So if you haven’t Akismet running on your blog and you want to have a spam free blog, then you really should give it a try.  The installation is very easy; Download the plugin (via the plugin page in the admin part if you’re using Wordpress), get your API Key & activate Akismet and you’re good to go!

I don’t know why, but some theme authors embed links in an encoded footer. Now it’s not that we don’t like to give credits to the theme authors, but what if the theme author has placed a lot of sponsor links which doesn’t have to do with your blog (or with the theme author!) or what if you want to add some information to the footer? When a theme’s footer is encoded, then this is just impossible. However you can remove this encoding by following the next steps:

1. Go to your index.php file
2. Find a line that says:
   <?php get_footer(); ?>
3. Place the following marker text above the line:
   <!-- Evil Footer Devil FOUND -->
4. Place the following marker text below the link:
   <!-- Evil Footer Devil BEGONE -->
5. Now save the index.php file and view the source by pressing CTRL+U in FireFox.
6. Now look for the HTML code between those two markers and copy it.
7. Make a copy of your existing footer.php file (or just paste the HTML code in your existing footer.php file) and save it.
8. Now you’re able to change the links etc which was encoded in the first place.

NOTE: Don’t forget to insert the <?php wp_footer(); ?> before </body> tag.

I’ve used the method above and it did the job for me. Perhaps this might be handy for you too!

In the past I had tried some plugins but they didn’t do the job as I would like to. While surfing on the net today, I found the solution to my “problem”. The solution is actually a plugin called: Miniposts. Kinda obvious! So from today on you’ll see my 5 newest miniposts in the tabbed sidebar which can be found to your right!

So why display miniposts?
Well, minipost can be very handy in case you like to share a link, video or anything else to your readers and you just don’t have the time to write an post about it.  You can also use miniposts to let your visitors know that there’s a new post on one of your other blogs etc. With other words, you can use it for almost anything!

In case you would like to have miniposts on your blog too, just head over to the plugin’s page and follow the instructions there!

Anyway, in the meanwhile I had some time to update the gallery page! A lot of people and friends didn’t liked the way the gallery worked and asked me if I could change it… I actually hadn’t thought well about this so I had to look into it. The problem was that I used the build-in gallery option in Wordpress and linked/opened the picture in the attachment page. By doing the whole site needed to be reloaded over and over again which is actually pretty annoying and slow, right? So I had to look for another option.

A picture of Jannie and me on our holiday in El Gouna (Egypt).

After giving it some thoughts and playing around with a dozen of plugins, I actually found the perfect solution: Slimbox!
Slimbox is a visual clone of the popular Lightbox 2 script and to be honest.. this wasn’t actually what I was thinking about when I started but I really like this plugin! It works really simple (download, install and you’re good to go!) and it’s really fast.

Now you are able to view and navigate between the pictures in the gallery very quickly! Give it a try and let me know what you think!

So when you haven’t updated the feed links in your header people will end up subscribing to different feeds and your subscriber stats might become incorrect. To make sure that the feed link in the header is also pointing to your Feedburner feed you need to remove the last 2 of the 3 “alternate” links that you will find in the header.php file of your theme. Then simply update the URL of the first feed link by removing the WordPress PHP code and inserting your Feedburner URL instead. Watch the video for more details.

Easy right? So have you updated the feed link in your header section?

If you don’t have the plugin installed yet, click here to get the plugin. If you have the plugin installed and you want to be on this list, just leave me a comment and I’ll add you asap.

• BioTecK.net
• susangregg
• Tazdog.com
• Multifarious Mushrooms
• Tenacious Creations
• Wayfarer Wings
• Datmoney.com
• Nice2all
• SimplyDunn
• Myinterestingfiles
• Forced Green
• Travelin’ Show
• MoneyBites
• Vivid Lamp
• Theaffiliatesecret
• Affiliaterevenue-info
• Coming to a Nursery Near You
• mastersofseo
• Blogciety
• Madmouse
• The Hussy
• DT´s Flash Drive Blog

The CommentLuv Wordpress Plugin will visit the feed of the comment author and attempt to scrape the last post they made and display it under their comment, this way you can encourage people to join in the discussion of your posts and give something back straight away.

With this pluging I like to encourage people to comment, joining in the discussions of my post and giving something back to the commentator straight away.

What benefits does this have for you, as a commentator?

1. Increased Traffic / Readership:
   You can increase your traffic and readership of your blog. Why? As people visit and read through the comments, they can see the titles of each person’s latest post. So If you’ve a great post titles, you WILL get traffic from this source and don’t forget that some of this traffic will convert to regular readers if people like your the stuff you write about.
2. Benefits To PageRank
   If the blog you leave a comment behind is a Do Follow blog, (like mine!:razz:) it will send you visitors your way but it will also pass you a little bit of PageRank.

   Source: Scratch99.com

For maximum exposure and benefit when commenting on CommentLuv enabled posts you should turn off FeedBurner redirect in RSS feeds.

Anyway, As I didn’t like the original CommentLuv badge I wanted to make my own. Jep, like the You Comment I Follow badge. Anyway, this is what I came up with. Cool isn’t it??

Almost all blog platforms by default are set up so that a “dead end” piece of code is inserted wherever there is a link in a comment, so that search engines will not “count” the link as they are crawling the internet. This was originally designed to help stop comment spam, but it doesn’t work. What it does is remove some of the incentive for your readers contribute to your site by commenting on your posts.

What can you do about it? Turn off “nofollow”. Show your commenters that you appreciate them. Spread the link love.

After reading this I decided to turn off “nofollow” with this plugin called: Do Follow. Do you wish to join this movement? Just download and install the plugin and use one of the badges.
Randa Clay has created some “I Follow” logos which people can use to let the visitors see that they DO Follow.

For a long time I’ve used his logo but today I decided to make my own unique badge and make one which matches with everything else on this site. So I started Adobe Illustrator and after spending some time on it, this is what I came up with, do you like it?!

But if you have a theme which doesn’t have an archive page, you can make one your own very easy when you follow this steps. I take my own archive page as an example.

1. Make a copy of your index.php and call it archives.php. This is just to preserve your theme structure!
2. Open the file and type this at the top of the Archives.php
3. Now remove the original loop code in the index.php.
4. Add the category listing by inserting this code:<h2>Archives by Categorie:</h2>
<ul><?php list_cats(0, '', 'name', 'ASC', '/', true, 0, 1); ?></ul>
5. Add the month listing by inserting this code:<h2>Archives by Month:</h2>
<ul><?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?></ul>
6. Add the page listing by inserting this code:<h2>Archives by Pages:</h2>
<ul><?php wp_list_pages('title_li'); ?></ul>
7. Save the archives.php file, upload it to your theme’s folder (wp-content/themes/themename/).
8. To use your archives page you have to create a new page and select your newly upload Archives page template for that page!

I wanted to display the date for all of my posts, even when they are published on the same day! If you don’t like this like me, you can change this by replacing the date tag with: <?php the_time('l F j Y'); ?>

This way every post will be displaying the date, exactly what I wanted!

More information here and here…