This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the resources mashup, #FollowFriday recommendations, a beautiful video of the 2nd largest aquarium in the world, reviews, and previews for next week’s posts on kikolani.com.
The Resources Mashup
Here are some of the best articles I have stumbledupon this week.
Blogging / Design
When browsing other WordPress blogs with awesome themes, I always find myself wondering how someone handled a particular aspect of the layout or functionality. This is especially true with the Thesis Theme, because of the difference in setup due to the Thesis hooks system. So for anyone browsing Kikolani, I wanted to answer the question of “how did you do that” in a new series on WordPress Thesis Theme Customization.
Part Two: Plugins
One of the things I love about WordPress is that most of the functionality that you are seeking can be found in the plug-ins directory. Most of them (with exception to cForms II) can be found in the WordPress plug-ins directory and installed automatically in WordPress 2.7+ by going into your Admin Panel > Plugins > Add New >. Other plug-ins can be uploaded in .zip format on the Add New Plugins page. Here are the ones that I use – with exception to Thesis OpenHook, these are great suggestions for other themes as well.
- Add Post Footer – This plugin allows you to add specific content to every post, text and ads. This is where I add in the 468×60 Google Adsense ad along with the “Enjoy this post?…” text at the end of each post. (This plugin isn’t fully necessary, considering I could add it into the custom-functions.php, but I haven’t gotten around to moving it yet. Plus it’s a great plugin for other themes.)
- cForms II – This plugin controls the form on my contact page. It is highly flexible in terms of adding additional fields (checkboxes, drop downs, additional text inputs, etc.) and customizing the styling of the forms, offering several pre-built styles to choose from with the option to further edit the CSS for those styles.
- Chat Catcher – This plugin captures some of the Twitter and FriendFeed shares of a particular post and adds them to your post’s comments as comments or trackbacks. I have mine set to “Post Trackbacks.”
- CommentLuv – This plugin automatically captures the latest blog post of a comment author, provided that they have registered their site on ComLuv.
This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the resources mashup, Follow Friday recommendations, back to school backpack safety, reviews, and previews for next week’s posts on kikolani.com.
The Resources Mashup
Here are some of the best articles I have stumbledupon this week.
Blogging
When browsing other WordPress blogs with awesome themes, I always find myself wondering how someone handled a particular aspect of the layout or functionality. This is especially true with the Thesis Theme, because of the difference in setup due to the Thesis hooks system. So for anyone browsing Kikolani, I wanted to answer the question of “how did you do that” in a new series on WordPress Thesis Theme Customization.
Part One: Options
The Thesis Theme comes with two sets of options: Thesis Options and Design Options.
Thesis Options
Thesis Options control the main functionality of the Thesis Theme, including SEO, syndication/RSS, thumbnails and more. Here are the options I have set for Kikolani.
This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the resources mashup, #FollowFriday recommendations, the Slap Chop remix, reviews, and previews for next week’s posts on kikolani.com.
The Resources Mashup
Here are some of the best articles I have stumbledupon this week.
Blogging / Design
This post is the fifth in the Benefits of Blogging series, where I will cover the many benefits of blogging, for bloggers and readers.
What is authority?
I consider being an authority on a subject being someone that others can look to for solid, useful information. If someone is an authority on SEO, then you would know if you were having SEO related questions that this person would be the one to ask.
Do you have to know everything to become an authority?
Some people may assume that, because they may not be an expert on a subject, they cannot become an authority on it. I do not feel that is true. I think that an authority on a subject not only knows their subject, but also knows where to find information that they do not know. They continue to learn and expand their knowledge, as new information becomes available.
This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the resources mashup, Follow Friday recommendations, a New Moon parody, reviews, and previews for next week’s posts on kikolani.com.
The Resources Mashup
Here are some of the best articles I have stumbledupon this week.
Blogging / Design
This post is the fourth in the Benefits of Blogging series, where I will cover the many benefits of blogging, for bloggers and readers.
One of the advantages some bloggers may not think about when they are promoting their blogs is the amount of SEO and internet marketing skills they are developing in the process.
What SEO & Internet Marketing Skills Do I Know?
Chances are, you have done one or more of the following for your blog:
- Considered important keywords for the title of your posts
- Installed SEO related plugins (Platinum SEO, All in One SEO Pack)
- Found people online who are interested in topics related to your blog
- Created a large audience on social networks
- Shared your posts on Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Delicious, etc.
- Encouraged others to bookmark posts on social bookmarking networks with socialble plugins and icons (such as the ones at the end of this post)
Have you ever run into the challenge of not having the time to do everything? And when you run into that challenge, have you wondered whether it is all or nothing, or if even a little here and there was good enough?
This is a challenge I have been experiencing for the past few weeks in terms of comments on this site. I love replying to comments, and I love going around to other blogs and commenting there as well. But as most people who do a fair share of commenting know, while it can be rewarding and educational, it can also be time consuming.
I think that my number one fear is that I’ll soon be considered the kind of blogger that takes but never gives, expecting comments but never giving them. And I certainly don’t want that. But right now, between maintaining a full time job, working on freelance projects, creating and expanding my freelance portfolio, finishing personal projects that I have been wanting to do for a long time, improving functionality around this site (like finally getting my contact form working again) and spending time on things to improve my health, I have found myself unable to budget in time for the other things I love to do around here, such as the commenting.
