One thing more WordPress bloggers have been doing lately is moving their categories over to a horizontal menu, rather than displaying them in the sidebar.   Depending on the type of blog you run and how well you keep your categories organized, I think this can be a great idea to help manage the website and improve overall navigation.  Doing something like this allows for a much better use of sub-categories, and gives you the option of displaying them in a drop-down to give your blog a much more professional feeling.

If you are interested in moving your WordPress categories into a menu and then displaying sub-categories in a drop-down menu, Anthology of Ideas has taken the time to write a detailed post explaining how to display WordPress categories in a horizontal drop-down menu.   You can also view their menu to see if you like it.  I recommend you check it out before attempting this on your own.

Of course doing this will require the use of Javascript, but the author does a great job of detailing the process and provides the CSS required to style it properly.  Once you have everything up and running correctly, you can then adjust the colors and margins to give your new menu the look and feel you want it to have, as well as fully integrate it into your WordPress theme.

I like the idea of having the sub-categories be drop-down menus, but one downside I see is that displaying categories in a menu sort of eliminates using a traditional menu for your pages.  It would be hard, in my opinion, to achieve a good look with more than one menu, so you then have to find a different way to display your blog pages.   I think you are probably best off using this method mostly if you are trying to achieve a magazine-style look or some sort of a content management system (CMS).

What do you think of moving your categories to a menu and displaying your sub-categories in drop-down boxes?

This post is being submitted as part of the tutorial blog writing project over at Daily Blog Tips. If you are interested in participating, all tutorials must be submitted by midnight of January 27th, 2008.

Depending on the type of blog you run, you may at some point have an interest in only showing only a short excerpt of a post on your blog’s homepage. This could be for a variety of reasons, ranging from attempting to increase page views to trying to make your homepage more easily navigated and organized.

Another really popular place for using the post excerpt is for your archive pages, which helps you to avoid being penalized for duplicate content by the search engine spiders.

No matter what the reason is, if you are interested in switching some of your templates to show post excerpts, it isn’t very difficult to do. Go to the template you want to make the change on and find the following code:

< ?php the_content(); ?>

Depending on your theme, it may include something in the parenthesis. Change this code to the following:

< ?php the_excerpt(); ?>

This will cause your blog theme to only display the first 55 words (and strip pictures/formatting). If you’d like to add a link to allow readers to then click over and read the full post, you can instead use something like the following excerpt code:

<?php the_excerpt(__(’Continue Reading This Entry’));?>

You can of course adjust the wording to fit your personal needs.

If you’d prefer to show an excerpt longer than 55 words, or want to display your pictures and formating, you’ll have to do a little manual work. You currently have two choices:

1. Use the More tag - Once you’ve written your post, you can switch over to Code view in your WordPress Write panel, click where you want the excerpt to stop and click the More button.  (See the screenshot above)
2. Optional Excerpt field - Paste the part of the post you’d like to display as an excerpt in this field of your WordPress Write panel. It should correctly display everything in the excerpt including links and specific formating.

If you use either of these methods, you’ll notice that your feed is only displaying partial posts. If you’d prefer to have the feed display the entire post, but keep the partial post on your actual website, I recommend using the Full Text RSS Feed WordPress plugin to override this and have the feed display the entire post.

Questions?  Let me know in the comments below.

Have you ever noticed those cute little smilies that some WordPress bloggers use to show emotions within their posts? Offering these has become quite the trend around the blogosphere.

As a user of WordPress, there are a few WordPress plugins available for you to easily offer smilies to commentators on your blog. My plugin of choice to accomplish this is the Smilies Themer plugin. Once uploaded and activated, you can then pick a smilies theme to use.

A variety of people have submitted smilies themes for this plugin, and many come in a variety of colors. My favorite was provided by Nyssa J Brown called the XPressions Emoticon Pack. You can choose from a variety of colors:

If you use the WordPress Write panel to create your blog posts, you have probably noticed that the buttons available for you to use are often lacking. Recently WordPress added an advanced panel to the Rich Text Editor, but even that is still missing a lot of options that people would love to use. I know that I personally have always wished that there were a few other options available, such as underline, headers 1-3, etc.

For people looking for a way to do this, I recommend you read the tutorial written on WPCandy called Adding Buttons To The Post Editor. Michael has taken the time to spell out each individual step so that someone without any coding knowledge could easily make the necessary adjustments. As always, don’t forget to backup your quicktags.js file before making any changes so that you can easily restore it if something goes wrong.

While browsing my feeds, I noticed an interesting post over at JohnCow explaining how to make money online with missing pages. The author noticed that a lot of traffic was ending up on his error page (almost 26,000 people to be exact) and felt that there had to be a better way to use this page so there wasn’t so much wasted traffic.

In the authors example, the idea is to redirect all traffic that hits his 404 page to his “make money” page, which contains affiliate links and other ways to get paid. While this example probably wouldn’t apply to most of us, I do think that it might be a good idea to redirect these bloggers to a more important page on your blog, such as your homepage.

In order to do so, you simply need to do a quick edit to your 404.php page (which most themes should have). Before attempting, make sure you have a backup copy of your 404.php page in case something goes wrong. You’ll want to add this code to the top of your 404.php page:

<?php
header ('Location: http://yourhomepageurl/’ );
?>

You’ll of course want to manually enter your homepage URL. If you have a favorite post you’d like to promote, you could instead add the URL to that post.

If you’d prefer not to redirect your 404 page, you can always customize it to help the potential reader to find what they were looking for.

We all know that duplicate content can be a problem. People copy your work, re-post it on their website, then you both are penalized for duplicate content! Unfortunately, there isn’t much that can be done about that, but did you know that often blogs have duplicate content within their own blog? The biggest culprit for duplicate internal content is your archives page, which is usually used for categories and monthly archives. Unless you only display partial posts in your archives, you’ll want to make sure Google doesn’t index it. If you aren’t handy with Robots.txt, you can instead use this code to easily tell Google not to index your archive.php page.

<?php if(is_archive()){ ?><meta name="robots" content="noindex"><?php } ?>

You’ll want to grab that code and paste it anywhere in the header of your theme above the closing of the head tag. That way, Google will not index these, and search engines won’t refer traffic to your archive pages instead of your single post pages.