Have you ever noticed that many blogs put up a daily post that is simply a bunch of links to other websites? This is actually done automatically, and if you have ever wondered how to set that up, you’ve come to the right place. That feature is called Del.icio.us Daily Blog Posting, and this post will explain how to accomplish this if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog.

First thing you need is to sign up for an account with the popular social bookmarking service Del.icio.us. The account is free and allows you to store your bookmarks online in a nice and convenient location. Once you’re registered and ready to set up your daily blog posting feature, you’ll want to follow these easy steps:

1. Click Settings.
2. Click Daily Blog Posting.
3. Click Add a New Thingy.
4. Now fill out the following information in the appropriate fields:
   job_name : Enter the title of your choice
   out_name : [WordPress Admin Username]
   out_pass : [WordPress Admin Password]
   out_url : http :// [Blog URL] /xmlrpc.php
   out_time : Enter the time you want the posts to appear each day. 0= 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time
   out_blog_id : 1
   out_cat_id : Enter the category I.D. you want to use. It may post to your default category.
5. Click Submit Query.

Now that you are set up for daily blog posting, you’ll want to visit the Del.icio.us Buttons page. This page allows you to add a button to your web browser of choice. With these buttons, you can simply click the button while on a page you want to bookmark and it will automatically be bookmarked on your Del.icio.us account. Each day during the time you established above, it will then post your links automatically to your blog.

This post is being written as part of Tutorial Group Writing project happening at The Writer’s Manifesto blog.

I talked previously about how there are a lot of basic things WordPress theme authors can do to make a theme more functional and appealing to WordPress users, such as separating blog comments from trackbacks.  Another thing that theme authors often forget to do is add “edit” buttons to posts, pages, and comments.   Having access to these buttons can save blog authors a lot of time when trying to manage their blogs.  As a result, I decided to write up a quick tutorial that explains the really simple process of adding edit buttons to your WordPress theme. 

If you’d like to add an “Edit” button on your individual posts or pages, here is the code you will want to place somewhere in your post and/or page template (usually called single.php and page.php) where you want it to display:

<?php edit_post_link(__("**Edit**"), ''); ?>

If you’d like to add an “Edit” button to your individual comments, here is the code you need to place somewhere in your comments loop (usually called comments.php) where you want it to display:

<?php edit_comment_link(__("**Edit**"), ''); ?>

A couple of quick notes about adding edit buttons to your theme:

• These edit links will only appear if you are logged in with the appropriate priviledges (administrator, editor, etc.).  Your traffic will not see them.
• You can wrap them in a div or whatever you would like to and then set its position in your stylesheet to appear where you want it to. 

With the increasing popularity of using affiliate links to generate income online, it can significantly improve your conversion rate on affiliate sign-ups by disguising your affiliate links using a URL with your domain name, then redirecting them to the appropriate affiliate. 

The idea behind using this theory is that readers will click on it thinking it is an internal link on your site, rather than taking you to a third party site.  Another benefit is that all of your blog’s links point toward an internal address on your domain, giving you control to update the URL easily. This helps avoid dead links whenever a company changes a URL and makes it easy to update your affiliate links when the need arises.

Redirects can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but as this blog focuses on self-hosted WordPress, I will be going over an easy way to do this using a PHP redirect.  Here are the steps I took when I hid my affiliate links for this website:

1. Create a folder called “Go.”
2. Create a .php document (this can easily be done with Notepad or any similar program) and name it after the appropriate affiliate link you are using.
3. Now paste the following code into the document: <? header("Location: http://youraffiliatelinkurlhere"); ?>
4. Save it into the “Go” folder created above.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until you’ve created a .php file for each affiliate link.
6. Go to your FTP and upload your “Go” folder directly to the public_html folder.
7. Update all your affiliate links to point towards your new redirect!

Your redirect will look something like http://www.yourdomainname.com/go/phpdocumentname.php.

You can name the documents whatever you want, or you can use a different name than “Go” for your folder name.   The important thing is that you remember what you named it so that you can use your new affiliate link!

If you are planning on making a WordPress theme available to the WordPress community, it has become somewhat of a necessity for it to support widgets. This is especially true now that recent WordPress installs now come with this ability built-in, meaning you no longer need a plugin to accomplish this. This will make your theme more appealing to a larger number of WordPress users because they will not need any coding knowledge to set up their sidebar to look how they want it to.

If you would like to set up your theme to support widgets, I recommend you check out this post by Garry Conn entitled How To Widgetize a WordPress Theme. In his post, he provides a detailed walk through of how to widgetize your sidebar for a 2-column theme.

According to Automattic, it is also really easy to add widget support to 3-column and 4-column themes:

Instead of register_sidebar() you should use register_sidebars(n) where n is the number of sidebars. Then place the appropriate number in the dynamic_sidebar() function, starting with 1. (There are several other ways to use these function. See the API). You can even give your sidebars names rather than numbers, which lets you maintain a different set of saved sidebars for each theme.

My favorite part about widgets is that it provides a extra option for theme users, but isn’t required to be used.  A theme that supports widgets can still be adjusted manually if you prefer to do things the hard fun way.