Display Your Feedburner Subscribers With The FeedCount WordPress Plugin

By Kyle Eslick on May 5th, 2008 | Filed Under Plugins | 8 comments

It has become quite the blogging trend lately to display your Feedburner subscribers. Some may think it is an ego thing, but really I think most people do this as a strategy to attract new subscribers. I know many people that auto-subscribe to any blog they stumble upon that has 500+ subscribers, so this is often a very good strategy for a blogger than has already built up a following. On the other hand, if you have less than 200 subscribers, it is probably best not to display the chicklet until you have reached the 200 subscriber benchmark. Otherwise it could have the opposite effect on your blog where people don’t subscribe due to your smaller following.

If you are someone that likes to display your subscriber count on your WordPress blog, but you don’t want to use the Feedburner chicklet, WordPress now has a plugin available called FeedCount. This plugin allows you to display your Feedburner count and style it to look they way you want it to look via CSS. Here is a sample of how the plugin can look with the right styling to blend into your theme:

I personally like the Feedburner chicklet just fine, and it is nice and compact, but I have to admit I’ve seen some very nice designs using this plugin.

Copyrighted Images - and the Ideal Solutions

By Herbert Lui on May 3rd, 2008 | Filed Under WordPress | 5 comments

This guest post was written by Herbert of Digital Media Break, where he writes about the latest digital technology. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

I recently wrote my first guest post for Hack Wordpress, which didn’t really go as smoothly as planned. I made an honest mistake about copyrighted images, which lead me to think that the readers at Hack WordPress could use a good lesson from my blunder and not fail where I did.

I’m now ashamed to admit it - yep, I’ve used copyrighted images before. This is dangerous in the sense that your reputation can end up a bit banged up (hehe…), but can also result in legal action. Whoa, if you’re not careful what image you use, you can get sued? Yep. But in this day and age, there’s a ton of non-copyrighted images out there that are published under Creative Commons that can be used.

The Solutions

Not to worry - I’ve got a solution for you. My primary solution, YotoPhoto, is down at the moment (and has been for a while now) - so I ended up actually having to do some research to find some alternative resources.

I chose to bring up image search engines instead because I feel that as bloggers, none of us have enough time to browse around entire stock image sites. For those that have time, I personally find SXC.hu to be a great stock image site - best of all, it’s free! Also, some photos on Flickr published under the Creative Commons license can be used freely. If you’ve got any other free stock image sites to suggest, feel free to list them in a comment.

ReadWriteWeb’s got a great set of reviews on YotoPhoto and four other alternatives - Xcavator which searches iStockPhoto.com as well as six other photo providers, everystockphoto which searches through licensed Creative Commons images, PicFindr which runs through free-to-use stock images but also Dreamstime images if you prefer, and FotoSearch which examines pay images . Click here to read the article.

I personally also enjoy using the Photo Dropper Wordpress plugin, allowing you to search through Flickr Creative Commons licensed images right from your blog’s dashboard.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for stock/creative commons-licensed images to take your post content to the next level, then why not give these search engines a try? However, if you want to take advantage of image SEO, then I won’t guarantee these will make the cut for you.

55 Best Free WordPress Themes Gallery

By Kyle Eslick on May 2nd, 2008 | Filed Under Magazine Themes, Premium Themes, Themes | 25 comments

It has been awhile since I’ve created one of our popular WordPress theme galleries, so I decided it was time to build a new one. In the past I’ve always taken the approach of trying to remove any personal bias and just display the WordPress themes and demo/download information in a manageable way so that the reader can choose their favorite themes that they’d like to use.

This time I decided to comb through the internet and pick out my personal favorite 50 free WordPress themes. Right now, they are broken down into the following categories: 2-Column Themes, 3-Column Themes, 4-Column Themes, and Magazine Themes. I’m pretty sure not everyone will agree with my choices, so if I missed one of your favorites, feel free to add a link to the theme in the comments below.