By StrangeWork.com: I’ve been invited by Jeffro to participate in a weekly podcast on TalkShoe.com called Wordpress Weekly.

WordPress Weekly will discuss WordPress related news, tips and tricks for using WordPress, plugins, updates, and everything else involving WordPress. We will be recording new episodes every Friday evening at 9PM EST on TalkShoe.com.

Be sure to join us during the live taping of WordPress Weekly and get involved! Call in to the show and ask questions, give suggestions, or tell us about your experiences with WordPress.

We plan on having a great time and I’m sure it will be entertaining. Hope to see you there!

WordPress Weekly TalkShoe Information:

Talkcast Name: WordPress Weekly
Talkcast ID: 34224
Phone Number: 724-444-7444

Popularity: 15% [?]

By StrangeWork.com: Have you ever come across a topic you wanted to blog about, but didn’t have time to write at that moment? So you put it off and come back to it later, right? Of course, but what happens if you forget about the original topic you wanted to post about? I’ve had this problem a few times, so decided to find a plugin to help me out. Enter the WordPress Todo List Plugin.

The Todo list plugin is a great way to help organize topics you want to write about. With it’s simple interface you can easily add and manage your own Todo list. The plugin also displays on your dashboard to help keep your Todo list fresh on your mind.

For easy access I created a bookmark directly to the add new item page for quick additions on the fly.

I highly recommend this plugin for anyone wanting to get more organized with blog topics.

Popularity: 18% [?]

By StrangeWork.com: I recently upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.3 and made the decision to switch my tagging system over to WordPress Native Tagging. Prior to my blog update I used Ultimate Tag Warrior for tagging. WordPress 2.3 makes the switch from Ultimate Tag Warrior to Native Tagging extremely easy! Just follow the instructions below:

STEP 1: Import existing Ultimate Tag Warrior tags into WordPress 2.3 database

1. Login to your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to Manage > Import.

2. Select Ultimate Tag Warrior and follow the instructions to import your tags. WordPress does all of the work for you.

Simple as that! Now let’s integrate our WordPress tags in to our existing theme.

There are two different ways to integrate tags into your theme. The first is a Tag Cloud:

STEP 2: Add a Tag Cloud to your existing theme

A tag cloud is a simple widget that displays your most popular tags. The more topics under each tag the bigger the font is in your cloud. An example image is shown.

1. Open up the page you would like to include a Tag Cloud on. Typically this is added to your sidebar.php file.

2. Add the below 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; ?>

There are many different ways you can customize your tag cloud. WordPress has compiled a nice list of available actions that you can use. View Tag Cloud Doc

STEP 3: Add related Tags to each blog post

Another commonly used method is to list the tags for each post directly below the post.

1. Open up the file you would like to add your tags list to. Typically this is added after each post so you would need to edit single.php and index.php

2. Add the following code:

<p><?php the_tags(); ?></p>

There are many different ways you can customize your related tags. WordPress has compiled a nice list of available actions that you can use. View Related Tags Doc

Tags are a crucial part of any blog. If your not currently using tags take some time this weekend and get them setup. You’ll thank me later!

Popularity: 21% [?]

By StrangeWork.com: After reading Jeff’s WordPress upgrade post I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my blog to WordPress 2.3. As always WordPress has made this process extremely easy. Simply follow their online instructions and you shouldn’t have a problem.

One small annoyance, which was changed a few versions ago, is the removal of the Post Preview Pane located at the bottom of the posts form. WordPress 2.3 does include a Preview >> link, but I hate opening new windows just to preview a post. Here is a quick hack to get the Post Preview Pane back:

Open up your post.php file from your wp-admin directory.
Navigate to approximately line 72 and find the following line of code:
include(’edit-form-advanced.php’);

Directly underneath that line, add the following code:

?>
<div id=’preview’ class=’wrap’>
<h2 id=”preview-post”><?php _e(’Post Preview (updated when post is saved)’); ?></h2>
<iframe src=”<?php echo clean_url(apply_filters(’preview_post_link’, add_query_arg(’preview’, ‘true’, get_permalink($post->ID)))); ?>” width=”100%” height=”600″ ></iframe>
</div>
<?php

Save your changes to post.php and upload. Easy as that!

WordPress 2.3 has added some really slick new features including native tag support, plugin update notifications, and a few new SEO URL updates. It appears all of my plugins ported over without issue, but be sure to check your plugins before upgrading.

I also have the dashboard bug that Jeff posted here. Apparently it has something to do with using Google Blogsearch rather than Technorati. I’ll see if I can find a hack to switch it back to Technorati, because that is a feature I’ve always enjoyed.

* UPDATE
I found the hack for incoming links.

If you want to get Technorati results back change:
“http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&scoring=d&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss&partner=wordpress&q=link:”

on lines 11 and 12 in index-extra.php to
“http://feeds.technorati.com/cosmos/rss/?url=”
and
“http://www.technorati.com/search/”

I recommend everyone take the plunge and get upgraded!

Popularity: 22% [?]

By StrangeWork.com: I decided to remove the nofollow code from my blog comments. Nofollow is an attribute that can be added to links to discourage comment spam. I use Akismet to block spam comments, which works about 98% of the time, so why penalize good comments from reaping the SEO benefits of outbound links on my blog?

I used the dofollow WordPress plugin. You can download the plugin here:
http://www.semiologic.com/software/wp-fixes/dofollow/

To install upload the dofollow plugin folder into your plugins directory and activate the plugin through your WordPress Plugins admin panel. Easy as that! Now readers of my blog who post comments will receive a good inbound link to their site. I wonder if this counts for good karma points?

Popularity: 24% [?]

By StrangeWork.com. So you’ve decided to move your WordPress blog to a new hosting account, but need to know the proper steps to accomplish the transfer seamlessly. WordPress does have some tools available to help you move your blog, but I’m going to show you a much simpler approach.

I’ve broken this tutorial down so even a novice user can understand the steps involved.

Export your entire WordPress database using phpMyAdmin.

1. Login to cPanel on your OLD hosting account. Your login credentials should have been supplied to you when you created your hosting account.
2. Click the MySQL Databases icon listed on your cPanel home screen.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on the phpMyAdmin link.
4. Click the Databases link and select your WordPress blog database. The default naming convention is username_wrdp1.
5. Click the Check All link to select all of your WordPress tables.
6. Click the Export link at the top of the page to export your data.
7. Verify that SQL export is selected and click the Go button to export your database into a SQL file.

This will generate a textbox containing all of the SQL code you need to recreate your WordPress database. Copy this code to a textfile on your computer and save it. You will need it later.

Install WordPress on your new hosting account
Next you need to install WordPress on your new hosting account. The easiest way to do this is using Fantastico, which is a typical component of cPanel.

1. Login to cPanel on your NEW hosting account.
2. Click the Fantastico icon listed on your cPanel home screen.
3. Click the WordPress link under Blogs to begin the WordPress installation.
4. Click New Installation and fill out the required installation information.
5. Install WordPress

Import your WordPress data in to your new WordPress installation
Now we need to import the SQL code from earlier into your new WordPress database

1. Login to cPanel on your NEW hosting account. Your login credentials should have been supplied to you when you created your hosting account.
2. Click the MySQL Databases icon listed on your cPanel home screen.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on the phpMyAdmin link.
4. Click the Databases link and select your WordPress blog database. The default naming convention is username_wrdp1.
5. Click the Check All link to select all of your WordPress tables.
6. Select Drop from the With Selected drop down list.
7. Confirm you want to delete the selected tables. These tables are from your new installation of WordPress and contain no data.
8. Click the SQL link at the top of the page
9. Copy and paste the SQL code from earlier in to the SQL textbox and click Go to execute the query.

Your data has now been imported in to your new WordPress database on your new hosting account.

Copy themes and components to your new hosting account
Your database has all of your settings saved and knows what components and themes you have installed. Simply copy the themes and plugins folder (located in wp-content) over to your new hosting account and your all set!

Popularity: 16% [?]

I just added a new module to my sidebar to show my Twitter updates (stalker vision ;). The module is from a WordPress plugin called Twitter Tools create by Alex King.

The plugin is very easy to setup and only contains 1 necessary PHP file.

1. Download Twitter Tools Plugin for WordPress

2. Upload the Twitter Tools plugin into your plugins directory via FTP. From your root FTP folder the path would be: \wp-content\plugins\

3. Login to your WordPress blog admin account. The web address is by default: www.domain.com/wp-admin

4. Click on the Plugins tab at the top of your admin page.

5. Twitter Tools will be listed as a plugin, but will not be active. Click the “activate” link to enable Twitter Tools to run.

6. Click the “Configure your settings here” or from the Options tab > Twitter Tool

7. Save your Twitter.com username and password into the module. Your all set!

From the Twitter Tools admin page you can add and remove various options. Here’s a quick example:

Show Tweets/Updates on Sidebar

1. Open your Wordpress theme sidebar file called sidebar.php. From your root FTP folder the file would be located: \wp-content\themes\[YOUR THEME FOLDER]\sidebar.php

2. Add the following code anywhere you would like your Twitter tweets to appear:

<pre lang="php"><?php aktt_sidebar_tweets(); ?></pre>

Your tweets will automatically be displayed on your sidebar for everyone to see! For more features be sure to view the Help Documentation

Alex King created a solid Twitter plugin so be sure to support Alex.

Popularity: 14% [?]