WordPress Alternatives

WordPress is a fantastic piece of software and is hugely popular. However, its popularity sometimes makes bloggers forget that there are other great blogging scripts and services out there.

Here is a quicklist of wordpress alternatives that you might be interested at looking into if you want something different :

Understanding the WordPress Sidebar

The sidebar is a very important part of your blog. It appears on every page of your blog and is usually the main method visitors use to navigate around your blog.

The sidebar code may seem quite daunting at first but when you take the time to break it down, its very easy to understand. I hope this guide will help you understand the sidebar more and will help you modify it to your needs.

A look at the basic code of the Sidebar

Some themes use a different method however most themes (including the default theme of wordpress), the code looks something like this.


<div id="sidebar">
<ul>

5 Tips to remember when buying a blog theme

Recently i have noticed a growing trend of designers and ‘would be’ designers selling blog themes through web development forums. I’ve seen a lot of grabage getting sold but i’ve also saw some cracking designs. If you want a unique design for your blog and don’t want to spend between $300-$2000 to get a unique design then buying a blog theme through a community is definately something you should consider.

As i said, i’ve seen a lot of garbage being sold but hopefully this guide will help you decide which themes are bargains and which ones are rip-offs.

*Note : Non wordpress users may be dissapointed to hear that the majority of blog templates being sold are for wordpress.

Why Pingbacks are important

Pingbacks and trackbacks have become a very important feature in the blogosphere. This post discusses why pingbacks are such a fantastic feature for blog owners.

What are Pingbacks?

How To Creating a links page in WordPress

Creating an links page is very easy in wordpress and displays all your links in one directory.

You use the same method as you would to create an archive page in wordpress.

How To Creating an Archives page in WordPress

You will see that ive added an archives page to bloggingtips. It shows Archives by Month and Archives by Subject. WordPress is already setup to show old posts via the category archive on the sidebar etc but it’s good to have an archives page in addition to that.

In this post ill show you how to add an archives page to your wordpress powered blog

It’s incredibly easy to add an archives page in wordpress 2 onwards. All you need to do is create a blank page (eg write, write page via the wp admin panel) and then make sure you change the page template from default template to archives. Thats it. If you now look at the archives page you should see all posts listed by month and category. Enjoy!

This Is How You Make Thesis Awesome WordpressTheme

WordPress is easily one of the most popular content management systems on the Internet. It’s simple enough to use for the beginning blogger, but it’s also powerful enough for seasonsed veterans with large audiences. Tack in Thesis Theme and you have quite the robust framework for running just about any website… but what if you want to customize Thesis?

Thesis Theme is totally open to customization, but you might not have the time or expertise to do exactly what you want to do. For that, you can turn your attention to ThesisAwesome, a subscription service that provides you with a continuous supply of Thesis Theme skins and styles.

5 Must Have Maintenence Tools for WordPress Blogs

It’s very important to perform blog maintenance on a regular basis. It not only helps to keep your blog running and loading properly, but it also helps with SEO and search engine rankings. Google and other search engines are not fond of websites with a lot of errors and issues; so you want to have as little as possible. It’s a good idea to use some, if not all, of these tools to help keep your blog running smoothly and maintain your page rank.

Broken Link Checker

This plugin continuously monitors your blog and lets you know whenever it finds any broken links. Having too many broken links can affect your search engine rankings because it shows that your blog is not being regularly updated or maintained. So it’s important to keep up with these and keep them to a minimum. This plugin monitors your posts, pages, comments, blogroll and custom fields. It can also detect missing images and redirects. You can get notifications on your blog dashboard and/or via email.

How to fix WordPress.com Stats plugin showing zero (0) visitors!

This article explains how to fix WordPres.com Stats plugin when it doesn’t show any statistics for your site or shows 0 visitors.

Apache Mod Security update, How to Fix ‘Error 406′ or ‘Not Acceptable’ issue

How to Uninstall and Reinstall WordPress

in this post I have explained how you can uninstall and reinstall WordPress. You will rarely think about uninstalling/reinstalling WordPress on your site unless you start having ‘Apache security mod rewrite and htaccess’ issue like myself.  I decided to Reinstall WordPress on one of my sites after trying numerous fixes to solve the issue and getting no result. Some people uninstall/reinstall WordPress to start over from scratch. Anyway, whatever the reason is, you can uninstall and reinstall WordPress the following ways.

WordPress Plugin for Simple Google Adsense Insertion/Integration

Easy to use WordPress plugin to insert Google Adsense to your posts, pages and sidebar by using a trigger text or calling the php function.

4 easy steps to set up your self hosted wordpress blog

Top 10 Web Sites for Hiring WordPress Experts

With no doubt WordPress is the biggest, best and most popular blogging platform around. Top blogs (BloggingTips too!) use WordPress as the core of their publishing platform, because WordPress offers what other blogging platforms don’t: flexibility.

WordPress’s powerful engine allows you to run a simple personal weblog, or even build a fully custom framework to run your website on. Lets not forget about the hundreds of thousands plugins and themes which allow you to customize your blog just the way you want to.

List of the Best and Must Use WordPress Plugins

Must Use Plugins

How to Add Widgets to WordPress Theme’s Footer

I wanted to use widgets in the footer of my WordPress theme but my wordpress theme didn’t come with a footer-sidebar by default. I didn’t really wanted to change the theme just because of that. So I hacked the wordpress theme to introduce footer-sidebars. If you are looking for a tutorial that explains how you can add sidebars/widgets to the footer of your WordPress theme then keep reading.

Infinity Remix – Premium WordPress Theme

2 Simple WordPress Blog Optimization Tips and Tricks

This trick involves changing some of the dynamic wordpress queries to static ones which in turn reduces the number of database queries and improves site performance. This does require a little bit of PHP knowledge but it’s really basic stuff.

Tips to Boost Your WordPress Site’s Security

You have started a blog to share your opinion with the World Wide Web. Someone stumbles upon one of your articles. He likes it, and posts it on Digg. Now it gets everyone’s attention. Visitors come pouring into your site. Your revenue starts to go up. Definitely good news! But now there is a catch. You are now the target of the ‘bad crowd’ of the Internet, spammers, hackers and leechers.

How to Add Javascript in a WordPress Post or Page