This is part one of my blog tips. Starting with the basics – WordPress

I’ve found several brilliant where you can get some really good advice and help with your WordPress blog.

These pages has helped me a lot in the past and I keep returning to see what new I can learn and how I can improve my blog.

• Tamba 2 – WordPress help divided into topics and with how-to’s
• Problogger – One of the best around. There are plenty of articles on how to generate traffic, monetize, Adsense tips, SEO and design tips. If you don’t already know Problogger you should head there after you’ve read this post
• Bloggingpro – All the news about WordPress like what is going on inside the WordPress development team, when will the new version come out and so forth
• Makeusof – An amazing collection of web goodies, tips and applications

This is the fifth part of my WordPress bloggin tips project – Today: Themes

Themes…ahh the wonderful themes. You can spend a lot of time looking for themes. There are so many beautiful theme out there. It makes it very hard to pick.

I’ve had this blog for two years now and I’ve changed my theme four times (maybe five but who is counting).

I’m currently using a combination of TypoXP Reloaded and TypoXP Revisited.

If you are looking for themes there really is only one place to look.

ThemeViewer

Many blogs offer a great variety of themes but I think most of them can be found on ThemeViewer.

I can’t tell you which one to pick it depends on your mood, blog, subject, technical knowledge and taste.

Good luck you are going to need it

This is part four of the blogging tips project – Today: WordPress Plugins

There are tons of plugins for WordPress out there. Most of them are very useful, some are useless and others are nice to have. I’ll let it up to you which ones you prefer but here is a list of the ones I’m currently using.

All in one SEO pack – Optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines

Feedburner Feed Replacement – Easy way to setup your Feedburner feed on your blog

Google Sitemap – Generates sitemaps of your site makes it easier for search engines to crawl your blog

Optimal Title -Makes your headlines search engine friendly

Sidebar Widgets -Enables widgets on your sidebar

Snap Shots – Enables Snapshots on you blog from Snap.com

Sociable – The small links beneath each post ie. Digg, Technorati etc.

Viper’s Video Quicktags – This plugin provides a very fast way to embed YouTube and Google videos in your post

WordPress Database Backup – Backup your WordPress database

If you are looking for more there is a list here WordPress Plugin Database and WP Plugins.

Of course there is the official one from WordPress

What is your Alexa Rank? Currently mine is 532,913. It has improved 60,000 the last week alone, all I did was to install the Alexa extension in Firefox and Flock.

David Airey has written two articles with some great insights and references to many informative posts. For instance DoshDosh and Andy Beard. Alexa Rank – What is it all about and How I improved my Alexa Rank.

For your convenience I have gathered seven of the best tips here:

1. Download the Alexa toolbar and use it every day to visit your own and my website. If you are a Firefox or Flock-user, download the Search Status extension. Alexa even gives you the ability to co-brand the toolbar with your own logo and give it away. You can expect a Petersen Inc Toolbar soon. Download the Alexa toolbar here: http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/associatetoolbar.htm
2. Use the Alexa widget on your site. I’ve added mine in the sidebar. I picked the basic one, but you can customise it with graphs, links in and reviews.
3. Review and rate my Alexa profile. Get a friend or reader to review your Alexa profile.
4. Get dugg or stumbled. From time to time I get some traffic from StumbleUpon. I would love to get more, so please stumble this if you like it.
5. Get listed on as many search engines as possible by placing a free listing in DMOZ. This is the largest human edited directory on the web and has all the categories you can think of.
6. Write your own site reviews of the Top100 sites on Alexa.
7. Some say you should use http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?petersen-inc.dk whereever possible. I think it looks cheap and noobish. I see a lot of these links on MyBlogLog and similar sites. I am not going to use that kind of linking.

Now as previously mentioned my current Alexa ranking is: 532,913. Let us see how it develops the next two weeks.

Update: It has already improved again to 442,280!

Until now I have received two logos from some very helpful readers.

This one from Jacob from Clazh.com. He has some really great themes by the way.

and this one from Ganesh

Thank you very much to both of you. I REALLY appreciate it.

I would love to get couple more and make a contest out of it So if you can help me with a new logo or theme design, please let me know.

If you want to know more about it, read: ” Any Designers Out There? I Could Really Use Your Help

Since I upgraded to WordPress 2.2 I’ve received blank notification mails everytime someone posted a comment. It has driven me…well almost crazy, but finally I found out what was wrong. My WordPress Backup-plugin caused the problem. I am not sure why, but I’ve updated the plugin and now everything is running smoothly again. My sincere apologies for sending out blank notification emails to my comment subscribers. It is all good again!

I just upgraded Petersen Inc. and three other blogs to WordPress 2.2. It went great on three of the blogs, while I ran into a few minor issues with the WordPress upgrade on this blog.

First my previous Widgets sidebar returned, which is odd because it was empty before the upgrade and the widget-plugin was deactivated. It was easy to restore, I simply removed the widgets in the Widgets section under Presentation. It doesn’t seem as though you can deactivate widget support.

I was pretty sure everything was ok, but…I get an email everytime a reader (thats you) comments a post. That part still works, except the body in this mail is empty. The subject line says the usual stuff, but the content is empty. I will look further into this and update this post.

In the mean time you can read Technosailor’s post about WordPress 2.2. 10 Things you should know about WordPress 2.2

ÂÂ

Well I did today. Its my first movement and I’m very excited. The best thing is, it is a very exclusive movement.

Its the U Comment I Follow-movement!

Most blog platforms are set up so that a “dead endâ€? piece of code is inserted wherever there is a link in a comment, so that search engines will not “countâ€? the link as they are crawling the internet. This was originally designed to help stop comment spam, but apparently it doesn’t work. According to some experts, it removes some of the incentive for your readers to post comments on your blog. Well thats is no excuse anymore. The “nofollow” command is forever gone from Petersen Inc.

Randa Clay started the whole movement, inspired by Dawud Miracle, who again was inspired by several pro-bloggers including Wendy Piersall and Andy Beard. Dawud started after he found the WordPress plugin, Dofollow, on Semiologic. Randa then created the graphic you can see below and the I Follow-movement
So my fellow bloggers join the U Comment I Follow-movement, turn off “nofollow” on blog comments and help make the blogsphere a better place