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By becoming involved in specific communities you can promote your BANS sites, build links, and possibly make money all at the same time! Build buzz for your BANS site AND your blog!

This is installment #6 of “Watch Me Build a Niche Site From Scratch”, and since our BANS test site still has a google penalty and/or is in the “Google Sandbox” (read the last installment) – we’re going to start building some more “targeted” links back to our BANS niche store. We’re not going to see results overnight with this, but over time this can and will dramatically help our store with both relevant backlinks and possibly traffic!

If you are building BANS stores (or any niche sites) there are two communities you should know about right now.

Both of the communities above allow you to “author” your own targeted pages (as many as you want) on specific (or broad) niche topics. Want to become an expert of learning guitar? Maybe you love origami? Write about travel topics, cars, or sports! Whatever you choose, these niche pages have the ability to promote your BANS or Build a Niche Store better than anything you’ve seen. Why build a single link when you can build an entire relevant page! And the best part is, if your page is successuful (on hubpages or squidoo) you can earn money there too!!

First view the pages that I created for our BANS test store as part of our series “Watch me Build a BANS Niche Store from Scratch“:

My Used Cell Phones Squidoo “Lens”

My Used Cell Phones “Hub”

The process of building your own page is nearly identical at both Squidoo and HubPages. Select a (not already taken) name, click “ok”, add “modules”, publish! Both sites have similar modules, “text”, “Amazon”, “eBay”, “polls”, and more. Squidoo has more robust modules since they’ve been around longer, both sites allow you to pull images from flickr. Both sites allow you to earn commissions from affiliate sales, but at HubPages you actually get to enter your Amazon, Adsense, and eBay affiliate ID’s for direct commissions. Squidoo I believe pays you a percentage.

At both sites when you build a page (“hub” or “lens) it’s like you’re building a mini web site all on one page. You squeeze as much original content in as you can about the subject, then add relevant modules for either additional content or relevant monetizations (like items from eBay or Amazon). The give and take of Squidoo and HubPages is no different than submitting articles to Ezine Articles or working the Entrecard system. Creating a page is great, but you are expected to promote it a bit by commenting on other people’s pages or using the forums. This will raise your “score” (hubpages) and “rank” (squidoo). You “could” spend as much time modifying these pages as you do an entire blog or BANS store – I recommend that you try not to lose yourself in these as you will quickly lose 1/2 a day (they are addictive!). I could write dozens of posts just on the ins and outs of creating Squidoo lenses and HubPages hubs.

The thing that’s unique about these community type “all-in-one” promo pages are all the different things they can be used for. You are building a targeted keyword laden page containing new original content that can obtain it’s own pagerank over time and promoting it. Within that page is a link to your BANS site, you could even link several pages within your niche store. You can link back to your relevant blog(s), web sites, forums, or whatever else you have. If you promote well you can build traffic to both these pages AND your BANS store.

The potential is unlimited because you can created UNLMITED hubpages and lenses at both these sites. For instance, I created the default page about “used cell phones” at both Squidoo and HubPages which links to my BANS store, and my cell phone blog. Backlink, traffic, and monetization all at once! But, I could create many, many more pages on specific topies linking back to BANS content pages, BANS product pages – linking to specific accessories, cell phones, plans, parts, and more! Imagine a dozen pages on Squidoo and a dozen pages on HubPages all pointing to a BANS site home page and deep linking inside pages! If you promote these pages well and become an authority in these communities the targeted links you cultivate will gain their own pagerank and become better for the health of your BANS site than hundreds of blog comments or forum posts!

Have a special way you drive traffic to your BANS site? Comment now!

Today we’ll learn How to add Tag Support by hacking your WordPress theme!

This is day #15 of 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days.

If you’re using WordPress 2.3x or 2.5 or higher you have the ability to use “tags”. If you use social media at all, you should already know what a tag is. Basically it’s just a piece of metadata, a “descriptor” of some kind. When you blog, it’s also another way to pigeonhole and file your content. The implementation of tags in WordPress is very important, because it keep people from “using categories as tags” as many of us have done over the years. There were dozens of plugins available to add tags to your WordPress blog, but now all that functionality is available without using any plugins at all.

Think of categories as high level descriptions. What do you like to blog about? Movies, Music, Politics, and Web Design. Those are categories. However, when you blog – the tags would be Obama, John Candy, AC/DC, and HTML. Get it? All you have to do is enter description tags when you blog, along with a category. Now you’re probably wondering, what do I do with that information?

Depending on how old your theme is it may or may not have “tag support”, which means that it might not be coded to do anything at all with those tags you’re entering. The first thing you can do is to add a (now famous) “tag cloud” in your side bar like I did, with this code:

<?php if ( function_exists('wp_tag_cloud') ) : ?>
<li>
<h2>Popular Tags</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=22'); ?>
</ul>
</li>
<?php endif; ?>

If you want to know more about how that codes works and how you can modify it, visit the WordPress Codex Tag Cloud Page.

Another thing you can do is to add the tags you used beneath your post by adding some code to your single.php file (for single posts). You could do it on your index.php home page as well, but I don’t much see the point in that. All you have to do is add the following code near the end of the loop to display the tags used at the end of the post:

<?php the_tags('<p>Tags: ', ', ', '</p>'); ?>

So, now we’ve talked about how to modify your theme to add the tags used after a post, and how to place a tag cloud in your sidebar (without using a plugin). Click on one of the links in my post (to a tag) or my tag cloud and you’ll see (much like a category page) it goes to a “tag” page, or something like site.com/tag/wordpress-hack.

Be default WordPress will look for the “tag.php” file (that most themes don’t have), and if there isn’t one your archive.php will be used by default. You could just leave this as-is, or create your own custom “tag.php” to make your tag pages unique. One way to do this would be to add a “tag cloud” to the top of each tag page. The WordPress Codex Tag Page has more information on creating a custom tag.php file for your theme.

This post was all about “how to add tag support to your WordPress theme”. In a future post, I’ll show you what you need to know about tagged pages and WordPress SEO. As always, if you have something to add to make this post better, or a question – comment now!

This is what cheap shared web hosts don’t want you to know – their account have limits (they don’t tell you about)! Don’t worry – I will!

This is installment #4 of JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting

Every Web Host wants your business and wants you to know they offer more than anybody in the world at the cheapest price. They will hype every single feature over and over, but it’s what they don’t tell you that you need to worry about. How many web sites are hosted on each box? How much memory is on each box? How often are backups performed? Do they have backup generators in case the power goes out? How many and how powerful are the processors on the servers? Do they have TRUE 24/7 support – or only emergency on call? Can you physically talk to live support over the phone? How many customers do they have? How long have they been in business? You need to extract all the information you can before going with a web host, in addition to googling “this host sucks” or “I love xyz host” to see what people are saying about them.

I’ve hosted some things with goDaddy for a few years now, and their accounts and services have gotten better. I’ve used many other web hosts too, and had some of the exact same problems with them, but I’m going to detail my GoDaddy experiences here because they are the largest web host in the world (or so they claim) and I see lots of people every day searching for various bits of “godaddy help” online that’s not available within their system of FAQ. My “run-ins” with them are perfect examples of things “I didn’t know” before I signed up with them for web hosting. For the most part – hosting my slower web sites with them have been great, but here’s what nobody told me once things got a little bit busier…

Email accounts are limited: I was used to “cpanel” based web hosts, and godaddy has built their own custom control panel to manage their sites. Management of email is in a whole separate control panel from the web hosting control panel, and when you setup email each account is limited to 100MB. This is MUCH better than when I first signed up – all email accounts were only 20MB. What annoys me is – my account has 10GB of space. If I only use 500MB for my web sites, I should be able to use the other 9.5 GB for my email accounts if I want.

Spam filters block “some” email: When I first signed up my email account(s) went through a spam filter and I didn’t always get all my email. Now, when you setup an email account with them they say that you can choose to turn the spam filter off, but even when I did this I still had problems with mail. I think they use some kind of “blacklist” to determine who can and can’t communicate with their mail servers, and I could never get email from either doubleclick or amazon at all. My own parents sent me an amazon gift certificate for my birthday (5 times) and I never received it, and in fact they got “bounce” emails back saying my mail server rejected the amazon mail. I had a blogger last month send me email from the contact form of this site, and because it had his email address on it (which was apparently wrongly on some black list) my own site wouldn’t deliver it and sent him a rejection notice. That was the straw that broke the camels back – I moved all sites with email from goDaddy to another host last month and have had NO problem getting any email from him, Amazon, or doubleclick since. I talked to goDaddy about this over the phone – they were not helpful.

All logging is turned off by default: Your account doesn’t save any access stats or error by default. All logs are turned off. You can turn on the access stats (which are free), but you can’t really customize them and they are godaddy custom stat reports, not Analog, AWStats, or Webalizer that you might expect. In addition, if you have problems and want to error check, you have to go into your admin panel and “turn error logging on” and then it only lasts 30 minutes – then stops. Many bloggers and web workers might not care about this – but both these things really irked me.

Their “unlimited web sites” for Premium accounts doesn’t apply to auto-install scripts: Here’s a shocker, their $14.99 “premium” account offers unlimited web sites, AND they have cool auto-install scripts you can use (like WordPress, Drupal, Mambo, Forums, etc.). If you install WordPress in your main “root” account, and then attempt to install WordPress, or ANY script that uses clean-url’s, permalinks, mod-rewrite, or an .htaccess file THEY WILL NOT SUPPORT IT! I went round, and round, and round with GoDaddy support about this over the phone. They will allow you “unlimited web sites” and “auto-install scripts” for ever single one of them, but NO SUPPORT for nearly all of them, because they can’t figure out how to resolve conflicts with url re-writes. It’s for this reason that my post “How to Fix .htaccess File for mod_rewrite and addhandler on godaddy subdomain” is on of my most popular. They sell you one thing, without telling you critical details of how it may not work in some of the most popular scenarios people want to do (host multiple blogs in one account).

It’s nearly impossible to reach 300GB of transfer: This point is something that most of you may never find out – but if your blog, web site, and online businesses are growing you should. Web “transfer” is when your web site sends something to someone’s browser. If a visitor comes to your home page, your hosting account would send your index.php file of your blog, maybe a few graphics, a stylesheet, and maybe a javascript or two. You might have 5-10 “hits” or that one visit. In addition, the data contained with your index.php would come from your blog mySQL database, and to get your title, metadata, posts, comment counts, pages, categories, tags, and whatever else your site contains could take up to 20 database queries before it has everything it needs to send that page out to the browser.

I realized over a year ago that it’s nearly impossible to ever reach the 300GB of transfer they say you can use for only $4 per month, when I had a site generating a lot of weird errors like “unavailable”. Let me give you a scenario. Let’s say that your index.php was 100K in size, and it sent a stylesheet (8K), a few javascripts (15K), and 3 graphics for logo, header, and footer (37K). The total to send your entire home page would be about 160K in size. That’s only 16% of 1 megabyte. By dividing 300 “Gigabytes” (300,000,000,000) by 160K (160,000) we get 1,875,000. That means you should be able to get 1.8 MILLION pageviews per month on this “economy” account for only $4 per month. That’s 62,500 unique pageviews per day, which equivalates to 2,604 per hour. Every knows that traffic is never distributed evenly throughout 24 hours, you have 6-8 hours of the day that are busiest.

This means that you should be getting 2,500-5,000 pageviews per hour to reach your limit every day. I went to all the trouble to explain this because I had a site on goDaddy that was getting only about 25,000 pageviews per day and I was getting the “unavailable” errors. I called goDaddy support and was on the phone with them for over an hour drilling them about the errors, their account limits, and what I could do about it – since my site was fine (until it got that busy), and then all of the sudden every 5th or so pageview either turned out an error or incomplete page. It turns out (after much screaming and profanity, 2 support people, 2 phones calls, and one supervisor) that they have a “150 concurrent connection per account limit”.

Wow. I was stunned. I realized right away what this meant – and I went off on that guy. I told him I felt I was lied to from the start (of signing up with them). The “150″ limit means that only 150 people could be requesting a web page from my site “at the same time”. And a request is a “hit” or each graphic, script, and individual page. So if a person gets one page and has 10 “hits” that’s 10 connections. If you got lots of people browsing a site at once, it’s easy to reach that limit – and I did every day between 1 and 4pm on days I had 25,000 pageviews or more. The less busier hours of the day were ok.

I told the goDaddy support guy the problem was obvious – the support people, the server admin people, and the marketing people never talked. Marketing wrote up the ad slick based on the highest capabilities they could sell at the lowest price. The server admins put the “150 concurrent” limit in as a governer to keep the busier sites from crashing the box and stealing resources from the other 900 sites that weren’t as busy. And support was just trying to put out the fires from people who called in barely knowing there was a limit at all, and not realizing (or caring) what advertising information people were reading before signing up.

The fact of the matter is – cheap hosting is “shared”, and your account is on a server with up to 1,000 other web sites. Like being a tenant in an apartment building, the landlord couldn’t tell you before signing a lease “you can use up to 10,000 gallons of water per month” if there were 100 tenants and the capacity of the entire building was 100,000 per month. If each tenant used 10,000 gallons per month, the usage would be 1 million gallons per month, and that’s 10X the building’s capacity.

My point is – a shared web host is kind of like a utility. They have a pretty good handle on what each consumer uses, and even in most peak times they can handle the load. But in the hottest times of the year, in big urban areas you see “rolling blackouts” when everybody has their air conditioning on – because the can’t handle all that load at once. Your web host may sell you all these grand amounts of bandwidth you can use, but in the end given the amount of other “tenants” and the physical limitations of the machine and your account, you couldn’t use that much bandwidth in a given month (on the economy account) if you had to.

The next post in this guide will be “Differences between Shared Hosting, VPS, and Dedicated Server”
Read more – JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting

Godaddy – the largest web host in the world, treats hosting like a fast food drive through…

This is installment #3 of JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting

I got sucked into GoDaddy the same way that people were sucked into “supersizing” at McDonalds’s when it first started. GoDaddy had slick ads during Superbowl halftime that millions of people noticed. I remember the first ones. They were cool, sexy, funny, controversial – but in the end I remember that domain names were somehow $1.99 there. I had only owned a couple “domain names” over the years, and I always registered them with Network Solutions because they were always known as the most reputable (and the first ever) registrar. But – to register a domain name there (and renew it each year) was for years and years $35 annually. See why I never bought any more domains?

So, a couple years ago I got an idea for a new web site and wanted to try my hand at making some money with it. Up until that point all my personal web sites had been for fun, and the work I did online was either for my day job (web programmer) or for some moonlighting on the side consulting with a few companies here and there needing help. I’ll never forget that first time, because I only wanted to buy one domain name. After I selected it I had an offer “buy .net, .info, and .org for just $5 more” and I thought “really? why not…” so I did. The trick was (at that time) if you buy 3 or more you get the $1.99 price, but just one would have been $8.99. So I had 4 new domain names I think for like $7 – and I thought that was awesome.

It got me thinking, and a few weeks later I had some more web site ideas, and I went back and bought more domain names. They also had a deal where if you bought any single product (like $3.99 web hosting) every domain name you buy is only $1.99. They still have this deal today. So I bought that economy hosting account, and then about 10 new domain names. I have hosting AND 10 new domains for about $24 – sweet!

What GoDaddy sells is “opportunity”. Their marketing is based on “hype” too, and pumping you up to buy lots of stuff “right now” – because they feel that they’ll make it up on the backend when you renew each month, or each year (for domain names). They hope you’ll come back – again and again! I did for the better part of a year. But, much like McDonalds with the “supersizing” – it’s not their fault if you get fat, or if you can’t stop eating. I think the difference is, McDonald’s doesn’t advertise that you’ll become healthier or lose weight by eating their food every day. They may infer you’ll be happier, buy not healthier. GoDaddy, and just about every cheap web host out there thrives on showing you how many “features” they can shove in your account for a very, very low price. When you’re offered 10 GB of space and 300GB of content for only $4 and you’re just starting a web site, you may think “that’s incredible, I’ll never use all that…”. Much like the fact that McDonald’s doesn’t say “it would take 10 miles of running to burn off all the fat from one Big Mac Combo Meal…”, GoDaddy won’t say “we’ll give you 300GB of transfer, but we actually know it’s physically impossible for you to use that much the way our servers are configured…”.

The next post in this guide will be “What Shared Web Hosts Won’t Tell You…”
Read more – JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting

Can you get a quality web host for $3.99 per month? How can they afford to give you all that space and bandwidth so cheaply?

This is installment #2 of JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting

I’ve had many web hosts over the years for a paltry few dollars per month. Like most people, a great majority of the time I’ve had no problems with any of them. The difference between my 95% success rate and 5% failure has been the growth of my web site. I think in many ways though – it wasn’t my fault because I think that nearly every web host in the world is engaged in false advertising.

Let’s take a look at goDaddy, who say they are the “largest webhost in the world”. They have an “economy plan” for about $4 per month (price depends on how long you pay for). Before I go on let me state the first rule of web hosting: Never pay for more than month to month service. This rule has served me well, because it’s easy to move to a new web host, and I’ve been with dozens over the years. Just because a host is good this month, doesn’t mean they will next month, or next year. Do you think there’s a reason that a host has a 95% satisfaction rating? What do the 5% unsatisfied customers have problems with and why?

For $4 per month goDaddy offers:

• 10 GB of space
• 300 GB of transfer
• 10 mySQL databases
• 100 email accounts

I’ll tell you right now that 95% of the customers are satisfied because they aren’t getting any traffic. The 5% unsatisfied customers are unhappy because their sites have become busy or big or complex, and they’re unable to keep them working right. When a web host claims “99.9%” uptime that means their servers are online and running 99.9% of the time. It doesn’t mean that their customers web sites were available and error free 99.9% of the time.

The next post in this series will be “GoDaddy – the McDonald’s of Webhosting?“
Read more – JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting

If your blogs and web hosts are growing beyond your web host – you are not alone. This guide will teach you everything you need to know about choosing and moving to a good web host.

This is installment #1 of JTPratt’s Guide to Webhosting. Follow the link for all installments.

Have you ever heard the phrase “you don’t know what you need until you need it?”. If you are a blogger, a niche site builder, an affiliate marketer, a domainer, an SEO, a web web designer, a web developer or any other type of online web worker – your “working environment” is the web, and your office building is your web host. You may outgrow that office building before you know it and not know how or where to move to expand your business.

It’s not surprising to me that so many people fail in online business, people fail in the brick and mortar business world each and every day. The difference between the two is, online a person can start a “web business” with no money at all (and virtually no risk) – and the only investment you need to make is “time”. There’s no penalty for walking away and abandoning your business either if you haven’t been successful.

In a lot of ways building a business online is still like the old wild west but it’s maturing more each day. When I started on the internet in 1995 there weren’t any classes (and hardly any books) on building web sites. You learned HTML, web graphics, and how to get search engine traffic purely by the seat of your pants. There were no classes or degrees you could get in nearly any kind of web technology. Those of us that trained ourselves were able to command high dollar amounts consulting with and working for small businesses and large corporations.

Nowadays, you can get all kinds of degrees and certificates as a web designer, web developer, and many specialties have emerged like database architect, information modeler, network engineer – you name it. What you don’t see are a series of courses designed to prepare you for building an online business. There aren’t even a lot of real world courses available that apply to working online. If you want to learn to manage a site with WordPress, how to do search engine optimiztion, how social media works, how to build income from multiple affiliates, how to interpret web statistics and trends, how to write good linkbait, or even how web hosting accounts work you are left to scrounge information for yourself from dozens of blogs and forums to piecemeal that information together yourself.

I’ve built and maintained web sites for more than 13 years now, and I even did technical support for and worked at an ISP and webhost in the 90′s for nearly three years – and even I have had a very hard time with web hosts over the last few years. The thing I had a hard time recognizing was when one of my web sites was too big for a web host, when to move it to a bigger account, and who that web host should be. In order to describe to you the process that I went through, first I should explain to you the big business of hosting cheap web sites.

Tomorrow’s post in this guide will be “Cheap Cookie Cutter Webhosting – Good or Bad?”
Read more: JTPratt’s Guide to Webhosting

I just wanted to take a minute to update all the readers of jtpratt.com – and those of you subscribed via RSS what’s been going on behind the scenes here at jtpratt.com. This week has been plagued by quite a few web hosting snafus – even though I have 3 different web hosts! I’ve had problems with BANS sites, WordPress sites, and WP plugins – so bear with me which I fix all these issues, move a bunch of sites around, and acquire yet another (and bigger) web host because my little enterprise of sites is growing.

I apologize for not having the “30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days” up to date, in addition to the BANS series (which is seriously behind in content). The good news is, I have a tendency to document everything I do and write it up into articles to help you be a better blogger and learn about the pitfalls of working and building a business online. This means that you once again, will be getting content from me in the very near future that you won’t find anywhere else – regarding all the issues I’ve been having.

Working online is not all roses, especially the first few years. Did you know that in brick and mortar small businesses 90% are lucky to even make a profit the first two years? Most are lucky to not have to close their doors in that time. All too often I read about a “guru’s success” and huge profit online – but it all sounds like a walk in the park. They want you to buy their $87 eBook that will “change your life”, and everything they say is hype, hype, hype. Have you ever read a sales pitch page that contained something negative? Ever seen an online marketer’s page that had both “pros” and “cons”?

The posts and articles that I write for you come from an incessant need for me to document information that I myself had a hard time finding. The information is free, and I’m not trying to “build my list” or convince you to buy things I think are “awesome” so I can make an affiliate commission. Sure, I’ll put my affiliate links out there – and if you choose to buy something through me or click on my ads, that’s great, but I’m not John Chow and I don’t “Make a living telling people how much money I make online”. In fact, – (at the present time) I don’t even make a living telling people my struggles trying to make a living online.

My goal with this site has been to help you become successful by watching me fail 10,000 times. Be learning from those mistakes – it should be easier for you to do well with your online business (but no less work). I will give you the good, the bad, and the ugly – and hopefully the end result of this site will become “how I became successful online”. For now – we’re still muddling through the mistakes and gaining some traction, but I promise if you stick with me and work hard – you will begin to build a monthly income online as well.

Be on the lookout for my next post, which will be “JTPratt’s Guide to Web Hosting”. It contains everything I wish someone had told me 5 years about about web hosting accounts, and invaluable advice for growing sites and blogs. I have 46 pending drafts for this site and a dozen more written down on paper I haven’t entered yet. The best has yet to come.

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!