Wordpress Exposed: Part 1 - Overview

So you’ve been toying around with the idea of setting up your own blog. Your own little space on the internets to spread your ideas, share inspirational thoughts, make observations about the bizarreness of life, the universe and everything or maybe you just want to have a good old rant about the recession.

Whatever your reasons, the end goal is the same – to establish your own web presence where you can express yourself freely to just about anybody on the planet. The purpose of this series of articles is to help you achieve that goal.

Over the next few weeks we will take an in-depth look at the world’s most popular blogging platform and see how you can take advantage of it to create a unique and functionally rich weblog from the ground up.

We will cover such topics as:

• Why you should choose Wordpress
• How to install Wordpress on your own domain
• Tour of the Wordpress control panel
• Themes (Changing, using and creating your own)
• Plugins
• And more…

What you will need:

• Your own domain name (such as www.mydomain.com)
• Hosting package with a web hosting company
• Time and patience
• I’ll hopefully provide you with everything else you need

I’ll update this post with links as new Wordpress Exposed articles are published on this site. Part 2 should be coming very soon. I hope you find the articles useful and have fun creating your own Wordpress powered blog.

Wordpress & Twitter Tutorial

The report goes on to say that while only 9.5% of this traffic is driven toward commercial sites almost 56% of it goes to other social networking sites, media sites and blogs. It’s clear to see from this that Twitter can be an important source of traffic to your blog.

One of the easiest ways to allow people to share your blog posts on Twitter is by allowing them to tweet directly from your site. There are a number of plugins available to help you do this. However, here we will look at one quick and simple method that does not require any plugins to be installed on your blog.

Adding the Link to Wordpress

Step 1: Open the header.php file of the Wordpress theme you are currently using. Locate the closing </HEAD> tag and insert the following lines just before it.

<?php if ( is_single() ) { ?>
   <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"
            src="http://bit.ly/javascript-api.js?version=latest&login=tweettrackjs&apiKey=R_7e9987b2fd13d7e4e881f9cbb168f523"></script>
   <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"
            src="http://s.bit.ly/TweetAndTrack.js?v=1.01"></script>
<?php } ?>

Step 2: Open the single.php file of the Wordpress theme you are using. Insert the following lines below the_content() function.

<a href="#" onclick="return TweetAndTrack.open(this, '<?php echo get_permalink();?>');">
<span style="display:none;">Reading: <?php the_title();?></span>Tweet This Post on Twitter</a>

Of course you can modify the final line of code to display whatever text you want your visitors to see. You can even replace the text entirely with an image file if you wish.