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If you’ve been looking for a free WordPress theme to spice up your blog but just can’t find one that doesn’t look cheap, check out these 10 great WP themes. You may find one that gives you that custom look without having to pay one cent!
Have you ever been writing something on your blog and needed to present it in a column format? Sometimes certain types of content are just more easily understood in a chart layout but unless you know how to use html, it can be extremely difficult to pull off. Fortunately, there is a great WordPress plugin called WP-Table Reloaded that makes it super easy to insert tables into your WordPress pages.
I just spent the past two and a half months redesigning my site and came across WP-Table Reloaded when I was looking for an easy way to add a chart to one of my pages. It installs just like any other WordPress plugin. You can download it here. Once installed, adding tables to your WordPress pages is a snap. All you have to do is put in how many columns and rows you want, then start adding your content. The columns will automatically adjust to fit your content properly. If you need to add more rows or columns, you can do so at any time. If you want to move a row up or down the table, no problem. Plus, you can even add links or images to the cells inside your table. You can see two charts I’ve built using the plugin by looking at my blog installation and plugin pages.
The next time you think a table would be the best way to present your blog content, check out WP-Table Reloaded. It sure saved me a lot of time.
It’s that time of year again. No, I don’t mean time to make resolutions for the new year or to plan out your business strategy for the next twelve months. It’s time to update the copyright date on your websites. Well, if you use WordPress you can fix this issue now so you will never again have to mess with changing your copyright date.
Many WordPress themes include a copyright date in the footer. The problem is that they only list the current year. However, a proper copyright date should cover a range of years beginning with the first year your website went live. For example, if your blog started in 2005, your copyright should cover 2005 through the current year. To fix your copyright date so that it contains the proper date range and automatically updates at the beginning of each year, just place the following code in your footer.php file:
© Copyright 2005–<?php echo date('Y'); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>. All rights reserved.
Replace 2005 with whatever year your website started. You may also replace <?php bloginfo('name');?> with your domain name or the legal name of your company if you wish, so you may end up with something like this:
© Copyright 2005–<?php echo date('Y'); ?> My Company Name, Inc. All rights reserved.
If you want to see how it looks, just scroll to the bottom of this page and look at the copyright in the footer. With this code in your footer, you’ll never have to worry about updating your website copyright date again. Happy New Year!
Hello everyone! As we wind down the last day of 2009 and get ready for a new year, I just wanted to announce the relaunch of Ninja Blog Setup. What started as a service to offer people free WordPress blog installations has now grown to something much bigger. Ninja Blog Setup now offers blog transfers to new servers, blog transfers to new domains, Blogger to WordPress transfers, and our very own Ninja Lifeline blogger help desk. Check out our new services as well as our new website design.
Let me know what you think and have a Happy New Year!
I was recently asked the question, “Why use WordPress?” This is a very valid question for anyone thinking about building a website and looking at all the available platforms out there. WordPress is by no means the only platform out there to build a website with but in no time at all I had thought of ten reasons to use WordPress to build your website so here they are.
It’s free, but don’t let the zero price tag fool you. WordPress is robust enough that Fortune 500 companies like Ford Motor Co. choose to use it. If it’s good enough for a multi-billion dollar company, it will likely suit your needs just fine.
Many website owners want to add a blog to their site and often use WordPress as the platform to do that. With WordPress, you can create just a simple blog but you can just as easily create a static website with an integrated blog and kill two birds with one stone. There’s no need to have one platform for your website and another platform for your blog.
WordPress is constantly releasing updates to stay up with the latest security threats, add features and improve usability. Sometimes, they update so often it’s hard to keep track, but with the built-in update feature, it’s painless. How many updates has your current platform had in the past year?
Google seems to love WordPress. I have made new posts and seen Google index them in less than 10 minutes. I have had WordPress sites that got indexed without me even trying. Why? Because of the pinging feature of WordPress. It allows you to send “announcements” known as pings to tell various websites that you have new content on your site.
With it’s built-in permalink feature and the right combination of plugins, WordPress can easily be optimized for the search engines. I recommend All-in-One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps. Together, they take the hassle out of search engine optimization and best of all, they’re free! Every site I build has these two plugins.
WordPress has a built-in categorizing and archiving feature, making your posts easy to find for both the user and the search engines. With WordPress, many things just happen automatically, so you can concentrate on creating great content and not worry about the technical details.
It’s easy to learn and if do you run into a problem, there are tons of free tutorials you can find on hundreds, if not thousands, of websites. Don’t like to read? Just go to YouTube and type in “WordPress Tutorials”. No other platform has as many free tutorials available online.
There are tons of great themes for WordPress. Many of them are free. Most premium themes can be had for less than $100. No other platform has such a large choice of themes and with WordPress you can easily switch from theme to theme.
There are tons of great plugins for WordPress. Again, many are free but even the ones you have to pay for can usually be purchased for between $20 and $80. No other platform has such a large network of people creating plugins which can be used to easily modify and customize your site.
If you want to make money with your site through Adsense or affiliate marketing, you just can’t beat WordPress. Why? Because of the various plugins that are available to easily place ads from Google’s Adsense or affiliate networks like eBay, Amazon, Overstock and others. Some of these plugins are incredibly robust. A couple of my favorite affiliate plugins are phpBay and phpZon. Of course, you have to have great content to pull the traffic in before you can make money, but these plugins make it easier to make money from your hard-earned traffic.
Okay folks, those are ten good reasons to build a website with WordPress. Can you be successful with other platforms? Sure you can! But go look at the most successful bloggers in the blogoshpere and see what they are using. WordPress is undeniably the king of the blogs, but it can be used as a CMS (content management system) just as easily. I know lots of affiliates who use it to build their sites with, some of them making four figures or more every month. I myself have used it to build everything from affiliate websites to business websites to political blogs to church websites. Combine all the great features of WordPress with all the wonderful themes and plugins and there really is no limit to what you can do when building a website with WordPress.
Why do you use WordPress?
In this post I’ll cover how to get your blog upgraded to version 2.7 using the Instant Upgrade plugin. If your site was setup by Ninja Blog Setup, then Instant Upgrade was installed when we set up your site.
There are always risks when upgrading your blog, especially a major upgrade. The worst case scenario is that you would need to completely roll back to the older version and restore your database from a backup.
Minor problems that could be faced are plugins that are not compatible, errors in your theme, or general brokenness in the admin area.
At the bottom of this post, I’ll give you some pointers for where to get help for these problems.
One plugin that I know is not compatible with WordPress 2.7 and needs to be disabled before you upgrade is called “Plug Installer”
You’ll need to go to the Plugins page on the dashboard and de-activate it. We usually do de-activate it at the end of our install process, but go and make sure just to be safe, you can also delete it, once it has been de-activated, as you won’t be using it again.
Once you have de-activated the “Plug Installer” plugin, then continue from here.
Using the backup plugin installed under Manage / Plugins, go and take a backup (make sure the checkboxes for all the tables are selected) and download the backup to your computer. Once it has finished go to the location you saved the file and verify that it exists.
Once you have created a backup and verified that it is safely on your computer, then continue from here.
This video covers how to actually use the Instant Upgrade plugin to upgrade to version 2.7 of WordPress.
Click the Image or here to watch the video.
If you get any errors, skip this part and read on down below for where to get some help and debug the problems.
Once the upgrade has completed and everything looks cool, check out my video tour of the new WordPress 2.7 admin area and new features to find out what’s not.
Deep breath…
Every blog that Ninja Blog Setup has installed has been sending a backup to your primary email once a week since it was setup, so even if your were extremely crazy and didn’t heed my warning to take one before you began, you should still have a fairly recent one that you can use to restore your site.
Theme is broken or not displaying correctly – Contact the author of of the theme, usually there is a link to them in the admin area under “Themes”. It will be the top theme, since it is the currently active one.
Plugins causing error or not functioning correctly – this is common during major version upgrades. The only thing you can do really is to disable the plugin(s) and wait for the plugin creator to come out with a new version to fix the issues. You can also search for alternatives, since most popular plugins have at least 2 or 3 competitors.
Errors Everywhere or Error Script on The Page – here you have 3 options:
Hope this helps and that your upgrade goes smoothly. I think you’ll find WordPress 2.7 is well worth the time as the many new features will save you time and make blogging more fun!
This video is an overview of the dashboard area of WordPress version 2.7.
I’ve also demonstrated what I think is the best new feature of WP 2.7 and that is the ability to search for and install new Plugins from right inside the WordPress dashboard.
A word of caution however: don’t get a case of “Pluginitis.” Just because it is easy, don’t install 300 plugins. If your blog is brand new, sure try them out, but once your blog gets more established, the fewer plugins the better, as it will just slow your blog down and open up potential errors and security problems if you have too many plugins installed.
Click the image below or here for a video tour of the WordPress 2.7 Dashboard
Here are a couple other resources for getting to know the new WordPress a little better:
I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about all the changes and the new look of WordPress 2.7, but overall I think if you spend some time getting to know it, you’ll find that there are a lot of major improvements.
The only thing that seems like an obvious oversight is to be able to install new themes automatically the way you can with the plugins (fingers crossed for this one in the near future).
Covers all the areas of the dashboard and administration of a WordPress 2.5 blog.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.
Covers all the post editor: how to write and edit your blog stories
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.
You can watch part one and part two of the WordPress admin dashboard tour in higher quality on the Ninja Blog Setup Channel on Blip.tv.
Or click the little “Full Screen” icon on the bottom right hand edge of the video players to watch in full screen (looks awesome).
Blog-well.com has put together a great guide on how to transfer your site from WordPress.com (your url would look like this: yourwebsite.wordpress.com) to your own domain (yourwebsite.com) and fully hosted using your own hosting account.
Previously you ran the risk of losing your page rank and any search engine rankings and incoming link traffic, but the free report tells you how to take care of all that and move without cost in traffic or rankings:
Transfer Blog From WordPress.com to Your Own Domain
As an alternative, you can let a Ninja install your blog for free 
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