If you have made comments in this blog in the past, you will get the link credit for your comments as the “nofollow” attribute no longer exists. And for all the comments you will make here onwards, you will always get the credit for it.

Removing the rel “nofollow” attribute from the comments section was rather an easy job, my big thanks to the “Dofollow” plugin, for WordPress, from Semilogic which was very easy to install. Just install it and activate, that’s it!

The following links might interest you if you need more info on nofollow attribute.

• Working Together Against Blog Spam – Live Search Official Blog
• Preventing comment spam – Official Google Blog
• Prepare for more comment spam, not less – Semilogic

Related Articles at BlogHash:

• It’s time for DoFollow comments to GO
• WordPress: Spam comments on my blog are down by 90%
• Why do spammers spam blogs?
• SEO Tip: Use Comments Section of Your Blog to Get More Search Engine Traffic
• Should You Commercialize or Monetize Your Blog?
• Does Showing Your RSS Feed Subscription Numbers Help?

Is Tagging better than using Categories?

Yes! Tagging provides with many advantages that categories can not. Let’s look at the some of the advantages because of which I am moving away from categories to tagging.

• I can have any number of tags and associate the posts on this site with tag words that matches very close to the subject of the post. For example take this post. I can use tag words ‘WordPress’, ‘WordPress plugin’, ‘Tagging’ and ‘Blog’ that matches very close to the subject of this post. And moreover since the plugin provides automatic recommendations, I don’t miss the tags which I should be using.
• I can even use both tagging and categories for more effective results. For example, I can put a post on ‘basic unix commands’ in the category of Operating Systems and tag the post with tags such as ‘Linux’, ‘Solaris’ and ‘HP-UX’. If I were to use only categories, I had to create 4 different categories for that one post. Getting the point?
• Since I have claimed this blog on Technorati, it’s one more reason and another advantage to tag my posts. Why? – Technorati has over 10 millions tags and that leaves me with plenty of opportunities to attract lot of traffic from Technorati’s search using different tags.

Features of Simple Tagging Plugin

The Simple Tagging Plugin offers the following features:

• Lets you import the tags from UTW, Jerome’s plugin and you can also import the existing WordPress categories as tags.

• Just beneath your editor, you get another text box that you can use for creating and associating tags with your posts.

• You will be delighted to note that this plugin offers auto completion of tag names as you type its name in the text field (Michael calls it Type-Ahead feature). If you have lot of tags, this feature is a great time saver.
• It displays tags in the posts and also has feature to show related posts depending on the common tags between posts. Using the ‘related posts’ feature will display some related posts to your current post and keep your visitors stay for longer duration on the site.
• It can add your tags as categories to your feeds which can then be indexed by Technorati. I find this feature very useful since Technorati will also be able to use my Tags as categories in its own search engine.
• This plugin can also display related tags in del.icio.us style and show a tag cloud.
• And finally, it can add your post specific tags to the META Keywords header tag which is very helpful too.

Installation and Configuration

The instructions to install and configure Simple Tagging plugin that are available on Michael’s website are self explanatory and require no further mention. One thing you must notice here is that since I use ‘Add Meta plugin‘ by George Notaras, I had to configure the ‘Add Meta’ plugin to not add the keywords from post to META headers. Instead, I configured Simple Tagging plugin to append the tags as the keywords in the META header of single posts.

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and start using tags today!

» Links: [Simple Tagging Plugin], [Author's Website]

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• Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of WordPress Blogs
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After you add linkify to your browser, all you have to do is highlight the text in the textarea that you want to create a link for and click on linkify in your browser. It will then pop-up a small window (see the snapshot below) with the search results based on what you had highlighted. Then click on create link against the most relevant search result and the highlighted text will be instantly turned into a hyperlink with that URL.

The tool is based on Google AJAX Search API and can create links for the text in the multi-line textarea, and as of now works in Firefox only.

All the links in this post were created using linkify and it was very much an easy task to create those links. I wish this was a built-in feature of WordPress.

I highly recommend that you give it a try and I am also sure that you will love linkify.

Source: [Matt Cutts Blog]

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• 6 Things that Every Blogger Must Know and Do for Success

I am a subscriber to his blog and use Netvibes to read the RSS updates from various sites and since yesterday the blog of Matt cutts was showing up an error message in Netvibes. I initially thought it be to a network related problem due to which Netvibes was not able to reach his blog site but it was only when I typed his blog’s address in the browser, to my shock, I saw this – “This site have been hacked by… message” on his home page (see the snap shot below).

This reminds us how important it is to secure our websites to prevent such hacks happening to our blog. We must ensure that we use safe and strong passwords, disable directory listing and ensure that we always update our wordpress version to the latest release.

Note: This incident coincides with April 1st and if Matt is playing a prank, it’s a nice one.

Update: This eventually turned out to be a prank by Matt Cutts that he setup for April Fool’s Day! and it was a good one!

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• linkify: A Great Bookmarklet Tool for Blogging
• Blog Hacked – Paying the price for not upgrading WordPress
• SEO Tip for Blogs – Show Popular Posts on Home Page
• WordPress: Spam comments on my blog are down by 90%
• Google Blog Search Pinging Service
• Hello world!

As InsideWH continues its journey, I will expand my blogging to other web hosting related topics as well.

Let me also take this opportunity to extend my gratitude to all the current readers of BlogHash without the support of whom I couldn’t ever have imagined launching a second blog. I will continue to blog on BlogHash and keep bringing a lot of valuable information.

Please head over to InsideWH, take a look around and drop in your feedback, suggestions and questions if any. Thank you in advance – Raj

Related Articles at BlogHash:

• What Happens When you Park your Domain Long Enough?
• Blog Web Hosting: 5 Points to Consider Before Buying a Hosting Account
• How To: Measure the Success of Your Website
• Matt Cutts WordPress Blog has been Hacked!
• 6 Things that Every Blogger Must Know and Do for Success
• Best blog directories to list your blogs

At times this is really not harmful, but if you have uploaded some critical files, like I did, containing your personal information such as passwords list in plain text file then you better think about it and turn the directory listing off as soon as you can! Others who have already turned off directory listing, that’s good!

I usually go through a checklist when I setup new domains and it has a point to turn the directory listing off, but I missed it this time and I had to change all the my passwords which were mentioned in that file (7 accounts in total).

If you happen to be using CPanel, you will find Index Manager option under Site Management, just click on it and have the directory listing turned off! That’s it. You may also use htaccess file to turn off the directory browsing on all your folders if your site contains lot of folders.

If you have some tips for our readers, please don’t forget to post them in the comments here.

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• Matt Cutts WordPress Blog has been Hacked!
• 4 things to consider before submitting your site to web directories
• Submit your site to search engines for free – Do it yourself!
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• Hello world!
• Beginners Guide to .htaccess File with Examples

• Search Engines – Also known as natural search traffic
• Paid Traffic – Through various campaigns such as AdWords campaign
• Referral, Bookmarks & Direct Traffic – Mostly through social bookmarks, link on other sites and direct type-in traffic
• Stumbleupon and Digg – Non-targeted incoming traffic (not limited to just these two sites)

How does it matter where the visitors come from?

It does! There is a lot of difference between a visitor from search engine than someone getting referred to your site by Stumbleupon. When a visitor finds your website in search engine’s results page, it’s mostly because your site came up as a result of the search performed by the visitor using some keywords for which your site had some sort of relevance. But when your site shows up as a result of someone Stumbling, your site might have little or no relevancy for what user might be interested in.

To be more specific, when you receive traffic from search engines, it’s because of relevancy of your content and what user was looking for. It greatly increases the chances of the user staying at your site and reading through the content. In case of Stumbleupon, user may spend as less as 5-10 seconds quickly scanning through what your site/page is about and may Stumble again to see the next site. Similarly, when your site/page is on Digg, you will see a surge in traffic to your site which again will either have user spend some time on your site or quickly scan through and finally exit.

So, how does it affect my Click Through Ratio (CTR)?

Simple! A user who is reading through the content is more likely to click on your ad unit than someone who is paying very short visit from Digg, Stumbleupon or some other source. People spend a great deal of time reading through your articles when they find it through search engines and likely to click on your ad units placed along or in your content.

What ad formats should I use?

Now, that’s the right question! Depending on the type of traffic, we will accordingly select the ad format or ad unit format.

» Search Engines – Since people visit your site because your site shown up in search engine results, placing text based unit is more likely to perform better. Text ad units show more than one ad and hence present more options or ads for a user to click from. An image only ad unit may not produce relevant ads, hence text only ad units are recommended for your pages if the traffic is mostly from search engines. Suggested ad unit formats are 336×280, 300×250 and 160×600. You may place these ad units at the top of your content (see top of this page) or bottom of the page, but do blend the ads well.

» Paid Traffic – If you are running some sort of campaign to generate traffic to your site, placing an image unit is likely to perform better than text ad unit. This is because some visitors may or may not stay for longer on your site and to get their attention on ads, an image ad unit would be a better choice. Placing an image unit more closely to the point of their entry, such as top of the the content, below the header is highly recommended.

» Referral, Bookmarks & Direct Traffic – Strategy similar to that for Search Engines is recommended.

» Stumbleupon and Digg and others – An image unit is likely to out perform text ad units as the traffic brought in by such sources will often bring visitors who are less likely to read through your content. Getting their attention using an image ad unit is much easier than text ad units.

The suggestions and recommendations made in this articles are based on my experience with different ad placements on my blog. The results may vary on your site depending on your selection of ad formats and ad placement in your site.

You have some suggestions and tips for our readers? Please don’t forget to post your comments here!

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• Blog Hacked – Paying the price for not upgrading WordPress
• Make money with AdSense

Blogs could be of many types. Most popular and commonly seen blogs are news blog, technology blog, video blog, internet marketing blog etc,. Lets run through a list of items you should consider when searching for blog hosting company. [Note: These items may not help you decide if a hosting company is good or bad, but only help you ensure you get everything required to smoothly run your blogging software.]

» Web Space
Enough web space should be available to initially upload and install the blogging software and then depending on the type of blogging you will do, ample web space should be available for your blog site to grow without any pain. If you intend to upload lot of videos in your blog, you may want to consider buying yourself at least 1-2GB of space initially and scale it up when more space is required.

» Bandwidth
Bandwidth is not paid much attention when a hosting account is purchased. Imagine your site gets dugg every now and then, it will then consume lot of bandwidth. Consider the number of visitors you expect to visit your blog on a monthly basis and buy a package accordingly. Most hosting companies offer 20-30GB of monthly bandwidth which is quite enough for most blog sites.

» Hosting Platform
Since most of us use Linux OS for our blogging software, it’s most often LAMP combination that we must be opting for. First check the readme file or documentation of your blogging software and make a note of the version numbers of Apache, MySQL and PHP. Then contact the hosting company you have on mind and check if their hosting platform matches your requirements. Secondly, since many bloggers do lot of SEO with their blogs, Apache must be mod_rewrite enabled and other things you will keep in mind are:

• Site should be able to send emails using PHP.
• You should be able to upload large files (say 2MB) to your site using PHP.
• Server must support htaccess file in your site and overrides must be enabled.
• At least one Web Statistics software such as AWstats must be available.
• Hot link protection, Custom Error Pages and URL Redirects must be available.

» Site Backup
Backup must be taken on regular basis and your hosting company should be able to restore the site from the backup in minimal possible time. In an event of a server getting crashed, your hosting company should be able to restore the backup to a different server and restore the service.

» Technical Support
Hosting company must provide 24×7 support on chat and through ticket based system as well. Check for their reputation by visiting web hosting forums and search by company name for any known history of bad service and support.

The 5 points that we mentioned above are only some of the most important things one must consider before making a purchasing decision. Please feel free to contact us (Email is Raj at bloghash dot com) for any suggestions and recommendations for your blog web hosting.

You have something to add? Any tips for our readers? Please post your comments!

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1. Quickly check if the plugins I use, that are critical for functionality of my site, have a compatible/latest release to run on Wp 2.1.1 or at least 2.0+. Downloaded their latest versions and installed them. Luckily, I found updated versions of all the plugins that I use.

2. Download the latest version of WP from WordPress.Org and extract to a folder.

3. Create a backup of WP database using the Backup plugin in WP. WP-Admin->Manage->Backup and select all the tables corresponding to your WP. You may also want to select additional tables that should be backed up.

4. Make a backup of all the required files, customized files, images directory, wp-content directory on your system. Use any FTP program such as FileZilla to achieve this task. I had made changes to wp-rss2.php and wp-atom files in order to serve Pheedo RSS Ads and since it was on my log sheet of changes, took a backup so I could re-make the changes.

5. Disabled all the plugins to avoid any immediate issues when upgrade is done. Disabling the plugins has an advantage and that is it quickly lets you isolate a problem, if arises after the upload. So, you might enable them one-by-one and observe your home page for any potential problems. In this way, you are immediately aware about the plugin that could be causing the error.

6. WordPress.Org recommends deleting the files and uploading files from latest version. Since I knew what I was doing, I preferred to overwrite them. I checked the option in FTP client to overwrite the files if they existed on the remote server instead of overwriting only if the files were newer than existing files. [Getting the difference?]. I then began the process of uploading all the files, and I replaced all the required files.

7. After uploading the files, I ran the upgrade.php, located under wp-admin folder as per the instructions. This was by far the most easiest step involved in entire upgrade process.

8. I was done, almost! Checked the home page but could see nothing coming up. I knew that the plugins were disabled. Started to enable them one-by-one till all the plugins were activated.

9. All Set!!

WP 2.1.1 seems to be faster than earlier versions and I am glad that I made the move. There are times in our life when we have to stop thinking and act! I did it!

[Upgrading WordPress - Official Page] | [Download WordPress] | [Minimum Requirements]

Related Articles at BlogHash:

• Blog Hacked – Paying the price for not upgrading WordPress
• Hello world!
• WordPress 2.2 Development is now Open
• WordPress: Spam comments on my blog are down by 90%
• Matt Cutts WordPress Blog has been Hacked!
• Effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of WordPress Blogs

» TinyMCE 2.0.9 – WP 2.2 will feature 2.0.9 release version of TinyMCE. This should be good for most WP bloggers who use the built-in editor for writing articles.

» Prototype 1.5.0 – It’s an easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and also an Ajax library for easy web application development. My guess is that it might be used to enhance some stuff in the administration interface of WP, that will make it easy to operate.

» Script.aculo.us 1.7.0 – script.aculo.us provides easy-to-use JavaScript libraries for cross-browser user interface.

» jQuery 1.1.1 – jQuery is a JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages.

» WP XML-RPC API (WP-specific API for working with pages, authors, and categories)

» Atom 1.0 Feeds and Atom Publishing Protocol support.

» Better MySQL UTF-8 support.

» User cache streamlining and an Improved options caching.

» Plugin sandboxing – Many WP users do not know what to do when the plugin they upload causes some Fatal errors. Sandboxing a plugin will provide a way to load a plugin in sandbox mode such that if it throws an error, it won’t be activated.

Version 2.2 of WordPress should be more easy and fun to work with these new features!

Related Articles at BlogHash:

• Hello world!
• Smooth Upgrade to WordPress 2.1.1 in 8 Steps
• WordPress: Spam comments on my blog are down by 90%
• Matt Cutts WordPress Blog has been Hacked!
• Blog Hacked – Paying the price for not upgrading WordPress
• Google Blog Search Pinging Service

1. Lack of quality content – Quality of content is a major key component that contributes towards success of your site. Readers appreciate the quality of content that you write and your writing style that makes them come back looking for more content. Everyone of us is not a professional writer to accomplish this in a short span of time and hence we must continue to improve our writing style by closely observing how other bloggers write, reading editorials in magazines and newspapers etc. One most common type of blogging I have come across is where bloggers write excerpts from a post of another site and provide a link to the original content. When your readers find such posts, they do not stay on your site to read more – they simply follow the link to the original content and may not even come back to your site.

2. Lack of regular readers – Closely observe any major successful blog and you will see that it’s regularly visited by lot of visitors who also actively participate in discussions by posting their feedback and comments. The key to achieve this is by writing compelling articles which your visitors will not only find interesting but also make them engage in a conversation with you and other fellow readers of the site.

New blogs which recently surfaced should not expect to see some overnight magic happening in their favor. The reader base builds over time and it takes lot of efforts to build loyal community of readers for your blog site.

3. Frequency of posting articles in your site is an another key component of greater importance. You may not see a direct impact of not posting regularly in short term but looking a its effect in long term can cause some serious negative impact on your blog. While professional bloggers would like to keep posting articles as and when they think of topics, non-professionals should be looking at writing at least 3-4 essay style, not so big and not so small and topic focussed articles every month. This will ensure that in a long term your readers will expect 3-4 articles every month and not expect a lot out of your blog.

4. Bloggers may often lose focus as they grow big and forget the key components which actually made them successful. No matter how big you grow – always remember those key components of success. If you have developed a niche area for your site, stick to it and don’t end up writing on topics on which you don’t have any domain expertise. On a contrary, you don’t have to be an expert to blog on any topic, but your readers might expect to see original content out of your blogging which is more or less a result of the type of expectation you have set since the beginning.

To summarize:

• When you write, your primary focus must be on quality of content. Don’t aim at quantity of articles.
• Write original content. Put some research based data in the posts to make it more interesting.
• Maintain the frequency of posting articles in your blog.
• Don’t lose your focus when you start to grow big.

Related Articles at BlogHash:

• How embedding a video can fail the XHTML validation of your web site?
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• Google Blog Search Pinging Service
• SEO Tip for Blogs – Show Popular Posts on Home Page

Core Functionality WordPress Plugins

[Akismet] – It checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key [Free] to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days. This is a MUST to have plugin and without which you will have a tough time fighting with spam comments on your blog. It is bundled along with your WordPress installation files, so all you need to do is get your API key and activate it.

[Spam Karma 2 (SK2)] – Another great plugin for fighting spam in your blogs. Read the FAQs about this plugin.

[WordPress Database Backup] – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. This plugin is bundled along with WordPress core installation files. Enable it and take regular backups. You never know when things could go wrong. Taking a backup ensures that you have all the content in your hand for easy recovery. This plugin can lets you download the backup, email it or store in a folder on the server itself. A must to have this plugin activated in your WordPress and more important is that you take backup of your WP database regularly.

[WP-Cache] – This is a very efficient and fast caching system plugin for WordPress. It’s a must to have plugin in these days when you never know when someone will digg you and your site might unexpectedly go down. Caching help your blog to a great extent by saving a static copy of your content and serve your visitors without a need to query the database to fetch the pages.

[Admin Drop Down Menu] – For people with lot of things installed in their WordPress, this plugin will be a time saver. When installed, you don’t need to click on top menu items in Admin menu, just hover your mouse and it will display the sub menu items just beneath that. This demo page is best to explain how it works.

Manage Advertising on Your Blogs

[Adsense-Deluxe] – This plugin places Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. The best part about this plugin is that it lets you create AdSense blocks with AdSense code in it. You are not limited to use it just to display AdSense, instead also put HTML, Javascript code of your newsletter subscription form or something else and it will work. At the end of this post, you will see a link to subscribe to our updates and feeds by email. That’s a simple trick with this plugin. Another great feature of this plugin is its ability to enable AdSense units selectively on only front page, single posts and globally enable and disable AdSense. To change AdSense unit code everywhere all you have to do is change the code in the Admin area and it changes it on all pages in one go. That’s a plus for people who frequently experiment with their AdSense units to achieve better performance.

[WP-Ads] – This is another top plugin that will let you create zones and place various ad units in those zones. You can place more than one ad unit in a zone and WP-Ads plugin will rotate it for you. The plugins page in admin section also shows the number of times the ad units were served. Creating and managing your ad inventory is very easy with this plugin.

[WP e-Commerce Lite] – If you are in need of a shopping cart for your blogs, this is the one. The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your product and services online.

External Services Related Plugins

[flickrRSS] – This plugin allows you to display Flickr photos on your site. The plugin supports user, public and group photo streams. It’s easy to setup and configure via an options panel. It also has image cache support too.

Feed Management

[Feedburner Feed Replacement] – Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while letting through some important User-Agents.

Forms in WordPress

[PXS Mail Form] – A great form for using in WordPress. It has a CC Sender option, validates email address, send email to multiple recipients and it will even create a drop-down menu if required to allow the user to select a recipient.

Podcasting in WordPress

[PodPress] – With this plugin, you can see how Podcast will look like on iTunes, Podcast Download stats, Support for Premium Content, Audio Comments and many more features. Visit their page for more information.

[PhoneBlogz] – PhoneBlogz allows you to blog to your WordPress by phone and they also support direct posting and remote polling. More information on their website.

Reports for WordPress

[Analytics and Feedburner Reports] – Anyone with an account with either Google Analytics or Feedburner would love to have this plugin. It displays statistics about your site in a very simple to understand graphics. It also the ability to automatically installed Google Analytics tracking code in your WordPress for you.

Search Engine Optimization [SEO] and Traffic Related

[Add Meta Tags] - A great plugin that adds the post’s categories and excerpt to the “keywords” and the “description” XHTML meta tags respectively, while viewing single posts. It also adds the blog’s description and categories to the “description” and the “keywords” meta tags respectively on the home page. A must for your SEO related activities. However, not every search engine relies on META tags anymore, but this greatly helps in improving your Search Engine visibility in many ways.

[Dagon Design Sitemap Generator] – Generates a customizable sitemap containing all posts and pages. You will have to create a page by name ‘Sitemap’ and use this plugin to generate a sitemap with all posts and pages of your blog. This is a great plugin to show a sitemap on your blog that automatically gets updated every time you post a new article or create a page.

[Google Sitemaps] – This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. The sitemap is automatically updated with your blog entries and you can use the URL of sitemap [http://your-domain.com/sitemap.xml] to submit to search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. Not only Google, but Yahoo! and Microsoft will also use the same sitemap going forward. [Read the FAQs on http://www.sitemaps.org/]

[Ultimate Tag Warrior] – It allows you to add tags either through the Write Post page in WordPress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAX box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors. [Note: Some blogs seemed to have performance issues with this plugin. Please observe for any such issues on your blog and act accordingly]

[Simple Tagging] – Those looking for an alternative to UTW plugin, look no further. Simple Tagging is another tagging plugin for WordPress that is much faster than other tagging plugins and very easy to use. It features auto suggestion of tags in Ajax style and can also import your existing WordPress categories as tags. I use this plugin for tagging the posts on this blog. You can see how it in Tags section at the start of this post entry or read my post on Simple Tagging for details.

Social Bookmarking

[Digg This Reloaded] – Adds Digg story link/button to your posts as well as options to submit to other social bookmarking sites. This plugin has an integrated release with Share This plugin bundled with it. After a post is dugg, it show the number of diggs on your post just like it’s shown on digg website.

[Share This] – A great plugin with options of many bookmarking sites in it. And it can also email from within the plugin itself.

WordPress Posts Related

[Related Posts] – Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. At the end of this post, see the Related Posts section. That’s how it will show up on your site too! A great way to show more content to your visitors.

[Landing sites] – There is a problem with search results and that is when people search for content on Internet, they often land on pages from your blog looking for specific content which is readily not available on pages such as categories. This will drive them away and sometimes they may not even come back. To overcome this problem, help them by showing them related posts to their search on your blog? This plugin lets you do that, works with a long list of search engines! It’s NOT same as Related posts plugin, but works on similar concept by showing posts related to the search keywords used by a visitor. Test it out by search for “mod_rewrite example” and click on the link that points to this site. You will see this plugin’s implementation on the top of the page. Another advantage is that, by offering more number of relevant pages from your site to visitors, you increase the chances of retaining the visitor for longer duration on the site and it increases your page views.

[Recent Comments] – This plugin displays excerpts of the most recent comments and/or trackbacks that have been posted to the articles in your blog. A great way to show recent comments posted in your blog site in your sidebar.

[Subscribe To Comments] – This plugin allows your readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. It also lets them manage the subscription by themselves without your intervention. You can see it in action under the comments section below.

Please let us know the plugins that you are using on your site, why you use them and if you recommend them to others. We will be glad to add them to this list.

Related Articles at BlogHash:

• Smooth Upgrade to WordPress 2.1.1 in 8 Steps
• Are Firefox Addons and Plugins Safe to Use?
• Simple Tagging Plugin for WordPress: Highly Recommended
• Hello world!
• How embedding a video can fail the XHTML validation of your web site?
• WordPress 2.2 Development is now Open

When will Google pay for Firefox referral clicks?

Firefox plus Google Toolbar: When a user you’ve referred to Firefox plus Google Toolbar runs Firefox for the first time, you’ll receive up to US$1 in your account, depending on the user’s location. Your referral must be a Windows user, who has not previously installed Firefox, in order for you to receive credit.

So, what should you do?

The solution is quite simple! Display Firefox referral units to only those users who are using browsers other than Firefox. This dramatically increases the chances of your users clicking on the referral Ad unit and you making some money out of it. Also, when you know that a user is already using Firefox, display some other referral unit instead Firefox referral unit. This will make more sense. Don’t you think so?

How to display Firefox referral to ONLY those users who don’t use Firefox?

That’s quite simple to accomplish. We will show you a simple PHP based solution, that you can implement on your site, with minimal efforts. We don’t recommend using a Javascript based solution at this stage as it will fail if browser has Javascript disabled. But for people with no PHP, Javascript would be the best solution to go with.

Below is the self-explanatory PHP code that you can use in your pages. Users of blogging softwares such as WordPress, simply put it in right places and it will work right away. Of course, you will have to put in your Google AdSense code in the PHP code below for it to work.

<?php
# Leave below line for trackbacks. You may remove it if you wish to.
echo "<!-- BlogHASH-Track-Firefox from www.bloghash.com -->";

# First lets read the user_agent information
# Note: I am not using built-in get_browser function here as
# it requires browscap.ini to be set properly on the server
# and that is not bundled with PHP. Many hosting companies may
# not have this installed. So let’s use something that works everywhere!
$browser_info = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

# What’s the browser we want to look for? Obviously Firefox
# Note: All other browsers are considerd non-firefox
$browser_name = "Firefox";

# Lets see if the browser name mentioned above is found in user_agent
$position = strpos($browser_info,$browser_name);

# PHP if loop to show firefox Ad if browser is not firefox
# and if not Firefox show something else!
if ($position > 0) {
#User has firefox, so show something else
echo "NON-Firefox Ad Unit here!";
} else {
#User does not has Firefox, lets show him Firefox referral unit!
echo "Firefox referral Ad Unit here!";
}
?>

Please feel free to test and report any issues to us. Your feedback is appreciated.

Suggestions: When you know that it’s a Firefox user, display AdSense referral Ad units of other products and that way you increase the chances of people clicking on your Ads.

How do you make more money by following the above tip?

Looking at my visitor statistics, I can see that almost 75% of visitors are Firefox users. That means, those users will never click on Firefox referral Ad unit if I were to display it. Isn’t it? It might be something similar with your website too! So, you must show Firefox referral Ad units to only those users who are not using Firefox. Statistically, those 75% users will now most likely click on the non Firefox referral Ad unit and thus chances of you making more money also increases.

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• How to Create a Personalised Menu for Your Firefox?
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• Do you GMail? Go for Better Gmail [Firefox Only]

How does Zookoda work?

You will have to signup and create an account [which is free] and then add your blog to your Zookoda account. Zookoda will automatically identity all the blog feeds when you enter your blog URL. It will then start refreshing the feeds of your blog every 3 hours and discover new blog posts. Since Zoodoka supports RSS v0.91/0.92/1.0/2.0 and Atom 1.0/2.0 and also OPML, you don’t have to worry about compatibility between your feeds and Zookoda. Next step is to place some code on your blog, which is of course a form to let your visitors subscribe and receive email newsletter from your site. All the email addresses are updated in a mailing list on Zookoda’s servers and you can even export all the addresses in case you want to discontinue this free service.

Next, select the feed that you want to broadcast, select the template and schedule the broadcast. That’s it! You can then start tracking the results of your feed broadcast. Another great feature of Zookoda is that you can change the order of your articles, add or delete some articles from the email and change the headers or layout of your email.

One good thing that’s missing with Zookoda’s free service at this moment is lack of Ad delivery along with your feeds but it will be introduced in future version of Zookoda [mentioned in their website].

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I know from reading comments on numerous posts in various websites and forums where new bloggers ask for a lot of information on making it big and taking right steps towards making money too. Here are some of my tips that most of you will find useful and some of these will probably have an immediate effect on your success.

1. Why should I blog? – Is it because blogging is the most happening thing these days or just that some of my friends have their own blogging sites and some are even minting money from it. Ask yourself – Why do you want to start blogging? Setting your own expectation right is the first step towards successful blogging. Take a paper and write down the topics that you will blog about. These may be Family, Yourself, Technology, Music, Internet, Programming, Web 2.0, Tech News, DIY stuff, Your City, Your Country, Your Music Band and the list will go on. If you plan to setup your personal blog and don’t really look forward to making money out of it or you will not be blogging seriously but just for your interest and fun, then there is not much you have to worry about. For people who are serious about blogging – think about the topics you will blog about, will you have a free sub-domain [something.wordpress.com] or your own domain name, how will you pay for your hosting charges etc etc.

2. The blogging platform – For either personal or professional blogging, I recommend that you get your own domain name and only if you can not afford domain name registration and hosting charges [somewhere around $70USD per annum], think of a free blogging account with WordPress or Blogger or anyone else. My personal recommendation is you own domain name + WordPress – simply because I can do anything with my website. I can change the look, the features, customize the code and many more things. Your website’s look doesn’t need to be unique, any free theme would do as long as content is clearly readable and accessible as well. Read [Best practices of Web Designing] and also Effective SEO of WordPress. For more info see how to choose the right blogging platform for your blog.

3. I am ready to blog – I hope, by now you have decided the topics on which you will blog. The first thing you should think of putting up is an ‘About Me’ page on your blog. No matter if it’s a personal or professional blog, you must put up this page for your visitors to know more about you. Professional blogging sites with a page about the author greatly helps your visitors to know what you do, your areas of expertise etc etc. The more articles you write at the beginning, the more beneficial it’s to attract visitors as soon as your blog is launched. I would suggest you to publish at least 5-10 quality articles as soon as your blog goes live and then publish articles regularly. There is no recommended number of articles a day, per week or every month. Write at your own pace but write regulary and maintain the posting interval. If you happen to post during weekends, then keep posting during weekends [not a rule]. Your visitors will know when to expect new posts on your site.

4. Quality or Quantity? – It will really not help you to write 5-10 articles everyday if it’s not worth reading. Your articles must be appealing and full of information. People must like your articles and keep coming back for more quality articles. It’s ok to write only 5-6 articles a week, but give your best, make it informative and avoid most common topics which every other blogging site writes about. It’s quality of your articles that matters, not the number of articles you post on your site. Keep your articles simple, straight to the point, clear and easy to understand and your visitors will like it. Don’t ever copy articles, content from other sites. This will bring down your reputation and also your site will get penalized by search engines, thus removing all indexed pages from search engines.

5. How to publicize my blog? – The first thing you must do is to setup pinging on your site. This will ensure that search engines, blog syndication sites are always informed about the newly posted articles on your site. Other things that you can do to reach wide group of audience is signup with Technorati and feedburner services. Technorati has got a huge collection of blogs and users too. Signup with Technorati and claim your blog, then setup pinging on your blog site. Feedburner, on the other hand, will offer feed and email subscription services to your visitors. Your visitors will then be able to sign up using Feedburner’s email subscription service and receive your articles in their mailboxes. For professional sites, you may consider AdWords and Text Ads to publicize your blog. The more articles you write, the more visitors you will receive and thus increase your chances of retaining visitors. Happy visitors will spread the word about your blog with their friends and other. So, blog more! For more info, see how to publicize and grow your blog.

6. Ok, I want to monetize my blog – There are plenty of options available to turn your blog site into a money minting website. For every type of website Google AdSense is a good option. If your website is more of product or hardware based, then chitika is another option. For sites with large number of email subscribers, Feedburner’s Ad Network is just great. Don’t get disappointed in the beginning if you don’t see the results you expected. Things works best with more number of visitors coming to your site which increases the chances of people clicking on the Ads. You must place the AdSense at right places which might yield in better click ratio. Don’t shift your focus towards making more money, just sit tight and keep writing more quality articles and rest will automatically fall in place. For more info see how to make money blogging and AdSense alternatives.

[ If your site has 60 pages that gets you 200 visitors everyday out of which 2 click on your Ads to make $2, then how many visitors you might receive with 600 pages after an year of writing those articles and how much money you might make with 20 people clicking on those Ads everyday? -- It's just to tell you that more number of visitors -> more money. Keep writing articles! ]

Summary – To be successful, you must have the right blogging platform which you could customize to any extent, write and keep writing great content, publicize your blog as and when you can and place the Ads at right places.

Related Articles at BlogHash:

• Continue or Give Up Blogging – What I Learnt from Blogging
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• 4 Reasons Why Blogs Fail
• 5 Most important questions to be successful in blogging
• Using Digg as a linkbait tool
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