Suffering from a writer’s block? WordPress can help you unblock it. Automattic, the company that provides you your favorite blogging software, has acquired Plinky, a service that stimulates your writing chords by asking you a new question everyday.

Does it really help you get over your writer’s block? Depends actually. I think it’s more of a “meme” service where multiple bloggers are given a topic to write on. It comes with social media features: you can promote your Plinky (sounds kinky, actually) inspired blog posts using your favorite social media and networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, and if course, it comes fully integrated with WordPress now.

Aside from text you can also post videos, images, your playlists and even maps.

Again, does it help your writer’s block? You suffer a writer’s block when you don’t seem to be able to write. It’s like, you know what you want to write but somehow you cannot put your thoughts to words and the more effort you put in, the more attrophied the entire experience becomes.

More than helping you get over with your writer’s block, Plinky stimulates you by giving you different writing ideas everyday, which is good for writing/blogging practice. Blogging after all is all about writing something new and fresh regularly and then sharing it with people who are interested in it. Besides, the success of WordPress depends on how many people blog regularly. Although it’s the best blogging tool available, the core base is going to saturate after a while. It’s important that old bloggers keep blogging and new prospective bloggers are encouraged to write and share more.

Wondering how to upload images and photographs to your WordPress blog without having to use your FTP program again and again? Images are a great way of enhancing your blog posts and if you are a power blogger you must always be looking for ways to speeding up your repetitive tasks like publishing blog posts and uploading images to your WordPress blog.

If you use Live Writer to publish your blog posts you can use its inbuilt feature to upload images and photographs. Read how to upload images and photos to your WordPress blog with Live Writer. Once you have submitted your FTP details and the default image folder path, it’s simply a matter of inserting images just the way you may do using a Word Processor. Even other blog editors may have a similar feature.

Even if you directly publish your blog posts using the default WordPress dashboard you can easily upload your photos and images and insert them into your blog posts directly. While editing or creating blog posts, you simply need to click this icon/button:

This brings up the window that let’s you upload, enter various attributes, set image orientation and size, and then insert the image into your WordPress blog post:

You can choose file by clicking the “Choose File” button and when you click the upload button after a while you get the following screen (click image to enlarge):

As you can see, all the information boxes are self-explanatory. If you scroll down a bit you can just copy the URL and then save the image so that can use it later on.

WordPress released the final version of 3.0 (code named Thelonious) yesterday and we have started upgrading all our blogs. Why should you always upgrade to the latest version. For security reasons, if nothing else.

Every new release of WordPress plugs the security holes that may have existed in the previous version [read how to make your WordPress blog more secure]. So even if you’re not looking for new features, installing the latest version always increases the safety of your blog.

BEFORE UPGRADING make sure you have backed up your existing blog posts, in case something goes wrong (nothing should go wrong, but then, you never know).

Upgrading to WordPress 3.0 (Thelonious)

You can upgrade to WordPress 3.0 in two ways: through your Dashboard and by uploading the files manually. Whenever you log into your Dashboard at the top you’ll be able to read “WordPress 3.0 is available! Please update now.” By clicking the link you can start the upgrade process. If your current version is very old then you may not be able to upgrade to the latest version automatically.

Your web host may also help you upgrade to the latest version. Some web hosts automatically take care of your WordPress updates.

If you are comfortable using an FTP program (FileZilla, for instance) you can download the version 3.0 to your local hard drive from this link. You’ll need to uncompress it.

Then launch your FTP program and go the folder where you’ve installed your WordPress blog. Assuming you are using FileZilla, the left hand side window contains your local files and the right hand side window contains the file on the remote server. Go to the folder (on the left hand side) where you have uncompressed the WordPress files.

Select all but LEAVE wp-content and wp-config.php in case it exists. This is because wp-content contains your themes and plugins — overwriting this will completely destroy your current blog layout and other settings. wp-config.php contains settings that connects your blog to your MySQL database.

On the right hand side, go to the folder where you have installed your blog. Upload the new files.

Then in your browser window, type http://yourdomain.com/yourblog/wp-admin/upgrade.php and press Enter. If you have installed your blog in the root folder you can simply use http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php.

It’ll ask you to update your database and let it do. That’s it. Once you have followed these steps you have upgraded to WordPress 3.0.

An SEO-related issue with WordPress is it uses the blog post title as the webpage title too. Wondering what’s the difference? A blog post title is the big text you see above every post content. The page title is the text you see in the title bar of your browser window.

Whereas people prefer to use enticing and catchy blog post titles they may not carry the SEO qualities that can fetch better search engine rankings [read how to search engine optimize your blog post titles http://www.howtoplaza.com/how-to-search-engine-optimize-seo-your-blog-post-titles/]. You need to find a way where you can use different webpage titles for your WordPress blog posts.

Fortunately, there are many theme frameworks that let you enter webpage titles that are different from the blog post titles, and one of them is the WordPress Thesis theme.

Thesis allows you to enter custom title tags for your webpages that are different from your blog post titles. As you can see here you can also add custom Description and Keywords too.

If you don’t want to spend money on a commercial WordPress theme framework you can use the All-In-One-SEO-pack plugin. Aside from helping you search engine optimize your blog it also lets you enter custom webpage titles that can be totally different from your blog post titles. Once you install the plugin and tweak it the extra fields appear where you are creating the news blog post or editing an existing one.

Using these fields you can have different, customized webpage titles for your WordPress blog posts.

By default WordPress shows “admin” when you publish blog posts. That is, when you have installed WordPress on your own and you are publishing blog posts on your own, unless you make some changes, with every blog post you see “admin” instead of your name.

You can remove “admin” and show your first name or full name instead. You can either create another admin-level account with a different username and then delete the account having admin as username (all your blog posts will be allocated to the new admin), or you can simply make changes in your user information: this is the preferred way of removing “admin” from your blog posts and showing your name.

The username in WordPress cannot be changed, but you can certainly decide how the name of the author — including yours — is displayed with the blog posts. Go to your user management section from the WordPress admin:

From the available list of authors and admins decide to Edit admin. If the First Name and Last Name fields are blank, enter the right information there. You may also like to enter a nickname but this is not necessary. Then click the Update Profile button. The information will be updated but remain on the same page. Scroll down to the section that says, “Display name publicly as”. This is where you can decide what to display instead of the plain “admin”:

This is how you remove “admin” from your WordPress blog posts and use the actual name instead.

You need to customize your WordPress theme if you have downloaded one of those free themes available on thousands of websites, to have a unique look. This is primarily the greatest reason why WordPress is so popular among the blogging fraternity: little knowledge of CSS and PHP lets you create killer theme layouts in a very short span of time.

There are different ways you can customize your WordPress theme. Basic features of a WordPress theme may involve:

• The header (logo, top navigation, etc.)
• The side bar (containing recent posts, categories, archives and widgets, etc.)
• The footer
• The content area (chronologically arranged posts, single posts, category or tag wise posts, etc.)

These features are available with almost every WordPress theme. The most common files that your theme folder may contain are:

• index.php
• style.css
• single.php
• page.php
• comments.php
• search.php
• header.php
• sidebar.php
• footer.php
• 404.php

A typical screenshot of your theme files may look like:

The path to your WordPress theme files in almost all the cases is going to be:

../blog_path/wp-content/themes/current_theme

If you have installed your blog in the root folder itself the path is simply going to be:

/wp-content/themes/current_theme

The best way of customizing a WordPress theme is installing the blog first on your local computer; then you can see the changes live without affecting the blog running on the server.

Customizing the WordPress theme CSS

You can either customize your WordPress theme CSS using your favorite desktop text editor or you can straightaway edit the file on the server, using the WordPress admin interface. You can access the online theme editor through the Appearance section in your Admin area:

Using your CSS file you can decide how your headlines, content text, side bar and various elements should look. Prior knowledge of CSS is required.

Instead of using the WordPress editor you can also use the FireBug FireFox plugin…you’ll actually need to install it and see it yourself how cool this is.

Customizing the WordPress theme content

The main page, home page, or the index page can be customized in many ways. A typical way of displaying the home page is displaying n number of — usually 15 or 10 — blog posts in a chronological order, showing the latest post at the top. You can change this number by simply clicking Reading in the Settings section.

Here you can also decide whether you want your home page to look like a convention blog (with multiple blog posts) or you want a static page as your home page [read how to create a website with WordPress].

Instead of showing entire blog posts on the home page you can also show just the headline and the excerpts. A typical WordPress home page loop goes like this:

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
        <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
                <h2><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
                <?php the_content(); ?>
        <?php endwhile; ?>

        <?php else : ?>
        <h2 class=”center”>Not Found</h2>
        <p class=”center”>Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.</p>
        <?php get_search_form(); ?>
<?php endif; ?>

So instead of the_content() you can have the_excerpt(). You can also use the “more” button in the post editing window (in WordPress admin) to insert a tag that shows only a particular length of your post and then adds something like “Read more…” at the bottom of the post.

You can read more on how to customize your WordPress theme on this Mashable blog post.

Many people prefer to publish dates on top of their WordPress blogs to let their visitors know exactly when the blog post was published. The format of the date in WordPress can be changed according to your preference, or the way your theme has been designed. For example, you can display your dates using the following formats:

• June 01, 2010
• Tuesday, June 01, 2010
• Tue-05-01-10

There can be umpteen formatting combinations. Just make sure they’re easily understandable.

As you know WordPress is built using PHP so many of its functions resemble PHP functions. You can see various PHP date formatting options on this PHP link.

In WordPress the easiest way of changing your date format is through your admin dashboard. After logging in, go to Settings and under Settings click General. Scroll down a bit until you reach the Date section.

If you don’t need anything complicated you can simply use the radio button to select a particular format. If you want to do your own thing, then you can enter the parameters in the last radio button. Different letter, upper case and lower case, represent various options for printing days, months and years. Separators like dash, comma, colon appear as it is. Some of the formatting alphabets are:

• j = The day of the month without leading zero (1, 2, …, 31)
• d = The day of the month with leading zero (01, 02, …, 31)
• S = The ordinal suffix like like st (as in 1st), or nd (as in 2nd), so “The jS of F” gives “The 1st of June”
• F = The full name of the month
• m = Numeric month with leading zero (01, 02, …, 12)
• n = Numeric month without leading zero (1, 2, …, 12)
• M = The first three letters of the textual month (Jan, Feb, …, Dec)
• Y = The year, all four digits
• y = The year with the last two digits
• l (small L) = The full name of the weekday
• D = The first three letters of the name of the weekday (Sun, Mon…)

You can use the various combinations of these letters to format dates in your WordPress blog.

You need to search engine optimize (SEO) your WordPress blog if you want to get quality traffic from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! Search. These days there’re lots of noises being raised about people getting too obsessed with SEO and neglecting the core issue — the content quality. Although the quality of your content is the most important factor when it comes to publishing a successful blog, this success depends a lot on how much traffic you can get from various major search engines, including social media search engines.

Here’s how you can maximize search engine traffic if you’re using WordPress to publish your blog.

Use a plug-in like All-in-one SEO pack

The All-in-one SEO pack is a great WordPress plugin that can immensely boost your search engine optimization effort. It’s not like magic happens all of a sudden the moment you install this plugin. Once you have it activated, you can enter your own page title, description and keywords instead of WordPress picking them up for you. So whatever zany blog post headline you might be having, you can enter an SEO-friendly title using this plugin.

Use a search engine friendly WordPress theme

There are many themes, the Thesis theme, for example, that allow you to create highly search engine optimized blog posts by arranging different bits of useful information in different sections. The basic idea is, have a light theme so that the search engine crawlers can quickly access and assess your core content.

Keep your WordPress theme light

More bells and whistles means you need more stuff like JavaScript libraries and very huge CSS files. This needlessly increases the load time of your blog and these days search engines like Google have begun to penalize websites that load slow and seem heavy.

Create theme based content

Theme based content too is a big part of search engine optimization. When you create theme based content you stick to your core keywords and key phrases and this fetches you higher rankings because the search engines think you specialize in that theme.

Use your keywords in your titles

Your blog post title is the first thing people see when your link appears on the search engine result pages. And since the search engine users tend to click more on links that carry the words they’ve just used to conduct the search, the search engines take the words appearing in your title very seriously.

Use search engine friendly URLs

In WordPress you can easily create search engine friendly URLs by going to the permalilnks section (under Settings) and changing your permalink settings. The search engines don’t normally prefer URLs that are dynamically generated, something like http://yourblog.com/index.php?p=56. A better way of having a URL is http://yourblog.com/blog-post-title.

Interlink whenever possible

Link to your other blog posts whenever possible because this way even the content that remains hidden from search engines and human visitors is highlighted and consequently they too get some SEO boost.

Do you know some tricks to search engine optimize WordPress blogs? Please do share them in the comments section.

Would you like to use the latest FaceBook Like button with your WordPress Thesis theme? Although there are multiple FaceBook Like button plugins available, it’s good to be able to tweak the source code, especially when you are using the friendly WordPress Thesis theme.

Unlike putting the FaceBook Like button on a regular WordPress theme, in Thesis there is no need to change the single.php source code. All you have to do is add a new hook. Wondering what a Thesis hook is? Here’s a good reference

Hooks are basically functions that you add to the various portions of your blog. For example, the FaceBook Like button code will go into a hook that handles stuff that occurs after the blog post, after the text, but before the comments.

The WordPress Thesis hooks are edited in a file called custom_functions.php and this file resides in the custom folder of your active Thesis theme. So open your custom_functions.php file and add the following code:

function facebook_like_button()
{
        if(is_single())
        {
?>
                <iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php the_permalink() ?>&layout=standard&show_faces=true&width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light” scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ allowTransparency=”true” style=”border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:60px”></iframe>
<?php
                
        }
}

As you can see, is_single() takes care that the core activates only when a single post is being displayed. After creating the hook, you need to add this to the Thesis hook collection. For that, you need the following command:

add_action(‘thesis_hook_after_post’, ‘facebook_like_button’);

That’s it.

The FaceBook Like button lets your WordPress blog visitors promote your links from within your link, without you having to first post the link on FaceBook. According to the recent figures available on various blogs and websites more than 5,00,000 websites and blogs so far have put various FaceBook buttons on their websites.

A FaceBook like button appears like this:

A great thing about using a WordPress blog is that it’s very easy to change the source files. Although you can use plugins to activate the Like button but when you can alter the source code you can be more flexible about exactly where the button appears on your web page or blog post.

For this particular section, go to the folder of your current blog theme. The path should be

your-blog-path/wp-content/themes/your-current-theme

You’ll need to edit your single.php because this is the file that handles individual blog post publishing. Normally, social media buttons appear at the end of the post content. You can insert the FaceBook Like code after this line:

<?php the_content(); ?>

And this is the code that you insert:

<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php the_permalink() ?>&layout=standard&show_faces=true&width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light” scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ allowTransparency=”true” style=”border:none; overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:60px”></iframe>

You can read more about the Like button on this FaceBook link.