Zack Live

Video Tutorials for New Bloggers

Zack — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 12:24:07 +0000

It’s kinda to late for me, but maybe useful for new bloggers. BecomeABlogger.com offers some FREE videos to help new bloggers, if you are new to blogging world, you should check it out. And here is the first video from BecomeABlogger.com

Nice Guide for WordPress Forum Users

Zack — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 18:20:41 +0000

Jeff Chandler wrote a great post for WordPress forum users, if you are new to WordPress forum, you may want to read it, Check it out here.

Four WordPress Theme Frameworks

Zack — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:35:15 +0000

I found four WordPress theme frameworks which worth to try out.

Hybrid
Hybrid is a WordPress theme framework designed with content in mind. There is no other theme that will display your content in a meaningful way like this one does. It’s all about getting your information out there to the world. Without all the fuss. That’s what Hybrid does.
Thematic
This is more than just a WordPress theme: Thematic is a highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins and more. The coding, functionality and support rivals the best in “premium” themes. With one, important, difference—Thematic is completely free and open source.
WP Framework
WP Framework is a “blank” WordPress theme that empowers you to create awesome WordPress Themes in little to no time!
Sandbox
The Sandbox is a powerful tool available for WordPress theme designers and developers. The Sandbox can be easily designed just with CSS, so beginners will feel comfortable not bothering with PHP.

Experienced developers and designers can accomplish almost anything with minimal work, thanks to the rich, semantic markup and profusion of classes dynamically generated by the Sandbox.

WordPress Plugin Updates for 11/27

Zack — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 10:26:56 +0000

New Plugins

WP-Niceforms

Niceforms is a script that will replace the most commonly used form elements with custom designed ones.

K2 Hook Up

K2 Hook Up exposes the seven hooks in K2 theme to the admin as friendly input boxes, where you place any HTML, CSS, JavaScript or PHP code (including template tags, other WordPress functions, or even code from other plugins) that you like.

Custom Post Template

Provides a drop-down to select different templates for posts from the post edit screen. The templates replace single.php for the specified post.

SuperSlider-Show

Animated Gallery slideshow uses Mootools 1.2 javascript replaces WordPress gallery with a slideshow.

Use Google Libraries

A number of the javascript libraries distributed with WordPress are also hosted on Google’s AJAX Libraries API. This plugin allows your WordPress site to use the content distribution network side of Google’s AJAX Library API, rather than serving these files from your WordPress install directly.

Chitika | Premium

This plugin will automate adding Chitika|Premium to your blog posts. Chitika|Premium is an AdSense Alternative/Compatible search targeted ad solution.

AmazonFeed

This plugin enables you to automatically advertise products from Amazon.com which are specifically related to the topic you are writing about.

Addynamo

Display Addynamo ads before, after or in the middle of a post without modify the theme. This plugin inserts and embeds the code into your website.

Simple Social Bookmarking Plugin

Will add bookmark icon for each post and page to share with popular social bookmarking sites.

Updated Plugins

Webcollage

Displays a collage or quilt of screen shots of the websites that you link or specify in your WordPress blogroll. After installing and activating the plugin, insert the tag “[webcollage]” (without quotes) in any post or page where you’d like to display the collage. Webcollage uses websnapr.com’s screen shot generation service.

FTP Plugin for WP Database Backup Plugin

This plugin adds a fourth way to save the database backup files from the WP DB Backup Plugin of Austin Matzko, Scott Merril and other authors. With the standard WP Database Backup plugin you can save the database tables of your weblog a file. This backup file can stored on the server of your weblog, send to an email account or saved (manually) to your local harddisk.

Viper’s Video Quicktags

Just simply click one of the new buttons that this plugin adds to the write screen (rich editor included) and then paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box — easy as that. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more. Your site will even stay (X)HTML valid unlike with the code provided by most video sites.

JS AntiSpam

Simple antispam plugin without questions on Javascript-solution. Without JS-Solutions give it an textbox.

Breadcrumb NavXT

Adds breadcrumb navigation showing the visitor’s path to their current location.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

Stumble! for WordPress

Stumble! for WordPress extends WordPress to support a “random article” feature, similar to StumbleUpon’s StumbleThru and Wikipedia’s (Mediawiki’s) random article feature.

CompactRSS

This plug-in makes it possible to exclude certain parts of your posts in your feeds.

[Via WebblogToolsCollection]

WordPress Plugins Update 11/24

Zack — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:02:13 +0000

New Plugins

Strip

Strip! is a WordPress plugin that allows you hide links from a given comment. Unlike other plugins that do the same purpose, you can restore the links anytime you want.

JournalPress

A cross-poster supporting multiple LiveJournal Server journals.

Speed Test

This widget makes it possible that any visitor of your blog can test his bandwidth speed. The widget ist hosted on Amazon S3 storage and checks the speed from the nearest server worldwide. (Page in German)

Quizzin

Quizzin lets you add quizzes to your blog. This plugin is designed to be as easy to use as possible. Quizzes, questions and answers can be added from the admin side. This will appear in your post if you add a small HTML snippet in your post.

My Tag Cloud

My tag cloud provides you with a widget that actually gives you the ability to list the tags of your posts in a diiferent way than a tag cloud.

Exhibit to WP Gallery

Convert your ancient Exhibit 1.1b galleries to modern WordPress attachments / galleries

No Follow Tags In Posts

No Follow Tags In Posts Links searches for links to large websites that use the ‘nofollow’ tags for external links, and puts the same tag on your links to those sites.

Gravatar Shortcode

This is a simple plugin that just lets you use a shortcode in your WordPress Pages or Posts to quickly and easily insert a Gravatar.

Delete-Revision

Delete revision post from Database.

Krusty MSIE Body Classes

Once activated this plugin will use the ‘body_class’ filter to add Internet Explorer browser classes to the body tag of the sites front end, (public), pages. The reason this is needed is because Internet Explorer has a long history of incorrectly rendering css styles.

Updated Plugins

Hide Admin Icons

Hide Admin Icons hides the admin icons when the menu bar is expanded. The icons remain visible when the menu is in its collapsed state.

Featuring CountComments

Counts the number of comments by user IDs or author names (display name).

GD Star Rating

Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating system for pages and/or posts in your blog. Also includes the widget for displaying votes and rating statistics for all posts and pages with votes.

ZdMultilang

ZdMultilang is a Multilingual plugin for WordPress allowing you to blog in more than one language. You can define multiple languages and translate posts/tags/categories using the interface that will be added to your blog’s administration panel.

Albumize

By organizing your galleries as multiple child pages of one parent page, you can use this plugin to see a preview thumbnail and description of each gallery.

WP Widget Cache

Cache the output of your blog widgets. Usually it will significantly reduce the SQL queries to your database and speed up your site.

Secure WordPress

Secure your WordPress Installation with small functions.

ProjectManager

This plugin can be used to manage any number of projects with recurrent datasets (e.g. portrait system, dvd collection)

[Via WebblogToolsCollection]

How to Choose Paid Blogging Networks

Zack — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 20:10:53 +0000

After reading A Ddfinitive List of Paid Blogging Websites by Maki, I realized there are so many paid blogging websites out there for blogggers to pick up and dive in. I tried to categorize websites in that list for helping bloggers to choose the right one. All these websites below support PayPal.

First Class: there are three websites in this category, which are websites I am using now. This first one is PayPerPost. As Maki said, “ If you only want to sign up for one paid blogging network, I would highly recommend using PayPerPost above all the others.” This is the largest paid blogging network, offers a lot of assignments for you, and also pays good. The other two websites are ReviewMe and SponsoredReview. These two networks are include in first class because of their high payment and offering enough jobs for bloggers.

Fast Payment: These websites are good for beginners to test if paid blogging networks suit you, because they pay within one or two week. Blogitive pays weekly with a flat rate of $5 per post; Smorty also pays weekly with $1 more than Blogitive, $6 flat rate. Blogging Ads pays weekly. PayU2Blog pays every two week.

Worth Trying: the first one I will suggest LinkWorth. Because you can not only write sponsored posts, but also sell contextual links. Other websites worth trying are Blogsvertise, LoudLaunch and BloggerWave.

Paid blogging network is the easiest and fastest way for you to get paid by blogging, which may also encourage you in blogging. It’s good for beginners, you may like to try paid blogging networks before you find better ways to make money from blogging.

Auguries of Innocence

Zack — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:57:02 +0000

Poem of today:

Auguries of Innocence

( William Blake 1757~1827 )

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

Added Four WordPress Plugins to My Blog

Zack — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:48:12 +0000

Just finished reading Darren’s post about WordPress plugins, I found four plugins are useful for my blog.

Simple Tags: the most attractive function to me is the Tag Suggestion. Suggestions come from Yahoo, Tag The Net and your old tags. Another useful function is the Auto Tags.
WordPress.com Stats: I have Google Analytics on my blog, but it’s said that WordPress.com Stats updates in real time, I would like to give it a shot.
WP-Polls: it’s time to poll. This is an Ajax poll system, very easy to use. Update: I found that the WP-Polls can only use in Sidebar, not for single post. And you need to create a page for it. I don’t like that, so I deactivated this plugin.
Ajax Edit Comments: allow users to edit their own comments for a limited time.

I will create a poll for my WordPress Theme, Black n White, to find out what visitors think about it. You can check out my theme and poll it here.

New Black and White WordPress Theme

Zack — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:40:44 +0000

This is my second WordPress theme, I called it BlacknWhite because of the main colors of the theme are black and white. I created this theme according to l.m.orchard’s blog. I added some small icons to improve the design. It’s released under GPL license, you can download it for free.

If you found any bug or you want to say something about the theme, please leave a comment below.

Theme Name: BlacknWhite
Theme Version: 1.0.2
Theme Author: Zack
Theme Category: Two Column Themes
Theme Properties: 2 columns, Fixed width, Widget ready, Right sidebar, Black, White

Download Here: BlacknWhite WordPress Theme

This theme is just been accepted by WordPress Official Theme Directory, you can now download and preview it from WordPress.org:

Download

Preview

Update:

06/11/2008: Fixed the little bug of sidebar in single page.

How to Add Twitter Account to SuSuNa.com

Zack — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 04:50:50 +0000

SuSuNa.com is a micro-blogging website based on Laconi.ca. SuSuNa.com supports Twitter, you can add your Twitter account to SuSuNa.com, everytime you post a message on SuSuNa.com, the message will be sent to Twitter, too.

It’s very easy to integrate Twitter to SuSuNa.com, click Setting one the menu, and then select the Twitter tag. You can now enter your Twitter account and password, remember to check the first two options. You will get the same functions as Twitter.

Try to post a message on SuSuNa.com, and then go to check your Twitter account, you can see your message from Laconica.

Zack Live

Video Tutorials for New Bloggers

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Auguries of Innocence

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