PureBlogging

This simple tip for your WordPress blog comes from Everton over at Connected Internet. This small change has helped him go from 5 to 200+ subscribers to his comment feed! In fact he says that the number of subscribers jumped to 80 overnight!

What he did was add the comments feed to the list of feeds that are displayed when a user clicks on the RSS link in their browser.

And it is a simple change to make. All you have to do to is find the following line in your header.php file:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> RSS Feed” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>” />

Then add the following code below it:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”<?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?> RSS Comments Feed” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘comments_rss2_url’); ?>” />

That’s it! Your comments feed will now be listed with your main feed making it easy for your visitors to subscribe.

I just made the change here at PureBlogging.com and look forward to seeing if there is an increase in the numbers of subscribers. Why don’t you try it on your blog and let me know if it works for you.

Popularity: 13% [?]

WordPress has just released the public WordPress Plugin Directory where you can browse, download, rate, and comment on all the plugins that have been submitted. Plugins will also now have a permanent download link, because the new directory always takes the latest version and links straight to the download file.

Benefits for users:

• There is now a central place to find and download WordPress plugins.
• You can get a much better idea about plugin quality and compatibility from the site.
• In the future you’ll be able to get notification inside of WordPress about plugins you use that have updates.

Benefits for developers:

• Exposure to the millions of people who visit WordPress.org every month.
• Free SVN hosting for GPL plugin development at wp-plugins.org. (Like always.)
• Automatic download packages and free hosting of those.
• Statistics about how many people are using and downloading your plugins.
• Prominent links to your homepage, and the ability to specify a Paypal donation link from your plugin page.

This is a fantastic development! Check it out today…

Popularity: 17% [?]

Marc at Macalua.com recently released a very useful plugin for WordPress. His Top Post by Category plugin will allow you to show your top posts by visits or by comments, all sorted by category on a page.

Here is a bit of the description from his site:

One of the things your blog readers don’t have is time. That’s time to wade through your 500 or so posts to pick the golden posts that declare your blog “add to my feed reader” worthy. You need a way to present your top posts up front and you need an easy and automated way to do it. Lucky for you WordPress fanatics, help is definitely around the corner.

I present to you the Top Post by Category plugin. This baby allows WordPress bloggers to display their best posts, as determined by the number of visits to the post or number of comments.

Easy to setup and works like a charm. You can check out our top posts page for a small example or check out his example to really get a feel for this plugin.

More Info: Top Posts by Category

Popularity: 14% [?]

Permalinks Migration is a handy plugin for WordPress that will allow you to change your permalink structure without breaking any old links to your website and without affecting your search engine rankings.

It does this by generating a Permanent Redirect when a user or spider visits your site through your old permalinks which redirects the visitor to the new permalinks.

Good permalink structure can help you improve your search engine rankings, so if you would like to update your permalink structure, you can now do so quickly and easily!

More Info: Permalinks Migration

Popularity: 13% [?]

If you upgraded to WordPress 2.1.1 in the past 3-4 days, download the new version (2.1.2) and update your blog again because your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker!

Only WordPress 2.1.1 seems to have been affected, so if you have not upgraded to WordPress 2.1.1 you should be fine. If your blog is running 2.1.1, please upgrade immediately and do a full overwrite of your old files.

For further details check out the WordPress blog.

Popularity: 15% [?]