Wordpress is growing to be the most popular blogging platform today and since lot of people are using it, it’s quite possible that your blog looks like just another blog in that pool of 1000’s of blogs. So, to make it stand out amongst the crowd, here are some Must Do’s for your Wordpress blogs.

Highlighting Author’s comment

If you have a blog that gets large number of comments, it might be difficult for readers to separate the author’s comment from that of the visitors. I am sure you yourself must have faced this problem a lot. So a good way would be to differentiate the author’s comments by highlighting it and make it stand out from the others. Here’s a simple and easy trick to do so. (However there are many ways to do it and you can find it by yourself. Just ask your friend – Google!)

Logically, what you will have to do is just make the wordpress identify that the comment is from the author and then highlight it. For identification we will be using the userID.

A] Editing the theme to add an “authcomment” style:

Edit the style.css files located in your Appearance > Themes > Your theme and add the following code to the bottom:

.authcomment {
background-color: #B3FFCC !important;
}

Note: If you want to change the color to suit your theme/background, just edit the color code in the above code and that will do it!

B] Edit comments.php file to add the a little more code:

The file is located in Appearance > Themes > Your theme and in that file look for a line called:

<li class="<?php echo $oddcomment; ?>" id="comment…

Change it to this:

<li class="<?php
/* Only use the authcomment class from style.css if the user_id is 1 (admin) */
if (1 == $comment->user_id)
$oddcomment = "authcomment";
echo $oddcomment;
?>" id="comment…

That’s all. Now your author comment has background color different from others and hence can be easily identified!

Speed up your Wordpress Blog

No matter how fast your internet connection is, there are still times when it takes long to load a website and you get irritated by it. Also there are probably more than 30% people in the world today still using 256kbps or lesser speed internet connection! (Sounds like Dial-up days isn’t it). So it’s really important that you optimize your blog to load faster. Here are some tricks to take care of.

• Always update your wordpress to newest version whenever they are released.
• Disable (or even better) delete unused Plugins, themes and media files from your wordpress blog
• Decrease ‘whitespace’ or ‘freespace’ in your code. This surely helps a lot!
• Try avoiding placing tons of scripts in your header and index files and instead use as much as external scripts as you can.
• Minimize PHP and database queries. (If you don’t know about this, wait for another post of mine or just Google it!

Notify users by IM

Retaining your user base is perhaps, the most important and difficult task that any blog/site has. Hence it becomes even more important to make sure that your readers are up to date with the content on your blog. There are many ways to send them notifications such as RSS Feeds, e-mail notifications and SMS notifications (though not many people would go with the SMS notification for privacy concerns.) There is also an IM notification which I think is the fastest of these and the best way to notify your users. They are bound to check them! It’s very difficult however to make it work but I will explain you in the simplest manner to make it easier!

• Go to: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/notifixious-plugin/ and download the Plugin. It’s called ‘Notifixous’.
• Configure it as per your needs and voila! It is up and running. Yes, it’s that simple! (You really thought that it was difficult, huh! )