Like many other bloggers, I display 125*125 pixels ads on my blog, and earn some money with it. Currently, I own 6 different ads, and most of them change every week. I became bored of editing my sidebar template everyday, so I asked my friend X-OR to write a cool widget to manage thoses ads. Let’s review it together.

What the Show125 widget can do for your blog

I always loved the concept of widgets: drap n’ drop, easy to edit, easy to place, easy to remove. Most of todays themes can handle widgets, so there’s many chances that the theme you use haven’t any problem with it.

In addition to the basic widgets advantages, Show125 gives you many option and a true control over your ads. Let’s see:

• Display from 1 to 8 ads
• Available in English (default) or French
• Display all your ads together, or in an eye-candy Mootools slideshow
• Optionally add the target=”_blank” attribute to links, if you want ads to open in a new tab.
• Show (or not) a title for your ads block
• Easy to install
• Clean code
• Add custom css class to links for styling it your way
• And more!

Installation

Nothing hard here: First, download the widget. If you want to see a “live demo”, just have a look at x-or’s blog, where you’ll be able to see the slideshow mode of the widget.

Once you unzipped the widget to your hard drive, upload the entire directory to your wp-content/plugins directory. Then, go to your Wordpress administration panel and activate the plugin.

In Design » Widgets, you’ll be able to drag n drop the Show125 widget to your sidebar (or any other widgetized part of your WP theme) and set the options.

Once you filled the fields and saved your changes, you’ll see your ads in your sidebar. Managing your ads with Show125 really makes money earning easier!

Last time I mentioned some blogging icons here, it got a great response.   So I figured I would follow that up with a quick post about another great set of free blogging icons, this time from over at Blog Perfume.

These glossy icons include many cornerstone icons you’d expect to find on a blog, including icons for plugins, themes, and even a blogroll icon!  (Check that one out!)

Disclaimer & Conditions: Redistribution, Release for Download or Selling of these icons on an another site without permission is completely prohibited.

You can download the icons directly from Blog Perfume’s post.

This guest post was written by Ben Fraley of Ben Fraley.com, where he enjoys writing about WordPress. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Ok so, true to form, here’s my first review of a Wordpress tool for Hack Wordpress. It’s a Firefox extension called “Zemanta,” and if you like Wordpress, you just gotta get this. What it does it suggest links, tags, categories, even pictures for your blog post AS YOU TYPE IT. That’s correct, it doesn’t even wait for you to be done, and you don’t have to go searching yourself. It does it for you. It’s just awesome.

The extension installs into Firefox, and goes seamlessly into the Wordpress (2.3 and 2.5) admin section without any installation into Wordpress itself (I guess it’s not as much a Wordpress plugin as it is a Firefox plugin for Wordpress. Semantics ). Very easy, and very, VERY useful.

Today marks the final day to win a free copy of the OIO Publisher WordPress plugin contest.   If you’d like to enter, all you need to do is blog about the plugin on one of your blogs and link both here and to the plugin directly.  We also ask that you include in your post both what you like about the plugin and what you think could be improved. 

Check out this post for more information about OIO Publisher.   Good luck!

Wow, it seems like it was just recently, but a quick search through our archives shows that it has already been four full months since I began my campaign to get people to support Gravatars on their WordPress blogs.

That post was originally written shortly after Automattic acquired Gravatar and most WordPress bloggers were still using the MyAvatars plugin (which displays MyBlogLog avatars).   I always enjoyed the MyAvatars plugin, but felt that it was important to show your support for WordPress by displaying Gravatars.   That was about the time that this blog switched to Gravatars and hasn’t looked back (we’ve even gone as far as to integrate them into the recent comments in the sidebar).

In the last six months since Automattic acquired Gravatar, it has already come a long way.  Gravatars load a lot faster now and people using the WordPress 2.5 branch (or using WordPress.com) now have built-in Gravatar support.   In other words, there has never been a better time to have a Gravatar and place Gravatars on your WordPress blog.

Sadly, a quick glance at the Recent Comments section in our sidebar often shows a number of comments left by people without a Gravatar.  If this sounds like it might be you, I recommend you register your free Gravatar account.  It is really quick and easy!

I maintain a few Gravatar accounts (one for each website email address) so no matter what email address I use in my comment, an appropriate Gravatar should appear next to my comment.   If you have several websites, you may want to consider setting up a few accounts so you are covered in any situation.

This guest post was written by Jean-Baptiste Jung, who maintains a blog (written in French) that covers WordPress. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

I’m always surprised by the incredible extensibility of Wordpress. We already knew that you can use Wordpress as an online magazine, as a photoblog, or even as a Twitter platform. Now, it’s also possible to use your favorite blogging platform as an online shop, just by the use of a single WordPress plugin, WP-eCommerce.

Installing WP-eCommerce

Nothing hard: Just download the WP-eCommerce plugin here, extract the archive on your hard drive, and upload the wp-shopping-cart directory into the wp-content/plugins directory of your Wordpress install.
After activating the plugin, you’ll see a new tab named e-Commerce next to the Comments tab in your Wordpress control panel. This tab contains all options needed for running an e-commerce website, right into Wordpress.

I must admit it, i was surprised - in a good way - by the number of available options: language, localization, tax rates, brands, products, paypal integration, and so on. Sure, this is not Amazon.com, but everything is here to create an online shop which will give satisfaction up to 90% of online sellers. You can easily manage products, payment methods…There’s also a sales journal available, which will help you a lot to manage orders.

User Experience

In addition to its powerful management panel, WP-eCommerce comes with no less than 6 widgets in order to make your clients purchases simpler, and more pleasant. I particularly loved the “Shopping Cart” widget and its ajax interface. Clean, easy, and pro, definitely. Some other available widgets: Categories & brands, Special products, donations…

Conclusion

I was really impressed by this plugin. WP-eCommerce has absolutely everything you need for starting an online shop. There’s also a non-free version of this plugin, which will give you, in addition to the “basic” plugin, a search engine for your products, a picture gallery and some others nice things.