At the time of writing, I have these plugins installed...

• All in One SEO Pack
  Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
  Generates a fully customizable oldfashioned sitemap. Google loves sitemaps (have a look at the bottom of this site where it says "sitemap")
• Easy Contact
  An easy contact form you can use to set up a contact page (have a look at my contact page)
• Link Cloaking Plugin
  Excellent plugin to cloak outgoing links in your posts, pages, sidebar, etc... (see my woothemes goto-links in the sidebar)
• WassUp
  Excellent plugin to analyze your visitors traffic in real time with stats, charts and a lot of chronological informations.
• WordPress Database Backup
  Cheap hosting providers usually don't backup things for you, so here's your chance to have a backup feature for free.
• WP Super Cache
  A traffic surge might come to your site one day. Be prepared. Here's a very fast caching module for WordPress, ideal to handle heavy traffic. (You can activate this plugin in "off mode", and switch it on and off again whenever you need it)

Oh, BTW, I missed the Thank a Plugin Developer Day some days ago... Mister Matt Mullenweg declared Jan 28th as the official "Thank a Plugin Developer" day. Hope this post makes it up. Thanks everybody!

Important! (update feb 1 2009)
You need a self hosted wordpress blog for this. If you don't, there's another way to display your tweets on your wordpress.com blog (no badge though).

How to Install the Twitter Badge...
When you go to the official twitter badge download page, you will see that there isn't a "twitter badge for wordpress" option, so wordpress users are stuck with the "other" option.

When you click on that option, you need to decide which version you would like to install on your wordpress blog. (I picked the flash version.)

Click "continue"... Then pick either the interactive widget (the one I am using on my website right now) or the display-only widget. Click "continue" again, select a color style (smooth, velvetica or revo) and a widget size (narrow, wide or full). I chose smooth and narrow.

Copy the produced html code.

Now go to your wordpress dashboard, find "Appearance" and click on "Widgets".

Please note that your wordpress theme must be widget-ready. If it isn't, consider to switch to a widgetable theme. You can find some nice wordpress themes at woothemes.

Select "show all widgets", scroll down below, find "Text" and click on "Add". A Text widget appears to your right... Open it (click on edit) and paste the copied twitter code in there.

Now before you click "Done", inspect the code because you MUST adjust the twitter code manually to adjust the width of the twitter badge...

Now pay attention!
In that code you will find width="290"... not once but twice. Change both values to the desireable width (you can do the same thing with the height-values of course).

Now, click "Done", position the Text-widget where you wanna have it (I put mine on top) and click "Save Changes".

Reload your wordpress powered webpage and ... Voila. There it is. Your Twitter flash badge for wordpress.

Now the only thing I don't like about the twitter badge is that it leaves an empty hole while it is loading. This can take up to a few seconds. For this reasons, I added a background to the widget. In case you wanna know how to add a background to your flashy twitter badge for wordpress, let me know.

Also, in case you're worried about the W3C validation of your wordpress code (XHTML strict flags the embed method), there's a good workaround for that as well.

Talk to you later.

However, to be honest with you, there are a couple of things that I don't like about wordpress. But the beauty of it is that you can use wordpress' excellent flexibility to "change" what you don't like. "Yes Wordpress can!"

So what is it that I don't like and how did I fix it?

One thing that I definitely don't like about wordpress is that it automatically replaces "straight quotes" with curly quotes (amongst other things). Wordpress texturizes special characters for easier reading, but the result doesn't look good when you look at the source code (think search engine wise), and it's a pain in the butt if you try to share some programming code or if you try to paste some copied texturized text.

The solution?
A simple and free plugin written by Jason Litka called disable wptexturize. Download it and upload it via FTP to your plugin-folder:
your domain » wp-content » plugins.
Then activate the plugin via your wordpress dashboard. Click on plugins and find "disable wptexturize". Voila!

Now let's move on to the second wordpress feature I don't like: revisions and autosave. Each time you change something in your post, wordpress automatically saves a copy of the previous post version so that you can easily undo the changes you made (a revision).

Now this gets really annoying after a while, especially when you use the google toolbar as your primary spell checker. Google underlines the words it doesn't recognize and wordpress sees the underlining as a change, so it makes a copy, etc...

You can easily disable revisions and autosave by installing and activating a free plugin called... disable revisions and autosave. It was written by Exper Giovanni Rubaltelli and it works flawlessly.

There is however another reason why I think you're better of with a premium theme: they are easier to to modify.

I modify wordpress themes for 2 main reasons:

If the (x)html code generated by a theme isn't W3C compliant, then I try to fix it. I check the validity of the produced source code at the W3C Markup Validation Service. I'm very picky about that because I believe that perfect codes are better indexed by the search engines.
In case you find an error and you can't fix the code yourself, ask the company or person who designed your premium theme. I am sure they'll do this for free, as it is in their best interest to deliver perfect codes.

The other reason why I like to modify a theme is to make the theme a bit more personal. Small changes are usually enough to make a difference.

At the time of writing...
The WP theme I am using right now, as any other premium theme designed by Woothemes, is very easy to modify. In case you also installed a Woo Theme go to your WP dashboard, and click on your theme's options menu (at the lower left-hand side of your wordpress 2.7 dashboard). There you can add your custom logo, your tracking codes, your banners, etc...

Also, Woothemes are fully widgetized, which makes it a breeze to add widgets to your blog's sidebar.

Well, there you have it. Next time I will talk about some essential plugins you need to install. Talk to you later!

WordPress always comes with the default theme, so the first thing I did was getting a nicer wordpress theme. A wordpress theme is like a template and it gives shape to the looks and feels of your WordPress site.

Where to get WordPress Themes?
There are many excellent themes out there and many are completely free. Some theme builders sell their themes. Themes that are for sale are called "premium themes". You can download some of the best free and/or premium WordPress Themes at these places:

• Top WP Themes (Free)
• 100 Excellent WordPress Themes (Free)
• Woo Themes (Free and Premium)
• iThemes (Premium)
• Revolution Two (Premium)

How to install a theme?
To install a theme, unzip the one you downloaded and upload the complete folder to your wordpress themes directory. You have access to that directory via FTP under: your domain » wp-content » themes

Now log in to your wordpress admin area (dashboard), click on "Appearance" and click on the theme you want to preview. To install your selected theme, click "activate" (upper right corner).

Voila!

P.S. Did you know you can earn some good cash with premium themes? Watch the upcoming posts!

If you don't have a hosting provider yet, I recommend the baby croc web hosting package from Host Gator. That package allows you to install an unlimited amount of domains (and blogs, and websites, and ... ) on one hosting account which is great!
Hostgator offers great support and service too! Now, let's move on with the wordpress installation...

How to install WordPress
For those who have a hostgator account, log in to your control panel and scroll down to Software and Services. There you'll find the Fantastico De Luxe icon. Clicking on that icon brings up a new window. On the left hand side of that window, you'll find a menu. In that menu, find blogs, click "WordPress", then click on "new installation". Select your domain and follow the instructions to install WordPress.

That's it! You're ready to publish your posts and pages.

In the very near future, I will show you how to make some good money with your wordpress blog.