That being said, money and art have to mix at some point. You need your money to support your art, whatever it may be, and that is equally true for bloggers and other authors online.

So how do you make money from your WordPress blog without selling your soul? There are many different ways you do that, but it’s important to find the right model that works for you, your niche and your site.

1. Advertising and Sponsorships

For many, advertising is a foul word. However, it doesn’t have to be if done well.  Advertising that isn’t intrusive and doesn’t get mixed in with the content can be a very simple and safe way to earn money from your site. However, this means keeping your ads away from your editorial content physically and figuratively, ensuring a total separation of the paid message from your creative one.

This can be tricky if you find yourself writing about the companies that advertise on your site (it might be wise to favor sponsorships as you can control who advertises better), but with proper disclosure this doesn’t have to be a major problem.

All in all, if you don’t intrude on your readers needlessly and don’t let your advertisers influence your work, you can host ads on your site without worrying sacrificing your integrity.(...)
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Of course not. That’s why many sites direct mobile traffic to sub-domains (e.g. “example.com” becomes “mobile.example.com”), a workable solution if you have time to generate new versions of each page from scratch.

Luckily for WordPress users, mobile themes like WPTouch and WordPress Mobile Pack offer a better alternative to mobile sub-domains. Here are 3 reasons why:

1. Maintenance

Having a mobile sub-domain requires you to maintain multiple versions of each and every page – a laborious task if you don’t have a large staff.

Mobile themes, on the other hand, simply deliver all of your existing content in a mobile-friendly format. You can maintain your site as usual and rest assured that everything will display properly in mobile browsers.

2. SEO

When other sites link to your content, those links help you rank higher in the search engines. If you have multiple domains, all of which have different permalinks for each page, you forfeit your ability to rank well in the search listings.

Think of it this way: I post an update on my blog and get 10 links. 5 of those links are from desktop users, and they point to the post on my main domain. The other 5 links come from mobile users, all of whom were redirected from my main domain to a dedicated mobile sub-domain. Their links go to the mobile version of the post – the one they pulled up on their phones.

Instead of getting 10 links for my post, I really only got 5 for each version – a situation that leads to lower overall rankings for my content.

With a mobile WordPress theme, however, your content stays in one place. The page you serve to mobile visitors is the same one that exists on your main domain – everyone who links to it is linking to the same page.

3. Sharing

Mobile sub-domains can also cause social media havoc.

Let’s say you tweet a link from your phone and your colleague clicks it on her desktop computer. She’ll get the mobile version of the site that you tweeted – a version that is probably all text, heavily compressed into a tiny column, and devoid of any navigational links to help her explore other corners of your site.

This is not good for the user, and it’s unlikely that she’ll share any of your content with others.

Again, your mobile WordPress theme can save the day here. With no separate link for anyone to share, you don’t risk serving the wrong version of your site to any visitors.

And since several mobile themes are free, there’s little reason to put off “mobilizing” your site any longer. Spend an afternoon setting up a mobile WordPress theme and stop missing out on all that great traffic.

This post was contributed by Adam Green. Adam writes copy for tech companies and stays up to speed on enterprise fraud management software as best he can. Follow him on Twitter @IAmAdamGreen.

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The WPCandy post was advocating that theme designers should stop bundling WordPress plugins and other functionality which limits how easily users can switch themes, something which I feel is absolutely a good idea. But that’s not what I want to talk about in this post — I want to focus specifically on the issue raised in the WPLift post — building plugins directly into themes.

The post shows you how to add the DP Twitter Widget into your theme; it’s literally a case of copying a pasting the plugin’s code into your functions.php. In fact it’s so easy that there’s no reason not to build every single widget and plugin you can think of under the sun into your theme, right?

Unfortunately it’s a little more complicated than that and for the rest of this post I’ll set out exactly why that’s the case.

Firstly, the second you build a plugin into your theme, you’re assuming responsibility and are obliged to support the plugin, so if anything breaks in future updates, you’ll need to be able to fix it. Say the plugin used Ben’s timthumb and updating was an absolute necessity, the onus would then be on you to provide the update by offering an entire theme upgrade rather than just a simple plugin update independent of the theme.

Second, what’s the point? The functionality you’re providing already exists and unless you’re significantly changing the plugin, I’m struggling to see the point of just duplicating functionality. Sure, you get to brag about how your theme has thousands upon thousands of built in widgets and it makes everything really fun and it’ll do everything you’ve ever wanted, but by just adding a plugin that already exists into your theme, you’re just adding something I can do already by installing plugins. Plus, I’ll not lose everything in two years when I decide I need to overhaul the look of my site! And hey, there are sites like mine out there which show you how to do things like building a WordPress powered email newsletter without plugins anyway!

I’m not just wagging fingers from the rooftops — this was a mistake I made when I launched my ill fated theme site, WPShift nearly two years ago. At the time having a ton of functionality in a theme was the way to go and we made a decision that we would go down the route of essentially just bundling plugins with the theme.

I’m glad to say this isn’t all the range any more, so please don’t do it, it’s just making a mess in the long run.

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Once of my most recent Facebook plugin discoveries came from the developers at Premium Coding, a website which builds quite a few things, including a series of premium WordPress plugins.  The plugin I want to talk about today is called Facebook Page Themes, and the title pretty much sums up what this plugin does.  With this premium WordPress plugin users can generate a custom designed theme for your Facebook page, giving your business a professional look that promotes your product or service.(...)
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Not long ago I covered a free WordPress plugin called WPTouch which creates a mobile-friendly version of your WordPress blog to display for mobile web browsers.  The unfortunate truth, however, is that outside of clicking on a link from Twitter on their phones, most iPhone, Android, or mobile users in general do not use the mobile web to view a webpage.  In order to maximize convenience for your readers you really need a custom iPhone application.  This is where an app I recently discovered, Wiziapp, comes to the rescue.

What is WiziApp?  Wiziapp is a WordPress plugin that automatically turns your WordPress blog into a native iPhone app in real time, giving easy access to the following within the application: Posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, links, images, videos, and audio files. And if that wasn’t enough, Wiziapp even offers a push notification service to notify iOS users when your website has new content available!

Here is a complete list of the features provided by the Wiziapp team:

• Create and personalize your iPhone application from your WordPress dashboard using the plugin’s wizard.
• Deliver all of your blog content directly to your App in real time.
• Notify your readers about new posts via push notification service.
• Your readers can easily read and post new comments directly from your App.
• Your App will display your images and galleries in native iPhone style.
• All the media you have posted will be collected to video or audio libraries.
• Your readers can easily search your blog directly from your App.
• Playing video and audio using Wiziapp’s advanced players.
• Enable your readers to navigate between posts by categories, tags or author name.
• Integrate with your login system.
• Your readers can easily share your posts and images via Facebook, Twitter, Email or SMS.
• Monetize your App by displaying ads using your own AdMob account.
• Your readers can easily save your posts to their ‘favorites’ list.
• We publish your App to the iTunes App Store and save you time & money dealing with an Apple developer account.
• See daily stats of your App visits and downloads.
• Stay up to date with all iOS and WordPress new features.
• Check out the Wiziapp tour here.

(...)
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Of course, thanks to beauty of the open source nature of WordPress, WordPress users have access to all sorts of great WordPress plugins.  I recently found myself debating whether or not to develop an app for WordPress Hacks and decided that first I would look into what free WordPress plugins were available.  My goal was simply to find one which would display a WordPress blog to mobile browsers in a mobile friendly format.  

Based upon roughly 2 million downloads plus great reviews, far and away the best plugin I’ve found to accomplish this is one called WP Touch.  For those that haven’t heard of WP Touch, this WordPress plugin automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, and will display this theme when your WordPress blog is viewed from an iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung  and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile device!

The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your WordPress website to mobile visitors, all without modifying a single bit of code or making any changes to your standard WordPress theme.  The mobile theme also includes the ability for visitors to switch between WP Touch view and your site’s regular theme if that is what they prefer.

If you are looking for a more feature-rich product, I discovered that users can also purchase a Pro version of WP Touch which includes a slew of new features like more style, color and branding customizations, themes, 10 languages, more advertising options, web-app mode, and even iPad support.

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As a result, I’ve spent some time talking to fellow bloggers and getting input on some more comfortable furniture for doing my blogging.  I’ve tried a couple of different things ranging from laptop stands, to chairs/couches or other pieces of furniture, but hadn’t really found anything I could highly recommend to others….until recently.

This past week I had the opportunity to try out a product that isn’t completely new, but that I only recently discovered, called the Sumo Gigantor bag from Sumo Lounge.  My research showed that it had been featured in all sorts of magazines and received tons of great reviews from trusted websites, so I decided to give Sumo Lounge a try.

The closest comparison I’ve seen to the Sumo Lounge chairs is probably the Love Sac, which you may have seen for sale in most malls, however Sumo Lounge actually cuts out the middleman allowing them to make their similar bags available at a much more affordable price.  These well constructed bean couches aren’t built like the beanbags I grew up with, which was a pleasant surprise.  I quickly discovered that the great thing about the Sumo Lounge line of beanbags is that this allows me to comfortably do my blogging in front of my entertainment center or pretty much any room within the house (assuming their is adequate room available).

If you are interested in one for your blogging setup, here are some of the features that the sumo line of chairs boasts:

• Bean bag chairs range from 42″ x 42″ x 34″ to 86″ x 60″ x 40″.
• Includes a removable microsuede cover made with machine washable 100% polyester fiber.
• Each page includes several popular color choices.
• Stays fluffy and full over time (won’t ever go flat!).
• All bags include free shipping and a 100% satisfaction guarantee.

In addition to blogging I’ve also spent some time looking for other ways to enjoy my new piece of furniture.  The logical choice to me seemed to be to put it to the test playing video games.  I enjoy online gaming as much as anyone and decided to spend a few hours playing Call of Duty online with my friends.  Even though it may not have been reflected in my kill-to-death (KTD) ratio, it didn’t take long for me to appreciate the improved experience I was getting by sitting closer to the television.  As a result, I think I can also recommend these Sumo Lounge bags as an excellent gaming chair.  Lastly, I’ve also found that I often have to fight my wife for the Sumo Lounge chair as she often wants to use it for movies/Netflix, and then kids have been begging me to let them sleep in it pretty much every night since it arrived.

Overall I have to admit I’m very happy with my new Sumo Gigantor and can confidently recommend the Sumo Lounge line of bean bag chairs to friends and fellow bloggers.  I know we have hundreds of professional bloggers who read this site so I’d like to hear about your blogging setups.  Let us know in the comments below!!

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Ever notice how many features the standard installation of WordPress lacks? YouTube embedding, stats, and even a specialized Twitter widget? Well, if you have a self hosted blog at WordPress.com, these features are all given to you. In fact, many of these features are forced upon you by the sponsoring company, Automattic. Wanna learn how to get all of that “cloud-power” for your WordPress site?

If you are one of the people who would love to have these features at your disposal and already has a WordPress.com account, keep reading. Otherwise, you’re losing out on a great plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites!

(...)
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If you’ve never had a website go missing, then you’re very lucky. Your host can have a network error or hardware failure that loses your site’s files. A malicious hacker can penetrate your FTP server and replace your site with files of his choice. You might get curious about a new plugin, install it, and break your site to pieces in the process. No words really describe the panic you feel when you realize your website is gone!

If your host allows you to use CRON jobs, you can protect yourself from all those things by running a daily backup of your database and web site files. If you lose your site for any reason, you can put it right back in a few minutes.

A CRON job is script that your web server executes at a specified time. CRON comes from the word chronograph, and it is a time-based job scheduler for LINUX based operating systems. Most WordPress sites are running on such an operating system. If you have access to a CRON scheduler through your hosting control panel or have command-line access to your hosting server, you should be able to write a shell script to back up your database and site files.

The first thing you will need is a shell script. The script will connect to your database, export the whole thing to a file, and zip the file up so you can store it safely somewhere. Then, it will zip up all your website files.

If you have a host panel where you can create and edit a file, you can do this there. Otherwise, open any non WYSIWYG text editor and create a file called daily_backups.sh. The .sh file extension indicates this is a shell script file.

#!/bin/sh
TERM=linux
export TERM
NOWDATE=`date +%a` # Sets the date variable format for zipped file: Sun
clear # clears terminal window
echo
echo "Hi, $USER!"
echo
mysqldump --opt -Q -h your-website-host-name --user=your-db-user-name --password=your-db-password your-database-name | gzip -v9 - > /www/public_html/backups/MySQL-$NOWDATE-yourwebsite.sql.gz

The first line is an indicator to the server for which shell processing language to use. Your server might require

#!/bin/bash or something else there. Use echo $SHELL from the command prompt to determine your shell type if you have command line access.

The TERM instruction tells the server what terminal type it is communicating with; in this case, a text terminal.

Next we create a variable named NOWDATE and use a little script magic to set it to be equal to the abbreviation for the current day of the week e.g. Sun, Mon, Tue, etc.

The mysqldump command will “dump” the entire database including create procedures and insert procedures for all the current data.

Replace your-website-host-name with your website host name for your database. You can find this in your wp-config file if you don’t know it.

Replace your-db-user-name, your-db-password, your-db-name with actual values. Again, these values are likely exactly what they are in your wp-config file.

Replace /www/public_html/ with whatever your hosting account’s root path is.

Replace yourwebsite with some meaningful name.

Now, save the file. You need to set the permissions on the file so that it is executable. If your cpanel has a cron scheduler, just add this file to the list of files it runs. If you need to edit your crontab from command line, see this tutorial.

To back up your site files, as well as your database, add a few more lines to your script.

echo
echo "Zipping wordpress directory structure..."
tar -czf $HOME/backups/$NOWDATE.mywebsite.tar.gz $HOME/public_html/*

Hopefully, you do have a directory outside your public web root so that your backup files are stored in a location that is not accessible via the internet.

The tar command will pack the files up into a tarball for you (like a zip archive).

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