The best time of the day to publish a post

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A popular question among serious bloggers is “When is the best time to publish a post?”. Lorelle had previously touched on this topic, but she concluded that there can be no definitive answer.

I believe that you should keep things as simple as possible, and as such, in my opinion, the best time to publish posts are early in the morning.

Of course, this also depends on the timezone in which the majority of your readers are from; you want to try and publish a post in the morning of when your readers in the most earliest timezone wake up. This means that if you have a large Australian following on your blog, and you were from the United States, then you’d publish a post a lot earlier to synchronize with their morning.

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Keeping categories simple to keep readers happy

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Whenever I write a new blog post, I always think about which category suits the post best. I keep the number of categories that I have at a minimal level so that an appropriate category for every blog post is immediately obvious to me.

My rule of thumb for naming categories is, if you’ve got two categories that can overlap each other in an obvious manner, then you’ve got to change something there. Either merge the two categories, or remove one and expand the remaining one. I also tend to review my categories every few months, and if I have a category with less than 10 posts, then I ax it and merge the posts with that category into another category.

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Safely modify your WordPress admin’s CSS and make it futureproof

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I’ve written a few posts in the past on Blog Herald, showing how you can make different changes for your WordPress admin by modifying the CSS file for it.

Being able to modify the CSS file to make quick design changes to your WordPress admin is very useful indeed, but the problem is when you upgrade your version of WordPress, the wp-admin.css file is replaced with the newer version because it’s not considered a file that should be modified by users.

Here’s where a new plugin that I came across comes in. It’s called the WordPress admin themer plugin, and what it does is simple. It allows you to create a separate wp-admin.css file that does not require modifying the default wp-admin.css file.

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Split long posts into multiple pages in WordPress

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Have you ever read an online article that was so long that it was split into several pages so you didn’t have to load one long page, and instead, you had several smaller pages, making it easier to digest? If you’re using WordPress as your blogging platform, this very same effect can be easily achieved!

This is a feature of WordPress that is not very well known, probably because blog posts are generally not meant to be as long as a New York Times article. Keep in mind that WordPress is not only used as a blogging platform, but it can also be used as a complete CMS for your website, so there may be times when you DO have articles that are long enough to require the use of pagination (pagination simply means “the numbering of the pages.”)

Other people may prefer to split up their one, long blog post into multiple posts instead. Whatever you choose to do, it’s entirely up to you; what I’m offering to you here is simply another option that you can use in the future.

In order to paginate your blog post, in the Write panel in your WordPress admin, switch to the Code view (if you are using the Visual view) and then enter the following code to wherever you want to break the post up into a new page. An example is also offered along with it:

...so John went to sleep.

<!--nextpage-->

The next day, he...

This will create a list of pages that make up that post, shown like this:

Page 1, 2, 3

And you’re all done!

Gary King is a professional freelance web developer, primarily using Ruby on Rails and PHP to create cool new websites. When he’s not trying to take over the world one blog at a time, you can find him mulling over his thoughts at King Gary.

Forcing www. in the URL helps dig you out of Google’s Supplemental Index

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It’s never a good idea to have duplicates of the same page indexed by Google. Why’s that? Because they will be placed into the Supplemental Index.

What does this mean? As described by Wikipedia, “Supplemental Result is a supplementry Google search Index of less important web pages according to the Google’s PageRank”.

One of the easiest ways to ensure that you have as little duplicate pages as possible in Google’s web database is to use the same base host name for your website.

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Quick tip: How to make the ‘Categories’ box bigger when writing WordPress posts

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I’ve written at a couple blogs, including my own and Blog Herald (here), and quite often, I see that there are quite a number of post categories to choose from in order to tag my posts appropriately.

Below, you can see a typical listing of available post categories that you can use on a WordPress blog. As you can see, though, there are so many categories that the box requires a scroll bar. [Read more…]

How to use widgets with more than one sidebar on your WordPress blog

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In continuation of my last post, Enabling sidebar widgets for your WordPress theme, I am now going to show you how you can use these newfound widgets with more than one sidebar on your WordPress blog.

Most blogs have only one sidebar, but some, such as Blog Herald, have two (or more!) After reading my last post, you learned how you can use widgets on your blog’s theme, so now, I will show you how you can use widgets on two or more sidebars. This post assumes that you’ve either read my last post, or you already know how to widgetize a theme but would like to know how to widgetize more than one sidebar.

I’m also going to show you how you can customize your sidebars by choosing how you want each widget to be formatted on a per-sidebar basis, and I’ll also show you how you can name your sidebars to more easily identify each one.

This tutorial will focus on using widgets on two sidebars, but the steps can be easily reproduced to adapt to more than two sidebars.
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Enabling sidebar widgets for your WordPress theme

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So, you’ve got that brand-spanking-new (or kind-of-new) WordPress theme, and you’re strutting your stuff like it’s no one’s business. What next? Well, with WordPress 2.2 being released yesterday, major changes come along with it. One of the most important changes to take place involve sidebar widgets; these were once provided as a plugin, but are now built right into the application.

In this post, I am going to walk you through on what you need to know to ‘widgetize’ your blog’s theme, meaning we first have to allow your blog’s theme to use widgets. If you haven’t yet installed WordPress 2.2, then don’t worry, because you can install sidebar widgets as a separate plugin and still follow along.

Okay, now that you’ve got WordPress widgets installed, we first have to widgetize your theme.

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