By default, just having the plugin installed is a good thing because it rewrites your web page titles and helps restructure your URLs to be more search engine friendly.

1) Login to WordPress

2) Add a New Post

3) Write Your Post

4) Copy and paste your post title and select roughly 160 characters of text that you would like to appear in your ‘description’ when Google indexes your site into the All in One SEO Pack

Your Site Title and Your Google 'Description'

5) Paste it in the All in One SEO Pack plugin that is located below your text input window like so (remember to add a few tags you would like to include in your meta tags of your page):

6) Click ‘publish’ or ‘update post’ to save your changes and add these descriptions to your page.

Things you’ll need to know before starting:

• Your username and password for your wordpress blog
• Your username and password for your web server

That’s all you’ll need to install any wordpress plugin listed on the plugins directory of WordPress.org.

Here are the steps:

1) Login to your WordPress blog at http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin.

2) Scroll down the page until you see the tab labelled ‘Plugins’ and click it.

3) Click ‘Add New’

4) If you know the name of the plugin, type it in. If not, search for what kind of plugin you’re looking for, e.g. ‘Comments’ or ‘Popular Posts’ etc.

5) Click the plugin that you want to install or find out more information about.

6) Click ‘Install Now’

7) This is where you’ll need to type in your web server username and password to allow the plugin to install automatically. Then click ‘proceed’.

If all things went well, you should see a message like this. Click ‘Activate Plugin’ and you’re done!

So now you know how to install plugins to your WordPress blog.

N/B: Remember to read through the details provided by the plugin creator, as some plugins require a little bit of modification to the .php coding of your blog.

When you leave a comment, do you look like one of these icons? Do you wonder how come the other people have a little screen shot of their face, logo or some other cute picture next to their name? While you are a blank silhouette of a man or a spectacled smiley face?

Well that’s because they’ve set up a Gravatar account which is linked to their email address. Whenever you leave a comment (with a Gravatr linked e-mail address) then your selected picture will appear in the box next to the comments section.

To setup a Gravatar account follow these steps:

1) Go to http://gravatar.com
2) Sign up for an account

3)Login to your new account

4) Click ‘Add an Email Address’

5) Type in your e-mail address that you use to leave comments (or the admin e-mail address you use for your blog) and click ‘add’

6) Click ‘add a new image’

7) Upload a picture from your hard disk, a website or straight from your webcam.

Choose an image for your email address

9) Select the image that you just uploaded

10) Click ‘confirm’ when it asks you to

It’s as simple as that! Leave a comment with your new Gravatar picture below to test it out.

But what if you don’t have the little box next to your comments on your blog? How do you install it?

This only works if you have a WordPress blog.

1) You need to have access to the files on your server. For that, I’ll leave it up to you to figure out how to get them. I use Dreamweaver to get to my files.

2) Find http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/comments.php (where yourdomain.com represents where you installed your blog and yourtheme is the theme you are using for your WordPress blog)

3) Open comments.php in Dreamweaver or notepad if you don’t have it.

4) Find this line:

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

Anything under this line is for the comments section of your blog.

5) If you want to put your Gravatar icon above your name in the comment box (like my comment box below) then search for this line.

<cite class=”comment-author”><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite>

and ABOVE it paste this line:

<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 48 ); ?>

where the number represents how big you want the Gravatar image to be. Default is 32 (i.e. 32×32 pixels big) but I put mine a little bit bigger.

6) Save your file and upload it back to your server.

7) Refresh your page and the box for Gravatar images should be there.

Please remember that not all themes are the same and this method may or may not work for you. But it should work for the default and more popular themes out there.

Share this article if you liked it!

Thanks,

-William Lee

If you’re not sold on the idea yet, just have a look at some of the automated messages that spammers send as comments. It actually makes sense and seems like a good comment that a reader has left on your blog, but clicking back on the link of the commentor and you’ll find that it’s probably a website selling domain names or something similar like that.

Also, I encourage people to always set comment moderation to ‘on’ even with Akismet installed as some messages do get through their filters. On one of my other blogs, I get an average of 20 – 30 spam messages a day caught by Akismet.

Imagine getting 30 messages like this for every post that you write? And imagine having to go through your ‘comments awaiting moderation’ every day deleting these one by one. Install Akismet, it’s a must, and it’s FREE.

N/B: Check through your spam folder every once in a while as Akismet also does catch messages that isn’t actually SPAM. But this happens very rarely, but better to be safe than sorry right?

Happy spam catching,

-William Lee

Below I’ve compiled a list of the best free WordPress themes I’ve seen on the Internet. Of course there are a lot more out there but this is just to get you started.

Blogging Pro Theme [ Demo ]

Zeke 1.0 [ Demo ]

Smashing Theme [ Demo ]

xPlosive Reloaded [ Demo ]

dfMarine [ Demo ]

Morning After

Coldblue

Cubismo [ Demo ]

Abstractia [ Demo ]

Neoclassical

Tumblelog For WordPress [ Demo ]

Nishita [ Demo ]

I feel dirty

GR

Dream On

Glossy Blue

Blue Zinfandel WordPress Theme

Epsilon [Demo]

Promag [Demo]

Tropicala [Demo]

[Sources: Smashing Magazine 1 2, Top WordPress Themes, Worpress.org]

]]> http://onlinebusinessmalaysia.com/blog/wordpress-blog/20-best-free-wordpress-themes/feed/ 6 http://onlinebusinessmalaysia.com/blog/wordpress-blog/how-to-install-wordpress-with-cpanel/ http://onlinebusinessmalaysia.com/blog/wordpress-blog/how-to-install-wordpress-with-cpanel/#comments Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:43:22 +0000 William http://onlinebusinessmalaysia.com/?p=623 [ Read More... ]]]>

Continuing from where I left off telling you about WordPress as a blog platform, I’ve put together a short tutorial on how to install WordPress onto your own server using Fantastico in Cpanel.

First off, you’ll need to a) buy a domain name and b) purchase hosting on a webserver, may I suggest:

(Yes I admit I’ll make money if you decide to buy from Hostgator, but I use them myself and find it to be good value for money.)

For the rest of the tutorial, I find that putting the information in a video format or a slideshow (powerpoint) format gets the message across the easiest as you can see exactly what to click.

You’ll need flash installed on your computer to view the presentation or the youtube video, so for you reading this at work, you’ll have to go home and check out the tutorial… sorry.

Feel free to share the video/presentation with friends and embed it on you’re website/blog as well if you want.

Hope you find these useful:

Video

Presentation

Blog blog blog and blog some more,

-William Lee