I have seen many bloggers writing about how to increase your FeedBurner subscribers overnight. I don’t want to get into that. Using a few ways, you may get decent hyke in subscribers number. And others may be plain old craps or same known things over & over again. But I am today telling you about a Wordpress plugin that can help you to reach to your potential subscribers automatically.
If you have decent traffic, you may have noticed that many readers subscribe through FeedBurner email subscription option, but they never confirm it. Either they forget it or delete the mail by mistake & never care. Or they may even not notice that they have to confirm subscription. Now with the help of Notify Unconfirmed Subscribers plugin, you can easily ping them to subscribe. This plugin can fetch the list of unconfirmed email subscribers from your FeedBurner account & send them notification mail that they haven’t subscribed to the blog yet. As a blogger, it’s your duty to reach out for as many readers as you can. This plugin can make this process a bit easy.
I have found many bloggers asking how to show only the excerpts instead of full posts in Wordpress. So I thought why don’t I write a post on it. You can find some plugin to do that. But I personally believe in using as less Wordpress plugins as possible, especially for simple tasks. And for this case, you just have to change a line of code in theme file.
Go to Theme Editor (Appearance> Editor) from your Wordpress admin dashboard. Now think you want to show only the post excerpts in search results page. So you will go to the respective file (in this case search.php) & search for the phrase
the_content()
When you find it, just replace “content” with “excerpt“. That’s all. The code phrase should look like
the_excerpt()
Save the changes. Check your blog’s search results page. It should only show excerpts instead of full blog posts. Likewise you can change it in main page or archives pages too.
As a blogger, you surely want to notify as many services as possible when you update or write a post. That’s why most of us just add one after another ping service url in the Update Services list in Wordpress. The list gets huge & we sometimes even forget to care if a ping service is mentioned twice. Then the problem comes. Some servers keep track of the pings & if they find duplicate pings immediately without any time interval, they may take it as a attack of spammer. As a result they might ban your blog for future pings.
That’s where this new Wordpress plugin Ping List Checker can come handy. You can check for duplicate urls in the ping list. It will display the number of duplicates for a particular url & you can then find & remove them from the list. After you install & activate the plugin you can go to Dashboard> Settings> Ping List Checker to check the list.
By the way, some ping services like Ping-o-Matic (http://rpc.pingomatic.com/) ping multiple web services at the same time. So if you add one of those already pinged services like BlogRolling (http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/) in case of Ping-o-Matic, this Wordpress plugin won’t find it. But it will eventually be a duplicate ping. So be a little careful 
In April, I wrote a blog post about .co.cc asking for renewal payments. It was like cheating regular .co.cc users who started using it knowing it would remain free. Recently I noticed that .co.cc has updated & clarified their policy to some extent. If you are using the domain for personal, non-commercial purposes only then you don’t have to pay renewal fees. You can use it for free as long as you wish. That’s certainly a good news to the general user base of this domain. However if you use it for commercial purpose, you can register .co.cc for free but have to pay renewal fee each year. The current renewal fee is $3 per year. But I doubt how many users use it for commercial purpose & if it is really good idea to use such a free domain for commercial sites.
Forget about everything. If you were scratching your head for why you fell for free domains like .co.cc, you can have a sigh of relief for the moment.
Category filtering feature has been extended to public beta in many English speaking countries including Australia, Canada, USA, Ireland, UK, and India. If you haven’t heard of this feature, let me give you a quick note. It gives you the ability to block ads that fall under some specific categories. You can see a list of categories & can block ads up to 5 categories. The categories are usual, as you see in some online directories like Religion, Get Reach Quick, Dating etc.
Besides it will help you to monitor your ads better. You can see a “Recent Ad Impressions” column that shows the percent of ads served from each category. On the previous column you will find percentage of average earnings from each category. All the data is calculated based on last 30 days. So you get quite accurate result. And if you want to have a better understanding of which ads fall under which category, you can check the Show category details link in that page.
As you can see you have to go to AdSense Setup> Ad Review Center to check if this feature is available in your location. You can have an overview from the image below
As a blogger, I am sure that you are concerned about potential hackers & spammers. Today I am going to tell you about a Wordpress security threat that you may not have thought about. Most of us like to try different templates especially on the new blogs. There are tons of free Wordpress themes gallery sites around. And you will fall for them surely to try & find out a suitable one for your blog. But are these sites reliable? You can’t say yes for all of them. Now here comes the trick. When these theme galleries collect Wordpress themes from the respective authors, they can easily put malicious codes on the theme files before showing them in their sites. These codes can be spam related promoting third party sites or even can be used to hack your blog. You would keep blogging & never notice that someone is taking unwanted advantage of you.
As a precautionary measure, I would recommend to download themes from the respective authors’ home pages or from Wordpress.org themes directory . And here is this plugin called Theme Authenticity Checker or TAC, that can help you immensely. You can check all your installed themes for suspicious codes just from your Wordpress dashboard. You don’t have to know any coding. Just install this Wordpress plugin & activate it. In the Appearance menu you will see the option TAC. Click it & the automatic checking will be done. In case of malicious code, it will show the code & give you a direct link to modify the respective theme file from the Wordpress dashboard. By the way, this plugin also shows the static links present in your themes like footer credit links. You don’t have to worry about it
