Tips & Tools

It appears that Google AdSense will now let you change the fonts in ad units!

There’s not a huge choice, but it’s better than nothing, find out how to do it on the official AdSense blog.

As EasyWordpress.com points out, the new service from BlogRolled sounds a fantastic way of making a little “side” cash.

Unfortunately I’m with Gobala on this one, this is selling links again and Google are unlikely to be happy about it, I wonder if Matt Cutts will have anything to say?

What’s interesting is the pricing is determined by (in part) your Google PageRank, now my gut reaction is you won’t have a PageRank for long if you start doing this - if anyone knows better (particularly the BlogRolled team, or anyone at Google) let me know!

I run several Wordpress blogs and most of them never run the current version because I don’t have time to walk through all the upgrade process, time and time again (plus I always have to look up how I do it again as I don’t want to screw it up!)!

That was until yesterday when I found Wordpress Automatic Upgrader, here’s how simple it is:

• Download and unzip the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade zip file to your plugins directory.
• Activate Plugin.
• Go to the page specified in the plugin.
• Insert FTP details.
• Download the backup of the file system.
• Specify extra database tables to backup (I backed everything up).
• Download the backup of the database.
• Tell the plugin to use the latest release.
• Let the plugin put the site into maintenance mode.
• Let the plugin deactivate all of your plugins.
• Let the plugin upgrade your files.
• Click to upgrade your database.
• Let the plugin reactivate your plugins.
• Let the plugin take your site out of maintenance mode.
• Wait for the next Wordpress release to play with it again!

It does have an automatic mode (which I haven’t tried), but the above is the manual process and seems to work!

Interestingly it didn’t go quite so smoothly going from a Wordpress 2.3.1 blog to 2.5.1 and my plugins weren’t reactivated properly.

Definitely a worthwhile tool and will make my life so much easier!

You may remember a while back we discussed the ability to use a Wordpress plugin to find Flick Photos for your blog.

I emphasised that your blog contains adverts, that you should probably consider it commercial and only use images allowed for commercial purposes (to be on the safe side), if you felt I was being a little over the top here with my level of caution, you may find it useful to read Josh’s post about Creative Commons.

If you follow my personal blog, you’ll be aware that I’ve been keen to get a plugin that will allow me to insert Flickr photo’s to my blog posts, this all started when I read Skellie’s guide to using Incredible Flickr Images using images licensed under the Creative Commons license.

photo credit: NUCO

I wasn’t the only one and there were some half solutions around in the form of:

• J @ The Glass is Too Big’s prototype.
• EmoRate’s Photo Comment Tool.

Then Michael posted about Photo Dropper, it’s a fantastic tool that does exactly what I need.

For example, let’s have a look for elephants:

photo credit: exfordy

And a fox using a computer:

photo credit: Rob Lee

See, it’s great - that all took 2 - 3 seconds.

But Wait!

ProPhotographer posted a comment on Anne’s blog (where we’ve been discussing the plugin), about how this plugin could spell a whole host of trouble for Wordpress publishers who are less aware!

If you are using this plugin, you should make yourself aware of a few things in ProPhotographer’s post, because you’ll have no comeback on the plugin if you get into any copyright trouble - their disclaimer covers them.

I’d do a couple of things: Check the box that says you’re going to use the images commercially, because I agree with ProPhotographer - if you’ve got any ads on your site - that’s possibly commercial! ProPhotographer doesn’t say it explicitly but avoid: Street photography where the models will not have signed release forms. Trademarks and Logo’s. Pictures of People.

photo credit: laihiu

Is your blog commercial?

If it’s running adverts it could probably be described as commercial in my opinion at least, but ProPhotogapher does point out that:

That said, magazines are classed in the stock world as “Editiorial use” and you don’t need releases for editorial (supporting articles) use. Most blog images just illustrate the concept or message behind the post (like the ones I have inserted) so even though I have ads running - the posts are actually editorial comment.

The problem will come on those blogs specifically designed to sell something. A lot of webmasters are using Wordpress nowadays as its easier to get to grips with, and get a site up and running, than learning HTML from scratch. On these sites the choice of image will be crucial. Like I suggested; a site selling ringtomnes and featuring an unreleased image of a recognisable teenager on a phone would be hard pressed to say the image is not endorsing their product.

The big bottom line is:

If you use an image in a commercial context featuring a person, or a piece of property that needs a release for commercial use and you don’t have one then you’re a law-suit waiting to happen.

Remember that people!!

We’ve talked about Feedburner and Feedsmith before, but I had a site recently that I wanted to move it’s feed over to FeedBurner and was concerned that I might lose all the sites current subscribers.

It appears reading a few blogs that the redirect functionality of the plugin means that won’t happen at all! and Feedsmith, has been adopted by Feedburner itself!

Here’s what it does in the developers own words:

Using some WordPress plugin magic, and user-agent detection, this plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

There are a few issues with letting Feedburner run your feed, one being you can’t have separate feeds for separate categories (not without creating a separate Feedburner Feed for each one), this isn’t something I think I need - most of my sites are sufficiently different in content.

Converting from one to the other has taken just seven minute - it actually took longer to write this post! So what are you waiting for, do it today and take advantage of Feedburner’s features!

I run several blogs, both niche, personal and business! I probably spend more time diving in and out of WordPress than almost any other software!

I’d tried Live Writer before, way back in the beta stages and wasn’t overly impressed if I’m honest, but decided to give it another go today. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised (the previous post was written using it)!

One of the beauties of Live Writer is that I can save lots of drafts and add to them as I read more information on a subject, this could prove to be an invaluable tool when I’m fighting through my 3,500 unread posts in Google Reader!

The one thing I missed when I posted the previous post, was the ability to add tags to posts, I went in and manually added them afterwards. A bit of digging proved that this code had now been added to Wordpress Core and that I just had to go looking for the option (Insert -> Tags for those who are interested!).

Update: Interestingly the tags below don’t seem to link to themselves (they do however link to previous posts with the same tags that have been inputted to the Wordpress Tag system. Does anyone know how to make this work in Writer?

Technorati went down in my estimation after the Technorati Favourites Experiment  and now it appears in Wordpress 2.3 that the big nail went into Technorati, now Wordpress uses Google Blog Search for it’s backlinks rather than Technorati.

Most of us found Technorati through Wordpress, now you just have to rely on Google!

Internal Tags

As part of the Wordpress 2.3 release they also introduced their own tags system, more integrated maybe? But it does mean that your tags only point internally to your blog, so they are a great way to re-index your own content, but less great when it comes to finding out what other people are saying!

Steve Hudson points out that “the whole idea of tags in the first place was to create links to the larger conversation that might be going on in the blogosphere with the connector being those self same tags”, I tend to agree with him, but have found the internal linking useful from the perspective that I may list a post in one category, but give it multiple tags - if that makes sense?

Anyway, Geeky Ramblings have released a plugin that turns your WP2.3 tags back to Technorati tags! You can download it here.

John Eckman has also found that Wordpress 2.3 Tags weren’t being indexed in Tehchnorati, but believes he has a workaround for this - you should check yours!

Dashboard Links

As discussed above, people aren’t so impressed with this new move to Google providing your inbound links (via Blog Search), and Online Tech Tips, and Hack Wordpress have already found a plugin to replace them in your dashboard with the Technorati links again!

If you want a full roundup of the top 10 changes in Wordpress 2.3 I suggest you take a peek at this post “10 things you need to know about Wordpress 2.3“

Feedburner can put the word out there about your RSS Feed and allow you to get so many more subscribers it’s unbelievable. Here at Full Time Blogger, I use FeedBurner FeedSmith to get my feed all managed by Feed Burner for your viewing pleasure!

Recent changes at Feedburner (bought by Google this year) have given access to more and more stats, read more about this from Jason Van Orden and how Marshall Sponder has discovered more about his reader habits with this information.

If you’re stuck for how you can grow your subscribers on your FeedBurner Feed then take a look at these posts:

• How to Get 1,050 Subscribers in 3 Months
• How to Get More RSS Subscribers Through Feedburner