What’s My Feedburner ID?
Your ID can now be found in your feedburner feed URL. For example, if your feed URL was http://feeds2.feedburner.com/MyFeedURL, then MyFeedURL would be your Feedburner ID. Easy enough? :-)
Feedburner is an absolute dream come true for a blogger. In fact, I would put in in the top 5 tools that every single blogger needs in their arsenal. It tracks the number of feed subscribers you have, it allows you to offer feed updates via email, and it even has professional site statistics now too! (all for free, mind you)
If you don’t have an account there yet, go there and get one … NOW!
OK, now that you have an account, there are a few things you need to know about feedburner.
1. My feedburner address
This is actually pretty simple, but for the sake of the absolute beginner, you feedburner address is chosen by you when you burn your feed. It usually looks something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeedaddress (where “myfeedaddress” is the unique feed string you’ve chosen).
2. My feedburner ID
WordPress 2.3 Theme Backward Compatibility
Over at BlogginPro, the question was posed:
My biggest question is “what will happen if we take the newly updated theme, and place it on a blog running a previous version of WordPress?”
Is there some way to check which version of WordPress is being run, or will we have to put out a WordPress 2.3 only version of each and every theme?
I’m not normally an active commenter on blogs, but since I knew the answer to the question, I figured I’d speak up and answer the question. Because of this, I figured I’d go ahead and answer it here as well.
PHP comes with the built in capability to check to see if a function exists. Since template tags are nothing more than PHP functions, it makes sense that you can very easily use the function_exists condition to check the availability of the function before actually calling it. It would go a little something like this: (more…)
The Overlooked “Tag” Tags
OK, I admit being a sucker for all the “tag hype” in the WordPress Community too. I’ve seen all the WordPress bloggers (that is, bloggers who specialize in WordPress tips) try to be the first to write a tutorial on how to implement tagging in your WordPress theme. I’ve even been tempted to do it myself, although I’ve resisted.
And I subscribe to a good many blogs that specialize in this kind of information too.
And as I’ve been following these blogs, I’ve been waiting on one, JUST ONE, to mention the 2 template tags for “tags” that I noticed in the Default theme that came with my WordPress 2.3 beta download. Seriously, I’ve been waiting to see how long it would take for someone to realize that no one has written on them yet and capitalize on it. But as of yet, no one has (at least that I have seen). So, I decided to take a few minutes and let everyone know about two overlooked template/conditional tags that are available for the new version of WordPress: (more…)
A Piece of the Action
There were actually more submissions than I had thought there would be, but still … I decided to submit one of my articles to the DailyBlogTips.com contest to see if any of his readers might be interested in coming over this way and trying out this blog. I think I give practical, understandable advice to people looking to either get into web design … WordPress development … and also people looking to pick up a nifty trick or two to try out on their blog sometime.
Obviously, you can read more about the purpose of this blog over at my about page :-)
Anyway, I thought I’d share the list with people here for the sake of giving Daniel a little link love. This contest isn’t just to benefit the readers you know, it’s also meant to generate some extra traffic and a few links in the process for Daniel. So, here’s the list of all the articles submitted: (more…)
Web-Safe Fonts For Your Blog
No matter what blogging platform you use … even if you’re just building a straight HTML website … there are relatively few fonts that are safe to use. You can’t just find a “pretty” font on your computer and use it on your website. You have to do your research first. Hopefully, this article will help you narrow down the choices in your quest to make your website bulletproof.
In basic CSS format, you define a font for a website like so:
body { (more…)
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 12px;
}
WordPress Quick Tip: Turn off Smileys
This is just a very quick tip for your WordPress blog. One of the most annoying things about WordPress’s default settings is the fact that smileys are turned on by default. What’s a smiley, you say? When you put characters together like a colon and an closing parenthesis, WordPress replaces the text with a little yellow smiley face. How cute.
The problem is, many times WordPress theme designers put styles in the stylesheet to control any image in the content div that will either float all images or maybe put a border around them. The result is a screwed up story … all because of this “cute” little feature.
On top of that, let’s say you wanted to put an actual parenthetical statement in your blog story. Now imagine that your parenthetical statement ends with the number “8″. You wouldn’t think that would be a problem … but if you have smileys turned on, it is a problem. (more…)
3 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Homepage
Back when I wrote “Good Design Starts with the Homepage”, I didn’t include much in the way of tips for actually achieving that perfect homepage. The fact is, there is an endless list of possibilities to optimizing your blog’s homepage, but I believe that if you do these 3 simple things, you’ll be on your way to the perfect homepage!
(disclaimer: all the below tips pertain to WordPress blogs. Sorry guys, I’m a WordPress fanboy.)
1. Use the correct header tags
One of the most common semantic mistakes made by blog designers (at one time, myself included) is using the wrong header tag to wrap your titles in. (more…)
Free Advertising for a Limited Time
Because the page doesn’t get too many pageviews, I thought it would be beneficial to announce it in a blog post as well. For a limited time, I’m offering free advertising in my sidebar. I need to test out the system of advertising, and in order to do that, I figured that instead of using dummy ads, I’d allow people to submit their 125×125 buttons to be used in my sidebar.
If you’re interested in some free advertising, click on over to this page and check out the details on how to submit your ad for review.
