You can’t deny that Apple is re-defining the mobile web. The iPhone and iPod Touch are full fledged web browsers and there are lots of people using them. So, why don’t you take 5 minutes and optimize your Wordpress blog for the iPhone and iPod Touch?

Step 1 - Install iWPhone. This plugin and theme combo automatically detects the iPhone or iPod Touch and serves up a specific theme optimized just for those screens. All you have to do is install it and activate it. When an an iPhone or iPod stops by, your site will be ready.

Step 2 - Install iPhone Mobile Admin. This plugin re-works the admin side of your blog specifically for the iPhone or iPod Touch. It makes it quite handy if you have one of these devices and want to login and post or manage your blog on the go. It should work with other mobile phones too if you don’t have an iPhone. There is also WPhone if iPhone Mobile Admin doesn’t fit your needs.

Blog are just like any computer in the fact that they are only as good, and secure, as the software on them. Keeping your blog software up to date is important, but so is keeping your plugins and third party code updated.

Updating your blog’s plugins can give your blog a few advantages:

• Additional features if the plugin is a major update.
• Security fixes.
• Optimized plugin code that runs faster and more efficient.
• Better compatibility with the blog software or other plugins.
• Better compatibility with third party sites if it’s part of another service.

Don’t feel bad if you don’t update your plugins as it’s quite hard to keep them up to date; especially if you have a lot of them. Some plugins have update notifiers in them, others now tie back into Wordprss.org to look for updates. But that’s just the update notification, they all require some time and effort to download and update.

De-activing plugins is a lot easier, unless you actually have to modify the code, and doing so has its benefits.

• It can speed up the blog as it has fewer scripts to run or plugins to load.

Social media optimization is a big right now. There are a lot of sites that want to be featured on Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook or one of the many other social networks. However, getting there isn’t always that easy. The first steps though is ensuring you have social media links on your blog to make sharing that content easy. My favorite tool of the moment for this is ShareThis.

ShareThis use to be a plugin for Wordpres that injected social media icons, and an email this, link into your posts. It worked very well but was Wordpress only until recently. It’s since been re-launched as a service that’ll work across any blogging platform or website.

Signing up for a ShareThis account is really easy. They just ask for your email address and a password. This information is then used to track the ShareThis button performance on your site. It’ll keep track of who’s clicking which options, your most popular content and other visitor information. However, the reports are not yet available for the public but should be by the end of the year.

Being in SEO, there are lots of things to consider with a blog to make it more search engine friendly. One of those is the title tags and meta description. I’ve going through a few plugins in the past, but until Clive told me to check out All in One SEO Pack, I didn’t have one that did it all.

At first, I was a little nervous of All in One SEO Pack. The title of the plugin sounded a little egotistical. However, I tried it out and have been very happy with it.

All in One SEO Pack has a few great features. The first is re-arranging the title tags so that the post title comes before the blog name. You can also put in custom title tag templates for the homepage, posts, categories, archives, tag archives, pages and search pages. Or, you can write your own title tags per post.

In the past I used Optimal Title, which was nice, but you couldn’t have custom title tags and you had to modify the template to make the plugin work. It simply just put the post name before the site name. Then I switched to SEO Title tag.

Blogging is about more than just the site owner, it’s about the users too. Where as comments are a great way to get feedback, so are polls. You can easily ask preferences, opinions or collect user data from your subscribers.

An easy way to add polls to any Wordpress blog is via the WP-Polls plugin. WP-Polls is an Ajax plugin that allows a site owner to create as many polls as they want and easily integrate them into their posts.

Some features of WP-Polls include

• Unlimited Polls
• Allows user to select more than one answer.
• Tracks IPs so no one can vote more than they are allowed.
• Poll start and end dates & times. Optional ‘No end date’ also available.
• Styling of poll bar to match with your site.
• Sorting options for poll answers and results.
• Customizable Templates
• Stats & More.

How do you use WP-Polls?

First, ensure that the WP-Polls plugin is installed and running on your Wordpress blog. You can tell for sure if you see the Polls menu option in the main menu after Options.

Being a designer/developer, I’m very handy at coding and designing all my own posts. Need the text red? No problem. Need other fun formatting? Not an issue. However, not everyone is quite as handy with code as I am. I’ve had many clients ask for additional formatting options when writing blog posts. Wordpress has come a long way in adding more formatting options, but there are quite a few people out there that want it all.

Having tested a handful of WYSIWYG plugins for Wordpress, the best one I’ve come across so far is FCKeditor. FCKeditor replaces Wordpress’ current editor with one that has a lot of additional features. To make it even better, it even writes pretty clean code.

Additional features, besides those found in Wordpress, include:

• Font face, sizes and colors.
• Its own built in image uploader along side of Wordpress’.
• Flash capabilities.
• Post Templates.
• Paste from Word & Paste plain text buttons.
• Find and Replace
• Forms
• Subscript and Superscript text.
• Link Anchors
• Custom Smilies
• Special Characters
• Page Break
• Custom Styles
• Tables
• & More

Have you ever wondered where people were clicking at your blog? Now you can track every click with the Click Tracking Wordpress plugin.

It’s designed to recored every click, no matter where it is on your website. Links, images, forms or just random spots.

I tested the plugin on two different blog and have gotten the same results; nice click tracking but how accurate are the results? It seems that clicks are recored all over the place a not centralized on any specific area. There are small hot spots, but not necessarily on top of a button or link. So, to have a hotspot without an action makes me wonder how accurate it really is.

On the plus side, it is a free plugin and it can give a good overview of click data. I didn’t see a slow down in page render time either. So, whatever it’s doing, it’s not effecting the site performance.

I also found it hard to track clicks on the homepage of the blogs as the content keeps changing. You can get an idea of menu items, but not the general content. It’s best to look at individual post pages for the best results.

If you’ve ever wanted to add a contact form on your blog, but didn’t know how or thought it was to much work, then cforms is exactly what you need.

cforms is a Wordpress plugin that allows you to easily create contact forms on your blog. This is important as you want your users to be able to interact with you. This will help make the blog more personalble and friendly plus give your users the ability to contact you with items you may be interested in, problems they come across or inquire about your services.

cforms features include:

• Supports multiple forms.
• Customize each form with it’s own fields and receiver or recievers.
• No HTML knowledge required.
• CSS Themes.
• Submits via AJAX with a fall back to normal POST if necessary.
• WYSIWYG button for easy implementation into any post.
• Upload features.
• Customizable thank you message or ability to redirect to a specific page/post.
• Autoresponders.
• Email messages can be customized with variables from form.
• Easy Install.
• Spam Protection.
• Database keeps all contacts.
• Plus More…

With the recent announcement of the slimmed down version of Technorati, s.technorati.com, my use of the blog search engine is on the increase once again. Now I’ve made it even easier to access by creating sTechnorati.

sTechnorati is a search plugin that works in both IE7 and Firefox 2. It’s actually built with the OpenSerch technology so as browsers adopt to that, they too can install sTechnorati. What it will do is install an option to search from your browsers built in search box and go directly to the s.technorati.com search results page. Just like the Google option that is already there now.

While making sTechnorati I took a few liberties. It’s set to search only English posts and posts with at least a little authority. I felt that would bring back the best results. If you want one with different settings, just ask and I’ll toss a new one together.

Enjoy!

Install sTechnorati

[tags] technorati,firefox,ie7,opensearch[/tags]

Every have odd things happening with your Wordpress blog? Plugins work one minute but then not the next? It could be that you need more PHP memory.

I first noticed this issue when I moved a blog from one host to the next. I had three main issues:

1. The Wordpress Dashboard showed only the right had menu. No news in the main column.
2. My Google Sitemap plugin was now prompting me to download the options-general.php file when I tried to re-create it.
3. Spam Karma worked, but when I tried to manage items, it wouldn’t load anything but the main menu.

Knowing there was something wrong, I tried to contact the host of the blog. They kept telling me that they didn’t give support for third party scripts or plugins. I understood them, but didn’t feel that they were really listening to me. After a bit of searching, I found a possible fix; increase the PHP memory.

PHP is what is used to run Wordpress. It’s usually allowed a certain amount of memory to run scripts and do its thing. If your blog is big enough, or if your scripts are complex enough, it may reach it’s memory limit and quit the script. That’s what was happening in my case.