Have you ever noticed those images on websites where certain parts of the image are clickable, while other parts aren’t? This process is called image mapping, and Douglas Karr has a great post explaining how to create an image map for your blog.

In his post, Douglas shows you how to take the following image and convert the icons into individual links:

Once down following the steps that Douglas provides, you will have one image that people can use to subscribe to your RSS feed, request e-mail updates, or get your mobile feed.

Great guide Douglas!

Have you ever noticed that many next generation web browsers will often detect a blog’s feed by displaying a feed icon on the right side of the address bar?  This is something many estabalished sites have taken the time to set up to encourage feed subscribers, but something that most WordPress themes don’t do by default.  

In order to instruct next generation web browsers to automatically detect your WordPress blog’s feed(s), you’ll simply need to do is make a quick modification to your header.php file and add the following code:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Comments Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?>" />

If your theme already has the first code in place for the RSS Feed, then you’ll just need to paste the second set of code in to display your RSS Comments Feed.  You can also swap out the PHP code and instead use your Feedburner feed address if you’d like.

If you aren’t sure if you should bother to do this or not, never underestimate the power of suggestion.  It is an unobtrusive way to promote your RSS Feed and Comments Feed while not using up any valuable screen real estate.

This guest post was written by Keith Dsouza of Techie-Buzz. Keith is a WordPress enthusiast who has contributed numerous WordPress plugins to the WordPress community. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a guest post for Hack WordPress, please contact me.

Disasters are unavoidable and could happen any day, your server could have a crash one day and you will be left with nothing. Maybe your database will crash and you will lose all your posts. Your blog could be hacked too and someone may just delete all your posts. These are some things that could happen any day to anyone.

Taking precautions to safe guard your WordPress Blog is one of the best option to stay on top of it. The key to remember is that your database is the backbone of your blog, if you lose it your blog will be bankrupt, having a regular backup is they key to keep your blog up and running at all times.

WordPress is a platform that has many great developers working for it and providing with numerous amounts of plugins that could help to overcome the unavoidable.

WordPress Database Backup is a handy and blog saving plugin that will help you take daily backups of your database, you can either run the backup manually or setup cron tasks (scheduled tasks) to send you a backup of your database on a day to day basis.

The cron tasks have been introduced since WordPress 2.1 and if you do not have the latest version you should upgrade your WordPress installation first.

Below are some detailed instructions and tips on how to use the WordPress Database Backup plugin to setup cron tasks to automatically send you emails every day so you have the latest copy whenever you require it.

Step 1

Download and activate the WordPress Database Plugin for your blog.

Step 2

Click on the Manage option in the Admin panel navigation and from there click on the Backup link in the submenu.

Step 3

Once you are in the backup page, you will see a lot of options. Scroll down till you see an option to schedule a backup. In the scheduled backup you will see various options to schedule you backup.

You can schedule a backup varying upon how frequently you post on your blog. The best option is too choose a daily backup of your database. You will also be given an option to choose the database tables you want to backup. By default all core WordPress tables are backed up.

While making a choice to backup other tables you should only choose those that are critical to running of your blog, if you choose all the tables there are chances that the script may fail due to reading huge data.

If you want to backup all the tables the best option is to run the task manually and only email critical data to you every day.

That’s it with three simple steps you can save your blog from liquidation and always be sure that you are one step ahead of failures. You just have to follow the steps once and then you can ensure that you have a plan against disaster.

If you are looking for a way to generate more traffic and inbound links for your blog, and you have some web design talent, one of the best things you can do is contribute a few free WordPress themes to the WordPress community.

In order to focus on making your theme unique, I recommend starting out with a blank theme template. Jonathan Wold has created an excellent tutorial called How to Create Your Own WordPress Theme, in which he walks you through the basic setup of a generic WordPress theme. From there, you are then on your own to express your creativity and add some plugin integration for potential users of the theme.

In case you are new to the blogosphere, you might not have noticed that things tend to happen in trends. One trend that has become very popular over the last few months is the themes with date buttons.

If you are wondering what I am talking about, you can actually see the date button on this theme. The picture to the left is one taken from October 16th. Adding an icon to your WordPress theme will go a long way towards improving the look of your theme, while still allowing you to provide your readers with a date to your posts.

If you are interested in adding something like this to your theme, Small Potato has a great write up explaining how to add a WordPress date button. The only step that requires a little bit of thought is getting an icon to use for the background of the date. Everything else is pretty straight forward and well explained!

A couple of weeks ago the WordPress community was blessed with the latest release from the WordPress team, now known as WordPress 2.3. One of the included features was an extremely important and extremely useful one, which adds built-in tags to WordPress.

If you have already upgraded to WordPress 2.3 and want to take advantage of this new feature, you will probably have to manually add this tagging feature to your theme. In order to add tags, you simply need to paste the following code where you want to display the tags:

<?php the_tags(); ?>

This will actually add the text “Tags:” before the output of tags, so you will not need to do this manually. If you would like to proudly display your tags in a cloud somewhere (most commonly in your sidebar), you can easily do so by using the following code:

<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=36&'); ?>

This code tells WordPress to display your tags in alphabetical order with the smallest text being 8 point font and the largest font is 36 point font. You can adjust the font sizes to your preference.

If you would prefer to stick with the Ultimate Tagging Warrior plugin, the author has stated that the plugin will be updated to work with WordPress 2.3  Most people, though, would probably prefer to switch to the new built-in tagging system. If you’d like to make the switch from UTW to the new WordPress tagging system, WordPress has made it easy to make the conversion with their import feature. You can find the import option under the Manage tab in your Dashboard. In addition to the ability to import your UTW tags, WordPress also allows you to import tags from other plugins such as Bunny’s Technorati Tags and the Simple Tagging plugin.

Overall, I am extremely impressed with the new tagging feature found in WordPress 2.3 and even more impressed with how easy it is to convert your old tags to the new system.