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How To: Serve Better RSS Feeds To Your Subscribers

Most of your focus on optimizing your WordPress sites is probably on the look and feel of your design and the layout of specific things. Getting that content to display as perfectly as possible. Given that fact it’s a shame we spend as close to none time on optimizing our RSS Feed output. Sure, we hook our feeds up to Feedburner, but most don’t even select the ‘Optimize Feed’ option. Which is strange considering the ratio of people that view your content via RSS versus the actual site.

RSS is supposed to deliver your content as clean as possible, but there are however a few things you can do to optimize the output of your RSS. Here a few plugins that can help you out: [Read more…] about How To: Serve Better RSS Feeds To Your Subscribers

WordPress Frameworks, Have You Taken a Closer Look Yet?

I’ve been working a lot with WordPress Theme Frameworks lately, most notably Genesis, Thematic and Hybrid, when developing themes. Well, child themes really. There are many reasons why working with child themes is a good way to start developing, but there are also some drawbacks. For me the good weighs out the bad in general, but there are situations where the old straight forward theme development method is just plain faster.

The Good

Building with child themes has a lot of powerful advantages. My favorite are:

Development Speed: Having an already working theme as a parent theme, a theme that already has been looked at from a lot of different angels as to what it should be able to do, and already some basic styling in place makes it a lot easier to quickly make some changes via the child theme style sheet.

Humor Yourself, Backup Your WordPress Site

I’m sure you’ve read about if before. Before or after a tutorial on how to improve your site with a script, plugin or just plain regular hack. Read what you ask? To backup first and foremost. As you may have noticed some sites go offline for a while due to serious hardware failure. With a proper backup, all you have to is to restore the backup. I had a similar problem to other day where updating a bunch of modified PHP files via FTP at the same time somehow screwed up the contents of these files and subsequently a lot of data. Boy was I glad I backed up…

Backing up your software sounds like a chore to most of us out there, but I guarantee you you will thank yourself for doing it plus there a plenty of solutions to automate it.

Perhaps you’re not really sure when to backup and when not? Here’s just a few things you could be doing that in my opinion requires a backup first: [Read more…] about Humor Yourself, Backup Your WordPress Site

Edit Images in WordPress

The best way to add a bit of color to your site is by making good use of great imagery. Finding matching images for your posts can be difficult every now and then, but getting those images to show in a consistent manner throughout your site can be a pain. What I mean specifically is when you have finally found a matching image it most likely will not have the perfect resolution.

Perhaps you have noticed here on BloggingPro most images in post do not exceed the 240px range, but of course not all images can be found in exact that width. Most of the time you need to crop or resize those images you found to the proper width size.

Working on Your WordPress Site Behind The Curtains

A lot of times I hear people asking how to best approach fiddling around with certain design elements in their current theme without their visitors seeing any mistakes they make. A different version of the same question is about wanting to implement a complete new design and layout and optimize it to your liking. Also without you bothering your regular visitors. There is a very simple solution for that that requires a only a few simple steps.

Just a Few Steps

The only thing you need to do for this to work is installing the Theme Test Drive. There is a different way of seeing how your site would look like in a new a new theme, by the way. [Read more…] about Working on Your WordPress Site Behind The Curtains

Adding Pages to Your RSS Feed in WordPress

We all like to be kept up-to-date on our favorite WordPress sites. The best way to do so is to subscribe to the RSS feed. Unless you’re using a plugin such as Feedsmith which redirects all your feeds to your Feedburner feed, you have a lot of options to subscribe to. You have the general site feed, of course, but also the comments feed and the category feeds. But.. what you don’t have is a feed for pages should you as a company decide to only use WordPress with static pages and not with a blog.

Now a while back this would’ve not been the most interesting problem in need of a solution, but since WordPress is being used as CMS more and more and thus only using static pages, a proper solution is in need.

[Read more…]

Everything You Wanted To Know About Custom Post Types

By now you should be aware that WordPress 3.0 comes shipped with Custom Post Types. It’s a feature that may not be easy to grasp at first, but it holds almost infinite power over what you can do with WordPress. Custom Post Types are not set in stone as to what they exactly are. It’s more important you realize that they can represent any type of content you want. WordPress already ships with several post types such as posts, pages, attachments and even revisions, so it’s basically up to your imagination what you can do with it.

There are three sources about Custom Post Types I think you all should read to get a better grasp of what it can do for you. I’ve heard people say that the new WordPress 3.0 Custom Post Types feature is really not all that important, but I’d like to show them different by presenting you these three great sources. [Read more…] about Everything You Wanted To Know About Custom Post Types