I will boldly say upfront that there is one reason WordPress Max exists and that is to make money! I am a Capitalist and don’t apologize one bit for it. WPM is setup to help others with their WordPress blogs and when it takes up a good bit of my time to help someone personally I expect fair compensation for my time. I do however understand that to make money I need to do my best to provide good content that is free for all to read, use and share. But when my site is being used by others to profit from then that pisses me off!

Two points I want to make here in my rant: Recently some clueless contacted me regarding some PLR WordPress templates he purchased (or got ripped off with junk). He asked if he sent them to me he would pay me to look them over and explain to him how to “put them together”. The fist files he sent were a bunch of junk HTML splash page templates. I replied that these were not WordPress themes. He insisted they were because they used CSS stylesheets. I then took the time to explain to him that CSS is used in more than WordPress, it was a long informative email that took me some time to compose. He then sent another batch and the link to the site he got ripped off from. The link had no refernece to WordPress or how to use these PLR files.

The second batch had two poorly coded WordPress themes that were nothing more than the default theme with a custom header. I wrote back again telling him how to upload and use these files, and again that these files were all just separate templates to use or resell. The funny thing is that in all the 6 or so email exchanges he replied within an hour but after the last one with all the answers… no reply. I contacted him a few days later regarding payment he went off on me saying I didn’t help him and was rude for asking compensation. I spent about two hours messing with this idiot and since he didn’t like the fact that I told him he paid for junk he didn’t want to pay me. Lesson learned: Get paid upfront or at least partially for any free lance work you do online. I don’t always ask for payment upfront because the time it takes is unknown for some of the special requests I get.

The next point is very bothersome and has required me to password protect one of the more popular pages on this site. Recently it came to my attention that another free lancer who is setting up WordPress blogs, rather poorly I might add, has been sending people to this site to learn how to finalize and use the WordPress blogs he is setting up for less than I charge. These sites have no SEO, permalinks or a ping list (among other critical missing configurations) and his people are coming to me asking for help! Hey I don’t mind the competition at all but I’ll be damned if I let him or anyone else use my site for his support system. I spent a lot of time writing the guides on WPM to help my clients and many others, and all the content is still available to all except for the one page that has all the critical information on one page.

So beware of the cost of anything if it is real cheap there is a reason. Be careful online, people will steal from you even if they don’t take your content they can take your time or use your content for their gain. There are lazy thieves everywhere even on the Internet.

If I have setup your blog for you and you want access to the now password protected WordPress Optimization Guide, click here to contact me for the password.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Filed In: Rant by Jeff
9 Comments »

Related Posts

• Learn How To Make Money With A Blog Make Money Blogging
• Get Paid To Blog On Your WordPress Blog
• Why Blog

Finding blogging topics has been a bit of a struggle for me lately, or perhaps I just don’t have the motivation and time I once did. So now I am playing with my latest toy, a Motorola Q9C smartphone.

I inherited the new phone from my daughter who got it just a few months ago when it was the latest and greatest. But when the next best thing came out , I think the HTC Touch Pro, she had to have it so she stole my upgrade and we switched phones.

So I am posting this with the phone and while I like all its features like getting email, web browsing, navigation and the full keyboard. My fingers are getting tired this far into this post.

Blogging from a cell or smartphone may be a decent way of making short all text posts, but some of the more advanced features on the write post menu are not usable or just too cumbersome to use. But it may be something useful when out and about and an idea comes to you for a quick post.

Filed In: Blogging by Jeff
6 Comments »

Related Posts

• Get Paid To Blog On Your WordPress Blog
• Basics About Blogging
• What To Blog About How To Come Up With Blogging Content

There are several different solutions for a 404 error page or redirect with a WordPress site or blog. A 404 error is when a URL on a domain is not found or available. If you play around enough with WordPress themes you will see that WordPress theme authors will use many different solutions for a 404 error page. Some are a bit more user friendly than others, and some unscrupulous theme authors will even redirect your visitors to their website with a 404 error redirect.

The latter I spoke about is how I learned to make a 404 error redirect to a specific URL. In regard to the case I spoke about above, someone contacted me to teach them how to upload a few “custom” PLR WordPress themes they had purchased. First let me say that these themes were total junk and just a modified version of the default theme with a different header graphic (that needed to be edited) and of course the sellers links embedded all throughout the theme. Don’t get me wrong a good WordPress theme author should have a link in at least the footer in return for the free theme. But in this case it was like stealing traffic especially for such a crappy theme. It wasn’t bad enough that the links were scattered throughout the theme, the theme actually redirected the visitor away from the blog if a 404 error occurred.

Here is how easy it is to do if your theme has a 404 error template file (404.php) and you want to specify an actual URL to redirect your visitors to for the 404 error. Simply use this code in the entire 404.php file and then specify the actual URL:

<?php
header( ‘Location: http://www.ChangeToActualURL.com’ ) ;
?>

There are other methods and solutions like on this site, at the time of this post, it redirects to a page that offers to search the site, or click some AdSense ads, hey I have kids to feed! This is done using code that is actually within the main index file instead of a separate 404.php file. There are so many different WordPress themes and each author has their own idea of a 404 error page so I can’t possibly give solutions for each method in this post. But you should make sure your visitors are not getting hijacked by a pirate WordPress theme author or theme reseller!

Filed In: WordPress theme by Jeff
6 Comments »

Related Posts

• WordPress 404 Redirect And 404 Custom Message
• WordPress Custom Permalink Structure
• WordPress First Full Post Remainder As Excerpts

Learning more about the ability and flexibility of WordPress can really help to improve the functionality of your WordPress site. The Links and Link Categories panels or sub menus can be used beyond the intended purpose of just adding links to the sidebar. In fact with the addition of a simple WordPress plugin the WordPress links sidebar widget can not only be split into separate categories but each link category can be placed anywhere on any sidebar.

The first step is to get a handy little WordPress plugin called Single Bookmark Category List. The one file plugin installs like any other, just upload the file to your wp-admin/plugins folder and activate it. Now here is where you see the flexibility of WordPress. Say you want to have some type of site menu on your sidebar. You can use it to link to your best posts, post categories, or pages. Or if you have a few affiliate links you want to promote and of course links to your friends or sites you want to share with others.
The next step is to add a new link category or as many categories as you need. In the WordPress dashboard, click Manage, Links Categories.

Now add a new link category, if you don’t give it one, the category slug will default to the same as the title. If you want to fill in the optional description, scroll down and click the Add Category button.

The next step is adding a link to the proper link category. Click Manage then Links and add a new link. Remember this can be anything you want, like a page, a post, an affiliate link or any other link. When adding a new link it is important to expand the lower Categories box and I suggest choosing only one category for the link to be placed in unless you want it to show in different places on the sidebar.

After you have the link categories and links added now it is time to add them to the sidebar. Click Design then Widgets. Scroll down and add as many Single Bookmark Category Widgets (up to nine) as you need.

Now you simply add the Bookmarks From Category widgets to the sidebar, click the edit link on the added widget to expand them and choose what link category you want each one to display. Drag the widgets vertically into the desired position and scroll down and click the Save Changes button.

I hope you see the possibilities here, in fact I think this is a good solution for those running WordPress for a more traditional website. Another option with this is to remove the pages sidebar widget and manually add your WordPress pages into link categories for better site navigation and a more user friendly site.

Filed In: WordPress Guide, Customize Wordpress by Jeff
5 Comments »

Related Posts

• Why WordPress Categories Are Not Showing
• Use WordPress Blogroll For Site Navigation
• WordPress Categories Adding Subcategories To Your WordPress Blog

If you are still using the WordPress default theme or a customized version it may not show the sidebar on the pages. If you are using the static front page option you may want to add the WordPress sidebar on pages. If this is the case you can add the sidebar to the default WordPress theme pages very easily.

Click on Design from the main panel and then Theme Editor. On the right side you will see a list of the current theme’s templates. If you see a “Page Template” click that and the code will appear in the editor box. Copy all the code in the editor and paste it into Notepad or Wordpad and save the file on your computer for backup. Now at the very bottom of the editor box you should see this bit of code:

</div>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

That is telling the page template to get the themes footer, what we are going to do is tell the page template to also get the sidebar. Replace the above code with the following code and click “Update File”

</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

If you don’t see a “Page Template” then try the same steps above with the “Main Index Template” but be sure to copy the unedited code first into Wordpad or Notepad so you can put things back if they don’t work. Keep in mind that all WordPress themes are a little different and made by many different people so the files in them will vary.

If you managed to corrupt your theme’s templates files and it’s not displaying properly or worse you can’t even see your blog; go back and paste in the unedited text you saved and click “Update File” to put things back. What? You didn’t save a backup? Well then you will need to delete the corrupt file in your hosting account and upload an unedited version of it. Not sure what file you messed up? Man, you are a butcher! Then upload a complete unedited version of the entire template to your hosting account.

Knowing how to add the WordPress sidebar to a page template is a great way to use a specific landing page that doesn’t change yet still looks like the rest of your WordPress blog.

The final step in this WordPress guide can be found on here: Add Background Color To Single Page Sidebar On Default WordPress Theme

Filed In: WordPress Guide by Jeff
6 Comments »

Related Posts

• Adding The Sidebar To The WordPress Page Or Single Post Template
• No Sidebar On WordPress Pages
• Add Background Color To Single Page Sidebar On Default WordPress Theme

Have you ever found a good blog post or a website that you wanted to write a WordPress post on and refer your readers to the URL within your post? Did you know there is a way to automate the process using the “Press This” link provided with your WordPress blog.

Say your browsing the web and you come across a nice site that you want to elaborate on and write a WordPress post about it. This Feature was called Press It up to WordPress version 2.5. It is now called Press This and what it does is give you a shortcut or bookmarklet to your WordPress blogs write post panel. Below is the description from the WordPress Codex:

WordPress makes it easy to quickly add links and information to your site through the use of a bookmarklet called Press This. A bookmarklet looks like a link in your Favorites, Bookmarks, or Links list but it is much more powerful. It adds the capability to quickly create WordPress post entries on the fly while working on the Internet.

Setting up this feature is really quite simple: From within the WordPress dashboard go to Write to open the write post panel. Look over to the right of the post editor for Shortcuts. On older versions look at the very bottom of the write post panel. There you will see the instructions how to drag your WordPress blogs Press This link to your favorites or bookmarks.

After you drag and drop the Press This link to your favorites you now have access to a small pop up version of your WordPress write post panel to make a quick post. The post will automatically have URL of the site you are currently visiting and the title of your post filled in. Of course you can change all of that before posting. This a great way to do a quick post including a trackback.

Filed In: WordPress Guide by Jeff
11 Comments »

Related Posts

• What Is Blogging Understanding What A Blog Is
• How To Use A Static Front Page With WordPress
• Write WordPress Blog Posts That Top The Search Engines