One of the most popular posts on BloggerDesign is how to get Flash (swf) into a WordPress post. The previous post is about three years old so I thought I’d write up a follow-up post, as embedding Flash is much easier now as it’s all built into WordPress.

With the newer versions of WordPress there is a button to embed media.

Embed Button

Once clicked, all you have to do is enter in the Flash (swf) file URL, set the dimensions, hit ‘Insert’, and WordPress will do the rest.

Embed Window

It’s that easy. No plugins, no confusing code, just provide WordPress with the URL of the Flash swf file and it’ll write the code to embed the Flash file into your post.

As a bonus, the embed option also works with Shockwave, Quicktime, Windows Media, YouTube URLs, and Real Media if you need to embed those media files as well.

Google Analytics is a full-featured analytics suite that is free to all to use. The data it captures lets blog owners know referrers to their site, keywords, popular posts, unique visitors and so much more.

With the Google Analyticator plug-in, you can view a summary of the blogs Google Analytics, for the past 30 days, right on the dashboard for quick and easy access.

Here’s how to setup Google Analytics on WordPress’ dashboard.

1. Sign up for a free Google Analytics account. If you already have a Gmail, or other Google account, then just sign-in. http://www.google.com/analytics/

Get Google Analytics

2. Get the Google Analyticator plug-in, install it on the blog, activate the plug-in, and remember to configure it.

Download The Plug-In

3. Once you have Google Analyticator up and running, go into the settings click the link to authenticate with Google.

Authenticate with Google

4. Google will then ask you to grant access.

Grant Access

5. Once access is granted, Google Analyticator will confirm that you are indeed authenticated.

Authenticated

6. Head back to the WordPress dashboard and check out the blogs Google Analytics summary for the past 30 days.

Overall new look and feel for the post screen. Cleaner, more colorful and simplified. Everything is still there, but the layout is different. Getting use to it may take a minute or two, but you’ll end up loving it.

Here are a few of the modifications made to the post screen. Under the image is a listing that describes each number call out.

1. New menu layout. Main menu options are bigger and on the left. Secondary options smaller and on the right. They are all still there though.
2. The post window is basically the same, however they did add in a media bar. The media bar lets you post audio, video, images and other sorts of media. The image uploading is now up here too which makes it much more convenient. This is a great addition for all content publishers.
3. There is also a new ‘Fullscreen‘ button that allows you to maximize your post writing area to use your whole browser window. I’m currently in love with this feature.
4. Tags are still below the post and now get add one at a time instead of in a comma separated list.

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.

Getting the feed for a particular label in Blogger is much harder than it should be. Really, Blogger should just give them to us, but instead, they send us to help documents that may not help.  To make it even better, just because your label feeds use to work, they may no longer work as I found out the other day for a client. I did my research and here is how you can get your own label feeds on Blogger blogs.

If you have a Blogspot blog:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname

Just be sure to change blogname to match your blog. The labelname is what appears in the URL of your blog label page.

Example URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/personalization
Example Feed: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/personalization

If you host your own blog:

http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/blogid/posts/default/-/labelname

The trick here is that you need to find your blog id. To do this, login to your Blogger dashboard and click on the new post link. In the URL bar your blog ID will show up and it’ll look something like this:

http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1234567980123456789

Example URL: http://www.yourblog.com/label/personalization
Example Feed: http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/1234567980123456789/posts/default/-/personalization

If you have spaces in your label, your feed URL would look like the following.

Having recently moved a few Wordpress blogs from one host to another, I thought I’d write up a quick ho-to. It’s actually quite painless.

The first thing you need to know is that you are moving your blog, not re-installing it. Don’t attempt to re-install Wordpress as that may cause more issues.

Step 1 – Backup
It’s very important to backup your files and database. Files can be gotten via a FTP client and here are instructions on backing up your blog posts.

Step2 – Upload Files
When uploading your files to the new host, make sure to either upload the files you backed up, or upload the exact same version of Wordpress you are running on the old host. You can get your Wordpress version number at the bottom of any admin page.

Step 3 – Upload Database
Most web hosts come with a control panel area that gives the user access to phpMyAdmin for managing databases. Other hosts give instructions on how to connect to your database from a desktop application. Either way, connect to your new database. If you feel lost on this step, contact your web host for details on how to connect to your database.

This tutorial will run though the basics of posting to a Blogger blog. It’s intended for newbies and should give a quick overview to get you started.

Step 1: Login

There are actually two steps here. Since Blogger recently upgraded their services, they now have two different types of logins. One for all the new accounts that have been merged with Google accounts and one for all the original Blogger signups that haven’t converted over. If you don’t know which one you are, ask the person that setup the blog for you.

Once you have chosen New Blogger or Old Blogger you will be presented with the login boxes. Enter your username and password and hit Sign In.

Step 2: The Dashboard

This is the starting point for all Blogger accounts. It will list the blogs that you have the ability to post to and give you a few other options. Lets click on the New Post link to create a new blog entry.

Step 3: The Post

A lot of people get this idea that they are gong to start blogging, but then they don’t know how. They are either to scared or unsure of what to do. I agree that it can be a bit intimidating, but that can be easily rectified by starting off with a starter blog.

Here are 4 steps to start blogging.

1. Get an Account. Go to Wordpress.com or Blogger.com and get a free blog account. This is the first big step. Lots of people talk, but if you don’t have an account, you’ll never start posting.
2. Start Posting. Post once a day, or once a week. Post about your dog, your car or what you saw on TV last night. Anything. Two sentences or one short paragraph is fine. Just get posting. The more you post the more you’ll feel comfortable doing so.
3. Post Better. Once you get posting down, you can start posting more often and posting more thought out posts. Something like book or movie reviews, tutorials or anything more than you’d previously been doing. Shoot for three or four good paragraphs.

Going out of town? Can’t find time to blog each day? Have a time sensitive post? Just future date your posts in Wordpress and they will post when the time comes.

Future posting is a great feature for anyone who doesn’t want their blog to look deserted when they away for a week. Or those that have lots of time to write posts at 11pm, but want them to be published at different times throughout the day.

It’s quite simple to do. We just edit the time stamp on the write post page. Here are the details:

1. Login to your blog and click on the ‘Write’ Tab.
2. On the right side, expand the ‘Post Timestamp’ box.
   
3. Click on the ‘Edit timestamp’ checkbox.
4. Modify the date to be sometime in the future.
   
5. Publish the post.

Now, you’ll want to be careful when setting the time. It’s set off the 24 hour clock as there is no AM, PM indicator. It also runs off your servers time. So, if the time in the box doesn’t match up with your current time, you’ll need to calculate the difference or update your time settings in the ‘Options’ tab. (Find your time offset.)

Since I help a lot of people get up and running on blogging I thought I’d document the process of posting to a Wordpress blog.

1) Login to the blog: http://www.your-blog.com/wp-login.php

2) Click on the write tab.

3) Write your post title in the title box. Keep any important keywords or phrases related to this post in mind.

4) Write what you want to say in the post box.

I’d highly recommend not copying and pasting from any Microsoft product as it’ll bring in all the same formatting and special characters. This can cause havoc with formatting. If you are using Firefox, it’ll also keep the same formatting (colors, fonts, links) if you copy out of Thunderbird or off a webpage. Instead, copy any text to a plain texxt document (Notepad or TextEdit) to remove all the formatting.

5) Format, link and add images as you see fit.

6) Click on the + sign next to categories on the right side, blue area. Choose the categories to associate with this post or add new categories by entering them into the input box and hitting add.