Have you ever came across a Wordpress blog, saw something you liked, and questions like ‘how they did that‘, ‘is that a plugin or hack?‘, ‘where can I get those cool mods‘ begin to pop? Well, it’s really pretty normal because most of us did the same thing. HongKiat has spent time with some 14 Wordpress bloggers, finding out what kinda hacks and plugins they are really looking for to enhance their blog in any aspect. Here’s the outcome, 40+ most wanted Wordpress tips and hacks, including those you don’t even knew the keywords to search for.

Source: 40+ Most Wanted Wordpress Tricks and Hacks

Joast has written a beginner’s guide to WordPress SEO. You can find all different SEO articles fall into one big piece and become this final guide to WordPress SEO. It covers quite a lot topics from the basic technical optimization to advanced technical optimization and even off site blog SEO. And the Wordpress platform evolve he will keep this article up to date with best practices.

Source: WordPress SEO - Definitive Guide to High Rankings For Your Blog

After weeks of development, we are happy to announce the release of “Blogging Icons Set” specifically designed for bloggers. There are total 12 shiny and modern icons for your blogs. It comes with 3 sizes, 24×24, 36×36 and 48×48 in png format. Blogging Icons Set is released under Creative Commons License, please feel free to use it on your personal and commercial projects. If you love them, please digg, stumble or link to this article. Spread it like wild fire now~

Download Blogging Icons Set Now

Disclaimer & Conditions: Redistribution, Release for Download or Selling of these icons on an another site without permission is completely prohibited.

As we promised from the start of Blog Perfume, we would like to help bloggers as much as we can. We are trying to find all the best wordpress resources for bloggers, at the same time are developing some helpful tools for bloggers. You can view our themes and tools we have released eariler.

Feed Analysis - Detailed report and analysis for individual FeedBurner feed.
SilveRay - Clean and Soft Free WordPress Theme
Blubs - Elegant Premium WordPress Theme
Feed Compare - Compare your FeedBurner subscriber numbers with Others

A lot more coming…… Please subscribe to our RSS and stay tuned.

WordPress seems to be everywhere these days, and it’s no wonder with it’s ease of use and ease of customization. Recently launched NetTuts has written a tutorial which is dissecting the default WordPress theme’s comments.php structure and giving you various snippets of code to make your skinning easier. They have included some of the really useful tricks within the article: Unraveling the Secrets of WordPress’ Comments.php File.

• Preventing direct access to comments.php
• Basic comment template tags
• Gravatars
• Comment numbers
• Alternating colors for comments
• Comments RSS link

Source: Unraveling the Secrets of WordPress’ Comments.php File

This is a guest blog post by Eli from PhotoshopStar

Everyone knows that nice images/photos can brighten up a boring old blog post, even if the content is great, a picture of some sort at the top or on the side can draw the visitor’s eye in! In this article we’ll be looking at a few simple Photoshop tips for regular bloggers.

Cropping your Images

If you’ve already been using images in your articles, then maybe you’re not doing it as well as you could be. You should always remember to adjust your images in any way necessary before putting them in, particularly cropping them so that the object inside of the image is more in focus.

Example:

For cropping you should either use the crop tool or the canvas resize option (image > canvas size).

Brighten it, Darken it

I’m not so sure about darkening images before putting them up, but it sure can be helpful brightening your images before putting them on your blog. The easiest way that people know of is using Brightness/Contrast settings (image > adjustments > brightness/contrast), which is all well and good, but sometimes you just need a little more control, so you can use the Levels (image > adjustments > levels) or Curves (image > adjustments > curves).

You can also lighten up or darken particular areas by using the Dodge and Burn tools.

Making Headlines (add text)

Adding interesting headlines to your images can be particularly helpful, especially if your blog post has a theme (see, Star Trek Blogging by Daily Blog Tips). If you want to use a heading in a blog post image, you’ll want to be careful about the fonts, colors and sizes that you choose, it’s most helpful to keep things as simple as possible in this case. For some great font resources, be sure to check out:

• DaFont
• Font Space
• Typographica

Here’s an example using Myriad Pro, and a simple Drop Shadow layer style to help it stand out:

Resize

Resizing your images is in fact very important, and it depends on where your image will be going. At the top, or aligned to the left or right? Another thing you need to know is if you align your image to the left or the right, will your text stick right to the edge of it? If this is the case, you can add padding, or you can add a white strip to the side of your image (if your content area background is white).

For images that go on the top or the bottom of the article text, you should use something like 400-500 x 160 pixels or so, and these images go well with interesting text headings!

For images that you will be aligning to the left or right, you’ll want to use a smaller size such as 140 x 165 or something similar, and maybe you could even link that to a larger version of the image, if you have something important to show.

As you can imagine, resizing your images is related to the cropping, so you should crop your images first, then resize them.

Sharpen, or Blur?

Now this one can be tricky.

The only reason you should ever want to blur a complete image would be because you want to add a text heading inside of it, or something of the sort. Sometimes though, you may want to blur the background of a photo to bring the main character/object into focus. For blurring things, you can either use a filter blur (filter > blur > x) or you can use the Blur tool.

After resizing an image to a very small size (400 x 300 for example) they may need to be sharpened slightly, so to do this you can go to filter > sharpen > sharpen (or Sharpen Edges), but if the sharpening seems too strong, go to edit > fade sharpen and input 50% or so!

Using Abstract Images

If your post has no particular subject, it may be a good idea to choose a random, abstract image to place into your blog post, if there’s space free and the post is a little dull without it.

To find some top-notch abstract images, you should check out the resources section at the end of the article.

Colorize, Desaturate

Another interesting thing you can do to your photos is change the color of them, saturate them more-so, or remove the color altogether. For simple color settings, you can go to image > adjustments > hue/saturation, or if you want a little more control, try one of the other color adjusting tools such as Selective Color, Channel Mixer, or Gradient Maps.

For desaturating your photos, I highly recommend using a gradient map with a black and white gradient, rather than desaturating using hue/saturation.

Additional Resources

Here is a short list of resources that you may find useful.

• Good-Tutorials (photoshop tutorials)
• iStockPhoto (stock photos and more)
• Bittbox (textures and freebies)

Thanks for reading everyone, I hope you enjoyed the article.

Visit Eli’s Photoshop tutorial blog, PhotoshopStar

Whenever you opt for a new theme, you’re going to have to do a fair amount of customization to get everything just right for your site. By the time you get to your third or fourth theme, you’ll probably begin to grow a little weary of reinventing the wheel with each new design.

Fortunately, savvy users like you can solve this problem by creating a user-defined functions file that will work with any WordPress theme. Pearsonified has shared How You Can Use WordPress Functions to Run a Smarter Blog by placing all of your common, customized design elements within functions that reside in a separate, non-theme file. This serves a twofold purpose:

First, because your common design tweaks are isolated in a non-theme file, you won’t risk overwriting them whenever you change or upgrade your theme.

Second, using a separate functions file creates a much more organized and less intimidating environment for customizing your theme. You can add and subtract HTML from your user-defined functions file without fear of “breaking” your theme, simply because you aren’t trying to edit the theme files directly.

Source: How You Can Use WordPress Functions to Run a Smarter Blog

Blogs are a very popular outlet for Internet marketing? they are easy to start up and easy to keep up, they’re also a free medium to advertise products and ideas with content. Blogs are popular because readers get to participate in the conversation about niche markets and aren’t as formal as sales pages and website pages. Once you have a blog up and running, you need to promote it to get traffic to your blog? we won’t go into what you should have in your blog (compelling, interesting and informative articles/copy that engages the reader and creates a dialogue), but we will look at the top 10 ways to promote your blog and get the traffic that you need.

1. Social Bookmarking Sites

Sites such as Digg and Delicious grab traffic and have it head right for your blog. These are quite easy to use (so long as you don’t vote for yourself)? create a free account, write a description, add tags and the address to your blog, and voila! - With compelling headlines and descriptions, you can quickly gain traffic to your blog.

2. Visiting Forums

Visiting forums in your niche market is nearly as old as the Internet itself ?but this works and it’s free. Participate in the forums with relevant (and compelling) information that leads to what your blog is all about. Having a great signature line with a link to your blog is the key.

3. Free eBooks

Writing and offering free eBooks will also bring traffic to your website. Your eBook should be compelling, well written and chock full of useful information (otherwise, no one will visit your blog, thinking you’re nothing real to say anyway).

4. Join Groups

Look at MSN, Yahoo and Google groups and find some that are relevant to your niche. Don’t spam them ? enjoy the conversation and ease into it.

5. Video it

Create a video (or hire someone to do it) then submit it to one of the many popular video sites (such as YouTube) and find more traffic being directed to your site. It’s not a secret that video sites are incredibly popular and that this popularity is only growing each and every day ?so get in on the action, create a compelling video and get more traffic to your blog.

6. Update Regularly

Updating your blog regularly is very important. You have to continue updating with relevant information that is interesting and leads to more information yet to come. This will bring people back to your blog time and time again.

7. Blog Directories

This is very simple ?submit your blog to blog directories for backlinks and new potential readers. Although most blog directories will require a link back from your blog, it may not have to be permanent. Here are a few of the most popular blog directories you should submit to:

• BlogCatalog
• Blog Flux Directory
• BlogHub

8. Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

RSS feeds are also incredibly popular and this allows your loyal readers to know when you’re updated your blog (which should be often and regularly). It’s quite easy to RSS your blog and this allows your readers to know when you’re posted more information that they want to read.

9. RSS Directories

Don’t forget, now that you’re syndicated your blog, to submit to RSS directories as well.

10. SEO your Blog

The most importnat, SEOing your blog will lead to receiving completely free traffic from search engines. The main things you need to do is make sure your markup is error-free, and you’re using headings, such as <h1>, <h2> and <h3>’s, the most important three. You should also link to your homepage with the appropriate anchor text. You should try and get as many quality backlinks as you can to help this along.

With WordPress, you have pages that display the content you put on those pages. To style the content on these pages, we use different files in a WordPress theme. But which files are assigned to which pages? That’s where the Template Hierarchy comes in. Depending on what templates are available in the theme, different files will be assigned to certain pages.

“WordPress looks for template files with specific names in the current Theme’s directory and uses the first matching template file listed under the appropriate query section below.” - WordPress Codex

There’s no better way to understand the WordPress Template Hierarchy than to see it visually.

Source: WordPress Template Hierarchy Diagram

When designing blogs, there are a few different design elements that we need to take into account every time. BlogDesignBlog has written a really nice article about “How to Blog Design Style Guide” and he has broken these different design elements into different parts. The more attention you give to each part, the better your overall blog design will be. He has divided the design elements into 9 categories, analyse each part with us carefully with some very nice exmaples.

Source: How to Blog Design Style Guide

We are happy to announce the winners of 2 x Market Premium WordPress Themes Giveaway are

1. SE7EN
2. Kelly

We have just contacted Astereostudio and they will send you an email about getting the free Market Premium WordPress Theme very soon. Thank you for all of the participants. We will have a new giveaway event very soon. Please stay tuned.