I upgraded to WordPress 2.1 today, mostly motivated by the editor updates. The upgrade itself was painless and all of the plugins seem to be working fine. The only problem was that embedded YouTube videos didn’t work. This was a good opportunity to test the new editor and I was able to fix the videos by getting the embed code from YouTube and replacing the code in the posts using the new “code” view of the editor. The new editor is a bit better than the old one, but I like the improved image handling. The autosave is also great. Here are some of the key features (more…)

WordPress has a very useful more tag (<!--more-->) that publishers can use to split their blog posts so that only the part before the <!--more--> tag is displayed on their blog homepages while the whole posts are displayed on the post/content pages. The purpose of this *teaser* is to encourage interested readers to either click on ads or to continue reading by clicking on the “more” link and get more page views for ad sales. Unfortunately WordPress’ default RSS feed does not obey the <!--more--> tag and only offers Full or Summary syndication. Full syndication is what users want, but publishers are reluctant to do that because their RSS subscribers would get everything in their their RSS readers and they wouldn’t need to click-through or browse to the publisher’s Web site. The Better Feed plugin solves that problem and Da Vinci Planet’s feed looks a whole lot better now

It is said that title tags are one of the most important of the on-page factors for SEO. So I put it to the test. A couple of weeks ago I implemented the SEO Title Tag plugin for Wordpress which updated the HTML titles of my pages to be “more SEO friendly”.

The idea was to give keywords more importance in title tags by placing them first, e.g. a page formerly titled “Da Vinci Planet ›› Blog Archive ›› Essential Portable Apps” is now titled “Essential Portable Apps | Da Vinci Planet“. Google’s search results pages have since updated and are now showing the “SEO friendly” page titles. The results are somewhat surprising! (more…)

One of the motives behind blogs is earning some extra cash from ads. To add Google AdSense to a Wordpress blog is a breeze. First sign up for a an account with AdSense. It may take a few days for the account to get opened. In the mean time you can download the AdSense-Deluxe Wordpress plug-in. I have not tested it, but I am sure that the plug-in should work for most affiliate programs.