This guest post was written by John Pratt who blogs about blogging, WordPress, and his life as a webmaster. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

There are a lot of unethical “content spinning” plugins for Wordpress and other blogging platforms on the web. But for those of us with legitimate blogs, after about 100 posts your content starts to get lost. Most of it is still good, and most of us have multiple blogs as well. Why not “bring back” a post from the archive to the home page on a regular schedule and reuse that old content again? Before I had this plugin I longed for something that would effectively rotate my blog posts out of the archives and back onto the front page of my blog. Not every blog will have a need for this, but I have quite a few blogs, and I can’t always work on every one every day (or even every week). The blog paradigm means that the newest things are on the homepage scrolling down to the oldest, and when the content doesn’t change it makes you blog “stale”.

Being able to recycle your blog posts takes a marketing tip from fast food restaurants. Do you ever notice that certain things “come back” on a regular basis? Every year for Lent, all the fast food restaurants being back the “fish sandwich”. You see McDonald’s bring back the “McRib” and the “Monopoly Game” about once per year. They take things in and out of the rotation to keep it fresh, and if your blog posts stand the test of time, there’s no reason that they can’t be rotated too.

I have a fun site called “Top Jokes that’s been live with jokes for about 8 months or so. I used to posts a joke or more every day, in fact there are now more than 500 jokes. This type of site doesn’t pay very well, as far as a CTR, and the traffic isn’t so high either. But I don’t want to get rid of it because like all web real estate “it grows over time” - I just want to minimize the amount of time I spend on it. I’d like to post maybe a half dozen jokes per month and rotate old jokes from the archives to the homepage at the rate of one per day.

Enter the brilliant plugin by Dagon Design Scheduled Post Shift Plugin for Wordpress. It’s a very simple, very easy to use plugin. Once you install and enable it - just set the options:

Just enter the number of hours between post shifts, and at that time it will rotate your oldest post in your Wordpress blog to your home page by changing the published date to current time. Once per day enter 24 hours, twice per day 12 hours, every two days enter 48 hours, etc. The second option you can leave blank, but if you enter a category ID only posts from that category will be rotated. You could use this to your advantage in an interesting way by creating a dozen or so posts, and give them dates from a year ago and assign them to a “sponsors” category. Then enable Scheduled Posts Shift for just the “sponsors” category every 24 hours (if you post every day) or whatever your post schedule is to have “recommended” or sponsored items cycle through your home page regularly. This could be a very interesting way to monetize your blog.

However you use it, Scheduled Posts Shift can help you to automatically recycle your WordPress blog posts and keep all that hard work and those archives you’ve built up over time producing both traffic and income for years!

If by chance you’re using data based permalinks - will need to remove them and use just the post (/%post%) so the URL of your posts doesn’t change when the old posts are “shifted” to the home page. Read How to change permalink structure seamlessly if that situation applies to you.

I talked a couple of weeks ago about the importance of always upgrading your WordPress install, as old WordPress installations are often vulnerable.  One thing I don’t think people realize is that a hacker can easily find vulnerable WordPress blogs because most standard WordPress themes will actually tell them what version you are using.

If you open up the header.php file of your theme, you should notice some code that looks something like this:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /><!-- leave this for stats -->

In order to protect your WordPress installation, I recommend people completely remove this code from their header.php file for all of their WordPress blogs.

Now, this obviously isn’t going to make your WordPress blog hack proof, but what it will do is make it so hackers can’t easily locate your blog if it is using a vulnerable WordPress installation.

Update: Thanks to a tip from Leland, it looks like WordPress 2.5+ now generates the meta link anyway via the wp_head hook, which is something you can’t remove.  With that said, if you care about your security, you can still remove the meta generator.  It looks like Ian of ThemeShaper has provided a couple methods, including a WordPress plugin to remove the meta generator information from your WordPress blog.

Here are a few WordPress-related links I’ve enjoyed over the past few weeks:

• How To Display Code in WordPress Posts - Leland of Theme Lab has posted some tips/plugins you can use to help you display code in your WordPress posts.
• 40+ WordPress Tricks and Hacks - Hongkiat has another good collection of WordPress hacks and other guides, including a few of ours.
• WordPress 2.6 Disabling XML-RPC By Default? - James Mowery of Performancing takes a look at the effects of WordPress 2.6 coming with XML-RPC disabled by default, which will hopefully reduce security risks.  Unfortunately, this will also pose a problem for people that write their posts in 3rd party blogging software such as Windows Live Writer and will have to be manually enabled.
• 20+ Must Have WordPress 2.5 Compatible Plugins - Mashable has posted over 20 WordPress plugins that are compatible with WordPress 2.5.

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.

There’s nothing like the feeling of knowing your website’s theme is unique from everyone else’s. Usually, this reassurance is accompanied by a four-digit bill for a professionally-designed page. This isn’t the most realistic or feasible solution if you’ve already got background knowledge in HTML and CSS, are willing to learn, or just can’t cough up the change (I know I couldn’t). So, you stick to the free themes that everyone else has - except you’re going to put your own spin on it. You’re going to modify the colours, the logo, the footer, add DomTABS, and make it totally amazing. For free. Sounds good, right? I’m right behind you, but let’s not dive headfirst into this.

Before choosing your colour schemes, your logos, or researching how to modify Search.php to fit your own needs, you’re going to need to choose a theme. This is arguably the most important step - as the theme defines your blog’s/website’s functions, layout, and abilities. If your chosen theme has these three qualities, I know you’ll be satisified:

1. Author’s Support

No, you don’t need a one-on-one e-mail session; theme authors are usually too busy for that - so they set up support forums and an introductory modifying readme. If the author of your theme didn’t offer up a readme or support forums, try Googling when troubleshooting. If there are no results anywhere in the world, reconsider the theme - do you know enough HTML and CSS to modify it on your own?

2. Layout

Many people overlook the layout - but it can actually make a huge impact on your site. Not only is the site’s layout a reflection of yourself (let’s hope it’s not too cluttered or messy), but it’s also something that is extremely difficult to change yourself. Check the layout - are the sidebars wide enough to fit advertisements into? Is there an advertisement banner in the header? Does the theme have too much stuff in too little space? If you’re feeling iffy about the theme already, take a breather and reconsider - is the theme worth it? Ask yourself - what kind of layouts work best, and with which kinds of sites?

3. Sustainability

Believe it or not, the best-looking themes probably will end up having you do a lot more work. For example, the best-looking Magazine themes, which typically incorporate a lot of graphics in the front page, make use of WordPress’ Custom Fields to display them on the front page. The images must be to a specific dimension, and must be uploaded to the correct folder in your theme. Can you imagine doing that - for all your posts from now on? Do you have the resources to do so? Does your theme automatically resize your photos for you, or will you need to learn how to use Paint.NET or Photoshop?

I can personally relate here - I used to use the Mimbo theme by Darren Hoyt. It was just two images: one for features, and one for the latest featured post. I’d probably change the latest featured post on a weekly basis, and I could use Photoshop to crop it easily. My generous Internet connection allowed me to have quick access to my FTP folder, and I was satisfied. However, I got really sick of the murky Mimbo colours, so I switched themes to The Morning After by Arun Kale. I realized that the Latest Post function, although beautiful, incorporated graphics, and just looked horrendous without the picture. The problem was - with every post, you needed to upload a 470×175px picture to your ftp folder, as well as a 48×48 thumbnail of your picture for the “Recent Posts” sidebar. That’s two pictures for every post. Was the trade-off worth it?

Not in my opinion. After a couple of weeks of redesigning, I scrapped everything and started from scratch. For two days straight, I was tinkering with the three-column Copyblogger theme. No custom fields, no different categories - the theme is the going back to my simple roots - and I like it!

Once you start, don’t stop.

Once you pick your theme, you can’t re-choose. It exhausts both your time and mind to search for themes - so once you find a suitable one, stick with it! Instead of second-guessing yourself, do your research and choose your colour schemes. Fix up your logo. If you’ve got second thoughts, wait until you’re through finishing altering your theme - and if you realize you can’t sustain it, then scrap it and go for a makeover.

Open source is a wonderful thing.   Probably my favorite part about it is that everyone who uses open source software can find ways to help improve it.   So, what can you do to help WordPress grow?  Weblog Tools Collection did a great job recently when they tackled this exact question in their post 24 Ways to Contribute to WordPress.

The first three things that come to mind when I think of contributing to WordPress are creating WordPress themes, creating WordPress plugins, or creating a WordPress blog to help the community.   If you’d like to see the other 21, click over to check out the list.

This guest post was written by Hayes Potter, the 13 year old web developer and programmer that gives webmasters tips on protecting their website from common hacking techniques. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Today I want to tell you some very simple tips to keep your WordPress site running smoothly and easy ways to keep readers coming back.

First you should always keep your site running well.

• Try to avoid things like “Under Construction” and “Coming Soon!” for pages or new site features.
• Keep everything organized.
• Set categories to divide your posts, don’t cram everything in one page and create multiple pages for more organization.
• Make everything obvious, don’t keep your visitors guessing where the Contact page is.
• Always make sure your site is actually fast and not keeping your visitors waiting at a white page, 6 seconds waiting is fine in life but online it’s like an eternity.

For more in depth help on speeding up your site take a look at my tutorial by clicking here (see there’s another hint, “by clicking here”, easy and simple).

Next keep your readers interested and intrigued about your content.

• Always post top quality content.
• Don’t post about your cat, new boyfriend/girlfriend, or that awesome YouTube video you saw recently.
• Short isn’t bad, sometimes short stories that are to the point are better than long lengthy stories full of unneeded details and side stories.
• Make your articles into a series, keep your readers guessing on what your next article is about, but don’t write enough information in one article or the post is basically obsolete.
• Stick to one niche in your blog. If your blog is about blogging tips, why are you posting about that new computer that just came out?
• If you have a lot to say, say it. Don’t just write the bare minimum as long as the content is relevant.
• Most readers simply scan anything you write, so adding pointless information (even if it somewhat pertains to the article) doesn’t help much.

For some more simple ways to keep your readers visit my tutorial by clicking here.

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day! Also a big thanks to Kyle Eslick for having this awesome site.