Many people want to make simple CSS changes but do not know where to start or are afraid that they will change the wrong thing. As a result of this I get asked a lot of CSS related questions from new WordPress users. The fact is that learning CSS is not really that hard. Once you get a hang of the basics, you can quickly become an advanced CSS user if you keep playing around with it. In this article I have explained how to do simple CSS modifications, hopefully it will be of some help to some of you. Let's get started. First, you should make a back up copy of CSS files you are going to modify. You should do this with any file you plan on modifying incase something goes wrong, you can always revert back to the version you know works properly. What is CSS "Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. It's most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML ...

This WordPress plugin lets you customize the email details that appear on emails sent from WordPress. By default the "From Name" on emails sent from wordpress has a name "WordPress" and the "From Address" on emails has "wordpress@your-domian.com" which is not very meaningful. You can customize both these fields with this plugin so your customers are not confused. Plugin Installation Unzip and Upload the folder "change-wp-mail-from-details" to the "/wp-content/plugins/" directory. Activate the plugin through the "Plugins" menu in WordPress. Plugin Usage Check the appropriate checkbox for the options that you want to customize. Enter the customized text in the appropriate field. [caption id="attachment_1884" align="alignnone" width="443" caption="Settings Screen of the Change "Email From Details" Plugin"][/caption] Support/Donation Option Donation option can be found on my projects page. Download Latest Version (v1.0) Download the Plugin.

Earlier, we discussed some Pay-per-click ad serving options; their features, advantages, limitations and payment policies. This time we will look into some WordPress plugins that integrates advertisement into the site. Most of them are related to Google Adsense, since it's the most widely used advertisement program on the net. But I've also covered some popular alternatives such as, Chitika, Amazon etc. WP Simple Adsense Integration As the name suggests, this plugin makes Adsense integration truly simple. Adding a Google advertisement on your WordPress blog post, page or sidebar is just a trigger text or a PHP function call away. If you feel overwhelmed while using some premium plugins built for the same purpose, this one is definitely for you. [Get the plugin] Adsense Beautifier If you are worried about ads making your beautifully design website look bad, you can try out this plugin. This plugin makes your Adsense look soothing to the eye, by adding images adjacent to the ads. This also helps increase your click-through rate(CTR). However, don't forget to add a line between the image and the ad, otherwise you would be voiding terms and conditions set up by Google. [Get the plugin] Adsense Earnings This plugin enables you to check your Adsense earning right ...

One of my readers asked me the following question: "How can I run a JavaScript within a WordPress post?" In this short post I have explained how I use Javascript in my WordPress posts. Adding javascript in WordPress post is really simple. You just have to switch to the HTML view in the editor and paste the JavaScript code and that's pretty much it. If the JavaScript code is in an external file then you need to include it first. You will need to add a bit of code similar to the following in your "header.php" or "footer.php" file to include the external JavaScript file: <script type="text/javascript src="http://www.your-domain-name.com/scripts/my-javascript.js"></script> I prefer to add javascript in the footer for site performance factors. You can paste it in the HTML view of the post too if this file is only needed in that one post. Replace "http://www.your-domain-name.com/scripts/my-javascript.js" with the actual location of the JavaScript file. After you have included the file you can use any functions that is defined in that file. Use something similar to the following: <script type="text/javascript"> <!-- custom_function(); //--></script> Replace "custom_function();" with the actual name of the function.

This morning one of my site visitors was kind enough to email me saying that the RSS Feed of my blog wasn't working on Internet Explorer and Google Chrome browsers. Internet Explorer is well known for its issues so I wasn't that alarmed but my hearth jumped as soon as I double checked the RSS feed on Chrome and found that it was complaining too. In this article I am going to explain what the error was and what I did to resolve it so you don't panic if it ever happens to you. The 1st RSS feed Error and Solution Internet explorer was displaying the following error when I clicked the RSS feed link on my site: The XML page cannot be displayed Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later. Chrome gave me the following which was a bit better as it was pointing out the line of the error rather than saying there is an error: This page contains the following errors: error on line 485 at column 330: Encoding error At this stage my best option was to validate my RSS feed using the W3C Feed Validator A quick validation check ...

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. It's time to toughen up your innocent little Wordpress site. The .htaccess file is the easiest and the cheapest (actually it's free!) solution to secure a Wordpress blog. What is a .htaccess File? The .htaccess file is a configuration file for use on web servers running the Apache Web Server software. When a .htaccess file is placed in a directory which is in turn "loaded via the Apache Web Server", then the .htaccess file is detected and executed by the Apache Web Server software. It is often used to specify the security restrictions for the particular directory. In this article I'm going to show you how to strengthen your site's security by adding/changing a few lines in this file. Before you make any changes, it might be a good idea to take a backup ...

I have been pretty busy with the WordPress plugin development lately, so didn't get a chance to write any posts for a few weeks. I think it's about time I share a simple but effective website performance improvement trick with the readers of this site that I have been using on all my sites. If you haven't read the WordPress site optimization tips and tricks already then you should read that first. 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. In your WordPress theme's header and footer you will see many statements similar to the following: bloginfo('home') This queries WordPress for the home URL of your blog (eg. http://www.your-site.com). Now, how often do you think your home URL is going to change? Most likely never! So why not replace it with the static information which is "http://www.your-site.com" and make one less database query? Saving one database query may not sound very convincing but you probably have many statements like the following that can also be replaced: bloginfo('html_type') bloginfo('charset') bloginfo('name') bloginfo('version') bloginfo('stylesheet_url') bloginfo('rss2_url') bloginfo('template_directory') bloginfo('home') Now multiply that by every page load per ...

Few weeks ago I wrote on how to optimize your WordPress site for better performance which has some tips and tricks on how to speed up a WordPress Site. I received a few requests to elaborate on some of the points as not all of them are obvious changes. In this article I have explained how you can add far future expiry header to your image, css and javascript files to speed up your site. Adding expires headers do not affect the site load time for a first time visitor but you will be surprised how much the page load time decreases (faster page load) for subsequent page views/return visits from that visitor. Expires header specifies a time far enough in the future so that browsers won't try to re-fetch images, CSS, javascript etc files that haven't changed (this reduces the number of HTTP requests) and hence the performance improvement on subsequent page views. If your server is Apache (most web servers), you can use the 'ExpiresDefault' directive to set an expiration date relative to the current date. ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 months" This sets the expiry date of the file 2 months into the future from the current time. The following values can ...

It is a known fact that having an affiliate program is the most powerful way to market your products or services online (Read more on the benefits of affiliate program). If you own a WordPress blog/site and your answer to the following questions are 'yes' then the 'WordPress Affiliate Platform' might just be what you need: Do you sell products or services online from your WordPress blog/site? Do you want to increase your sales and explode your profits by using an affiliate program? Do you want to have your own affiliate program so you can cut the middle man? Plugin Summary The 'WordPress Affiliate Platform' is an easy to use WordPress plugin for affiliate recruitment, management and tracking that can be used on any WordPress blog/site. This plugin lets you run your own affiliate campaign/program and allows you to reward(pay commission) your affiliates for referred sales. The admin can upload/configure banners/links which the affiliates can use on their blog/site to drive traffic to your site. All the clicks, leads, sales etc are tracked by this plugin. How It Works How the WordPress Affiliate Platform Works Plugin Features Some key features of the WordPress Affiliate Platform include: Easy Installation Easy installation like any other WordPress plugin and very easy to use. Real Time ...

I recently changed my web hosting again in an attempt to speed up the page load time of my website. I had to do it as the former hosting's page response time was horrible. It was taking 9 seconds for my home page to load with the former hosting. Now my home page loads under 4 seconds! It's amazing the difference it makes... now I don't get angry when browsing my own site (I wonder what my visitors were thinking while waiting for the page to load!). Anyway, The transfer was smooth but I had a slight issue that I noticed after the transfer. There were special characters similar to the following scattered throughout my blog posts: I was pretty sure that this was a character encoding mismatch problem. I got a little scared thinking it would take a long time to fix but then I found a really easy way to solve it. Fixing the Character Encoding Mismatch Problem in WordPress Open the 'wp-config.php' file in a text editor such as notepad (the wp-config.php file can be found on the directory where you installed WordPress). Find the following two lines and comment them out: define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8'); define('DB_COLLATE', ''); They should look like the following after ...