Here’s what I got recently stating to update one of my site:

Wordpress update notification from Google.

It is always good to keep updated since insecure versions of wordpress are vulnerable to attacks. Newer versions come with possible solutions to patch those vulnerability until new loopholes are found.

The moment I received this notification, I was bit in doubt since I had never heard of Google sending such mails to its webmaster users suggesting to update the wordpress and the formatting of mail was not good! I even thought this might be fake, but after looking at the details of the mail, the sender ID was google’s official webmaster tools address. Later I did a search on internet and was confirmed that it is official after reading Matt Cutts’s update on twitter.

You don’t need to enable any option to get such notification in webmaster tools. It’s great to see google sending such update notification to wordpress users. Hope this will make people who often tend to be lazy updating their installation. All it takes is just a click to update the wordpress to latest version.

Later I tried asking my friends to see if they face the same issue, then I found that while few have the issue, few doesn’t. So again, I found the solution when I searched for “wordpress stats” on Twitter. Even there many people were having the same problem. People even started blaming wordpress for the same reason. But after couple of minutes, someone tweeted for a possible solution. And the solution is to use the wordpress’s new plugin that literally replaces the WP Stats.

Say hello to JetPack!

Jetpack supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com. It comes with even more features, you can learn more about it over here.

All you need to do is just install this new JetPack plugin, activate it and link your wordpress blog to your global wordpress.com account.

Once done, you can access the “new” stats page just under the JetPack. And the new stats page looks like this:

Solution?

There are many ways avoid images from being hotlinked, but on WordPress, there is an easiest way to do it with a bunch of other goodies. And that is by using a mighty plugin called “PictPocket“. So install the plugin from your wordpress’s inbuilt plugin installer or install it manually via FTP by download it.

What to do after installing?

Configuration:

After installing it, you can see the PictPocket in the left pane of wordpress admin panel at the bottom. Go to “Overview” and you see this:

Click on “Auto Configuration” button to configure the .htacess file.

Set the “Don’t Hotlink” image:

Create a image with message not to hotlink image (something like this) from your blog and upload it to your server and provide the URL in custom images under “Options” and save it.

What happens next?

After you do all those stuff, you are almost done. Now whenever someone hotlinks an image which is present on your wordpress’s “Uploads” folder in wp-content, you can see it in “Hotlinks” page of PictPocket with details like who has hotlinked with a link to the page containing your hotlinked image and a count with how many times your image has been viewed on the site where it has been hotlinked. Now you can block those sites where your images are being hotlinked.

Click to view large image.

PictPocket will then add those links to it’s blacklist and the your actual image which was hotlinked will be replaced with the image containing the message not to hotlink your images! Cool isn’t it?

That’s all. If you have any question, do let me know in the comment.

When it comes to blogging, if your blog has more than one administrator or writers, there will be a need to leave messages to your fellow admin/writers to send messages or a to-do list. WordPress being one of coolest blogging software, it has as loads of plugins in it’s arsenal to cram in additional features. And one such plugin is “WordPress Admin Notepad” which enables you to leave sticky notes to your fellow bloggers.

Install the plugin:

Install the plugin either automatically from plugin installer in your wordpress admin panel by searching “WordPress Admin Notepad” or install it manually via FTP by downloading it from here. After installing, activate it.

Configure and start using it:

Navigate to Settings > WordPress Admin Notepad

Now that you have WordPress Admin Notepad installed, you must make a small configuration to make it work and ofcourse leave a message to see how it works.

Here, the first thing you notice is a large text box where you can leave notes. And then plugin comes with couple of options to customize it the way you want it to work.

In the Options, you must enable “Current Saved State of Notepad?”. If this is not ticked, it won’t display the note in dashboard. Also, you can tick “Disable Notepad Toggle at top right corner?” if you want the note to be displayed in all the pages of admin panel. I don’t suggest using this feature, because it annoys you sooner or later. So it’s better to show it only in dashboard.

The “Permission to Notepad?” option gives you control over to which usergroup the notepad should appear. This comes handy if you don’t want your contributors or subscribers from peeking into your admin notes.

Now after configuring it once, you can start leaving notes in WordPress Admin Notepad. You must click on “Note” on top right corner of screen to bring in the box the enter text. You can immediately save the changes you made from there as well. And whenever your fellow admin or writer logins, they can see what your message.

That’s it.

How to display recent posts in WordPress without using any plugins:

1. Login to your WordPress Dashboard and navigate to Appearance > Editor
2. Now decide where to display the recent posts. For instance if you want to display after single post, then open “single.php”
3. Paste this code where you want the recent posts to appear. (Don’t put it in any of the PHP loops).

<ul>
<?php
global $post;
$myposts = get_posts('numberposts=6&offset=1');
foreach($myposts as $post) :
setup_postdata($post);
?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

Just in case if you want to customize the list, a small explanation might help:

In line 4, you can see numberposts=6. This will display 6 recent posts. You may increase or decrease the number as your wish. Then, offset=1 will exclude one latest post since we are displaying recent posts and not the latest posts. You can set it to zero to display as latest posts.

Update the file and you are done. Now it will display a list of recent posts in your single posts or wherever you place it.

Adding a link to an HTML page is quite simple and the syntax for that is,

<a href="url">Link text</a>

Now, this code will cause the browser to go to the ‘url’ upon clicking the Link Text. The ‘href’ attribute is used to designate the target address of the link.

What Are Anchor Links

Anchor links are an extremely useful tool for easy navigation on extremely large posts and pages. These links, also called internal links or page jumps are used to navigate inside the page from one place to another. You might have seen links like ‘Go To Top’ or, footnotes which again allow jumping back to the last position. These are called Anchor Links. It’s very easy to create Anchor links in a page with a couple of lines of coding.

Creating Anchor Links

To create simple Anchor links in wordpress posts, first switch to the HTML editor mode. Inside that mode, suppose you want to create a link to go to a specific part of the page like the example anchor at the top, you can do so by adding this simple code.

Example Code

What we have done in this page is, I have set an anchor to this heading. The code reads as,

<h3 id="Example">Example Code</h3>

At the top of the post, you can see a link called example. When you click on that link, the page will jump to this heading. The hyperlink created at the top of the post has a code similar to this,

<a href="#Example">example</a>

So, whenever you click on the example link at the top, it will search for an element named Top in the page (as the link is relative). When it finds an object with the specified name, browser jumps to that location. Here, the current heading is named Example and the link at the top jumps to an object named Example so, when you click on that link, the browser jumps to this heading.

It’s pretty simple actually, in even more simple words, a named anchor is created like this,

<a name="anchor">Named Anchor</a>

And a link to that named anchor, within the same page is created like this,

<a href="#anchor">Jump to the Named Anchor</a>

If you want a link to jump to a specific location in a different page then you will have to provide the full path of the link. (along with the URL and the path). Return to the Top.

New to WordPress Themes? Read: How to install wordpress themes.

Here are 10 coolest WordPress theme with minimalistic design:

1. min

Download | Demo

2. Clean Home

Download | Demo

3. Minimo

Download | Demo (Select Minimo)

4. The Journalist

Download | Demo

5. MagZine

Download | Demo

6. Simplicity

Download | Demo

7. Empty Canvas

Download | Demo

8. WPCandy

Download | Demo

9. Modern

Download | Demo

10. Grid Focus

Download | Demo

Beautiful Sunflowers

As everyone knows, WordPress is the god of blogging platforms, it lets you do many things which others can’t do. Image Caption feature was introduced in WordPress 2.6 and it comes really handy when you want to put a small description or a title of the image that you are using. This is just one among the countless features that wordpress has managed to include into it’s CMS. Sometimes, an image without a background and border might look beautiful, but not when you add a caption to it. So this tutorial teaches you about how to add a good looking background and border to your captioned images.

Before getting started, just have a look at the image below that illustrates how captioned image looks with and without background.

Image courtesy: angus clyne

Now that you got a clear picture of how it looks after adding a frame-like backround to the image caption, I bet you can’t resist to add it to your wordpress theme soon.

Adding this background is made possible with the help of few lines of CSS code. WordPress has a bunch of pre-defined CSS classes. One among them is the “wp-caption”. This class is generate whenever you add a caption to any image. By default, not all the WordPress themes contain necessary codes to dress up the wp-caption class. So to dress it up, we need to declare the class in the stylesheet and add the properties.

To add the code, follow the below steps:

1. Login to WordPress admin panel.
2. Navigate to Appearance > Editor
3. Add the below code in styesheet.css at the very bottom:

.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}

4. Update the file and you are done. Now whenever you add a caption to your images, you get a beautiful frame-like background to your images.

Note: You cannot declare the class anything other than “wp-caption” since it is a pre-defined class by WordPress and has been built into the code.

Do let me know if you like the post and also feel free to ask me questions if you have any in the comment.

Before, it was required to use a separate plugin to this, but now you can display a list of random posts on your blog with the help of few lines of code. Just paste this code in the sidebar or edit the theme files and paste it wherever you want:
<ul>
<li>
<h2>Random Posts</h2>
<ul>
<?php
$rand_posts = get_posts('numberposts=5&orderby=rand');
foreach( $rand_posts as $post ) :
?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
<?php the_title(); ?>
</a></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>

In the above code, numberposts=5 will make 5 random posts to be displayed in the list. Increase the number from 5 to the number of posts that you wish to display in this list.

This will now eliminate the need of using a plugin to display random posts and hence increases the chances of your visitors to spend more time on your blog. There is yet another way to make your visitors to spend more time on your blog, and that is by displaying a list of Related Posts. This however requires a plugin to display the list of relevant posts. Here’s how you can display related posts on your blog.

Source: The above code is extracted from WordPress Codex.

Getting WordPress themes.

As said earlier, the availability of wordpress theme on the internet is very abundant. Designers release their themes in directories specially made to showcase wordpress themes. One of the most popular wordpress theme gallery is the official “Free Themes Directory” by wordpress. Here in this directory, you can find some of the well coded and designed themes on the internet. They all are licensed under GPL and is free to use and edit.

Though the official wordpress theme gallery has good themes, one can find large varieties of wordpress themes on other popular theme directories specially made to showcase the wordpress themes. I will list some of the best wordpress theme directories here:

• WordPress Theme Base
• Top WordPress Themes
• WordPress Supplies

To find more themes, just google “wordpress themes“.

Installing WordPress themes:

1. Extract the file. The theme files will be present in a folder named after the theme.
2. Now to upload the theme, you will need to connect to your server using an FTP client. Use a good FTP client like FileZilla and then connect to the server.
3. Navigate to the root folder of your wordpress installation and go to wp-admin –> themes.  This is the place where you will have to upload your new downloaded theme.
4. Upload the folder containing the theme that you just extracted few minutes ago.
5. After you finish uploading the theme folder, login to your wordpress dashboard and then navigate to Appearance –> Themes. If you had successfully uploaded the theme, here you can find it. Just preview it and then apply the theme.

Note: Please do not make any changes in the folder unless you are well versed. And also make sure you upload the folder that contains the theme files directly inside it. Not the folder containing sub-folder of the theme (it works, but is not recommended to do so). A typical folder containing theme files will have only one folder named “images” or “assets” or maybe sometimes an advanced theme might contain more folders like “javascripts” and “php files” etc. Apart from these folders the theme folder contains PHP files like “header.php”, “sidebar.php” and “single.php” etc.

That’s it.