If you want to use the Tweetmeme plugin for WordPress but can’t get it to display regardless of whether you’re using the auto-positioning option or manual inclusion, try adding <?php wp_footer(); ?> to your blog – insert it just before the </body> tag. This fix worked for me! (Many thanks to the WordPress support forum!)

Spam and blogs seem to go hand in hand, unfortunately. I don’t know of one blog, my own included, that hasn’t been hit by spam at least once per day. The good news is that there are many steps you can take to prevent a significant amount of spam, and several things you can do to easily clean up if you’ve been hit by a large amount of spam.

Preventing Spam on Your WordPress Blog

• Keep your WordPress installation up to date. This sounds like a no-brainer, but you would not believe how many people out there just don’t bother to keep their software updated. WordPress routinely tweaks their code to improve security and prevent hacking and spamming, so it’s always a good idea to use the latest version.
• Avoid excessive keyword usage if you can help it. In many cases spammers are attracted to your blog not only because of its ranking (Google PageRank, Alexa, etc.), but because of the type of content you post. Unless you absolutely have to, don’t keyword-drop left and right.
• Use spam preventative tools on your comments pages. CAPTCHAS and math problem anti-spam plugins are numerous, and most are easy to install and setup, and blend seamlessly with whatever theme you happen to be using.
• Close comments after a certain period of time, say, one week, or within a month of posting.

Removing Spam from Your WordPress Blog

• Go through your list of pending comments and delete spammy ones. Double check your list of approved comments, too, as sometimes illegitimate ones can slip through the cracks (on the flip side, always double check comments listed as spam, as WordPress can occasionally make a false-positive identification on a legitimate comment!).
• Use a plugin like Delete Pending Comments to help you clean up hundreds or thousands of pending comments that are spammy.
• As a final measure, update any out-of-date installations and plugins!

If you install and manage blogs for others, or simply want your own blogs to reflect your own site’s branding, check out White Label CMS. White Label CMS is a WordPress plugin that allows you to add your own branding to your WordPress administration area. Add custom logos to the login and logout screen, add custom icons within the dashboard’s header and footer section, change colors, choose which menus should be displayed, and even add your own custom welcome title and message. The plugin is very easy to install and configure, and offers you a lot of great options for branding your WordPress installation!

Have you ever wanted to share an unpublished or scheduled post with a friend or a business associate? Rather than publishing the post early, publishing it with a password or sending a copy or a screenshot, install and activate the Simple Preview plugin! This plugin simply allows non-logged in individuals to view an unpublished or scheduled post. It’s very simple to use: install, activate, then check “Allow Anonymous Preview” in the dialog box that will now be present beneath the post writing area on your post writing pages.

An update to What happened to Flickr Photo Album? — my, what a little Googling will do!

Edit tantan-flickr/flickr/class-admin.php so that the hook add_action is changed to the following:

add_action(‘admin_menu’, array(&$this, ‘addhooks’));
//add_action(‘activate_tantan-flickr/flickr.php’, array(&$this, ‘activate’));
register_activation_hook(__FILE__, array(&$this, ‘activate’));
//add_action(‘deactivate_tantan-flickr/flickr.php’, array(&$this, ‘deactivate’));
register_deactivation_hook(__FILE__, array(&$this, ‘deactivate’));
add_action(‘load-upload.php’, array(&$this, ‘addPhotosTab’));

Or, download the modified class-admin.php!

Congratulations — you can now activate and use the plugin!

Flickr Photo Album is the perfect Flickr WordPress plugin for me. I wanted something that would allow me to quickly and easily browse my photostream — from within the WordPress admin panel — and insert photos in my posts. The plugin worked beautifully. But now that I’ve upgraded to WordPress 3.1, the plugin no longer works. It seemingly deactivated itself, and refuses to reactivate. Completely removing the plugin files and then installing the plugin again makes no difference.

If anyone has a similar working plugin to recommend, please let me know!

Backup plugin. This is an essential plugin for backing up your content. It would be quite painful to spend years or even months to build up and maintain your blog, only to suddenly lose it all due to a server failure and no backup to replace everything with.

WordPress Twitter plugin. What better way promote your posts on Twitter than with a plugin that will do it for you automatically?

WordPress Facebook plugin. Same as above. Promote your posts on Facebook automatically with a plugin.

Anti-spam plugin. Prevent spam with plugins that require your commenters to enter in a string of letters or numbers, or answer a simple math question. Moderate existing spam with plugins that check the contents of comments against a database of known spammers (and their IP addresses).

Stats plugin. Keep tabs on who is coming to your site, how many people are coming to your site, where they’re coming from and where they’re going with a variety of plugins.

With these plugins in place, you’ll be free to blog about your day, your blog, or whatever else it is that you like to talk about, without worrying about losing your posts or having your blog overrun with spam. And by sharing your posts and keeping track of who is coming to your site and why, you’ll be able to better tweak your blog and optimize it.

One of the perks of using WordPress is having access to thousands of plugins. Plugins can expand and improve upon WordPress’s basic functionality; they can also create entirely new capabilities and features.

But there’s a downside to using plugins: they can impact the performance of the server that your site is hosted on. And depending upon the quality of the server and your host’s requirements, you may find yourself with, at best, a site that runs slow; or at worst, a site that is suspended due to excess CPU usage. Either way, if someone is trying to access your site after searching for vitamins for women, and ultimately is unable to, that’s a lost visitor — and potentially a lost sale, if you use your site for commercial purposes.

This is an issue I am currently dealing with. All of my sites are hosted with Surpass, and last week I made the switch from a shared server to a dedicated server. Yet the issue persists, which leads me to believe that there is a rogue plugin causing issues.

Most people think that if you have a feed and want to know how many subscribers you have, you’ll have to use Feedburner to know for sure. Not true! If you use WordPress and its default feed (http://www.yourdomain.com/feed), you can install the Feed Statistics plugin to find out exactly how many subscribers you have. Options include seeing the number of subscribers you have, finding out what readers they’re using, seeing which posts of yours are most popular, and more.

Footnotes are something I never used much in essays or reports, but now that I am blogging all of the time and find that I have so much to say, I have discovered that footnotes are much more efficient and a prettier solution than using parentheses throughout my blog posts. Too many parentheses can definitely be confusing, not to mention cluttered. So, footnotes it is! Only question is, how to go about implementing them in blog posts? I don’t have the desire nor the time to hand-code the anchored URLs that would be required for inserting footnotes.

Thankfully, there is a solution — FD Footnotes. FD Footnotes, a WordPress plugin, allows you to insert footnotes that will automatically be linked to the corresponding notes at the bottom (which will also include a link back to their source within the post!). Insertion is as simple as following this formatting: 1[1. This is a footnote.]. As you can see, each footnote must be enclosed within brackets, and should be numbered: 1., 2., 3. and so on. There are no limit to the number of footnotes you can use in a post.

I have been using this plugin for a few weeks now, love it, and would highly recommend it!