the sandbox just as the season ended.

So, I should also let you know that I did the wrong thing. I should not have ignored my test site for all these weeks, because now it seems out of the sandbox and it’s not ready really for the index. I could have done all kinds of promotion behind the scenes, like an athlete in spring training getting ready for the season. Now, I’m just going to have to work a little harder! If your BANS site isn’t getting much or any traffic, that’s no excuse for not working on it. The only excuse I have is that I have multiple sites and blogs to distract me.

So far I’ve shown you how to set your site up, how to put some content in it, and how to start building back links for it. Since I know my site was indexed and was getting some traffic, but now is not I decided to elaborate a bit on the Google Sandbox effect and Google Penalties and how they can affect your BANS site. I am by no means an expert on either, but I do have a lot of experience on both – and I can tell you how they affect me and what I do to try and correct the issue. I’m going to write this article as I work on my site, and document both what I think and do as I go along so you can learn from me.

I’m going to start some brief research to see if I can figure out why this site is getting <10 hits per day and almost nothing from google. In addition to the sandbox effect I may have had, this site might also have been sucked into google's bad graces because it's a BANS site. I had the "powered by build a nice site" link on the site when it was version 2.0 for a few months, and around that time I head some people hollering on digital point forums that google had targeted some BANS sites - and they either got flushed from the main index to supplemental hell, or they lost their pagerank. If you don't have a lot of experience with web design, web promotion, or the google index you might wonder WHY google has a problem with BANS sites. Think about it real hard - you're trying to put an entire online store into their index (that's already on eBay) with hundreds, maybe even thousands of pages for the purposes of making money with little or no original content. Maybe you even have lots of original content in your BANS store, but the number of eBay store pages vs. your content pages is a disparaging 50 or 100 to 1.

To google this is upside down, you’ve created an affiliate monster and tried to “game” the search engines with a bazillion pages with nothing more than (already existing) eBay auctions. To google you are better than a spammer, splog, or scraper site unfortunately – and if they find you, you may pay the price in their index. Just read google’s quality guidelines to find the quote: “Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. I need to find out if the Used Cell Phones site has been “googlesmacked” if you know what I mean.

I’m going to start with pagerank, since a big google PR update occured just a few days ago. I don’t have the google toolbar installed, because I have waaaay to many other extensions installed in my firefox, so I rely on other pagerank checkers that I can use. Google must have changed their API – because 98% of the online PR checkers don’t work, but SEO Tools Future Pagerank still does. Give it a domain and it will spit out page rank. If you get a number from 1-10, that’s great. If you get no number at all, that site may be in the index, but has no pagerank yet. If you have a site that comes up “0″ – then you were ranked for pagerank, but you have some kind of penalty. I just checked our test site, and it has PR 0 – so we have some kind of penalty. If I had the google toolbar installed, our test site would be grey or what we call “greybar” (penalty, PR 0). I don’t know how long or what kind it is, all we can do is promote, promote, promote – so we’re ready when we come out of it. There are some other preventative measures to take, but I have just a little more research to do first.

I should mention, that when you notice you have PR 0 or a penalty problem, the first thing you should do is go to google and do a search on www.yoursite.com to see what you get. If your own site doesn’t come up #1 for it’s own name – you have a problem. I typed that in and got zilch. The I did a search for link:www.site.com and got 6 backlinks, which was ok. Then I did site:www.site.com and got zero!!! OMFG – zero!! Google DUMPED ME from their index! They REALLY must have targeted me for having a bans site big time! THEN I logged into Google Webmaster Tools to see what kind of details I could glean. You should already be registered with Google Webmaster Tools (read: Increase Traffic with MSN, Yahoo, and Google).

So what did I find out? Our test site was crawled just a few days ago, but (confirmed!) it’s not in the google index at all right now (it was!?). Also, the remind says we never verified the site (which shouldn’t be an issue, except once we do – we’ll possibly get better error messages).

Fix: register our site with google in the Webmaster Tools

In bans you have to use the “meta tag” verfication method and add that code in your header.php file within the “head” HTML tag. Once I did that, google instantly gave me those error messages I wanted to see:

It shows a few 404 errors (that I can worry about later), at least there are only 3 – and probably just some minor URL problems I need to fix. Those same 3 errors occur for in the sitemap as well. So, to sum up my google problems I “might” be still in their sandbox, I “for sure” have a google penalty, I don’t know how I got it or how long it will last, and I need to build some more original content before I submit a reinclusion request. Keep your eyes peeled, the next article in this series will be “BANS Content Pages and How to Promote Them”!

As always if you have anything to add to make this article better, or question – please comment now!

My other articles that you should read right after this post are:

Guilty by Association – The Google Penalty
How to Track Search Engine Rankings for Your Blog
Increase Traffic with MSN, Yahoo!, and Google
Copy Sitemap Changes for SERP pages

Ever wanted to change your WordPress permalink structure but were afraid of 404 errors and SEO problems? I have a WordPress Hack to fix all your problems right here!

This is installment #12 of 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days!

This WordPress hack is one that I planned on writing write after the last one about rotating and recycling posts out of your archives and on to your home page. Mainly because there is one thing I didn’t address before, and that’s you permalink structure. In WordPress your “permalink” structure is your URL. By traditional default WordPress blogs have a day, month, year structure to the URL like this:

www.site.com/05/01/2008/my-new-post

In your WordPress dashboard in either settings (WP 2.5) or options (before WP 2.5) -> “Permalinks” you have the ability to change the structure to whatever you want. In the beginning (because they don’t know any better) most people don’t and leave the date default. Even Matt Cutts says don’t use post dates in URL’s. Why not?

Wordpress Hack #10 should have been a prime example – if you’re going to be recycling your old posts to the home page, it’s going to change the published date to the current day – right? Well, it won’t change the permalink (URL) – and it will still reflect the old date. You could change the permalink structure manually in your dashboard, but that would just create new URL’s for every single post (removing the date portion), so every single bookmark and every single search engine listing you ever had will now be an “Error 404″ page. Ouch!

Over time if you write new posts every day or every week you probably aren’t going to want the post dates to matter as much, since new readers will be coming on board all the time. In addition – maybe you’ll want to move out of WordPress to another blogging platform someday that doesn’t have a date based post convention. If you’re in the same boat I was, you are now in quite the predicament – what to do, what to do?? Once again, enter a lifesaver WordPress plugin “Dean’s Permalink Migration!” It’s very simple to use, and will solve all your permalink problems.

First install and enable the plugin. Then in options or settings -> “PermalinksMigration” in your WordPress dashboard you’ll see a simple text field for only one option:

All you have to do is enter your OLD permalinks structure in that field. For most of you that’s going to be:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

What I did was open up two tabs in my browser, both with my WP dashboard open. In one tab I had settings -> Permalinks and the other settings -> “PermalinksMigration”. I just copied and pasted my “permalinks” structure to “permalinksMigration”. Then in “permalinks” I changed the structure from this:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

to this:

/%postname%/

Then I click “update” to save each tab, one immediately after the other. To recap- what I’ve done here is removed the dates from my permalink (URL) structure, and the “Dean’s Permalink Migration” knows what my “old” structure was, and it will automatically redirect each and every page using old date based structure to the new page. You won’t lose any hits from bookmarks or search engines at all, and all of your URL’s will be much cleaner and shorter from now on.

The ONLY drawback I could think of was, this plugin only works ONE TIME. Since it only has one field for previous permalink structure to redirect – it can only redirect the last change you made. Hint to the plugin auther, you could hack this plugin to allow for multiple changes, and adding the ability to do the same for category permalinks would be a boon too!

Now I can just hear somebody screaming from the back of the room “what about my pagerank, what about my pagerank!”. In effect, to search engines, indexers, and crawlers this should be the same as a 301 permanent redirect. If you had pagerank assigned to any of your individual posts, it should transfer to the new URL over time – typically from a few weeks to a few months depending on google’s update schedule. I personally really don’t worry about pagerank anymore at all – you probably shouldn’t either.

I hope that this hack helped you as much as it helped me once found it. If you have any comments to make this post better, or question – please comment now!

By making old posts new and and recycling your WordPress archives you will not only keep them producing traffic – but keep making money with them as well!

This is installment #11 in the 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days Series! Be sure to view the previous hacks you’ve missed and sign up via RSS or email at the top of the page to make sure you don’t miss the rest of the series!

I’ve written a lot of lengthy articles in this hacks series so far, but here’s one that’s pretty simple. Before I had this plugin I longed for something that would effectively rotate my blog posts out of the archives and back onto the front page of my blog. Not every blog will have a need for this, but I have quite a few blogs, and I can’t always work on every one every day (or even every week). The blog paradigm means that the newest things are on the homepage scrolling down to the oldest, and when the content doesn’t change it makes you blog “stale”.

Being able to recycle your blog posts takes a marketing tip from fast food restaurants. Do you ever notice that certain things “come back” on a regular basis? Every year for Lent, all the fast food restaurants being back the “fish sandwich”. You see McDonald’s bring back the “McRib” and the “Monopoly Game” about once per year. They take things in and out of the rotation to keep it fresh, and if your blog posts stand the test of time, there’s no reason that they can’t be rotated too.

I have a fun site called “Top Jokes that’s been live with jokes for about 8 months or so. I used to posts a joke or more every day, in fact there are now more than 400 jokes. This type of site doesn’t pay very well, as far as a CTR, and the traffic isn’t so high either. But I don’t want to get rid of it because like all web real estate “it grows over time” – I just want to minimize the amount of time I spend on it. I’d like to post maybe a half dozen jokes per month and rotate old jokes from the archives to the homepage at the rate of one per day.

Enter the brilliant plugin by Dagon Design Scheduled Post Shift Plugin for WordPress. It’s a very simple, very easy to use plugin. Once you install and enable it – just set the options:

Just enter the number of hours between post shifts, and at that time it will rotate your oldest post in your WordPress blog to your home page by changing the published date to current time. Once per day enter 24 hours, twice per day 12 hours, every two days enter 48 hours, etc. The second option you can leave blank, but if you enter a category ID only posts from that category will be rotated. You could use this to your advantage in an interesting way by creating a dozen or so posts, and give them dates from a year ago and assign them to a “sponsors” category. Then enable Scheduled Posts Shift for just the “sponsors” category every 24 hours (if you post every day) or whatever your post schedule is to have “recommended” or sponsored items cycle through your home page regularly. This could be a very interesting way to monetize your blog.

In addition – I recommend you read Profitable Previous Posts, so when your old posts are rotated back to your homepage you can ensure that you are getting the most benefit, SEO, and profit from them possible!

However you use it, Scheduled Posts Shift can help you to automatically recycle your WordPress blog posts and keey all that hard work and those archives you’ve built up over time producing both traffic and income for years!

There IS ONE THING that I haven’t toldyou about recycling blog posts and WordPress archives, and that’s what to do about your “Permalinks”. If you’re going to use this hack to recycle blog posts – you have to read hack #12 as well to find out how to change permalink structure seamlessly, because hacks #11 and #12 go hand in hand!

If you have something to add to make this article better, or a question – please be sure to comment now!