In a Google+ community recently someone wanted to know how they could make posting to their WordPress blog as quick and easy as posting to Facebook or Google+. When you post a link on those social networks, all you have to do is paste a url and the title, description and image for the webpage you’re linking to are automatically generated, so it’s very easy to quickly share information.
I recommended three possibilities to make posting to WordPress this easy (click to enlarge screenshots).
This is a guest post from my friend and super-talented WordPress developer, Suzette Franck. I’ve mentioned the Jetpack plugin before and in this post Suzette will take you deeper into it’s social marketing features.
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Let’s face it, no matter how pretty your blog or website is, people come back for fresh, compelling, unique and informative content. While there are various services that will accomplish the same functionality, never before has posting to all the networks simultaneously been make simpler than with the magic of the plugin Jetpack. Jetpack is chock full of goodies like the Publicize, Sharing and Subscriptions features that can help the most amount of people see your unique content in your social network. Support for posting to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, and Yahoo, as well as share buttons for the major networks are all included in this no cost but priceless plugin.
What is Jetpack?
Jetpack (latest version is 2.0) is a free add-on suite of plugins once only available to WordPress.com users made available for your self-hosted blog. If your blog is hosted at WordPress.com, you do not need this add-on to access these features, but if you are self-hosting your blog, for example, at Media Temple, WPEngine, HostGator, Blue Host, etc. you will need to download, install, and activate this plugin to have it provide the features we will be covering, Also, you will be required to have a WordPress.com account, so that all of your subscriptions and stats can be accessed centrally right form the WordPress.com dashboard. I will walk you through the installation and configuration process and get you up and running in no time posting your unique content to your followers.
This a guest post by my friend and multimedia WordPress wizard, Jason Tucker. He streams live and archives the OC WordPress meetup group, and has recently launched a new Google Hangout and podcast show called WP Watercooler which you can watch live on Mondays at 11am PST, or you can catch the archive on the website and download the podcast via iTunes. He kindly agreed to share some of his wisdom here. Now over to Jason……
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So you want to learn how to podcast? In this post I’ll go over some of the basics of podcasting using WordPress, a mic and some audio or video recording software.
What is a podcast?
Before I get into how to start your own podcast I think we should define what a podcast is. Wikipedia states the following:
A podcast is a type of digital media consisting of an episodic series of audio, video, PDF, or ePub files subscribed to and downloaded through web syndication or streamed online to a computer or mobile device. The word is a neologism derived from “broadcast” and “pod” from the success of the iPod, as podcasts are often listened to on portable media players.
So, in plain English, a podcast is a way for you to receive and then consume typically audio or video in an episodic fashion. I listen to quite a few podcasts – some are news focused, and others are either short stories or very long shows. I’ve listened to podcasts that are 5 minutes long all the way to 2 hours long. Either way, think of a podcast as setting a DVR to receive a show someone records and makes available at various intervals, typically every week.
A common question that clients ask me is about how to automatically update their Facebook page, Twitter account or other social profiles, when they publish a new blog post.
There are many ways to do this – here are a couple of my preferred methods. Although there are some WordPress plugins available for these types of tasks, generally speaking I don’t use them. Sometimes they are tricky to configure, or perhaps just not that reliable. Plus, why add unnnecessary plugins when you can acheive the same thing just as well, if not better, another way?
Many WordPress users like to use a custom permalink structure which includes the blog post category in their url for additional SEO value. If you create relevant, keyword-rich category names for your blog, having them in the permalink can be useful. If you are one of these people, you NEED this plugin in your life!
I teach people on a daily basis how to use WordPress, from the ground up. A few face-smackingly simple issues come up time and again.
1) Pasting from Word will make your posts look funky
Anytime you copy and paste directly into the WordPress editor, from Microsoft Word, another website, or any other outside source, you run the risk of it looking, well, a bit funky ,when you publish it. This is because other applications, especially Word, have their own set of formatting that gets carried over when you copy/paste. Usually this ends up conflicting with the formatting and styling of your theme. You may not realize there is an issue until you publish the post and something looks off – the fonts don’t quite match, or the spacing is strange. 9 times out of 10 in these cases, it’s because you copied/pasted from Word. To avoid such issues, simply use the 2 clipboard buttons on the second line of the post editing toolbar with the T and the W on them.
