Old Post Promoter comes handy in many situations. Maybe you are planning to take a long trip but want to give your visitors the chance to read some of the older posts they may have missed. It lets you choose a cut off date for your older posts. You certainly do not want to promote posts that are more than a couple of weeks old. What’s nice about this plugin is the fact that you can choose the position in which your older posts get moved to.

You should not use this plugin if you display dates in your permalink structure. To get the best out of this plugin, you should add your time-less posts to a certain category and only push those to the front-page of your blog. Overall, this is a pretty neat tool to make your blog feel fresh if you are not around for a short while and can’t find other people to cover for you.

Publisher can be used to set up an e-book store or a portal to sell your digital products through. The home page is designed to give you the chance to promote your top products more effectively. It has 5 color schemes. This theme provides support for the ejunkie system. 7 page templates and 30+ shortcodes are offered in this template.

PayPal is integrated into this theme that makes life easier for publishers. Adding new custom fields is a piece of cake. The options page gives you the chance to change the design, SEO, and navigation options on your site. Publisher for WordPress does support a side-blog. The auto-install feature is a timer-saver too.

Publisher won’t work for every site. But it should be more than enough to get you started with your own digital store. It is professional-looking and fast.

Your ALT attributes should describe your images. You do not want to use these to spam the search engines. SEO Friendly Images can handle title attributes for your images too. It has 4 special tags you want to get yourself familiar with to optimize your attributes.

Why would you want to use this plugin? For starters, it can make your website’s code W3C compliant. It may give you a small SEO benefit (very small). ALT attribute hold more weight than image titles. But don’t use them to stuff keywords on your site. All in all, SEO Friendly Images is a time-saving tool for people with a ton of images on their sites with no ALT attributes.

There are various ways that hackers can compromise your website. You can always create a check list and secure your website step by step. Bulletproof Security takes the pain out of the process. This plugin tells you the status of your system and the steps you need to take to protect your site. It enhances your website’s security using .htaccess directives.

BulletProof Security may be a powerful plugin but it takes care of simple steps for you too. For instance, it turns off WordPress version and errors. All in all, this is a pretty neat plugin to have installed on your site to add more layers of security to it.

Feedback Engine is great for businesses but can work just as well for your blog. As long as you have a product people can give you their feedback on, this theme works. Your visitors can take advantage of this theme to report problems, suggest ideas, ask questions, and much more. The theme is quite sleek. The search capability with suggestion feature is superb. You have the option to create different sections for different aspects of your blogging business (for better organization). Communicating with those who have joined your community is possible through “mail broadcast” feature.

Feedback Engine has plenty of useful tools for your visitors to take advantage of. They can follow their favorite topics or use the advanced search option to find what they are looking for. The permissions system in this script helps you keep your blog protected and everyone’s role clear.

If you are looking to use your readers’ feedback to take your blog to the next level, Feedback Engine has you well covered.

Strong passwords: many of us tend to choose passwords that are easy to remember. That is recipe for disaster. Every blogger should change their admin username to something other than “admin.” A strong password with more than a dozen of letters, numbers, and characters is ideal. Here is my rule on passwords: if you can remember them, they are not strong enough.

Install Limit Login Attempts: it protects your admin area from brute force attacks. Gives you the chance to lock out people who are trying to guess your user/pass combo. It also alerts you when someone is messing with your blog.

Install WassUp: it keeps track of your visitors and their activities on your website. This information can be used to figure out if someone is trying to hack your website.

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam: a powerful anti spam plugin that adds CAPTCHA to your login page, making it a tad bit more difficult for bots to attack your site.

Block IPs individually: this may sound too drastic but is actually a good approach especially if you are using some of the above plugins to get notified about abusers. Black listing IPs in htaccess does not take too much work and keeps annoying hackers away.

No blog is hack proof. By backing up your database and taking some basic steps to protect your blog, you can save yourself a whole lot of trouble in the long run.

The anatomy of a WordPress theme: a very informative infographic by Yoast that shows you what WordPress themes are made of. If you are planning to get into the business of WP theme or plugin development, this is one of the infographics you should pick up.

WordPress facts: if you know someone who is not using WordPress and still has doubts about the platform, this WordPress infographic by Page.ly can make the case for WordPress for him/her.

The power of WordPress: just how powerful is WordPress? You don’t have to “guesstimate” or make things up about WordPress when you have this infographic by Tech King.

Please add your favorite WP infographics in the comment section.

PageLines: one of the elite WP theme platforms

Choosing a WordPress theme for your new blog is not always an easy decision. Many new bloggers choose to go with free WordPress theme just for the fact that they feel uncomfortable spending any money on WP theme. If a blogger is not ready to invest a couple of hundred dollars in their business by picking up a premium theme, he/she won’t achieve too much success in the long run.

Not all premium themes are created the same. Paying for a product does not make it a decent one. Bloggers need to do their due diligence to make sure they pick a theme that is right for their business over the short and long run. Here are 10 things you want to pay attention to when picking up a new premium WordPress theme:

1. Design: if you are paying for a WordPress theme, you may as well pick one that has a decent design. You can always make changes to your website, but you do not want to have to start from scratch.
2. Developer’s background: some premium themes can be very tempting right from the minute you see them. Doing a background check on the developer(s) behind these themes can give you a better idea whether they are worth investing in.
3. Customer praises and complaints: Google is your friend here. Just search for negative and positive comments that your favorite themes have gotten to make sure you save yourself from future headaches.
4. Options page: every powerful WordPress theme needs a decent back-end (0ptions page). Themes such as Thesis and Platform Pro have powerful back-ends that make it easy for their users to make changes to their websites. Do your research beforehand to find out whether your favorite theme has a decent options page.
5. Customization: even though you are paying for your theme, that does not mean you should not go out of your way to make your website look and feel unique to your visitors. A theme that is easy to customize can save you a lot of trouble here.
6. SEO: a WordPress theme that is not search engine friendly can set you back and reduce your blog’s potential. Take Thesis for instance. It is very search engine friendly and lets its users address some of the top SEO factors right from the options page.
7. License: I don’t know about you but I hate those WP themes with annoying licenses. As a blogger, I do not want to spend any time trying to figure out what I can or can’t do with my WordPress theme. GPL themes save you from having to deal that trouble.
8. Updates: what good is a premium theme if the developer behind it does not update the code once in a while. Do your research online to see whether the developers you plan to purchase your theme from have offered regular updates for their themes in the past.
9. Demo: never ever buy a theme without getting a demo up-front. Most theme clubs let you do just that. By test driving themes, you will have a better chance of picking up the best option for your business.
10. Scalability: if you are just getting started with your blog, there is a good chance most top premium themes will do for your site. But if you plan to add videos, images, podcasts, and other types of media to your website in the future, you want a theme that can handle those.

Picking a premium WordPress theme should not have to be difficult. You just have to make sure you do your research before parting ways with your hard earned money for a theme that may not meet your standards.

Are you just getting started with your first WordPress blog? WordPress is a wonderful platform that makes life a whole lot easier for bloggers from all walks of life. One does not need to be a genius to get started with WordPress. But it is always good to know what tools are available to you when you start using a new platform. There are thousands of plugins available for WordPress. You don’t want to install them all on your website. Here are 8 types of plugins you want to have available on your website.

• SEO plugins: I personally use All In One SEO as my main SEO plugin. There are many others that can do the job. If you don’t have a theme that comes with built-in SEO options, you want to make sure you pick a decent SEO plugin to manage your title tags, how your pages are indexed, and everything in between.
• Linking plugins: as a blogger you should take time to optimize your website’s link structure for the search engines. Linking to your previous stories in your new articles can be helpful too. Plugins such as SEO Smartlinks can help you do that in a less painful fashion.
• Social bookmarking tools: websites such as Delicious and StumbleUpon can bring a whole lot of traffic to your site. Twitter and Facebook buttons should be on your website for obvious reasons. Social bookmarking plugins let you add these buttons to your website.
• Social media add-ons: if you are involved on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, you want to give your visitors a chance to connect with you on those sites. Social profile add-0ns can add your profile links to your website quickly.
• Security: don’t want your website to get hacked? You want to protect your log-in page, manage spam, and stop DB attacks. Thankfully, there are plugins (Limited Login Attempts) that can stop hackers in their tracks and ban their IPs as they try to pull off attacks on your website.
• Affiliate & Content plugins: affiliate marketing is a nice way to boost your blog’s revenue. If you have been linking to Apple and Amazon in the past without using your appropriate tags, you can take advantage of referral plugins available for WordPress to turn those links into affiliate links. Plugins such as Redirection can track those links more effectively.
• Comment management: WordPress’ comment system is pretty decent. But it is no match for Intense Debate or Disqus. Make sure you download the appropriate plugin for your comment system to get it to work flawlessly on your website (not always necessary). Comment rating plugins are nice to download too.
• Analytics: some analytics plugins can keep track of your traffic and search engine rankings. Some others can help you add Google Analytics code to your website fast. You want to take a look at these types of plugins too.

What are your suggestions? Please suggest your favorite plugins for the above categories in the comments section?

Wibiya: a powerful social footer bar that makes your blog a whole lot more dynamic. It has free and premium apps (with branding opportunities) available to make your blog a more solid community.

Sharebar: one of the best social media WordPress plugins around. It adds a dynamic floating box to your website. The bar becomes vertical if browser window becomes smaller than a certain size. Sharebar is flexible enough to let its users add their favorite social buttons to it.

Apture: if you have checked top blogs in the Internet & technology field in the past, chances are you have seen Apture in action. Apture bar stays hidden until your visitors select something on your site or scroll down your pages. Pretty light-weight and effective.

Socialize: a flexible WordPress plugin that gives you the chance to make one last call to action after your content. It can also be used to promote a certain post or section of your blog.

The above scripts are easy to install and do not require you to be a web genius. They can take your new or already great blog to a whole new level.

What are your suggestions?