eRealMedia

What is RSS, how it works and why it is important?

RSS is the hottest; most talked and most used technology of the Internet today. By the way, this technology is not new one, it has been there and used by bloggers since 1999. It is only recently it attracted mainstream attention and of course growth. Today almost all major websites and blogs have RSS feeds. If you have no technical background, you might be wondering what I am talking about. So let’s go to main topic straight-What is RSS?

What is RSS?

RSS is actually a short form of words "Really Simple Syndication". It also stands for “Rich Site Summary”. It is an easy way for distributing content for the website or blogs to others. You can easily distribute a list of headlines, update notices, and sometimes content to a wide number of people. It is used by computer programs that organize those headlines and notices for easy reading.

How does RSS work?

RSS works by having the website author maintain a list of notifications on their website in a standard way. This list of notifications is called an "RSS Feed". People who are interested in finding out the latest headlines or changes can check this list. Special computer programs called "RSS aggregators" have been developed that automatically access the RSS feeds of websites you care about on your behalf and organize the results for you. (RSS feeds and aggregators are also sometimes called "RSS Channels" and "RSS Readers".) Producing an RSS feed is very simple and hundreds of thousands of websites now provide this feature, including major news organizations like the New York Times, the BBC, and Reuters, as well as many weblogs.

Why RSS is Important?

Most people are interested in many websites. They are interested in change of their content in unpredictable manner. Examples of such websites are news sites, community and religious organization information pages, product information pages, medical websites, and weblogs. Repeatedly checking each website to see if there is any new content can be very tedious and time consuming. Of course you can join mailing list for that site, but how many will like reading so many emails everyday and make mailbox crowded. Furthermore organizing these mailboxes is hard and tedious. RSS is a better way to be notified of new and changed content. Notifications of changes to multiple websites are handled easily, and the results are presented to you well organized and distinct from email.

WordPress Database Backup Plugin

WordPress is database driven blogging tool. All the information you see on this page is actually brought from WordPress database. WordPress database contain about 10 tables to hold different information regarding your blog site. Keeping backup of the database becomes very crucial to avoid data loss in case of any failure. WordPress lovers have developed this beautiful plugin which do the database backup job for your automatically. Download this plugin from WordPress official site, Download Database Plugin Now, and upload it to your WordPress Plugin directory.

 Don't forget to unzip the downloaded file if it is zipped, before uploading. Login as administrator and activate the plugin. There are a variety of options to choose from.

Configuring Database Backup Plugin

Configuration of this plugin is very easy, core table of WordPress is automatically selected for backup, additional tables which are created by extra plugin you have installed can be selected as shown in figure. This blog has extra plugin installed like wp_rating, wp_statpress, etc

Selecting Backup Options

There are two backup options as shown the figure below. Either you can save the backup files on server itself in some folder or you can email you backup file to any email you configure here.

Backup Schedules

Here you can configure, how often you want to make backup of your WordPress database and which email you want to send your backup information.

Free eBook: How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging tool. In more technical terms it is blogging Content Management System (CMS). This blogging site is using WordPress too and there are thousand of other similar blog which runs on WordPress. If you are not sure why you should use WordPress read this article 'Six great reasons for choosing WordPress for a blog'. If you are a beginner and want to learn WordPress from start in very easy steps then here is free eBook for you on WordPress. The eBook is called 'How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites With WordPress' by Caroline Middlebrook. By the way there is difference between sites and blogs, this book explain all those terms. This book will also teach you to incorporate Google AdSense to make some cash from your site.

The ebook is 43 pages long and these are the major sections:


Chapter 1: Getting and Installing WordPress
Chapter 2: Basic WordPress Administration
Chapter 3: Installing a New Theme
Chapter 4: Setting up Adsense On Your Site
Chapter 5: WordPress Plugins
Chapter 6: Creating Your Site Content
Chapter 7: Final Thoughts
Appendix 1: Uploading Using FTP
Appendix 2: External Resources

Download this eBook

WordPress 2.5.x: Widget size problem and its solution

There has been some complain regarding WordPress 2.5.x theme widget size. When you install WordPress 2.5.x and go to administrative area to further customize or add/remove widgets you might face widget size problem.  

Problem

When I try to customize it, widget size become big and all its useful buttons like remove and modify hide inside another layer. Please see the picture below. This is picture of widget when collapse(text widget)

 

This is same widget when it is expanded for editing. Most of its part is hidden behind main page layer (Like remove and modify buttons), which makes it difficult to edit as shown in figure below.

   

Solution

 Find: wp-admin/js/widjets.js

Find line 20 which looks like this: li.css( 'marginLeft', ( width - 250 ) * -1 );

Change the figure 1 on the end to a 0 so the line now looks like this; li.css( 'marginLeft', ( width - 250 ) * -0 );

I notice also in the file there is a comment which says “// it seems IE chokes on these animations because of the positioning/floating”

 

Maximize your Contextual Ad Earning with AdSense Optimized WordPress Themes

Who don’t like to earn money out of their blog? Everybody likes it and always looking for different ways to generate income out of their blog. Some of blogger work hard, take their busy time out and write on subject matters which they know very well. Certainly they deserve rerwards for the work they do. AdSense advertising has been a huge success and moneymaker for Google as well as for bloggers. You can embed AdSense textual links or image into you blog and get paid when user click/visit them just like newspaper ad. Putting an AdSense JavaScript code into your WordPress blog and make it appears consistence with your content can be difficult task for a non coder. You need to have some basic knowledge of coding to arrange these ads to appear in-lineand consistent with your content. But don’t worry there are so many AdSense ready WordPress themes available for free to download and use it for this purpose. These themes have been customized with AdSense so that all AdSense links or images appear in consistence with your actual content or with over all look of your blog site. You need very minimal or almost no extra configuration of your blog to start generating AdSense income. Here are few of the AdSense ready WordPress themes (read the text file comes with the theme to customize it)  

Prosense | Download Theme

SEO Adsense | Download Theme

 

 Problogger Clean | Download Theme

    

SEO Blix | Download Theme

    

Ads Minded | Download Theme

 

Connections with AdSense | Download Theme

  

MW | Download Theme

   

 Merah Putih | Download Theme

6 Great reasons for choosing WordPress for a blog

If you are thinking to start your own blog then WordPress is the right tool to go for. My friends have been using it for long time and some of them have built impressive blog site using WordPress. Myself I like it, not because it is free but it is simple, easy, light yet powerful. It has features of most of modern Content Management System (CMS) for blogging and it is most widely used over the Internet. Let me highlight some of the features of WordPress.

1. Easy to Install

One of the reason people run away from using CMS because they are hard to install and configure. WordPress is very easy while installing. Just need three click and you are ready with your blog. If you do not have your own domain name and web space, don't worry, still you can register free with wordress.org site and start blogging.

2. Nice Interface

Interface is another big factor which determines whether CMS will continue for long or not and will be liked by others. Interface help users to learn and understand particular software quickly. WordPress has nice blue Default interface. Administrative interface is blue with meaningful links. Links are placed just at right places so that you do not have to search around. You can spell check your post, edit it easily with rich text based editor. 

3. Customizable

If you know PHP and CSS then easily you can customize your WordPress blog with editing few files, which can be done easily. Editing of these files can be done right from inside WordPress; that means you don’t have to download these files, change them and upload them again. Do not worry if you do not know PHP or CSS, there are ready-made plugging, themes and Widgets to make your job easy.

4. Huge support team

You are worried that you may run into trouble and there will be no one to help you out! Forget about it, there are huge number of blogger's and support team behind you. Any problem, just post it on one of many forums for WordPress; your problem will be solve in couple of hours.

5. Lots of plugging /Themes

Enhance beauty and functionality of your site with lots of freely available WordPress plugings and themes. Once you have mastered WordPress you can write your own themes and plug-ins.

6. It is free

They say free things are not good, but the fans of WordPress have proved it wrong. Everyday WordPress users are increasing. WordPress is becoming better and powerful everyday. Furthermore support for WordPress like coding, forum, themes, etc increasing everyday.

So what you are waiting for- give it a try and see yourself