Photo by hamed.

The right SEO plugins for Wordpress get you Google love.

There you go, you’re on your way to being an SEO guru! OK seriously, there is a LOT to know about SEO however you can have Google give you a ton of love by doing some really fast and basic optimization. All you need are Brad’s words in your mind, and two plugins to let you optimize your Wordpress content quickly and easily.

Before you publish

First up, do your keyword research with free keyword tool at Wordtracker (or similar tool). Find the keywords you are looking to optimize any given post or page for. When you’ve got that down, you can publish your post and optimize that post with the following two essential SEO plugins for Wordpress.

Two Essential SEO plugins for Wordpress

All In One SEO
The grand daddy of them all: All In One SEO.

Sitemap Generator
Dagon Design has been giving and getting a lot of love from the Wordpress community. Here is their sitemap generator plugin.

Those are the two I can’t live without. What about you … got a favorite SEO plugin you just have to use?

The Video

First up let’s deal with the video itself. We’re going to assume you’ve got the video ready to go and simply need to get it online. By far the path of least resistance is to upload it to one of the many video sharing sites. Pick one and upload your video. YouTube and Viddler are two sites where you can park your video.

Getting The Embed Code

Now that you’ve uploaded your video, you’ll need to grab the embed code for the video. Select all then copy (Ctrl-C) the embed code. As examples, here’s where you’ll find the embed code for YouTube:

And for the video embed code for Viddler:

Put Your Video On Wordpress

When you paste the embed code into Wordpress, there’s one simple thing you need to do: remove the last OBJECT tag and you should be good to go.

Photo by gustty.

Wordpress baby themes

Personally, if you are looking for a Wordpress baby theme here’s what I would do.

1. Search for any of type of Wordpress theme you want. Don’t worry about the imagery for now. Here are 413 Wordpress themes you can review to get you started.
2. Download a theme that has either the structure (layout) that you want – and/or – has the color scheme you desire.
3. Boogie over to one of many stock photo sites (iStock, Dreamstime, Shutterstock etc.)
4. Purchase a high quality baby image you can use in the header and presto!

You’ve got yourself a good solid baby theme that doesn’t have to rely on some makeshift template that just happens to have a baby photo in the header.

Photo by dotbenjamin.

"Free Wordpress blog hosting makes me happeh!"

Automattic, the makers of the stand-alone Wordpress publishing platform (found at Wordpress.org) also run a service providing free hosting for Wordpress blogs (at Wordpress.com).  Although there are some limitations compared to hosting Wordpress yourself, they do stack a ton of coolness for what is essentailly a totally free service.  This includes:

• Instant setup and activation of your blog
• Free hosting of your Wordpress blog
• Integrated statistics for tracking blog traffic
• Spam filtering
• Loads of free themes
• Multiple blogs and members-only blogs
• Ability to export all your data should you choose to boogie and go elsewhere with your blog

This is just the start.  Automattic stacks a whole lot more into the deal … to the point it’s just silly how much you get for free. So if you or your clients don’t have the scratch for the project just yet; you’d be hard pressed to find a better place to start.

The Wordpress Magazine - www.thewpmag.com

My friend (and fellow Wordpress nut) Steve recently launched his new site which reports on all things Wordpress.  Highly active in #wordpress irc channel, and it’s because of people like Steve that the Wordpress project is so vibrant.  He and many others like him can be found assisting people with their questions about Wordpress.  Stuck on some PHP?  Wondering what that plugin is you saw on a site? You’ll find your answers floating around in the #wordpress channel.

To go along with the launch of his new site, Steve is running a competition that you Wordpress fans will be interested in.  The contest is this: submit a static design, and if your design wins, Steve will slice and dice it into a fully working Wordpress theme.  Like all contests, there are a few conditions so boogie on over to thewpmag.com and check it out.  Special thanks to Steve for featuring yours truly for his first interview.

“Installation Failed” or “Cannot download update from http://downloads.wordpress.org/”

You might try going to your host and making sure CGI support is enabled.  I’m not sure if this is a must for the automatic upgrade plugin feature in Wordpress to actually work, however, enabling CGI worked for me when recently encountering these errors.

Naturally double check your FTP username and password are correct and relax the CHMOD permissions on /wp-content/upgrade folder.

• Log into your Wordpress admin
• Go to Design > Themes
• Switch / activate any other theme than your current one (I just use the Default)
• Go to Write > Post (as if you are about to write a new post)
• You should see the GUI for the editor restored and be able to switch between Visual and HTML modes once more
• Go back to Design > Themes and reactivate your desired theme

If that doesn’t work … I have NFI.

What I initially was going after was a main menu that utilizes the ever popular Sliding Doors technique. In the end I opted for something simpler due to the way it looks. However, since I finally found a great article on how to incorporate tags into wp_list_categories, I wanted to give it a mention here for others to find.

The article is by Jean-Baptiste Jung called CSS Techniques: Using Sliding Doors with Wordpress Navigation.

Nice one Jean.

The problem

I uploaded a custom page template to my FTP and and wasn’t not showing up in the Wordpress admin.  So I double and triple checked to make sure my Template tags were all cool, and they were. Normally, a drop down that lets me choose which page template I want to use will show up, but for some reason: no dice.

The fix

What seemed to fix the problem was the following:

• Activate a different theme (I just activated the default)
• Reactivate your desired theme
• Go to Manage > Pages
• And you should now see the Page Template

Photo by superbomba.

"Baby, I know how to add hyperlinks to Wordpress captions."

Now, I’m not techy enough to know exactly why Wordpress strips links from captions but it does. I do know that with some fiddling about, I finally found a fairly straight forward workaround that doesn’t involve custom fields or plugins.

My situation might be a little different. I wanted to actually have a secondary caption of sorts to use as a photo credit and have a caption for the photo.

What seems to work for hyperlinking text within Wordpress captions is nesting the link within small tags before the end of the Wordpress caption tag, like this:

PGNvZGU+DQo8c21hbGw+RXhhbXBsZSBvZiA8YSBocmVmPSJodHRwOi8vd3d3Lmxpbmt5bGlua3kuY29tLyI+DQpsaW5rZWQgY2FwdGlvbiB0ZXh0PC9hPi48L3NtYWxsPg0KWy9jYXB0aW9uXQ0KPC9jb2RlPg==

I’m not sure why this technique of using small tags does the trick. As you can see from the picture above, it does work.

Once you’ve got your small tag in there, you’ll need some CSS if you want to position that tag somewhere special. I wanted it off to the left so that it would be a photo credit, visually separate from the caption but still within the Wordpress caption tags. The CSS I used for positioning is as follows:

PGNvZGU+DQojY29udGVudCBzbWFsbCB7DQoJZm9udC1zaXplOiAwLjdlbTsNCgljb2xvcjogIzc1NzU3NTsNCglmbG9hdDogbGVmdDsNCn0NCjwvY29kZT4=

Hope this works for you and if you have another, preferably easier or sound workaround for this issue, lets hear it.