Panning for Gold

WordPress makes it easy to add content from other sites to your sidebars through widgets. You can add tweets to your blog, links from your other sites such as social media, a podcast site, trending topics in your niche, etc. The best part is that this updates automatically with fresh content, links.

Adding RSS Feeds to Your WordPress Site

The internet is great. So much good stuff shared freely. You can learn how to do many things, whether it is making a diaper cake, a herbal education, visit places which use alternative energy, learn to do cool things on your blog, even online magazines. Blogs can contain videos, an audio podcast, enjoy beautiful photos from faraway lands. Families can use blogs to connect with their extended families, tell a story. Individual can use blogs to make a political statement, support a cause, express religious beliefs, to teach a group of people, inspire others, share their feelings.

So take some time today and visit some blogs, interact with others, add your thoughts to the conversation, you’ll find some jewels. Not sure where to go? Click on some of the links above, visit the ones below, read the comments, find a commenter you like, click on their name and visit their site, make new friends. Find a place you really like, bookmark it, subscribe to the rss feed, subscribe by email, digg it, stumble it, tweet, share on facebook, whatever fits your style.

I’d like to share a couple of gems I found today.

I’ve not visited Skelly’s blog in a while, almost forgot about it, except for her tip on using images from Flickr. But I’ve always liked everything I’ve read over there, past time to visit. I wasn’t disappointed. My kids are making decisions about school, career’s, life. I always advice them to find something they enjoy doing. To find their talents, passions. This applies to each of us, no matter what our age, our stories aren’t set in stone, still being written. In fact I have a new site in the works about this very subject. The HalfBaked Podcast. So Skellie’s post How to Find Your Hidden Talent was today’s must read. Check it out.

Christine Kane is always an inspiration. I love her post Extreme All-or-Nothing and Your Other Three Tires.

“A flat tire! On your brand new shiny car! How the heck did THAT happen?

What do you do?

Well, it is YOU after all. So you do the only logical thing.

You say, “Screw it.” You reach into your backpack, get out your camping knife – and slash the other three tires.

Hey, why even bother if they’re not all working?”

Visit Christine’s post and see what flat tires have to do with your dreams. While visiting, be sure to check out her music.

Be sure and share some of your favorite blog posts, whether by you or someone else, in the comments below. Let’s build a pile of jewels.

Blog Hopping for Jewels

How to Have Your Image Next to Your Comments

My homework for Day 14 was to update a key page on your blog. I knew my about page needed updating, ’cause I put something like more information coming soon. Then I looked for my about page, contact page and realized that they were both hidden with my last theme update. I’d never added them back to my navigation links.

Updated and fixed. Even added a short little blurb on the sidebar for new visitors to get an idea about the website. At least readers could contact me on various social networks. I can think of several more tasks I can do to update my website. A work in progress, one step at a time.

Besides updating your website, every business should check and update their voice mail, printed material, etc. Imagine calling a company and the voice mail takes you to the box of an ex-employee. You assume they are still working there, leave a message, it never gets returned. You get frustrated and call a competing business and give them your business.

Update Your Website

• I changed internet providers and one of the few places I’d used that email address was on my blog. (Note good to use email not tied to isp, use your domain name, google, yahoo, anything else and no issue when your change isp’s)
• I changed the email for my blog under options
• My password is on my laptop, it’s monitor crashed, I backed up my data anyway, mailed back for warranty work.
• Could not remember login, so hit link get new password
• Link sent to new email, but doesn’t work. Invalid key
• Searched wordpress.org and found link to reset password.
• Followed through phpAdmin directions
• Success!

What if I Can’t Log into WordPress?

]]> http://www.connectsimply.com/blog/what-if-i-cant-log-into-wordpress/feed/ 2 http://www.connectsimply.com/blog/adding-google-images-to-blog/ http://www.connectsimply.com/blog/adding-google-images-to-blog/#comments Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:26:44 +0000 Heidi Caswell http://connectsimply.com/blog/adding-google-images-to-blog/ Photo by Janusz L Google Images, what a great way to find photos, just search on your keyword and the images appear. But should you just grab and freely use any image you find? Not unless you want copyright issues. As a photographer (hobby) imagine my surprise to see my photo of a red rose [...]

Why Shouldn’t I Grab Photos from Google Images For My Blog?

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Photo by Janusz L

Google Images, what a great way to find photos, just search on your keyword and the images appear. But should you just grab and freely use any image you find? Not unless you want copyright issues.

As a photographer (hobby) imagine my surprise to see my photo of a red rose with snow being used as the avatar of a young lady who said she was a photographer on a social networking group. No mention anywhere that the photo was not her own nor where she got it. Irked me! My photo, I want credit!

I checked with some professional photographers in one of the photography forums. Yes, my photos, even if I post online, are my property, copyrighted unless I say otherwise. I could press charges if I wished. Others have been known to give the offender bad press. Often it is done out of ignorance, best to educate your fans, if they weren’t a fan of your work, they wouldn’t be posting it on their site.

I strongly advise against grabbing any image from a google image search without permission. Unless it says otherwise, you don’t have permission to use it. My 11 year old daughter was working on a famous rock page. She wanted pictures of famous rocks, when I told her about needed permission to use she was frustrated, too many were not free to use.

Images add visual appeal to your blog posts. Not everyone is a photographer or graphic artist. I like using others photos along with my own. Today I was very happy to find a
A Complete Guide to Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images by Skellie. Check it out!

Thanks to her advice, y’all can enjoy and share the beauty created by others while spreading a little fame and link love.

Why Shouldn’t I Grab Photos from Google Images For My Blog?

]]> http://www.connectsimply.com/blog/adding-google-images-to-blog/feed/ 11 http://www.connectsimply.com/blog/replay-of-blogging-conference-with-beverly-mahone/ http://www.connectsimply.com/blog/replay-of-blogging-conference-with-beverly-mahone/#comments Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:42:30 +0000 Heidi Caswell http://connectsimply.com/blog/replay-of-blogging-conference-with-beverly-mahone/ I so enjoyed listening and sharing information with the other bloggers. If you missed the call, you can may be able to still catch the recording at Talk2Bev

Replay of Blogging Conference with Beverly Mahone

]]> I so enjoyed listening and sharing information with the other bloggers. If you missed the call, you can may be able to still catch the recording at Talk2Bev

Replay of Blogging Conference with Beverly Mahone

]]> http://www.connectsimply.com/blog/replay-of-blogging-conference-with-beverly-mahone/feed/ 1 http://www.connectsimply.com/blog/dont-miss-blogging-seminar/ http://www.connectsimply.com/blog/dont-miss-blogging-seminar/#comments Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:55:36 +0000 Heidi Caswell http://connectsimply.com/blog/dont-miss-blogging-seminar/ “Blogging? I hear about blogging all the time. What is a blog?” “How does having a blog help my business?” “What do I need to do to get started blogging?” I hear these questions all the time. Want answers? Check out next Thursday’s blogging seminar hosted by Beverly Mahone, expert media consultant. This teleseminar is [...]

Don’t Miss Blogging Seminar

]]> “Blogging? I hear about blogging all the time. What is a blog?”
“How does having a blog help my business?”
“What do I need to do to get started blogging?”
I hear these questions all the time.

Want answers?
Check out next Thursday’s blogging seminar hosted by Beverly Mahone, expert media consultant.

This teleseminar is for you if:

• You’ve been thinking about blogging but don’t know where to begin.
• You’re not sure what to “blog” about.
• You want to learn more about how to attract more readers.
• You don’t quite understand the “technical” aspects
• You want to make money from blogging

These are just a few of the topics that will be covered with a panel
of experts:

Heidi Caswell Connect Simply
Betty Lynch My Country Kitchen
Karlyn Karlyns
Kathie Thomas VA Directory

Details and sign up information can be found at Talk2Bev.

Don’t Miss Blogging Seminar

]]> http://www.connectsimply.com/blog/dont-miss-blogging-seminar/feed/ 1 http://www.connectsimply.com/blog/how-to-add-bbclone-to-a-wordpress-blog/ http://www.connectsimply.com/blog/how-to-add-bbclone-to-a-wordpress-blog/#comments Wed, 02 Jan 2008 05:39:24 +0000 Heidi Caswell http://connectsimply.com/blog/how-to-add-bbclone-to-a-wordpress-blog/ I like being able to see the stats of my blog, who is visiting, amount of traffic, how do visitors find me, how long do they stay, which sites send me the most referrals, which keywords, etc. I was surprised to see my new blog Heidi’s Cards, place in the search engines for several phrases [...]

How to add BBClone to a WordPress Blog

]]> I like being able to see the stats of my blog, who is visiting, amount of traffic, how do visitors find me, how long do they stay, which sites send me the most referrals, which keywords, etc. I was surprised to see my new blog Heidi’s Cards, place in the search engines for several phrases which included keywords from my category names and post titles. Just a trickle of traffic, but encouraging just the same.

Different stats program show different things, and I’ll be the first to admit there is much I don’t know about the various stats programs, what they do, how they work, which one is the best, etc. I’ll probably never be an expert at all of that. BBclone does what I want for now, which is good enough.

I’m posting this information here as I don’t want to lose the steps, and others may find it useful. As I moved to a new host, I wanted a web stats program, and discovered a quick easy way to add BBClone to the wordpress blogs I’ve moved to my new webhost . Now I know which pages visitors enter/leave, where they com from, I can even click in the detailed stats and see which search engines searches referred them to me, what keyword or phrase was used, whose site referred them, how long they visited, which pages, etc.

Upload bbclone to my blog’s host.
My host allows me to do such. I uploaded
http://bbclone.de/download.php?get=bbclone-0.4.9b.tar.gz into the folder which holds my wordpress blog’s files. IXWebhosting has a WGET button which makes this easier. Push button, copy in url push get.

I decompressed the files. Double clicked on file. Clicked on decompress button. If your host does not have this option, you may need to unzip the files on your desktop before uploading to your web host.

You should now have a folder called bbclone, You can rename that file folder, if you wish.

Next came the tricky part, you want to add a little bit of code to each page so the stats program will work. But where to put it, I don’t want to type code for each page, I wanted to put it in one place. While I searched wordpress forums for the answer and found this bit of code to add, My son, Tim Caswell, showed me where to add the code so it would work as I wanted. Teamwork is great.

Add this code:

if (is_home() == true) {
$pagetitle = "Home";
}
else {
$pagetitle = wp_title('', false);
}

define("_BBC_PAGE_NAME", $pagetitle);
define("_BBCLONE_DIR", "bbclone/");
define("COUNTER", _BBCLONE_DIR."mark_page.php");
if (is_readable(COUNTER)) { include_once(COUNTER); }
else { echo "Counter is broken."; }

To the file template-loader.php in the wp-includes folder right after the first < ? php command.

Note: if you change the name of your folder you will need to change code too. After “_BBCLONE_DIR”, change “bbclone/” to “whatever you named the file/”

To access your stats go to the url: http://yourdomainname.com/bbclone/ Be sure to notice the links on the bottom to additional stats.

How to add BBClone to a WordPress Blog

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