How would you like to gain a steady stream of quality traffic to your website? Traffic that won’t vanish in a few weeks. Traffic that will keep on coming for a long time.

Write a WordPress Plugin, or if you lean more toward design rather than coding, make a WordPress theme. WordPress resources are the ultimate linkbait. It may take you awhile, but it doesn’t take much work to get the traffic coming. Write a page about the plugin on your blog, submit your theme or plugin to WordPress/Extend, post a quick note to WLTC News, and submit to a few social bookmarking sites. It won’t take long before the plugin spreads through the blogosphere, netting you some incoming traffic, and some good links and mentions on other blogs. I’ve done this twice, with WP125 and GoCodes, and both plugins have really added a helpful boost to Webmaster-Source.

If you Google “WP125,” a good many of the 12,000+ results are related to my plugin, though I have to admit there are some scrapers and non-plugin-related posts in there. “WP125 ad” returns higher quality results, and 4.890 at that. Not bad considering the plugin is only a month and a half old…

Now I know not everyone has the skills to put together a good theme or a useful plugin, and therefore may not be able to make use of this tip at the moment. But don’t give up on this idea yet. Anyone can learn PHP, or pick up blog design. If you’re already blogging with WordPress, chances are you’ll be able to pick up said skills without too much difficulty if you put your mind to it.

Prolific plugin author Joost de Valk has put together a WordPress plugin that’s simple in function and insanely useful.

Are you a member of Amazon Associates? Amazon’s widely-used affiliate program can be an effective way to monetize a blog, especially if the blog publishes book reviews, or something of the sort. However, it’s a bit of a pain to, when writing a post, traipse over to associates.amazon.com, log in, and go through the menus to generate an affiliate link, search for the product you want, and paste the resulting URL into your post.

Enter Amazon Auto Affiliate Linker. Install the plugin, tell it what your Associates ID is, and go back to blogging. Now you can skip the Associates dashboard when you write posts. Just go to Amazon.com to search for the book, and copy the URL to the product listing. From there you can use that ordinary URL in your post, and the plugin will automatically add your Associates ID when you press publish. Simple, I told you.

Word of a new social media site has been slowly spreading through the blogosphere. WP Vote, based off the Pligg CMS, is a topical Digg-type site focusing on WordPress-related posts.

I assume the site is fairly new, since I’m just now hearing about it, and I’m surprised that it took this long for someone to create a WordPress-oriented social news site. It’s a great concept, and I hope it takes off. (Hey Automattic, you could buy them out and make the site part of WordPress.org )

WP Vote is off to a good start, with a bunch of submissions, a decent design, and good comment counts.

Have you ever wished you could have your oldest posts continually pushed back to the top of the stack, in order to highlight old articles from your archives? It’s not something I would do myself, but apparently there are some who would.

HackWordPress.com has a post on how to do just that, and an example scenario of why you would want to.

Personally, I don’t like the idea of mucking around with the time stamps like that, it’s…odd. What I would do instead, is have a section in my template that would pull older posts and display them. Maybe five random linked headlines that are older than 6 months? With the $wpdb class, you can work some WordPress magic and do whatever you want.

Though, as I said earlier, there are probably some people who would want to do what the plugin makes possible.

When you deactivate and delete a plugin in WordPress, something generally stays behind. All the tables the plugin added to the database, and their respective rows, remain behind, unless the plugin developer thoughtfully included a function to wipe them before deactivating. This means, if you have the expertise, it’s a good idea to go through the database once in awhile and delete tables created by plugins that you no longer use. (Warning: Unless you’re sure you know what you’re doing, don’t mess around with the WordPress database. You could easily break something.)

The next version of WordPress, version 2.7, will take care of this though. It will include facilities that will enable a plugin’s tables to be deleted if the plugin files are deleted (not deactivated, deleted).

The apparent best method for plugin developers to make use of the feature is to create an uninstall.php script in the plugin’s directory, and add some MySQL queries to remove their tables from the database. The script will run when their plugin is deleted.

Jacob Santos has a post up about the upcoming plugin uninstaller in WP 2.7.

This month’s featured, and free, WordPress theme is Night Transition by Web Kreation.

(more…)

Hendry Lee of BlogBuildingU recently published an article comparing WordPress 2.5 and the latest version of Six Apart’s Movable Type. It seems thought out fairly well, and seems to be fair comparision.

Though a lot of people may be getting tired of this little fight, it’s not going to end soon. Movable Type was the de facto standard before WordPress came along (coupled with that period where they charged for the software) and became the more popular option. Movable Type isn’t going to go down without a fight, I can tell you that, but WordPress is a few steps ahead. They’ve built a strong community during their time as Blogging Script of Choice, and the architecture is better. To quote the article:

WordPress is entirely developed in PHP, while Movable Type uses a mix of PHP and Perl (but mostly Perl).

Though there are a lot of Perl fanatics out there, PHP is, in my opinion, a better language for web publishing, and is easier for newbies to grasp. Movable Type has some cool features that WordPress doesn’t, but it’s reliance on Perl is a major handicap.

As soon as possible!

When a new WordPress release, it normally fixes a plethora of bugs and security holes (WordPress 2.6 patches a round total of 196), in addition to adding useful new features.

One of the biggest reasons people wait to upgrade is plugin compatibility. The best thing to do is to check to see if plugins are compatible with the new release before upgrading. If a mission-critical plugin doesn’t work, let the developer know, and give him or her a couple of weeks to make necessary changes.

That’s also a reason you should upgrade as soon as possible. Plugins. With every release, new features are added that developers may want to take advantage of, and existing functions are changed. It’s a real pain to keep support for older versions for too long. I’m sure there are still people on WordPress 2.2…and they’re pretty much out of luck plugin-wise. If it’s pre-2.3, I’m not going to make sure my plugins work on them. They probably do work, but if they don’t you’re pretty much out of luck. WP upgrades are free, there’s no real reason to support older versions of WordPress that really shouldn’t still be in use.

Of course you have security to. If you have WordPress 2.4 still, your blog is at risk. The same certainly goes for older versions as well. I can’t say this too many times: Your blog is probably at risk if you’e using an outdated version of WordPress.

Sure, wait until your favorite plugins are available for the latest release, then upgrade. But don’t wait longer than a month. Outdated versions of WordPress are a big target for “hackers” (for want of a better word).

DBS>Interactive has put together a comprehensive template tag list for WordPress users. The easy to navigate list features expandable JavaScript boxes that display examples and instructions for the tags, as well as a complete list of parameters for the function.

While it has exactly the same content as the WordPress Codex, some may find it easier and quicker to navigate.

I went ahead and bookmarked it for quick reference in the future.

Email obfuscation is a useful technique to use to stop spammers from finding your email address (as opposed to the more common “munging” where you write “me [at] blah [dot] com”). An obfuscated email address is unreadable to humans and most robots in the source code, but is rendered correctly in a browser, and will function correctly in a mailto link. I’ve found it works well…but it’s a pain in the arse to do by hand. There are free online tools that will obfuscate an email address for you, but what if you want an automatic solution.

I didn’t know this until WordPress Garage pointed it out, but it seems that WordPress has a built-in obfuscation function. It’s called antispambot().

The function antispambot() above parses the e-mail address passed by get_the_author_email() (this is the same as the_author_email(), except it returns rather than displays the author’s e-mail address). Use of the echo command displays the output of antispambot(). An interesting feature is it encodes only portions of an address, and does so randomly so the letters encoded are different each time the page loads, adding a little more firepower to the spam protection arsenal.

The wiki page on WordPress.org has an example on how to use the function.