The other day, I was playing around with the new WordPress menus that came with version 3.0 and up; I created a new menu and throwed some pages and posts in the same menu, which was a cool and an easy task. I figure out that  you can create a custom link with whatever you like in it, so I added all my social networks in a sub-menu, which was an easy task too, until I find out that when you click one of this external links on the menu, it opened on the same page, and since I didn’t want my visitors to leave my blog but to open the external link in a new window, it got me thinking that this was worthless. I started looking into the code which took me a lot of time and no results, then I started browsing the web and stumble upon a thread at wordpress.org that had the answer to my problem. While reading it, I felt so stupid because the answer was just standing in front of me all this time.

I found out that day that WordPress is becoming extremely friendly and easy to manipulate, We are so use to change things from the core that most of the time we don’t realize that somebody else has already been through all that trouble to make our lives easier.

So here is the stupid answer >

Go to > Appearance > Menus

Under your Menus Admin Go to > Screen Options and CLICK it

There you will find a lot of cool stuff to add , like

Posts > If you want to add a single Post or Article to one of your Menus

Post Tags> If you want to add a tag to your menu that redirects to the archive

Link Target> To check how you would like your custom link to be open : Same Window or Tab or New Window or Tab

CSS Classes> To include some cool stuff to your Menus, like Custom Icons to go with each link , like the ones that are on my menu ( Twitter and Facebook )

So you just Check everything that works for you, and it will add up to your custom links,

BEFORE

AFTER

Akismet or Automattic Kismet is a spam filtering service. It attempts to filter spam from blog comments and spam TrackBack pings. The filter works by combining information about spam captured on all participating blogs, and then using those spam rules to block future spam.

It is an Incredible tool to use if you have a WordPress Blog or Site. I receive about 10 to 15 spam comments daily, if those add up at the end of the month I will end up with 450 or so spam comments, Akismet will  handle this for you in a very efficient way.

But there has been some controversy on how AKISMET started charging for its service, when they use to be free. Most people will go and try to create an account, but will get the surprise of a paid service. Well let me show you how you can get it for free.

First you need to create an account at http://akismet.com/

Then you need to select a package, which now is a little confusing since every package has a paid amount, but don’t you worry , you can still get it for free, so go ahead an select the Personal Account

Here is the tricky part, when you get to the signup form you will see a $36.00/yr amount you have to pay, also shows a payment method; So your first impression is , “ I will get out of here and keep looking for a free solution”. But don’t panic since this is just an alternate way of the famous DONATE button, what the guys at AKISMET are asking you is for a donation, so if you don’t feel like giving away a couple of bucks, then just click on the price node and bring it to the left until it shows 0.

Fill in your contact info and go check your email, there you will find your api key, which you’ll need to activate AKISMET at your WordPress site

Now go to your WordPress Admin, and enter this API key into your AKISMET options menu. Click Update, and your are done. You have won the first battle against SPAM. For FREE!!

A few lines of extra code in your header probably won’t slow your site down or risk performance, but you would like to keep things as clean and efficient as possible, since it only takes one line at the time to end up with a load of unnecessary code piled up on your wordpress blog, and that will surely slow it down from time to time.

This tip will not only help add up to your Blogs Security but will help with performance by removing unnecessary code from your Blog. Since WordPress uses the function wp_head() to add a bunch of code to the header of each page. Some of it is absolutely unnecessary.

By default, many WordPress themes include the version information in the document this information proves very useful for the hackers as they can easily target blogs that are using the older version of wordpress software. Here is what many themes use to display this info:

<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(‘version’); ?>” />

To prevent this information from being displayed in older themes, you can simply remove the previous line from your theme’s header.php file. In newer themes, however, the entire meta tag is generated by the wp_generator function from deep within the WordPress core. Fortunately it is just as easy to remove by adding the following line to your active theme’s functions.php file located in your WordPress theme folder:

<?php remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’); ?>

The purpose for meta tags is to provide useful information to spiders and search engines. Meta tags do not display on a blog or website, but do display in the HTML or XHTML . Many meta tags are obsolete or do not serve any real useful purpose. You can remove these meta tags from your WordPress pages.

Do you want certain articles from your WordPress Blog to be accessed only by logged-in members?

You don’t have to install a plugin to turn your WordPress Blog into a membership site, you just have to unlock some features that WordPress comes with out of the box, but many users simply doesn’t know about.

You can use this feature for:

• Online education centers where registered students can access their learning material
• Share download links or information for member only visitors
• A place to gather ideas for a project restricted to team members only.
• Valuable Information worth sharing to subscribers

You can password protect it so that only the users that are logged in to your blog are allowed the access to your post. This option is available on your ‘add new post’ under the publish box. You have to click on ‘edit’ next to ‘visibility public’, change the settings and add a password if you want it protected and then click publish.

Giving an article a private members only feature turns it onto something you can sell, or something to help you gain new susbcribers. Of Course this information that you are going to lock has to be very important and appealing in your niche, to be able to turn your visitors into subscribers.

Remember that by using less plugins you optimize the performance of your WorPress Blog, when it comes to user experience,  you would prefer sacrificing the comfort of setting parameters in the dashboard , than having a slow blog that scares visitors away.

WordPress comes with lots of features, some of them are hidden, some can be fired up by a simple shortcode and some have been in front of us all this time and we haven’t even notice.

Stick around and let us show you some cool tweaks to turn your WordPress Blog into something Amazing.

Every WordPress installation contains a configuration file called wp-config.php that holds essential data for your Web site to work and  it’s located in your WordPress installation directory.

Important and secret information is stored on this file. Lets say you allready installed WordPress in a different directory other than you main public html directory ( If you haven’t check out How to install WordPress on a different directory) in order to secure it from bots and hackers , but if some hacker setup bots to crawl for your wp-config.php file and gets to it , he could easily learn all about your installation not to mention where your database is stored, the username and password, remember that this database is where all your articles, pages, comments, and all the information that you have or will have on your WordPress blog or site is stored; In malicious hands, this could be disastrous.

Here is a list of what is stored on your wp-config.php file

• Database name
• Database username
• Database password
• Database host
• WordPress language: English is the default.
• WordPress database table prefix: wp_
• Secret keys
• Absolute path to the WordPress files on your Web server

You have to take whatever steps you can to secure that file so that no one, but you, has access to it. One quick and easy way to do that is to disallow any bots access to it and to change the file permissions ( Bots are automated software applications mostly developed by hackers and spammers that are used to check which blogs and websites have vulnerabilities so they can attack , extract information and hack into )

To do so, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your Web server via FTP, and then locate and open the
   .htaccess file to edit it. If you don’t know how to use an FTP Client Check this out
2. Add the Deny from all code to the top of the .htaccess file.
   This secures the file from being seen by any bots or search engines
   on the Web:
   <Files wp-config.php>
   Order Allow,Deny
   Deny from all
   </Files>
   
   
3. Save the new .htaccess file and upload it to your Web server.
   Your wp-config.php file is hidden from any outside bots or
   search engines.
4. Change file permission (chmod) on wp-config.php to 640.
   Changing the file permission to 640 ensures that the file can be written
   (or changed/edited) only by the owner of the file, not by the public; or
   worse yet, by any automated bots or script programs run by hackers.
   
   

We are used to install WordPress at the root directory on our web hosting servers, usually html or www directory e.g. http://bloggermind.net ,  but you don’t want all the WordPress files cluttering up in here. WordPress allows you to install the WordPress files to a subdirectory, bt transparently your blog will exist in the site root. e.g. You may have all the WordPress files at http://bloggermind.net/blog/ but with the following tweak all your visitors will land on http://bloggermind.net without ever knowing about the /blog/ directory.

So let’s get to work

1. Create the new location for the core WordPress files to be stored (we will use /blog in our examples), use one of the 2 best ftp file managers to get access to your website and create a new subdirectory under the root.
2. Go to the General panel at your WordPress Administration menu
3. In the box for WordPress address (URL): change the address to the new location of your main WordPress core files. Example: http://example.com/blog
4. In the box for Site address (URL): change the address to the root directory’s URL. Example: http://example.com
5. Click Save Changes. (Do not worry about the error message and do not try to see your blog at this point! You will probably get a message about file not found.)
6. Using FireFTP or Filezilla Move your WordPress core files to the new location (/blog/ address).
7. Copy (NOT MOVE!) the index.php and .htaccess files from the /blog/ directory into the root directory of your site (Blog address). The .htaccess file is invisible, so you may have to set your FTP client to show hidden files. If you are not using pretty permalinks, then you may not have a .htaccess file. If you are running WordPress on a Windows (IIS) server and are using pretty permalinks, you’ll have a web.config rather than a .htaccess file in your WordPress directory. As stated above, copy (don’t move) the index.php file to your root directory, but MOVE (DON’T COPY) the web.config file to your root directory.
8. Open your root directory’s index.php file in a text editor like PSPAD to be able to edit it.
9. Change the following and save the file. Change the line that says:
   require('./wp-blog-header.php');
   to the following, using your directory name for the WordPress core files:
   require('./blog/wp-blog-header.php');
10. Login to the new location. It might now be http://example.com/blog/wp-admin/
11. If you have set up Permalinks, go to the Permalinks panel and update your Permalink structure. WordPress will automatically update your .htaccess file if it has the right file permissions. If WordPress can’t write to your .htaccess file, it will display the new rewrite rules to you, which you should manually copy into your .htaccess file (in the same directory as the main index.php file.)

That’s it , now you have given WordPress It’s own Zip Code

Well what if your primary language is not English and you are just using Google Translate to read this article, well good news there is a good chance WordPress is in your language.

Why WordPress, well just because is one of the best [tooltip text="Content Management Systems"] CMS [/tooltip] out there, apart from being easy to use and keep up, is well-known for its beauty and cleanliness. We have tried other CMS’s like Drupal and Joomla and let me tell you, nothing compares to WordPress, I think it’s because its founder Matt Mullenweg is all about Jazz and Poetry and that just reflects in the code. We love WordPress so that’s all you are going to hear from us and  we will teach you how to use it from head to toe.

So let’s get to work, first we assume you already have a Domain and a web hosting, and you are ready to install WordPress if you still haven’t I recommend taking a look at Before you buy a Domain

Download | Upload  | Database | Execute

D.U.D.E.

Download

First you have to download the WordPress files from here WORDPRESS DOWNLOAD , this link will always show the latest version of WordPress, so you can come back anytime to download it. If you are looking for a different language other than English I recommend you take a look at  Installing WordPress in 68 different languages

WordPress comes on a 3 MB zip file , save it on a folder you would remember

Upload

Unzip the File, open it and you will find the WordPress folder , which has all the necessary files and folders that will be uploaded to your server.

So upload the WordPress files and folders to your html folder at your web hosting provider using Filezilla or your favorite ftp application, you can do it directly from your webhosting’s file manager ( Most of them have one ); Some of you would like to keep your WordPress files in a different folder to do this go ahead and read Giving WordPress a Zip Code

Database

WordPress will need a database to store all the articles,pages,comments,authors etc., so you will need to create one before executing the WordPress engine

Go into your web hosting account and go to MySQL database manager, create a new database, assign a user to the new database and give it all the permissions to use it. Copy the database name, the username, and the password, because you will need them in the next step

Execute

Go to you favorite browser and type in your domain name to execute the WordPress installation. It will notice that you haven’t edited the config-sample.php file so it will ask you if you want WordPress to do it for you, well be my guest and allow it, now you will have to enter your database name, username, and database location. Click on to the next step where you will have to enter the Username you will use to login to WordPress administration platform, and the password.  Click to the next to finish the installation, login to your new WordPress Installation and enjoy.

Congratulations D.U.D.E. you just installed WordPress , now go on and share your experiences to the world.

Why do I have to optimize my blog’s Images ? Well First the loading time of websites has a major influence on the overall user experience and the first thing to cover is how to optimize images meaning that you should resize and save each image in a format that does not uses a lot of space and since Images can create an extra load on the size of your pages. Now, Photoshop and similar image editing software include a feature called “Save for the web”. Always use this feature since it will reduce the image size and load time substantially.

But these process can be time consuming and you can end up finishing an article in about 4 times what you expected, that is why we will show you how to do this in a batch, by using this little wonderful app called Fotosizer.

Fotosizer is a freeware batch image resizer tool. It resizes your photos in just 3 easy steps – 1. Photo selection, 2. select resize settings, then 3. Start the resize!

With Fotosizer, you can shrink JPEG image files, along with other supported formats, and dramatically reduce internet transfer times, enabling you to quickly and easily prepare your image collections to be published on the web.

Select all the photos you like and just type in your preferences, you cannot only resize, but also transform a .jpg to a .png and must used image formats, change the quality, conserve the aspect ratio, and much more.

Just Take a look at this Video we have prepared for you, enjoy.. DOWNLOAD IT HERE

Watch it in Full Screen so you can take a look at the Application’s Features