Tag Archives: Plug-ins

Photo-A-Day

I Need a Nap

I Need a Nap
Photo-A-Day #1421

That statement is not just a song by Weird Al and Kate Winslet (really it is sung by them and is on the Dog Train CD by Sandra Boynton). Today I was very busy at work. I started my day with a trip to the gym, 3rd one this week! Then I had a very long demo to observe, that ran into my next meeting which was a good meeting but there is now so much to do. I am coordinating a presentation that is open to the entire company. This is a high profile project, no more flying below the radar. Gotta put on the big boy pants now.

Today I did try my second can of BluFrog Energy drink. My earlier comments about taste aside I am pretty jazzed about this drink. I enjoyed my second can and it helped me big time to stay wide awake during a 3 hour demo. I was crazy productive to. I wrote a legal pad page size list of action items for the project for work as well as for the blog. I am so excited about my new theme that I have some awesome ideas for the site relaunch. I need to put wheels in motion though because much work needs to be done and I need to be ready when the theme goes live. I do not have a live date yet so all the more reason to do my back end work now.

Speaking of blog work, I have a bunch of interesting things going on in the coming month, there is going to be a Photography contest that will be open to the US and Canada, however for the top prize you have to be in Boston on the weekend of April 18 & 19 as the prize will be a two day pass to Digital Days in Boston. I will have other prizes as well. This will be a big photography contest and should launch during next week.

I installed two new plug ins today. I installed the MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate plug in and even signed up to be an affiliate. I signed up through Darren Rowse because the cost of the plug in was $30 off. I figure that if I am going to get serious about earning some additional income on this blog I need to pay for some proper tools.

In conjunction with that particular plug in I also choose to install the Unique Blog Design plug in called the UBD Block Ad, I learned about it from Life of Justin. I can’t quite get it to work right however, there are supposed to be two columns but I can only seem to get one column. Nate Whitehill from Unique Blog Designs has been great helping me out and offering suggestions. I ended up signing up as an affiliate for them too. I have a blog that was designed by those guys and I love the design. They designed Read To Me, Dad after I won a contest. They were awesome to work with.

On my action item list I put down test out my PoGo. I will try that out tonight. I have a bunch of ZINK Media that is for Blogs, Brews and Belly Laughs but I will use one pack of 10 to do some testing.

Because ZINK.com supplied me with a couple of PoGo units I was able to return the one I bought and use that money with the rest of the money from my Bonus mad money to purchase a Flip HD. I can’t wait for that to arrive. I am excited to see how the Flip HD works, I have heard so many great things about it.

Blogging

What can WPtouch do for my blog?

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Last night I installed the WordPress Plug-in WPtouch after I watched a very informative video by Chris Pirillo.

I’ve been using my iTouch quite often, I got it from coComment. I noticed that when I load blogs on it I have to expand each one so I can read the content of the posts. This takes time and when I don’t have a lot of it I skip ahead to a faster loading blog. I stumbled upon the video above while looking for ways in which to add a blog icon to my blog so it can show up on the iTouch/iPhone home screen. I wanted to make my blog stand out on the iPhone.

My iTouch Blog Icon
Notice the two blog icons at the bottom of my iTouch home screen. One is for The BenSpark and the other for The Wired Kayaker.

I downloaded and installed WPtouch and added a blog icon for this blog to the proper location. Then I went to my iTouch to see what the blog looked like. Here are some screen shots that show the features of using WPtouch. Basically, what the plug-in does is that it reformats your blog into an iTouch compatible theme. This speeds up load times and improves readability of your posts. This is what it looks like.

The WPtouch Theme

Installing WPtouch on your wordpress blog reformats your blog for speed and readability on the iPhone/iTouch. Here we see

  1. The number of comments on a post and the date of the post
  2. A snapshot of your post, with a large link to push to go directly to the content of that post
  3. Categories and Tags are included for additional navigation
  4. You can quickly load additional entries
  5. Click the “+” sign to add this blog as a bookmark or better yet add it to your home screen

Here are two well known blogs on the iTouch, how easy to read are they?

Shoemoney.com on the iTouch
Shoemoney.com		 John Chow on the iTouch
JohnChow.com

Not very, you have to pinch and expand each one just to read a post.

What I am going for is ease of readability and speed of load time. I want readers to instantly recognize my blog and add it to their Home Screen, so I had to give them something that was recognizable for my brand.

Add BenSpark to Home Screen
When you add BenSpark.com to the iPhone/iTouch home screen you get a distinctive and recognizable image that you can click to go directly to the BenSpark Blog.

So now that a reader has added The BenSpark to their iTouch they can click it right from the Home Screen and go right to my blog. Once they are there they can click on any of the latest blog posts or choose to see some older ones. Once they select a blog post they will see a well formatted and easy to read blog post. See what I mean below.

itouch_07

  1. Search box, readers can type in search terms to find posts from you
  2. Post titles can include the date, time,
  3. author and gravatar as well as an option to
  4. skip to the comments section.

Easy reading
With WPtouch your posts are formatted for very easy reading. No need to pinch or expand the screen.

Plug-ins that work with WPtouch

  1. You can still show your affiliate items in the posts.
  2. SezWho plug-in is supported with WPtouch
  3. Sociable plug-in is supported by WPtouch plug in
  4. You can show your categories
  5. You can show your tags
  6. Navigating between posts is easy.

Gravatars

  1. With WPtouch you can easily choose whether or not to show gravatars on your posts
  2. The plug-in Comment Luv is also compatible with the plug-in WPtouch

But what if you want to see the blog as it was created and intended to be seen on a browser. That is easy, you can select that option at the bottom of each screen.

Switching views

I hope that you can now see the importance of making your blog stand out on the iTouch/iPhone. With so many people using both products it would be a waste not to enhance your blog to serve their needs as well, especially when you can use a great plug in like WPtouch. There are many more features to the plug-in itself, you can set colors, decide if gravatars will be seen and even add additional icons for each of your blog pages like the about page and disclosure policy page.

* One caveat is that if you are using WP-Cache you need to configure it. And if you are using WP Super Cache. Currently, it does not work correctly with WPtouch. They’re working on it, though. Visit the WPtouch homepage for updates.