RSS feeds are the default choice if someone wants to follow your blog updates. But there are a lot of people who don’t know anything about feed, RSS, Atom and so on.

So, why don’t you offer a newsletter to let them follow yor updates via email?

There are several services to accomplish this task, some of them are free and some are paid services.

During past years I’ve tried lot of them but in the end I prefer to choose an highly reliable and customizabile solutions like Aweber.

Aweber lets you create a lot of different newsletter and offers all the tools you need to track subscribers and design web forms to allow your visitors to subscribe to your mailing lists.

They offer lots of informations and tips to empower your newsletter and achieve best results.

Aweber offers various pricing plans, the basic one starts from $19/month and it’s perfect igf you have less than 500 subscribers.

Sending newsletter isn’t the only service they offer, Aweber has also an amazing analytics platform that lets you track the performance of all the emails you send to your subscriber.

My preferred Aweber service is called Blog broadcast, also known as RSS to Email. It creates broadcast newsletters automatically from existing blog RSS content feeds or other sources of RSS and XML content. You can choose the day of the week and the hour to send your newsletter and decide to send it when number of new items in your feed is at least X. You can also enable click tracking and choose from an huge gallery of templates or create a new one.

Best newsletter service for blogger is a post from: WordPress World

If you want to use jQuery JavaScript library in your WordPress theme, the best choice is to load the version hosted on Google servers instead of the local one shipped by default with WordPress.

To load jQuery from Google you have to edit the functions.php file of your theme adding these lines of code:

if( !is_admin()){
   wp_deregister_script('jquery');
   wp_register_script('jquery', ("http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js"), false, '1.3.2');
   wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
}

Include jQuery from Google in WordPress is a post from: WordPress World

I’ve tried several hosting companies during last years and eApps is one of the best I’ve found. They offer a lot of different hosting plans from $9.90/month to $225/month and beyond. eApps offers both Virtual Private Server and Dedicated Server. Also on cheap plans eApps offer ssh root access to your VPS so you can manage everything you want.

Their customer support is excellent, it’s very skilled and fast to respond to your questions. On eApps you can find the perfect solution for Business Hosting, Developer Hosting or Reseller Hosting.

eApps hosting offers support for many software, application server and web framework. Some of them are:

• Django
• Drupal
• GlassFish
• Tomcat
• osCommerce
• Ruby On Rails
• WordPress
• Zend Framework
• Zend Server

eApps control panel is superb, you can do all the basic tasks in a rapid way: create new website, configure mailboxes or prepare new databases.

eApps offers some business services like business email hosting and Website tuning and optimization.

Web hosting review: eApps business hosting is a post from: WordPress World

Thesis is a great theme for WordPress (this blog uses it ) but I don’t like the way it handles the meta tag description on all the Tag archive pages. In fact, Thesis repeats the blog descrption on all these pages.

In order to avoid this, you have to edit the file \lib\classes\head.php (around line 104) of your Thesis theme.

You have to change it from:

elseif (is_category()) {
				$category_description = trim(strip_tags(stripslashes(category_description())));
				$meta['description'] = (strlen($category_description)) ? '<meta name="description" content="' . $category_description . '" />' : '<meta name="description" content="' . single_cat_title('', false) . '" />';
			}

to:

elseif (is_category()) {
				$category_description = trim(strip_tags(stripslashes(category_description())));
				$meta['description'] = (strlen($category_description)) ? '<meta name="description" content="' . $category_description . '" />' : '<meta name="description" content="' . single_cat_title('', false) . '" />';
			}
elseif (is_tag()) {
				$meta['description'] = '';
			}

This code will remove the meta tag description on every tag archive page. Because it’s better to remove it than have the same description on all pages.

Let me know your impression about it.

How to avoid the same meta description on Tag archives with Thesis theme is a post from: WordPress World

Are a you a Thesis user? Do you wanna put a custom image and a banner in your blog header? Follow this tutorial to learn how to do it.

Visit the Thesis Option page of you blog and deselect these checkboxes: Show site name in header and Show site tagline in header.

Edit your custom_functions.php file ed insert the following code:

function my_header() { ?>
<div id="sitelogo">
	<a href="<?php bloginfo('url') ?>"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory') ?>/custom/images/Sitelogo.png" width="610" height="100" alt="Whatever you want" /></a>
</div>
<div id="leaderboard_ad">
	<!-- Insert your banner code here (234x60) -->
</div>
<?php }
add_action('thesis_hook_header', 'my_header');

You must have Sitelogo.png image in the /custom/images/ folder of your Thesis theme. In this case the image size is 610×100 pixel. Obviously you can choose any other size but don’t forget to change the code in custom_functions.php.

You have to edit also your custom.css file (you can find it in custom folder of Thesis theme) and insert these lines:

.custom #my_header {
width: 100%;
float: left;
}

.custom #sitelogo {
float: left; height: 100px; width: 610px; padding: 0px;
}

.custom #leaderboard_ad {
float: left;
width: 234px;
height: 60px;
margin-top: 26px;
margin-left: 116px;}

That’s all, now you have a custom header with your logo on the left and a banner on the right.

Of course, you must adapt image and banner size according to your needs.

Custom image header for Thesis theme in WordPress is a post from: WordPress World

WordPress 2.9 has a small bug with the cron jobs feature, so scheduling posts ahead of the time was not working correctly. But WordPress community acted pretty fast to fix everything, and the new release is already available.

You should see a notice to upgrade on your dashboard. Otherwise you can point your browser on WordPress.org and download version 2.9.1 manually.

Don’t wait any further and update

WordPress 2.9.1 fixes cron job error is a post from: WordPress World

WordPress 2.8.6 is out. This release fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges.  If you have untrusted authors on your blog, upgrading to 2.8.6 is recommended.

The first problem is an XSS vulnerability in Press This discovered by Benjamin Flesch.  The second problem, discovered by Dawid Golunski, is an issue with sanitizing uploaded file names that can be exploited in certain Apache configurations.

WordPress 2.8.6 is a post from: WordPress World

Article Directory is a new plugin for WordPress that let you show a list of articles in parent and child categories.

Here it is a list of the features of this plugin:

• Amount of articles in parent and child categories.
• Category description in link title.
• Showing the empty categories.
• Using hierarchy for subcategories.
• Exclude selected categories.
• Simple and handy design using CSS. The structure of categories is the multilevel list which can be altered easily with CSS, as you need. The parent category have the container to mark it out with CSS as a parent.
• Support WordPress starting from version 2.3 and above.
• Parent category is showing amount of articles in subcategories. The character also include the number of articles in this parent category.
• Ability to display the specified amount of child categories (2nd level).
• Ability to display categories on specified amount of columns.
• Ability to hide all subcategories.
• Ability to exclude the child categories articles from the parent categories archive pages.
• Ability to add icons for parent categories using CSS.
• Ability to get article source code.

You can grab this plugin from this site.

Article Directory for WordPress is a post from: WordPress World

Here’s a tip from Brad Ney about how to speed up WordPress load times using web server compression:

First of all, upload a test file like “test.php” on your web server.  This file must contain this line:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

View this file with a web browser and check if “zlib” is enabled by your hosting provider.

It it’s ok, place the following code in your header (above the DOCTYPE):

<?php
ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 'On');
ini_set('zlib.output_compression_level', '1');
?>

That’s all! Test if everything is working correctly.

Another way, probably safer than this one, is to use Wp Super Cache plugin and enable “Super Cache Compression” in its control panel.

Check out Top Referers to see where the visitors of your website are coming from.

Speed up WordPress using compression is a post from: WordPress World

A new version of WordPress is available.  If you’re running a WordPress blog, you’d better get on it.

The headline changes in this release are:

• A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
• Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
• Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
• Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

WordPress 2.8.5 is out is a post from: WordPress World