This is old news but I just logged into my Google’s Webmasters account and got this message that I should update my WordPress blogs (the ones not updated yet) to the latest version of WordPress and the ones connected to my Webmasters account. I must say that I was quite surprised by this message and I’ll make sure in the future I login into Google’s Webmasters tool to check for any other “surprises”. Have you seen this message before? Dear site owner or webmaster o

Yesterday while I was busy updating a couple of my WordPress blogs, on one of the blogs I kept on getting an unexpected error when I was trying to add and update plugins – An unexpected HTTP Error occurred during the API request. To be honest, I was totally baffled by this error as this was the first time I got the error. This was a really big problem because I wasn’t able to update or add any of the necessary plugins to make the WordPress website work. Research research research Af

Twitter is one of the best tools that you can use as a blogger to promote your blog posts.  Many blogs (including this one) uses Twitter related widgets and badges where you can display Tweets.  If you would like to display your most recent Tweet on your WordPress website or blog without a plugin, use the code below anywhere in your theme where you would like to display the tweet. You can see this in action right here on this blog at the top where I display my most recent tweet with a link bac

Are you displaying excerpts on your WordPress blog without any excerpt related plugins?  Do you want to control the length of the excerpts?  This method is great if you do not want to use plugins to control the length of your excerpts. Use the code below that you can insert into the file plugins.php on the root of your theme folder to increase or decrease the excerpt length. {code type=”php”} // Changing excerpt length function new_excerpt_length($length) { return 100; } add_filter(‘

This is quite a nice trick if you don’t like buttons such as Facebook Like or any Twitter counter buttons on your WordPress website or blog. With this method, you can display your Twitter count as normal text and it can blend in quite nicely if you have custom WordPress theme for your blog or website. Create a new file and call it twittercounter.php and paste the below code into that file.  Make sure the file is located in the root of your theme file. {code type=PHP} <?php $tw = get_op

Widget Logic is quite a nice plugin that you can use to control where your WordPress widgets appear with WordPress conditional tags. Once you have installed the plugin, all of your widgets will have an extra text field where you can use WordPress conditional tags to control where the widget appears. Using this plugin with WordPress conditional tags, you can decide what widgets to display on your pages.  If you have an “about us” page, you can display dedicated widgets to that page t

Have you seen blogs where thumbnails are displayed next to the blog post content usually found on the home page, search pages, categories and archive pages of the blog?  Have a look at Mashable‘s home page and this blog’s home page to see this in action. If you have a WordPress theme and you would like to add post thumbnails to your theme, follow the steps below to enable and add them. Enable Post thumbnails Add the below code to the functions.php file found in your theme files. {co

Have you seen blogs where different types of RSS feeds are displayed on pages and blog posts? If you have installed WordPress out of the box, the only way that you can add RSS feeds to your theme is usually via the “RSS” feed widget but then it is only displayed on a widget ready area on your theme.  If you would like to add any “RSS” feed to your theme, there’s a couple of ways this can be accomplished. Install a plugin Create a “template” file with c

WordPress is great! In my opinion it’s one of the best PHP frameworks available.  Ok, maybe “PHP framework” is a bit far-fetched but since I’ve started using and developing on WordPress for my websites, I’m not developing around other open source CMS (Content Management System) or other blogging systems any more.  I’m also not using my own CMS that I have developed – even though there is still a couple of websites floating around that uses that system.