Popularity: 46% [?]

In case you ever want to Jazz up your WordPress blog - or perhaps you’ve got a kick-ass idea and no idea how to implement it… it might just be on this 40+ Most Wanted WordPress Tricks and Hacks. Seriously awesome - seriously you must get yourself there when you get a chance.

Things included on the big list:

• Display categories in a horizontal drop-down
• Add author bio to every blog post (handy if you’re group blogging!)
• Highlight author comments
• Format images for feedreaders
• Create a dynamic sticky
• Turn WordPress into a CMS
• Create a Peel-Away ad on your blog… for free!
• Protect WordPress blog images against hotlinking
• Add Ad stripe to improve blog earnings

The list goes on and on… obviously I have taken a couple of the ideas and have downloaded the plugins and I’m excited to mod my blogs!

I’ve been to HongKiat.com when I was having problems with uploading images to my newly upgraded WordPress blog - I didn’t know why I wasn’t able to “crunch” a new image and add it to my blog in their nifty Media Gallery - and it was really getting me aggravated. So I put my aggravation on the Internet and found HongKiat’s solution. And it worked!

So if you’re having problems with uploading images to your newly upgraded WordPress blog - go here and do what he says. Easy-peasy - step by step to get you through it. I’ve had to use this on a couple of my blogs - seems to only affect the upgraded sites… not the new freshly installed ones. I’m not sure why - but there you go - the fix.

Popularity: 27% [?]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately on how I can take steps to make my online life a little bit easier… a little bit more automated and I got to thinking about ad sales and how that can end up taking quite a bit of time to set up and then the way I set it up is manually and if someone buys from me it’s all manually done and that can lead to me missing things and lead to less revenue. So I’m on a quest to find something that will work with what I’m running - which is mostly WordPress.

So I’d heard about OIOPublisher before and to be quiet honest I thought spending $37 on a product when I could do it myself seemed silly. Now I’m thinking I will be investing in the program to give it a whirl here. I took a walk through the demo and I’m glad that I did. I had no idea how versatile the program was - seriously I thought it only did 125×125 placements on a site. But this program will do more than that, it will put ads in your RSS feeds, in posts, under posts, etc. Seriously a very versatile program.

I’ve also seen other “big” names out there using the program too - which is a good guide to see what the more successful bloggers are doing to monetize their sites and how they do it and keep their sanity in the meantime

So in the next week or two I’ll be implementing OIOPublisher on this site and we’ll see how it goes. I’d love to get some advertising going - where I’m supporting other affiliate bloggers and their sites or projects. I’m really looking forward to opening the door and getting people’s names out there - even though currently I’m not a “big” name in the industry… maybe I can help get people’s names out there - and their ideas. So fingers crossed!

… and we’ll get the good times rolling and a little more time saved to do things that will get me more productive!

Popularity: 9% [?]

There are tons of designs available for us out there when it comes to skinning our Blogs. I’ve been working on a few designs myself and I’m always downloading the freebies when I see them, because you never know when something like that would come in handy for your next project and you don’t have time to design or buy.

But here’s my question to you.

For your next project:

a. Would you be more inclined to use a freebie theme (that you and hundreds of others might have).

b. Would you purchase a pre-made design?

c. Would you go completely custom and hire a designer to make you one?

I’m leaning more towards going for a pre-made one and then tweaking it myself.  The custom sites are a bit more expensive, and I don’t think I would personally do that myself until I knew the site was taking off, or that I was super passionate about the subject and wanted to individualize it. I guess it really depends on the situation…

What do you do?

Popularity: 10% [?]

Over at How to Geek, they’ve created a pretty nifty WordPress plugin that will work on your dashboard (much like Google Mail… which they used as the basis of this plugin).   This plugin will alert you when someone has commented on your blog.  I’m not sure if it’s an exclusive - 1 blog plugin sort of thing or if you can have multiple blogs.

I’m not sure I’ll be using it any time soon - since I’m finding myself already WAY TO DISTRACTED with stats, posts, rss feeds and all that stuff.  But if you like to be notified as soon as someone has commented, this might be what you’re looking for.

… um to call this a plugin… I’m not sure if I’m using the right term - but it will alert you to comments on your computer much like Google Mail does.

Check out the nifty WordPress Comment Alert thingy here.

Popularity: 8% [?]