Ninja Blog Setup » WordPress

WordPress 3.0 Is Here, But Don’t Upgrade Just Yet

Shawn — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:27:17 +0000

WordPress 3.0 has just been released and is jam-packed full of a bunch of great new features. One of the biggest new features in my opinion is a much improved custom navigation area that offers extreme flexibility in setting up your navigation menus. Also, the default WordPress theme has finally been retired and replaced with a new theme called Twenty Ten that actually looks pretty darn nice. I’m not saying it’s going to replace all the premium themes on the market (it’s not), but it will work very nicely for bloggers who aren’t ready to spend the extra money for a premium theme.

Although the new release may have you itching to go upgrade your existing sites..WAIT!! Before upgrading, you will want to give plugin and theme designers a chance to upgrade their plugins and themes. They’ll be busy over the next few weeks working out all the bugs and making sure their products work well with WordPress 3.0. There’s nothing like upgrading only to find out that half your plugins don’t work or your theme no longer displays properly. My advice…be patient and give it about thirty days. It will be much safer to upgrade then.

For a glimpse of the new WordPress 3.0 and all the sweet new features, check out the video below.

10 Free WP Themes That Look Like They Cost Money

Shawn — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:08:16 +0000

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!

How to Easily Add a Table to a WordPress Page or Post

Shawn — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 01:53:41 +0000

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.

How To Automatically Update Your WordPress Copyright Date

Shawn — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:59:08 +0000

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– . All rights reserved.

Replace 2005 with whatever year your website started. You may also replace 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– 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!

Ninja Blog Setup Relaunches!

Shawn — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 19:00:53 +0000

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!

10 Reasons Why You Should Use WordPress

Shawn — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 18:26:19 +0000

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!

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.

Easy Integration

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.

Regular Updates

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?

It’s Search Engine Friendly

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.

Easy SEO

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.

It’s Automatic

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.

Free Support Everywhere

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.

Tons of Themes

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.

Plenty of Plugins

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.

Easy Money!

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?

How To Upgrade to WordPress 2.7

Shawn — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:55:43 +0000

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.

The Risks When Upgrading

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.

Step 1. Getting Started

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.

Step 2. Cover Your Butt – Backup!

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.

Step 3. Perform the Upgrade

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.

(Step 4. Disaster Strikes & Everything Went Wrong)

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.

Getting Help

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:

Free support on the WordPress support forums. Step one is to search for your error, chances are very high that someone else already had the same problem. If you don’t find it then post a CLEAR discription of your error, and a link to your site, and generally some friendly person will help you out.
Hire a WordPress Pro. Visit the WordPress pro’s page and follow the steps to send a email requesting help and asking for bids to troubleshoot and fix the problem. You’ll usually receive a lot of emails from great people willing to help for a very reasonable fee.
Hire Joel. Joel offers a blog help desk and can help you fix anything for a fee.

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!

Tour of the WordPress 2.7 Dashboard

Shawn — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 19:49:16 +0000

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:

WordPress 2.7 Upgrade Tips by Lorelle
2.7 the official release video on Ma.tt
First Look At WordPress 2.7 on Weblogs Tools

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).

Tour of the WordPress 2.5 Admin Dashboard Area

Shawn — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:27:06 +0000

Part One

Covers all the areas of the dashboard and administration of a WordPress 2.5 blog.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part Two

Covers all the post editor: how to write and edit your blog stories

Click here to view the embedded 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).

Transfer from WordPress.com to WordPress.org

Shawn — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 10:26:58 +0000

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