Sometimes, it may happen that your WordPress blog gets hacked and the hacker changes your administrator password. He may also change your e-mail address. In this case, you cannot reset your password directly from “Lost Password”. But don’t worry, I’ll tell you a way to reset your WordPress password and also your e-mail address directly through phpMyAdmin. Resetting WordPress administrator password is very easy through phpMyAdmin.
Following are the steps to change WordPress password through phpMyAdmin:
Step 1: Login to your phpMyAdmin using your SQL Database username and password
This can be done through cPanel of your host.
Step 2: Browse to your blog’s database
Step 3: Find wp_users:
(Edit the default WordPress table prefix “wp_” if needed)
Once you click on browse in your wp_users database, you will be shown the users on this blog. Scroll down to the ID which says user_login as admin(by default). Once there click on edit button, the edit button will appear as a pencil logo.
Step 4: Edit the values:
Once clicked on edit, you will be taken to a page that appears as below. Here the third field user_pass will have MD5 hashed password under the value column. This value is not in plain text. WordPress, by default, hashes the password to MD5 salt for security reasons.
If you want your WordPress administrator password to be “password“, change the value of user_pass to 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 and click the Go button and then log in to WordPress using your new password..
If you want your password to be different, you can use online MD5 hash generators to generate hash of your required text. You can search Google for “online MD5 generator”, etc.
Many of you may be knowing that changing WordPress login username is one of the ways to protect your WordPress blog. After a fresh install of WordPress on your host, you sign in with the default username “admin“. You cannot change this username directly from the Admin panel.
But don’t worry! There’s another way to change this username. It’s through phpMyAdmin. This is not a new hack/method. But, it’s quite useful from security point of view, esp. for WordPress newbies.
Following are the steps to change WordPress username through phpMyAdmin:
Step 1: Login to your phpMyAdmin using your SQL Database username and password
This can be done through cPanel of your host.
Step 2: Browse to your blog’s database
Step 3: Find wp_users:
(Edit the default WordPress table prefix “wp_” if needed)
Once you click on browse in your wp_users database, you will be shown the users on this blog. Scroll down to the ID which says user_login as admin(by default). Once there click on edit button, the edit button will appear as a pencil logo.
Step 4: Edit the values:
Once clicked on edit, you will be taken to a page that appears as below. Here the second field user_login will have admin under the value column. Change this from admin to anything you prefer.
Once done with the change save and click go on the page.
There we have changed the WordPress user from the default admin to something we prefer. This is one way to ensure your WordPress blog is one step secure than it was before.
Around one month ago, my blog went offline due to some host problems. I changed my host to JustHost.com. I restored my old database (Last Post dated – July 1, 2009 )
My Alexa ranking was around 95K at that time. It has reduced a quite now. I will have to work harder now to bring back my visitors and readers. :p
I want to apologize to all my readers and subscribers for the downtime. And I hope I will get back in the SERPS soon.
To add a Youtube video to your blog post, write a new post in your WordPress Admin area. Be sure to leave a blank line where you want the YouTube video to appear in the final, published post on your blog.
Step 2 – Switch to the HTML Editor View
After you’re done entering the text for your post, select the “HTML” tab to switch to the HTML Editor view in WordPress.
Step 3 – Find the YouTube Video that You Want to Embed in Your WordPress Post
Find a Youtube video that you want to embed in the post. Copy the code from the “Embed” box.
Notice that when you click in the Embed text box, the window may expand showing several options you can pick and choose from to customize the video’s appearance within your blog post. For example, you can choose to show related videos, include a border, and change the size. It’s up to you if you want to modify these settings or not. If you do change these selections, the code in the Embed text box will automatically update. Therefore, copy the Embed code after you make any customization changes.
Step 4 – Paste the Embed Code from YouTube into Your WordPress Post
Return to the window where you have your WordPress post open, and click within the HTML editor text box in order to place your cursor at the beginning of the first line where you want the YouTube video to appear within your final, published post. Paste the code here, and then select the “Publish” button on the right side of your screen to publish your post.
It’s important to paste the Embed code just before you hit the Publish button. If you do anything else to your post after pasting the Embed code, the YouTube video may not appear correctly in your final, published post. If that happens, you’ll have to return to the HTML editor, delete the code you pasted, re-paste it and republish your post.
Step 5 – View your post
Visit your blog to view your live post and ensure it published correctly. If not, return to Step 3 and repeat the copying and pasting of the Embed code and republish your post.
There’s a contest going on at John Chow’s site. I just read about that now. There is a cash prize of about $4000 for the winner.
This contest is sponsored by OnlineRadioStations.com. Online Radio Stations is one of Richard Lau’s websites. Richard is the guy who sent John $5,000 out of the blue because he blogged about his XR.com URL shortening service. Since he wasn’t expecting the money, John donated it to the Union Gospel Mission. Now Richard wants John to give up to $4,000 to give away to the contest winner.
To enter the contest, you need to perform the following task:
Write a blog review about OnlineRadioStations.com including what your favorite station is on the OnlineRadioStations.com site.
Richard suggests that you link to OnlineRadioStations.com using the keyword “Radio” because that is what the site is about. However, you are free to use whatever descriptive keywords you think is appropriate. Maybe “Radio Station” or “Online Radio” or whatever you think best describe what the site is about.
Link to this blog post telling everyone about the contest.
The deadline for entry is May 31. Winner will be drawn on June 6 at Dot Com Pho.
The winner will be selected by a random drawing of all entries received. The winner will receive $2,000. However, if there are 200 or more total legit entries, then the winner will get a big fat check for $4,000! Good luck and enter now!
New plugins are being released for WordPress on a fairly regular basis, but not all are so easily able to blow away bloggers with their capabilities as a recent release by the name of Blog Traffic Exchange. While not many people actually know much about Blog Traffic Exchange right now, it will not take long for this new WordPress plugin (Related Sites) to take off because it is providing a means of building high quality links on autopilot without any spamming. Rather than simply having your related posts listed beneath each of your blog posts, this is a plugin that is going to make it possible for you to show off articles and blog posts that are related on other blogs within your same niche.
As you know, when you create links to other blogs, you receive track back links from them in response. But when it comes to related websites, however, you simply get put into the cloud, and people who decide to blog about similar topics as you will have links to your blog in their related website link. These are relevant and powerful links that relate to your content and help gain exposure for your blog without requiring anything from you. Your readers will be able to check out relevant content in other websites and other blogs, and visitors to these other websites and other blogs will gain extra exposure to your blog, and you do not have to do anything to make this happen.
Kevin, who created the Blog Traffic Exchange, has been receiving a great amount of incredible feedback from everyone who has used the plugin so far. Some of the users who have given consideration to this plugin have seen as much as a 20 percent increase in the traffic they are receiving, simply as a result of using the plugin.
As the owner of a blog or a website, one of your biggest priorities should always be to hunt for new and effective ways for driving an increase in traffic to your website (like using Twitter to drive more traffic). One of the greatest strategies that you can employ is link exchange or traffic exchange, but there are too many flaws in systems like these. The guys who are behind the Blog Traffic Exchange or BTE created this word press plug-in as a means of alleviating some of the issues that relate to normal link exchange and traffic exchange systems, making it significantly easier to exchange links without any of the flaws or hassles. In other words, every blogger should absolutely be utilizing this plugin to the best of their ability if their priority is to increase traffic, because it allows bloggers from all niches and from all over the internet to significantly increase their traffic on autopilot without any spamming or gray-area tactics. This is the best way for bloggers to get targeted, interested traffic without having to employ older types of link exchange or traffic exchange tactics which have been flawed in the past.
Now, I’ll tell you how to make your blog go on and on and on…
That sounds cool.
Many of you will not find much time to keep blogging and posting at your sites continuously. So what can be done to make it easy for you to remain consistent with your blogs?
I have a few ideas…
Idea # 1: Accept RSS ads
The key is: You’ve got to be obligated to others to come out with new content on a fixed schedule. By accepting pre-payment for RSS ads, you will be forced to be on time!
Why Doesn’t the Sidebar Ads Work in Making You Disciplined to Blog?
Because you’ll most likely be charging for the sidebar ads on a monthly basis. Or on a CPM basis. But with RSS ads, advertisers will be paying you for a fixed number of posts per month!
So How To Run RSS Ads on Your Blog?
i. If you use WordPress, you can install the RSS Feed Footer WordPress plugin to run ads. (You may have to find other alternatives if you don’t use WordPress…)
ii. The easiest way to attract advertisers is to make a new post on your blog with a graph of the number of RSS subscribers you have. And asking people to contact you if they want to advertise.
iii. You can charge as much as $5-50 per post for every 1000 subscribers. (Start low and then slowly increase the rates.)
iv. If you don’t have many RSS subscribers, you can go to a forum like DigitalPoint.com and sell RSS ad placements for $1 or so. The money is not important. The fact that pre-selling RSS ads obligates you to write a certain number of posts every week without fail is.
Idea # 2: Hire a Co-Blogger
Another idea you can use to keep your blog fresh year after year is hire or joint venture with other bloggers. There are quite a few benefits of having multiple bloggers write for one blog:
i. The pressure is off any single blogger. If one blogger is slacking, others can put in a big more effort.
ii. You can now take vacations!
iii. Multiple authors bring multiple view points. Thus you can also attract a wider audience.
iv. More bloggers = more promoters too. Marketing your blog becomes a whole lot easier!
I’ll be telling you how to create a decent blog to get good and unique traffic.
Lets start with a Domain name.
Domain Name
A blog without a good domain is in vain, You should always try to go for keyword rich domains. For example if you blog is about Blogging, Include blogging word in your domain name also. If you are starting off with blogging, You can go on with subdomains from wordpress.com or blogspot.com but it does look odd to have long subdomains. Its always better to buy a Good Domain name.
I register all my domains from Namecheap, GoDaddy is also good but I prefer Namecheap much more. You can get a domain on Namecheap for $8.44 by using coupon codes (FIRSTSNOW)
Web Hosting
After domain its time to get Web Hosting, Hostgator is one of the best web host around these days, I have my own servers and I run all my websites on my owner servers, so if you are in interested in Free WebHosting you are most welcome to contact me anytime, I would be more than glad to host your website. You may even try hostgator, Its just $0.01 for first month if you use coupon code: wordpress.
Setting up blog
Well, there are tons of blog scripts available but wordpress is one of the best! and I would recommend you also to go with WordPress! You can download wordpress from wordpress.org or If you are hosted with Hostgator or me, You can login got your cPanel then click on Fantastico and with a click of mouse you can install wordpress.
Customizing your blog
After you are done setting up your blog, now its time to install some good themes and plugins. If you can afford to get a unique theme it would be great but if you cant then you can go for free themes, There are whole lot of websites which provide free themes for wordpress. One of best I know is wpthemedesigner.com.
After you are done with theme, its now turn for the plugins.. I will list here the ones I am using:
All in One SEO Pack – Its a great plugin which helps you setup your meta tags, meta description, keywords and a lot more things.
Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin you will find on almost every blog, It helps you to generate a sitemap for your blog and then you can submit it to Google, Yahoo and other search engines.
Top Commentators Widget – This plugin helps you to get more visitors as well as comments on your blog, It gives sitewide backlink to top commentator of your blog.
Subscribe Remind – This plugin displayes a short line on each post of yours “Subscribe to my RSS feed” it can help you increasing your RSS subscribers.
Buy Me A Beer – You can ask people to donate on your blog if they find information on your blog every good using plugin.
After plugins its turn to setup your Permalinks,
To setup your Permalinks follow these steps
1. Login to your WordPress account.
2. Navigate to the dashboard.
3. Options > Permalinks.
4. Check the “Custom” structure
5. Insert – /%postname%/
Monetization
Google Adsense, Adbrite and TextLinkads are best options if you want to earn from your blog, Place your ads nicely, blend them into your blog and you can start earning al lot depending on your niche. If you update your blog daily with nice information you will get good amount of traffic and if you get good amount of traafic you can get nice earnings from your blog too.
Promoting Your Blog
You can find forums having having relevant niche of your blog and put a link to your blog in signature(If the forum rules allows it) Be active on the forum and post there regularly.
Using social bookmarking websites may also help you getting lots of traffic, like digg and stumbleupon. Digg each post you make on your blog and you can get good amount of traffic with it
I was surfing through some forums and saw some sticky topics there. I thought, why shouldn’t I try to make sticky topics for my blog. Finally, I got the trick and I’m posting it here.
Sticky topics are those which always stay on the top of the archives irrespective of the dates when they are posted. All other posts will be posted after sticky topics
Technically, a blog is a kind of website that “displays posts in a reverse chronological order” – so the older stories are pushed down the order as new stories are added with time.
Why we need sticky posts on blogs ?
You may find sticky posts on blogs handy when there’s an important announcement or say you want to highlight a particular blog post at the top.
Sticky posts are helpful in cases when your blog has been slashdotted / digged / lifehacked – you would like the flood of new visitors to see your most popular posts first as it may increase their chances of subscribing to your blog.
How to Make posts Sticky?
The idea is very simple – Change the date & timestamp of your blogpost to something in future or you may do the reverse and set the date to wayback in 1900s if you want your blog story to appear at the end of your archives.
How do I change the date / time in my blogging platform ?
For blogger [aka blogspot] – save the post as a draft or if you like to make an existing story as sticky, open in it Edit view.
The Date and Time settings for a post are beneath the post-editing field. Change the values to a future date,and publish your post.
For Typepad – On the Edit Post page, click the clock icon and edit the time and/or date of the post you can use the arrows on the calendar to navigate previous and next through the months.
For WordPress – thought WordPress lets you modify the date of a blog post via the “Post Timestamp” setting, it won’t create a sticky post as the post will not appear on your wordpress blog before that date.
Luckily, there’s a wordpress plugin called Adhesive that lets you turn any blog post into a sticky one. If more than one post is sticky, the post with the latest post time will appear topmost. Thank you Ryan.
A limitation of Adhesive is that it creates sticky posts per category. So if your stick post is in the “google” category and you’re viewing the “yahoo” category, the stick post will not appear.
For Windows Live Spaces [aka MSN Spaces] – Windows Live spaces doesn’t provide a direct way to modify the data and time of your blogpost but we can use the free Windows Live Writer to change the date of any of your blog post on Windows Live spaces.
Open the existing post or compose a new post in Windows Live writer and click the Post properties button on the toolbar [next to the spell check button].
A properties windows will open in the footer of your post where you’ll find a calendar control to modify the date timestamp of the blog post. Choose a future date and post to weblog.
It may not be possible to change the date and time in your Xanga blog but if I discover a workaround, will definitely update this post.
Every once in a while when you bookmark a Web page in Internet Explorer / Firefox an interesting thing happens. A strange image appears in your bookmark menu and before the URL in your browser’s address line.
This is a “branded icon” — a special custom graphic that is associated with a particular URL. In this age of aggressive competition for attention, it’s important to use every trick you can to make your URL and bookmark memorable. A branded icon will make your URL stand out from ordinary bookmarks for the majority of Websurfers.
Your icon will appear both in the user’s Favorites list and the History/Address area of the browser. If someone adds a link to your page in his or her Windows Start menu, your icon will show up there, too, as well as on the Desktop, the Quick Launch toolbar, or any other folder or menu. (Wouldn’t that be
nice?)
In order to create icons, upload them to your Web site and make them viewable in your users’ Favorites lists, you must have all of the following: Windows 95 or later, Internet Explorer 5 or later, Icon editing software, FTP access.
Step 1: Creating Your Branded Icon
I’ve found that the easiest way to create a branded icon is to start with a graphics design app like PaintShopPro, Webster2 or RealDrawPro.
Bear in mind that the final browser icon will be 16 x 16 pixels, which is quite small. It will also be square, which limits your creativity somewhat. Your icon will have to look good at this small resolution, so you need to design it accordingly.
In your favorite graphics app, create a 100 x 100 px square. Depending on your design, the square could be one of your site’s colors.
When you have a design you like, reduce it to 16 x 16 px for the acid test. You may have to play around with it to get it to look good that small.
Now export it to a .jpg at the highest quality.
Step 2: Convert To Icon File
There are a number of icon apps in the market but I’ve found the best to be Icon Translator. I like it because you can convert JPEGs, GIFs, or BMPs into icons in seconds. It’s easy to install and use. The learning curve is less than a minute.
There are two icon-naming conventions. One is to name your icon “favicon.ico.” The other is to use unique names for your icons to distinguish them, which is what I do and recommend.
You should save your icon to 32 x 32 so in case people want to add your link in Windows, it will be larger. IE will automatically shrink it to 16 x 16.
Step 3: Add Code to Your Web Page(s)
In order for your icon to associate with your page, you mustadd the following in your
tag:
Remember that your icon must have a .ico extension to be recognized.
Step 4: Upload Icon and Encoded Page to Your Server
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