Again I am back with Twitter. This post is about placing a tweet, retweet button in every single post. A few days back I wrote such one to be done manually by creating html code in TweetMeme but this technique is more easy. You just have to install a newly released wordpress plugin New-Twitter-Button. [Read more →]

No matter whether you own or just setup a blog in Wordpress. You can take a look below to the long list of 11 essential tools for smoothly manage your blog. Some of them are free web services and the rest are wordpress plugins. [Read more →]

Really feel boring with the backdated white & grey interface of your Wordpress dashboard? Add some colors to it to manage your site with fresh, colorful mind. Though you can change the colors by tweaking with the CSS file of your installed Wordpress, it needs a good knowledge in HTML, CSS and much time also. [Read more →]

If you are staying on Wordpress, might hear about the popular shopping cart plugins WP-eCommece, Simple Paypal Shopping Cart etc. You can easily create a shopping cart website with these plugins but if you are a Bluehost customer, no need to install Wordpress and a shopping cart plugin.

Bluehost offers you a different content management system for free only for launching a shopping cart website. It’s “Free Shopsite Cart” from Simple Script.

You can grab this facility by simply entering into your Bluehost control panel. As far I know Simple Script provides free CMS installation service for the Bluehost customers so if you are not, quickly create a free account here.

Installation is so easy, check out the details steps below.

How to Create the Shopsite:

1. Login to your Bluehost account and click on the “FREE shopsite Cart” option at right most of “Partners” tab.

2. It will redirect you to the simple script page. Here you will get an “Install” button, click on it.

3. It’s the final page to start the installation. First it will detect all the assigned domains and sub-domains in your Bluehost account for Shopsite to be installed. So to install it in a new domain (www.example.com), assign the domain in your Bluehost account before. Otherwise you can create a directory under a existing site for install. I have created here a directory “shopsite” under my softtricks.com root directory and installed the shopping site there.

Now if you want to choose the site login username, password, uncheck the “Generate a random…me” option and put the password there otherwise leave it checked to get a randomly generated username, password.

Finally accept the Terms and Conditions and click on “Complete” button to install.

4. It should not take more than 2-3 seconds. Once done, you will be mailed immediately with site URL and login username, password. But now there is no products in your site, you have to enter these manually. The home page will look like below…

How to Add Products to the Created Shop Site:

1. Click on the login URL and do a login with the provided username, password.

2. Choose the site language and dealing currency from the drop down list. Finally click on “Next” to proceed.

3. Now it’s the page to decide how do you want to use Shopsite. Choosing the first option will build you a complete shopping cart website. If you have chosen the second option, you will be able to add just a product page to your existing site and the third will enable you to place an “Order” button to your existing site.

Anyway, I have chosen the first here. Click on “Next” to continue.

4. It will show you the features that you’re going to install in your site. Do a start by clicking on “Next“.

5. Put your store name and a good description also about the store because this will be shown at home page of your site.

Don’t stop here, just click on “Next” and continue with the steps. It’s clearly written there what you will have to do.

That’s it but don’t forget to comment me about ur success:)

If you are a website owner and several ads are placed on your site, of course you want to track the clicks on your site as well as on the ads. In this way you can recognize the particular portion of your site that is most popular to your visitors.

It also helps you to place the high revenue earning ads to the highly demanded portion of your site. Approx 1 year ago I did know about a web service Click Tale can map your visitors in video but this article is all about a Wordpress plugin Click Tracking.

Another recommended reading: 5 Exact Alternatives to Omegle.com.

Installing this plugin will show you the clicks with color spot throughout the page. It really looks like a LED lamp, called heatmap.

First download and install the plugin. Now click on the “Click Tracking” option under “Settings” at left sidebar of your Wordpress dashboard. It will open up the configuration page. No need to change any settings here, just click on “update options” at below.

Besides if you want to exclude some IPs to track clicking, put these in the IP box. You can track multiple sites by putting the URLs in the box.

Thus the plugin is now configured. Wait… for some clicks and then hit the “Click Tracking” link at top of left sidebar. Click on “show me map!” to finally see the heatmap.

Do you use some other tools to track your visitors, share it in the comment section below…

Showcase your previous posts that are most related to the currently appearing post. Related posts is a portable arrangement to let the visitors easily browse earlier posts so that they can definitely get what they want.

Another Recommended Reading: 10 Free Professional Wordpress Themes for Tech Blogs.

Lots of Related post plugins are in the Wordpress directory and also lots are in out of Wordpress directory. But the main factor is which you should choose to perfectly match your blog or site. Page-load time is the main factor here, choosing a wrong one might increase your blog page load time by loading unnecessary CSS and images.

Here in this article I will show you 5 related post with thumbnail Wordpress plugins with live preview.

1. WP-Thumbie:

Download

WP-Thumbie is an awesome related post with thumbnail plugin from BlogsDNA.com.Once after installing, you can change the number of post to show, exclude particular categories, adjust thumbnail size as per your choice. You are still able to set number of words to show per related post. Get the full stories from developer site.

2.  Wordpress Related Posts With Horizontal Thumbnails For Thesis Theme:

Download

After downloading install the plugin and activate from wordpress dashboard. To show the related posts put the code

<?;php similar_posts(); ?> in each single post or put in single.php.

3. Related Posts with Photo Thumbnail:

Download

It’s an another related post with photo thumbnail plugin but the working procedure is slightly different. Just go to the Download link and enter you name, email, thumbnail quantity to get the plugin. The developer site LinkWithin will provide you a blog widget or plugin that you have to integrate to your blog. Now LinkWithin will access all of your written stories and show in a vertical manner just after every single post.

4. Best Related Posts:

Download

As you see in the screenshot above, Best Related Posts plugin shows your blog’s related stories in a horizontal manner with thumbnails. Once after install, it will work automatically, you have to add the php code <?php boposts_show(); ?> after every single posts. You can try another wordpress plugin Post Layout to do the job automatically.

5. Related Post with Thumbnail:

Download

Install and activate the plugin, now go to the Plugin option menu and Run the SQL script. You can further customize the plugin by entering into option menu and editing the syntax below

related_posts($limit='', $len='', $before_title = '', $after_title = '', $before_post = '', $after_post = '', $show_pass_post = '', $show_excerpt = '')

where,

1) limit: how many related articles you want to show
2) len: how many word will be of each related posts to show.
3) before_title, after_title, before_post, after_post: Enter your comment.
4) show_pass_post: If you want to show password protected posts.
5) show_excerpt: If you want to show post excerpt

So that’s all, pick one and place on your blog. But don’t forget to let me know which one you selected.

Recently Page Load Time becomes the most popular and talkative issue in the web. Several sites are now discussing on this topic. SoftTricks also published an article to let you know the basic reasons of high page load time.

You can fix this problem by manually finding and optimizing the theme files but it’s a lengthy procedure and time consuming also.

Now I am talking about a Wordpress plugin “Theme Minifier“, offers you to reduce page load time by minifying the major theme files. It produces a compressed version of your existing theme automatically keeping the original intact.

How to Install and Activate Theme Minifier:

1. Download and install the plugin.

2. Click on the “Theme Minifier” option under “Settings” tab at left sidebar of your Wordpress backend. It will let you customize the plugin settings.

3. All the themes under your theme directory will automatically get detected. Now select your current theme from a drop down list and click on “Minify It!” button to proceed. If you want to optimize the stylesheet, check the “Use CSS Tidy?” box.

4. Now it will start to copy and compress the theme files. You can show the compress result in a short while. It will compress the images,CSS and Javascript if any. No need to get panicked, your original theme is kept intact. The compressed theme will get placed into theme section.

5. Go to your “Theme” option under “Appearance” tab to view all the available themes. Look the minified theme is appearing here keeping the original intact. You can activate it from here. 

Note:

I personally found before start activate the minified make sure the theme was well structured and simply designed. I have minified a complex designed theme but while activated, it shown broken.

Do you know the “Facebook Share” option has increased 50% blog visitors in last 6 months. Facebook has also released several types of plugins such as share button, share box, recommended, like it, to build a better communication with the blogs. These plugins are nothing but an HTML code.

If your blog is in Facebook, you can quickly grab one of these plugins otherwise read our another article to quickly create a Facebook page for your blog.

Anyway now I am talking about how you can place a Facebook share box on your blog without any Wordpress plugin. You can see it on SoftTricks at right sidebar.

Some Wordpress plugins also offer you to do this job but I personally think plugins may slow down your site. So follow the procedure below to do it with simple HTML code.

Procedure to get the Facebook Share Box:

1. Visit to the Facebook badges page and login to your account. Click on the “Like Button” link at left top.

2. It would show you the Like Button, click on “Like Box” link at left sidebar to let the box appear. You can get the preview of the box at right. If you don’t want to show the news streams, simply uncheck the “Show stream” checkbox.

As you see in the screenshot, it is showing the fan count automatically.

3. Once done, click on the “Get Code” button at bottom to get the HTML code. Now login to your wordpress or other CMS and paste it in the widget section.

You are still able to further change the height, width of this badge by editing the HTML code.

Sometimes you must notice that clicking on a link is unable to refer you to another site, it shows “404 not found” message. This problem happens due to broken link in your post content. Broken link occurs due to the change of link location. Let’s take an example, the topmost software download site Softpedia changes all of it’s download links in 10-15 minutes. So if you have used Softpedia’s download link then it’s confirm that after 10-15 minutes the link will become a broken link.

If you have limited posts in your blog then it’s possible to find out the broken links manually but for a large number of posts you must need to do it by software or plugin. If you are using Wordpress then here is a good news. Wordpress facilitates you a plugin, called “Broken link checker” to find out all broken links in your blog.

It would automatically check all the links in your blog and show you the particular places where the broken links occur. Not a big job, just download the plugin from here and install. After installing if there is any broken link it will seldom detect it and show the link in your wordpress dashboard.

Click on the Broken link option and you will be taken to the plugin management page. Now edit from here, whatever you want to do with that broken link. You can easily replace the broken link with a good one.

Take a quick tour to get details of Broken link checker.

You must know that most of the video files in internet are with .flv(full length video) extension which is not supported by all media players due to lack of proper codec. FLV files are nothing but a combined form of video bit stream and audio bit stream. The video bit stream is H.263 video standard namely Sorenson Spark. [Read more →]