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

With the release of Wordpress 2.3, tags are now a standard part of all Wordpress bogs. However, many new bloggers don’t know the difference between tags and categories so I thought I’d elaborate.

Categories are the different areas of your blog. They are the sections that you want to break your blog into. Categories will continue to gain more and more posts over time as you post on them often. Think of them like the main services or main product categories on a website.

If you have a site all about sports, your categories may be: Football, Baseball, Golf, Basketball and Hockey.

Tags are words or phrases that are specific to individual posts. They are items that will give the post additional exposure. Tags differ from categories as they are words or phrases that are less often used.

Example tags for the sports site, on a golf post about the Tiger Woods video game, may be: Tiger Woods, EA Sports, Playstation 3, PGA Tour, XBOX, Wii, Video Game.

Well it’s out, Wordpress 2.3 has hit the internet and it packs a few great new features along with internal code cleanup and bug squashing. Here are a few of the highlights to the release.

1) Advanced Editor
The WYSIWYG editor evolves and now includes eleven new ‘advanced’ functions. Just hit the little colored squares icon on the right of the main toolbar and you’ll get the additional buttons.

Included are:
Format dropdown for header tags.
Underline
Align Full
Text Color
Paste as plain text.
Paste from Word. Fixing my previous complaint.
Clear Formatting.
Clean Up Code. OMG I think I’m in love.
Special characters.
Undo and Redo.

2) Tagging
Ultimate Tag Warrior is no longer needed now that Wordpress will do tagging. Actually, Ultimate Tag Warrior had many more features so I guess it can’t be ruled out all together. But the new tagging functionality is nice. I can see people getting confused with tags and categories now as they are very similar.

A nice touch is the ability for Wordpess’ tagging system to import tags from other plugins. The Wordpress team was really thinking on this one.

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.

The title tag is probably one of the most important items on your blog posts. It not only attracts visitors, but is also used to help determine how the post ranks. However, what’s good for search engines, isn’t always good to attract users. The good news is that with Wordpress blogs, you can target the best of both worlds a lot easier.

To do this, you’d create a post with a title that is targeted towards getting people from blog search engines or grab their attention in feed readers. Something that jumps out a little or that makes the reader want more.

Then, using SEO Title Tag, you can customize the page title for search engines. This may be a bit more formal and include a few more keyword phrases. Still very relevant to the content, but maybe not as edgie as the actual post title.

As an example, your post title (the one that shows up in feed readers and blog search engines) can be: How I Royally Screwed My Site on Google. Now, for the actual page title you could say: Hidden Text - My SEO Experience and Google Lesson Learned.

As blogs become more and more mainstream, issues are coming up that blog software is not quite ready to take on. One of them is formatting issues created by copying and pasting content from Microsoft Word, Explorer, Outlook or even from Firefox!

The issue is that users are creating or finding content with other programs, then copying and pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor in their blog software. When that happens, the editor does it’s best to keep the same formatting including fonts, font sizes, line spacing, colors and much more. Any content copied from a Microsoft document will also come across with hidden, Microsoft only, tags such as the <o:p> and [endif] tags. This formatting then overrides the blogs default font, size and formatting tags giving your blog an inconsistent look and feel.

Here are a few examples:

The first one is what the code looks like when copied from Word. Can you tell what it says?

The second one is what the code should look like in Wordpress’ WYSIWYG editor. Much nicer.

Here are a few of the inconsistent layout options that can result. There are different fonts, sizes and use bolding.

Wordpress.com is all the rage, but Blogger has been around for quite a while and there are a few perks to using it. Here are a few I could come up with.

1. Editable Templates - No extra fee here, you can customize your Blogger templates to meet your needs.
2. Easier Widgets - This one comes from Anthony who feels that the ability to add widgets (or page elements) to Blogger is easier than over at Wordpress.
3. AdSense - Blogger makes adding ads quite easy. Before you know it, you’ll be making a quarter a day!
4. Video Upload - Currently in draft mode, but Blogger is going to allow direct video uploading into your post. The functionality is much like you already do for images. Sadly it doesn’t also publish to YouTube from what I can tell.
5. FeedBurner - FeedBurner functionality is built right in now that Google owns FeedBurner. More integration is probably coming too.
6. Publish via FTP - This is a big one, the ability to FTP your files to a directory on your own site is great. This means you can host your own blog, on your own site, regardless of your server setup.

I’ve recently been reading a book, yes a real book, about search engine optimization and PHP. It’s a great overview on a handful of things you can do to optimize your PHP website.

It’s from Jamie Sirovich and Christian Darie over at SEO Egghead and is written programmer to programmer. If you don’t have a handle on PHP, then this book is probably not for you. But if you have some programming skills and want to learn more about SEO, I highly recommend this book.

Chapter 16 is all about optimizing Wordpress for search engines. It walks you though the install and gives practical tips, code snipits and plugin recommendations to help any Wordpress blog become a bit more search engine friendly.

Some blog related topics include permalinks, social bookmarking, feed buttons, emailing blog posts, XML sitemaps integration and duplicate content issues.

Other topics throughout the book include basic SEO, link bait, black hat SEO, geo-targeting and much more. I did learn a few cool tricks and will keep the book handy for future projects.

I really enjoyed the book and have recommended it to some of my friends. If you have some PHP programming skills and want to learn more about search engine optimization, than I highly recommend Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP.

You can now add a Sphinn button to your site to let visitors quickly submit your post to Sphinn, the SEO Digg clone from Search Engine Land.

Here is the button:

Feel free to download it and host it yourself. It also does measure up to Danny Sullivan’s button standards.

Wordpress Code:
<a href="http://sphinn.com/submit?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>"><img src="http://bloggerdesign.com/downloads/sphinn.png" border="0" alt="Sphinn" title="Add to Sphinn"></a>

JavaScript Code:
<script type="text/javascript">
var URL = window.location.href;
document.write("<a href='http://sphinn.com/submit?url="+URL+"'><img src='http://bloggerdesign.com/downloads/sphinn.png' border='0' alt='Sphinn' title='Add to Sphinn'></a>")
</script>

I’ll be working on getting the Sphinn button into the social bookmark tool too in the upcoming week or so.

[tags]sphinn,search-engine-land,social-bookmark,digg[/tags]

If you missed the announcement just before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, FeedBurner Pro is now free. That’s one of those good things about a Google acquisition; things become free. All users now get Pro stats and MyBrand for feeds.

Honestly, I never quite saw why the Pro features were so great. MyBrand is a cool thing, but I prefer to promote and use my own feed URL that has been redirected to the FeedBurner version.  I do this with the FeedSmith Wordpress plugin from FeedBurner.

The two additional stats items do sound nice though. Reach estimates the number of users that interact with our feed (including feed search engine or news filter sites) and we get better click though stats.

Now everyone is a Pro at FeedBurner thanks to Google.

[tags]FeedBurner,Google[/tags]