Zack Live

Dotcom-Monitor: Fully Featured Website Monitoring Service

Zack — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:13:54 +0000

We’ve spent a lot of time on our websites, from design, content to SEO. And when we thought everything is ready, they just went down with no hints. It happens, all the time. No matter how good you are as a webmaster. That’s why we need a good website, a good hosting and a good website monitoring service.

Dotcom-Monitor is offering this kind of service, they offer not just uptime monitoring, but also Reporting, Notification and Analysis, everything you need to monitored. With the ServerView Monitoring Service, they can monitor your websites, web applications, FTP, email server, media streaming server and VoIP server. They keep tracks of your server uptime, will notice you right away when it goes down. They show you all data of your website to help you analyze it. It’s quite important when you are running e-business websites or web applications. Application performance monitoring is a must for these kind of websites, or you might lose a lot more, not just money, but potential clients and chances.

Another good feature from Dotcom-Monitor, is the LoadView Monitoring service. It’s a monitoring service and a stress test to your server. It simulates up to 3000 concurrent users, runs from multiple distributed networks and provides you detailed reporting. This will help you to figure out how good your server is, is it enough for your websites. You can decide if you need to extend your server. Beside the stress test, it keeps monitoring the load of your server, and will let you know when it gets high, so that you can do something to low it down before it totally goes down.

Dotcom-Monitor offers five different languages, including France and Chinese. They have pretty cool design of the website, and user friendly panel, you can start with no pain and let it help with your websites right away.

Dotcom-Monitor: Website Monitoring Service

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SEOClerks: SEO Services as Gigs

Zack — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:12:48 +0000

There are a lot of SEO services out there, SEOClearks is a new one. They are offering a platform to let SEO professionals to post SEO jobs on the website, and the clients choose the ones they are interested.

It’s very easy to start with SEOClerks, just sign up with your email or directly log in with your Facebook account. It takes like 10 seconds to do it. You can see a lot of jobs listing there, they are called gigs, and can be any type of SEO service. Find those you like the most, and click on Order Now, your job will be done for a while, all is as easy as ABC.

The best thing of SEOClerks is that they have a lot of great offers. They are provided by freelance professional with a affordable price. They are good as you can buy from a SEO company. Payments are made via PayPal, which makes much more easier to get done.

And if you are a SEO professional, you can post your gigs as well. Or you don’t need to be a professional, just if you know some tips about SEO, you can sell them as gigs. They might be useful to some clients, as they are useful to you.

Check out SEOClerks, Affordable SEO service.

Get Traffic to Your Website – Link Building

Zack — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:53:12 +0000

As you have a unique website with a great design and some nice content, another thing you need to consider is getting people to your websites.

The most traditional way to do this is to tell your friends about your website, ask them to take a look and give you some feedback. Of course the result is limited, unless you have thousands of friends willing to offer you advises.

And the better way is to make your website visible on internet. You can write guest post on famous blogs, like problogger, but this is not easy, because you need to have really good writing skill and you need to be familiar with those famous blogs. If you can do this well, it sure will bring you a lot of traffic.

If you are not confident with your writing, you may consider about build links to improve your PR rank so that people can find you through search engine like Google. It’s much more easier to do this. All you need to do is to go to other websites and leave your link of your website there. For example, you can go to your favorite blogs and forums, write something containing your link.

This is quite a drudgery to some people, you can get some Link Building Specialists to do it for you. Most of them have their own Link Building Software, using this kind of Link Building Services, you will get a lot of links very soon, and people will find your website via Google.

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MP3Mixx: Online Legal Music Store

Zack — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:19:35 +0000

MP3Mixx is a online music store, offering more than 3,000,000 legal MP3 tracks to download. They have the world’s largest database of MP3 musics, and update everyday, hundreds of songs will be added, you can find the latest album here.

All musics provide by MP3Mixx are in MP3 format, you can put them into all kinds of music players, take them with you anytime and anywhere.

They’ve got a large library of artists, albums and songs. You can find all kinds of music here, from Rap to Jazz. Also whoever artists you like, Eminem, Beatles or Jack Wagner.

The design of the website is very clear, easy to understand. You can get to the song or artist very fast and download music right away. I tried to play some music tracks, it loads very fast, play smoothly. The quality of the sound is very nice. They organize songs by albums and artists, I can download the whole album. Or listen to every songs to find those I enjoyed.

It’s good to see more this kind of stores online, makes it much more easier to the songs or art pieces we can enjoy.

Visit MP3Mxx, find your favorite artists and try out some songs, and let me know how you feel about this service.

MP3Mixx

VexFlow: Open Source Music Notation Rendering API

Create Your Own Logo Online

Zack — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:12:18 +0000

I always talk about making your website unique. Use a unique theme, get a special banner, even try to write different from other bloggers. These are the real stuff making your website stand out. As so many websites out there, standing out is quite a top mission for a blogger. That’s why we talk about this topic so often.

Another thing we can do to make our website special is to design a unique logo for it. And use it all through your website.

It’s not that difficult as you might think. A lot of softwares can help you with this. Photoshop is the most popular one, but it’s to expansive for a blogger, who won’t use it too many times and won’t use to many functions of the software. Paint.net is a free choice, it’s a open source software, you can use it for free, but less functions than Photoshop.

And you can also consider creating your logo online. Yes, you can do it online now. LOGASTER is a famous web logo creator. They’ve got 10 years experience in designing, their creator provides many useful features to help create logo online. You can even create a business card online with their creator.

Try it out for Free:

LOGASTER

Free Icons: High Resolution Browser Logos

You Need to SEO

Zack — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 16:34:47 +0000

I’ve seen a lot of hard working bloggers, writing new post everyday, working for 4~6 hours a day, some of them even work more than 10 hours to make every post perfect.

Unfortunately, the result doesn’t usually end up well. They don’t get the traffic they desired. Some can get quite ok traffic, but as they work so hard, they should have better than this.

When I go over these blog, the most common problem I found is always about SEO. Everything is fine, the design is all right, the content is good, but Google just doesn’t like them that much. Actually, sometimes they only need to do a little bit modify to get everything better, like get some better meta keywords, put “alt” to the images, etc.

Or you don’t need to do it yourself, hire someone to help you. A lot of SEO Company out there, they can help you with PPC Management, some will even provide you Free SEO Software to help all the way through.

Netpeak SEO is one of the best, they specializes on the complex digital website promotion in USA. We provide SEO & SEM (Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization), SMM & SMO (Social Media Marketing and Social Media Optimization) services and contextual advertising to promote your business or ideas on the web.

Customize Your Website

Zack — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 16:00:50 +0000

More and more websites are been created these days. It’s much more difficult to make your own website to stand out. Of course, the most important thing of a website is always, content. But it’s not the “first” important thing, because visitors are less patient now, they wouldn’t spend 10 seconds to find out how good your content is, if you can’t catch their eye balls at the first place.

How to do that? A professional and customized design. It’s not that hard to get this done nowadays.

If you’re using WordPress like most bloggers, you can find a lot of great themes out there, some of them are even free. Of course, you need to modify those themes to make them special. Or you can hire a theme designer to create a unique theme for you.

Hiring a theme designer is a good choice, another way to get a new design for your website, is a web design company, Calgary Web Design. One of the advantage of this kind of companies, is that they always offer hosting as well, it might save you a lot of time looking for a good hosting company. And they are offering quite competitive price rate now.

If you are looking for web design company, take a look at Web Design Calgary.

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Get Your Own Facebook App

Zack — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 11:36:30 +0000

The world of software development is changing. More and more softwares go online now, SAAS (Software as a Service) is the new way of running a software company. Instead of downloading from internet, we use softwares or play games directly in a browser. Facebook is the best example. The most popular game center nowadays is not a install-able software on your PC, but a website – Facebook.

Facebook is not just for games or business, it’s about everything of our life now. A Facebook account is not enough, people’ve started to create their own Facebook Page. Not only companies, but also bloggers have their own Facebook App. Do we need a Facebook Page or App? The answer is positive if you have a online business(including blogs).

Actually it’s not that difficult as you might imagine. There are a lot of talented programmers out there, like AES Connect, can help you to get your own Facebook App online. They offer services like Facebook App Development and Facebook Game Development. You can visit their website to find out more information.

Don’t be the last one, get your Apps now.

Proxy Pro: Full-featured Remote Control Software

Zack — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 04:53:59 +0000

After my last review of remote control software, Techline, I came across to Proxy Pro. Proxy Pro is another remote desktop software with rich advanced functions. You can use it to control your client’s computer which is far away from your house.

It’s different from Techline, you need to install it before you start to control remote computer. Proxy Pro offers a lot of great features, such as drag and drop file transfer. This is a amazing function, you can get a file from a remote computer as easy as copying on a local device.

Remote clipboard is another interesting stuff. Right click and copy from a remote computer, you will get it at local computer as well. Very helpful, especially when you need some text from remote PC, like password.

Here is a list of useful features of Proxy Pro, take a look, you may find something interested you:

Remote Control: ability to view screen activity on an end-user’s remote machine,
and with proper authorization, take control of and send keyboard/mouse inputs to
the remote machine in real-time

Remote Clipboard: ability to copy selected items on the screen of a remote
machine into the clipboard on the remote machine and transfer the contents to the
clipboard on the technician’s machine, and vice versa

File Transfer: ability to drag-and-drop files or directories on the remote machine to
the technician’s machine, and vice versa

Host-based Chat: ability to chat with the end-user on a remote machine, and any
other technicians connected to that machine

Remote Printing: ability to print selected items from the remote machine to a
printer attached to the technician’s machine

Host Administration: ability to view and edit configuration settings of the PROXY
Pro Host installed on the remote machine

Remote Management: ability to generate inventory of hardware and software
assets on remote machine, and to query and change certain system setting

For more information, please visit Proxy Networks.

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CreatvieStore.co: Find Amazing WordPress Themes

Zack — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:21:58 +0000

WordPress is the most popular blog platform. Every WordPress blogger needs a theme for his own blog. You can find a lot of themes from WordPress Theme Directory. There are many nice themes there.

But these themes are usually basic ones, they don’t have rich functions for advanced bloggers. This is why we have more and more websites offering premium WordPress templates.

Creative Store is one of these websites, they are collecting great WordPress themes, as well as some amazing icons, vectors and stock photos.

You can find a lot of useful information for both WordPress bloggers and WordPress theme designers on this website. As bloggers, they offers you stock photos and premium WordPress themes. If you want to buy WordPress themes, this is a good place to find some nice ones.

As WordPress theme designers, you can find beautiful icons, vectors and backgrounds to improve your designs. And those premium themes on Creative Store are also good reference for theme designers.

The website of Creative store itself is well-designed, it’s a good example for a professional WordPress blog.

So if you are using WordPress, you should take a look on Creative Store, you will find something useful for your own blog.

Website: http://www.creativestore.co/

HireAHelper.com: Online House Moving Company Finder

Zack — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:50:26 +0000

Last month, I’ve experienced my first house moving, it was a disaster.

The first thing is that I can’t find any local movers, as I said, this is my first time to do the moving.

And finally I’ve got a number from my neighbor, we settled down with the price on the phone. But when they come to my house, they raised the price. After a short negotiation, we got back the price we settled at the first place. But it’s really bad experience. If I know they do business like this, I would never make that call.

A new website comes to my eyes today, which can exactly solve this problem. HireAHelper.com can help you to find local helpers including moving, cleaning and garden help. They offer contact information for these services and, the most important thing, customer reviews. This will help you to find out how good their service is, and how their customers said about them.

Movers | Loading and Unloading Helpers
Get quality loading and unloading help from our qualified, affordable movers. Why waste money on an overpriced moving company? Find the right movers for the right price. You ren

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Techinline: Online Remote Support Software

Zack — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:17:33 +0000

I’ve tried some remote desktop support softwares, they are really useful. You know, you don’t need to go out to your client’s place where can be miles away, and it can be raining or cold.

The only problem is that you need to install it on your client’s computer first. Sometimes it’s not easy to guide a client to install a software. Trust me, I’ve been there.

I recently come to a website, Techinline, they offer remote support software ONLINE. Which means they allow you to control your client’s computer via your browser, without install a software, but just a plugin. This is interesting, I tried it out right away, it’s better than I expected.

Here is how it works:

1. Client side: Ask your client to visit FixMe.it(nice domain), install the plugin for the browser, and then a client id will be generated. You gonna need this id.

2. Expert Side: You go to techinline.net/expert, login your account:

You need to install a plugin for expert functions as well:

And then you will see the expert page, enter the client id here for connection.

If connect succeeded, you and your client will both see a new page, here is your client’s page:

And this is your page:

You may notice there are several buttons in the middle, they are the main functions for expert. Let’s try View Remote Desktop to take a look at your client’s desktop.

After you clicked on the button, your client need to accept your request:

Then you can start to help your client, you will see the whole desktop with a control banner on the top. The color of the screen is lower down for better speed, but that’s not important. It’s smoother than I thought, well done.

As everything goes SaaS, it might be a trend that remote support software will go online. And Techinline is the first in the industry, as a pioneer, I think they’re doing a great job.

Website: Techinline
Service: Online Remote Support Software

Web-Based Software: Directory of Web-based Help Desk Software

Web-Based Software: Directory of Web-based Help Desk Software

Zack — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 17:12:51 +0000

Saas(Software as a Service) is getting much more popular today. Most software companies provide a online version of their products now. We can see a lot of help desk software out there. They are all very powerful and well-designed, so the question is how to find the best one for your company.

Web-Based-Software.com is a directory of web-based help desk software. This directory listed out a lot of great online software including project management software tools, CRM, helpdesk software and so on. I found that the information of CRM and Help Desk category is very detailed. They have the instructions of every software and reviews written by their experts, this is the difference between Web-Based-Software.com and other directories–they have their own experts to review software that submitted to the website.

If you are looking for a CRM or Help Desk software for your company, I guess Web-Based-Software.com would help you.

If you are running a CRM or Help Desk software company, you can submit your website to Web-Based-Software.com as well. They provide free listing or you can become an advertiser and place pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

Website: http://www.web-based-software.com/crm-help-desk/

Wholesale Software

WordPress Complete Tutorial 08: WordPress Links

Zack — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:00:14 +0000

This is a post of my WordPress Complete Tutorial series.

For all tutorials in this series, please visit:

WordPress Complete Tutorials

What is Links/Blogrolls

The last thing I want to talk about WordPress.com is: Links. You can see there are some other sections that I didn’t mentioned, like Polls, that’s because these sections are only available on WordPress.com, you won’t find them in your self-hosted WordPress. And they are very easy to understand, just go try out if you’re interested. Links are URLs on your blog that you want to share with your readers, for example, if you’re blogging about iPhone, you may like to put a link to Apple.com on our blog. Or mostly you can put a link to your friends’ blogs. We usually call blog links as Blogrolls.

Add New Links on WordPress.com

It’s very easy to deal with links on WordPress. Let’s go to the Admin Panel and click on Links section. Here you can find all your links on your blog. By default, WordPress will set up several links to websites related to WordPress. You can delete them if you don’t need them any more. Everything looks familiar here, right? It’s just the same as the Posts/Pages/Comments sections, so you know how to play with it. Let’s try to add a link to my original blog: ZackLive.com Click on Add New under the Links section. This is how we add a new link: Enter the information of the link:

Name: Link text to display
Web Address: Link URL
Description: One line description

Link category can be set under the Links section, or you can directly add a new category here by clicking on Add New Category, it’ll be just the same as creating a post category. Target defines how to get to the website of the link – open the link in a new widow or tab(_blank) or in the currant window or tab(_top & _none). The difference between _top and _none is that _top will break all frames(if there is any) and display the page as a top page. That’s all we need to set for a new link, if you don’t want others to see this link, you can check Keep this link private, and then click on Add Link.

Link Widget

Links will not be showed on our blog automatically, we need to add a Link Widget to our theme to display links. Go to Widgets under Appearance. We’ve talked about widgets in our earlier post. Find a widget call Links, drag and drop it to Sidebar, you can change the order of widgets. That’s all, now refresh the blog to see our new link.

Conclusion

That’s all about WordPress.com. From the next post, we’ll talk about self-hosted WordPress, you will learn how to install WordPress on your own server.

Ace Project: Free Online Project Management Software

Zack — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:56:51 +0000

AceProject is a free project management software. There are several project management applications out there, but this is the only one I found that offering free account. You can try it out and find out if it’s the right one for you before you pay for it. The design of AceProject looks professional and its performance is quite great compared to several web applications.

Another good thing is that they have a new mobile version that is compatible with all mobile devices and also all desktop browsers like IE, Safari, Chrome and Firefox.

AceProject helps you manage several project management aspects such as project costs, expenses, timesheets, task management, documents and more. AceProject’s performance is great compared to several web applications.

Feature list:

Project Management
Manage projects with basic and advanced PM features, such as task dependencies, which ensure a by-the-book workflow.

Document Management
Upload documents to projects/tasks and share them with other users. Documents can be locked and even made public.

Timesheet Management
Fill out your time sheet online using our time tracking tool, with a time clock. Send it for approval and generate time reports.

Expense Management
Record expenses against projects and tasks and submit them for approval. Stay on budget by tracking every project’s cost.

Collaboration
Communicate, work together & get projects done as a team. Get email notifications and task reminders, among others.

Reporting
Track your users’ day-to-day workload with several reports, be it calendars, statistics, Gantt charts and custom task reports.

HR Management
Gather all human resources and external collaborators in one central place, with advanced security and access rights.

You can also add your own logo and adapt colors to your corporate image to build your own band.

Here is the full-featured demo for testing out. You can see how it looks like in the picture below.

Website: http://www.aceproject.com

Demo: https://demo.aceproject.com/login.asp?

WordPress Complete Tutorial 07: WordPress Commments

Zack — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:11:10 +0000

This is the seventh post of my WordPress Complete Tutorial series.

For all tutorials in this series, please visit:

WordPress Complete Tutorials

Comment is one of the most important things for a blog, I always believe that comment make a blog a blog.

Let’s see how comments work on WordPress.

Editing Comments

Login to your Admin Panel, here use: http://zacklive.wordpress.com/wp-admin/, click on Comments section, here we can see all comments on our blog.

We have one default comment by Mr WordPress, this comes with the installation of WordPress, just like the default post. You can edit it or delete it.

Here you can see comments are arranged in four categories: Pending, Approved, Spam and Trash. I guess you can understand what they mean, right?

Now move the mouse over the comment content, you’ll see the edit menu:

You can Approve/Unapprove comments, Reply to comments, Edit/Quick Edit comments and set comments as Spam or Trash.

Click on Reply, you can reply to the comment here, and of course you can reply at the post where the comment is posted to.

The difference between Edit and Quick Edit is that Quick Edit allows you to edit the comment right here on this page, and by clicking on Edit, you will enter a comment editing page just like editing Posts and Pages.

There are two drop down menus: Bulk Actions and Filter.

With Bulk Actions, you can edit multiple posts together. It offers four options: Approve, Unapprove, Mark as Spam, Move to Trash.

Two filters are available, Comments and Pings. Pings are trackbacks which will be generated when other bloggers mentions your post.

You see the Check for Spam button, you know what it does.

Conclusion

That’s all about comments for now, and remember all comment settings are located on Settings -> Discussion. If you’ve got any questions, don’t hesitate to let me know, and you know how to do it. Yes, comments.

Invoicera Launches Magento Extension to Automatically Send Invoices from Magento Store in Real Time

Zack — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 09:08:22 +0000

Invoicera, one of the leading online invoicing and billing solution provider has recently announced the integration of magento with their services which will enable magento store owners to automatically create invoices within Invoicera when an order is placed in their online store and professional invoices will be send automatically to customers in real time.

Invoicera integration with Magento will save most of the time of Magento store owners who, so far used to send invoices to their customers for each order manually. This integration would also provide online store owners an option to send invoices in their own customize invoice format that one can easily prepare in their Invoicera account with Invoicera’s customize template feature rather than Magento’s standard invoice format. The remarkable feature of this service is that all the online store merchants can avail this service without spending a single amount.

“Thousands of online retailers rely on the Magento eCommerce platform and we are so thrilled that Invoicera will now be a part of it with this new extension .We are constantly looking for ways to bring more value to our clients, and adding the Invoicera functionality to the Magento ecommerce platform is a great way for us to help our clients engage their customers and get more sales” as said by Mr. Manish Chauhan, AM-Marketing, Invoicera.com

Invoicera is a pioneer in providing trouble free invoicing solutions to its users and adding this new feature will definitely provide them an edge over the other highly competitive invoicing solution providers.

For more details one can visit Invoicera at http://www.invoicera.com/blog/updates/now-send-professional-invoices-to-your-magento-store-customers-in-real-time or drop an email to support@invoicera.com

WordPress Complete Tutorial 06: WordPress Pages

Zack — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 07:44:26 +0000

This is the sixth post of my WordPress Complete Tutorial series.

For all tutorials in this series, please visit:

WordPress Complete Tutorials

I am going to talk about Pages today.

What’s the difference between Posts and Pages?

Posts are articles we published everyday, and Pages are information of the blog, such as About Us, Contact information.

About Us Page

WordPress creates a About page for every new blog with some example data, let’s modify it to fill our need.

There is a default About page here, let’s edit it.

This is the Page Editing page, looks familiar? Yeah, it’s almost the same as Post Editing page. Just a little different settings on the right sidebar. Try to make some changes and click Update. Now check out the new About page on your blog. This is what I’ve done:

Some themes use Pages as Menu, which means you Pages will automatically shows on the Menu. Others use built-in Menu functions, in this case, you need to add your Pages in Menus editor under Appearance. Otherwise, you will not see your Pages on your blog.

You can also add your Pages to your blog using sidebar Widgets.

Add New Pages

Adding new pages is just the same as adding posts. Click on Add New under Pages section, and you know what to do.

There are three Page Attributes you can set on the right bottom.

Parent: Set a parent page for the current page. For example, you have a page called, Authors, which introduces all authors on this blog. And you want to have a separate page to talk about one specific author, you can create a new page and set the page Authors to be its parent page.
Template: You can have a specific design for a particular page using template. You need to create a template file in your theme to do this.
Order: Define the order of pages to be show, less number goes first.

Conclusion

Pages are useful to provide static information to your readers. Use your imagination to create unique page to surprise everyone.

WordPress Complete Tutorial 05: Publishing on WordPress

Zack — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 05:12:12 +0000

This is the fifth post of my WordPress Complete Tutorial series.

For all tutorials in this series, please visit:

WordPress Complete Tutorials

In the previous tutorials, we’ve set up our blog, changed the theme and get all the settings ready. We are going to do some publishing in WordPress today.

Creating & Editing Category in WordPress

Let’s login to the Admin Panel. Before we go for posts, we need to create a category for our posts. Click Categories under Posts section.

We create a category called, “Testing Category“, it’s a top category, we don’t specify any parent category to it. Most of time we don’t need Description, you can input whatever you want. Click Add New Category.

Now we have two categories, one is the default category, “Uncategorized“, the other is “Testing Category” that we just created.

Move your mouse cursor to the name of the category, it shows four links. The first and second, “Edit” and “Quick Edit” are for editing, you can change the name of the category.

And then comes the “Delete” links to delete the category. You can’t delete default category where you set in Writing Settings. Posts under the category you deleted will be move to default category if they don’t have any other category.

The last link is “View“, you will find all posts under this category when you click on this link.

Post Editing Page in WordPress

We’ve got our category now, let’s publish our first post. Click Add New under Posts section.

This is where we add and edit posts. In the middle of the page is the post editor. You can see the title box and text area for content.

There are three useful sections that help us in editing posts.

Upload/Insert Media(Red): this is where you upload images and other media for the post. The first icon is for uploading and editing image, we’ll use it all the time.
Editor Mode(Blue): Visual mode is what you see is what you get style, it shows everything in the post, like images, videos. And HTML mode shows the HTML code, you can make small modification via editing HTML code, for example, changing the border of a image.
Editor Button(Yellow): this will only show in Visual mode. They are useful functions for editing content, like making bold text.

On the right hand side, you can see a Publish section where you can preview your post, save your post as draft and you can also specify when the post should be published.

Categories section shows all categories you have, you can choose which category this post should be, you can choose more than one category and you can create a new category here as well.

Post Tags section is for adding tags for the post. Tags are keywords of the post, you can insert several tags related to your post, so that readers can find the post via these tags.

On the top right of the page, there is a Screen Option where you can choose what to be showed on this page.

If you theme supports Featured Image, there will be a Featured Image section under Post Tags section, where you can set a thumbnail for the post.

Publish a New Post in WordPress

Let’s try to create a post. Enter whatever you want in the title and text area, and then I will insert a image from my computer, click on Add an Image icon in Upload/Insert Media section, it shows a popup window for adding image.

The first tab is From Computer. You choose a file from your computer and upload to WordPress. The second tab is From URL, means you can insert an online image by provide the URL of the image. Media Library contains files you have already uploaded to WordPress.

Click Select Files to choose an image from computer, upload will automatically start, you see a processing bar showing the percentage of uploading.

When finished, you are able to edit the information of the image.

It’s recommended to enter Title and Alternate Text, because they are useful for SEO(Search Engine Optimization).

Link URL is what to show when readers click on the image. You can choose None that makes no link for the image, File URL is direct link to the image, we usually use this one, it shows the full size of the image. Post URL is the link to the post where the image belongs to.

Size can be changed in Media Setting. We’ve talked about this in the last tutorial.

Remember to click Insert Into Post to insert the image, if you don’t want to insert, click Save All Changes.

Here is the result.

Choose “Testing Category” as category of the post and insert some tags. You can input tags one by one or all together with comma to separate.

Last thing I want to talk about is Permalink right under the Title. This is the link of the post, you can change it by click on the highlighted part. It’s a important element for SEO, you should use some main keywords of the post, skip those meaningless word like “to”, “and”, “an”.

Ok, everything is ready, click Publish. Refresh our blog to see the new post.

You see the new post under the category of “Testing Category” with two tags of “Testing” and “WordPress”

Let’s go back to Admin Panel, click All Posts under Posts section.

You can see all you posts with some basic information. This is where you manage them, you can delete or edit several posts at once via Bulk Actions. You can use Quick Edit to modify basic information of the post, like Tags, Categories. Or you can click on Edit to change a post content.

Editing Post Tags in WordPress

Let’s go back to Admin Panel, I want to talk about post tags.

Click Post Tags under Post section.

This is quite similar with Categories page. You can add or delete tags here. Deleting tags will not cause the posts to be deleted.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you’ve learn:

Managing Categories.
Managing Post Tags.
Publishing and Managing Posts

You are able to write your blog posts and publish them to the world now. And in the next tut, we’ll learn how to manage Links, Pages and Comments.

WordPress Complete Tutorial 04: WordPress Settings

Zack — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 06:55:39 +0000

This is the forth post of my WordPress Complete Tutorial series.

For all tutorials in this series, please visit:

WordPress Complete Tutorials

We have our blog created and a nice theme installed. The layout of the blog is basically ready, so we are going to talk about some other settings of WordPress.

General Settings

Let’s go to Admin Panel(http://YourBlog.com/wp-admin), we will take a look at Settings section. The first Item is General settings.

Here are the basic settings of the blog. You can change the name of the blog(Site Title), your slogan(Tagline), timezone and date time format.

Writing Settings

These are the settings for writing and publishing content.

Size of the post box is the size of the editor, 20 lines means you can type 20 lines in text area, there will be a scroll bar when you pass 20.

Formatting is about graphic emotion and XHTML formating. It’s not recommended to check the second option.

Default Post Category and Default Link Category sets which category to used when a post/link is not specified to any category.

Press This is a tool let you easily grab content from other website and post it to your blog, you can try it out following the instruction.

Post by email: there is a detail instruction can be found here.

If you host your own WordPress blog, you’ll see some other settings in this section, like Remote Publishing and Update Services. we’ll leave them to later when we talk about self-installed WordPress blog.

Reading Settings

Reading settings are about what to be showed to readers. You can set how many posts to be displayed on the home page and how many in RSS feed.

Email Settings is only available on WordPress.com, it’s a email sent to your subscribers. You won’t find this in self-hosted WordPress blog.

Discussion Settings

There are a lot of options in this section. They are mostly self-explained. We’ll go through the most useful items.

Default article settings: you should check all three items of this part.

Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article: This means we will ping other blogs which are linked in our post. This is a good thing, it tells other bloggers that we are talking about them, they might come to our blog to continue the conversation.
Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.): Opposite from the first one, this allows other bloggers to ping us. We should allow that, so that we will be noticed when someone are talking about us.
Allow people to post comments on new articles: Comment is the most important thing to a blog, the more comments the better.

Other comment settings: these are optional and personal, choose what you like. I suggest you to check the first item, “Comment author must fill out name and e-mail“, this make sure you can communicate with commenters.

The second item, “Users must be registered and logged in to comment“, is not recommended, because it’s kind of wasting their time, they have nothing to do after registered, besides commenting.

E-mail me whenever: it’s better to check “A comment is held for moderation“, it will send a email to you when a comment is held for moderation, you should either approve it or delete it. You should reply to comments as soon as possible. This will make commenters feel like you’re concern about them.

Before a comment appears: check “Comment author must have a previously approved comment“, this means you need to approve the first comment by a commenter, if one has a comment approved before, his comments will be showed automatically, you don’t need to approve them again.

Avatar: is an image that represents you. WordPress uses Gravatar service. This service allows you to use your avatar in different websites/blogs without uploading again. WordPress will recognize your avatar via email. So if you set up your Gravatar with the same email on your blog, you can see your avatar here.

Default avatar is for those who have no Gravatar/Avatar.

Media Settings

Media settings are about images and videos.

You can set default image sizes, there are three types of image size, you will be able to choose them from editor.

Auto-Embeds: will convert video URL into a video. For example, you post a link of a video on YouTube in your post. WordPress will embed the video into the post, so that you can watch it on the blog.

Privacy Settings

There is only one option in privacy settings, it’s about visibility of your blog.

Conclusion

There are some other settings I didn’t talk about, because they are only available on WordPress.com. If you install a blog on your own server, you won’t see them. So that I skipped them, and I guess you can figure them out by your won, if you’ve got any questions, feel free to comment here.

And there is one more important setting, Permalinks, that I didn’t cover, because it’s not available on WordPress.com, I’ll talk about this later in this series.