Now that I have opened myself up to being a contributor blog and accepting guest posts from some other bloggers I realized that wordpress by default does not give you an easy way to keep track of who submitted a guest post for review.  You have to manually check your Edit Posts section and weed through to find any contributors who have submitted a post for review and I had forgotten for a few days and was late publishing a few guest posts at first.

A Wordpress Plug-in called Dashboard Pending Review solves this problem easily.  Once you install the plug-in you get a new module on your Wordpress Dashboard that lists all posts that are Pending Review just like the “Scheduled Post” plug-in shows which posts are scheduled.

This makes it much easier to manage and administrate the various articles and posts that are submitted for review and are up and publishing in the next few days.  I highly recommend this plug-in if you run a contributor blog where you approve posts that are submitted for review manually.  It will help you keep track of submitted posts so you can see them immediately and without having to search or click on extra steps to find them.

-Dragon Blogger

I upgraded Wordpress to 2.9.2 yesterday after reading that it fixes a potential security vulnerability where registered accounts on your blog can see posts sent to the trashcan. This could potentially have lead to revealing information you may not have wanted to reveal to people who are registered on your blog (readers or other contributor accounts). If you run a blog that requires registered users or you have contributors on your blog I would highly recommend you upgrade to Wordpress 2.9.2 as quickly as possible to plug this hole.

So far I upgraded 3 of my blogs and haven’t noticed any negative side effects, all my plug-ins are intact and my blogs are working without issue.

-Dragon Blogger

There are many things bloggers can do, but even more things that blogger shouldn’t do and one of those is clutter up your blog with too many ads, images, and overly busy backgrounds that distract readers from the content of your post.  Here are some tips bloggers should follow when designing the layout for their blog.

Less is More

The less clutter you have on your blog, the more people can focus on the content.  You want the reader to notice your “header” and then be drawn to the content almost immediately.  Unless you are trying to showcase an advertisement or affiliate ad on your sidebar or header area, you want the readers eyes to gravitate toward your article naturally.  You can do this by making sure your font and text clearly stand out against the background area, this is why 95% of the blogs use white background with black text, it contrasts and stands out.

Keep your blog background to a minimal, if you must use patterns or a photo then edit it in a paint program and either make the image faded (black) if you use a black background for your blog, or white if you use a white background for your blog.  By making the image/picture or background fainter you want it to not be as noticeable or draw the readers eye as much as the content/post area.  Nothing distracts a reader more than having a splash of colored images, pictures or items to look at all over the page that distract from the article.

Animations = Distraction

Again, unless you are really focusing on a user clicking or paying attention to something other than the content area, animated banners, gif’s and backgrounds are very much a distraction from reading plain text and even when reading text the animated gif’s will cause a readers eyes to notice them and pull attention away from the content.  Use with caution and deliberate intent, not just for fun or to try and “brighten your blog” as you can cause more harm than good.  A year ago I visited a blog that always made “pixel” rain fall all over the page while you visit, these pixels would rain over the entire page including the post area and sometimes obscure the text as the rain passed over it.  This is not a good way to keep a reader interested in reading your article.

Reduce Page Load Time

Again, less is more and the faster your page loads and the reader can read your content the better.  If you must use a background image then make sure you use a “gif” file which is much lighter weight and significantly smaller to load in memory than a jpg or png file.  (though you are limited in image quality and how many colors, often you can find a balance).  You want to minimize the number of scripts that call external blogs, especially ones in post that cause distraction.  I myself have too many items that load from external sources and am working to sculpt the page load times of my blog (though my page load times are about 50% better than they used to be).  You have to keep in mind that more readers are starting to visit from mobile devices which don’t have as fast connections as cable modems, and if your page loads quick over broadband it may be much slower from a mobile phone browser.

Summary:

You want to make sure that you draw your readers into your content before they go looking elsewhere, often a reader will quickly scan the rest of your site to see “what else” is on there after finding your article from a search engine.  I am not going to show examples of “bad websites” because I don’t want to offend anyone, but I do want to point out Ileane’s blog Blogging Wire which recently updated themes and uses a theme which very much draws a users focus directly to the content by making the sidebars very minimal and making the post area stand out in clear contrast.  It is worth looking at for an example in how to draw a readers attention to your post area.

-Dragon Blogger

One of the questions some readers have is how to embed an email subscribe form inside of your post, like I do with mine at the end of all my posts.  You know, the one that looks like this:

This is actually very simple and here are the steps on how you can setup your own “email subscribe” form in your own post. This works for blogger, wordpress or any other blogging platform as it is basic HTML tags and no custom PHP code.

Step 1 – Find your Feedburner Email Subscribe link.

Log into feedburner, click on your blog name and then click on the “Publicize Tab”
Click on “Email Subscriptions” to the left and “activate” email subscriptions if you don’t have it activated already.
To the right you will see the generic Google subscription form, you can use this but I found it to be too bulky and I wanted something more streamlined.
So instead, just copy your “Feedburner Mail URL” you can see it in the box below:

Step 2 – Edit your Single.php and input your form

You will want to either add your “subscribe via email” form inside your single.php (you could add it to your index.php but you will see the “subscribe via email many times on your homepage and this may be too redundant and annoy your readers so I suggest you only add it to your single.php (let your normal “Email subscribe” button or sidebar link handle your index.php visitors.

Edit your single.php and look for this line:

<?php the_content(‘Read more…’); ?>

If you put the below code above this line, then your email subscribe will be before your post content (at the top of your post).  If you put the below code below this line, then your email subscribe form will be below your post content.  I see many bloggers do it both ways, I prefer to have it after my content so that if a reader enjoyed reading my content they can see the email subscribe right away rather than having to scroll back to the top of the post where they may have forgotten I had one.  I have also seen many bloggers put them right at the top of their post as well so it is a matter of personal preference.

When you build your form you want to use the HTML code below, but make sure you replace the parts in RED with your custom Feedburner Email URL.  The orange text you can customize your message right before the user inputs their email and clicks submit, and finally the light blue part has to be the value of your FeedBurner URI=

<center>
<form style=”background-color: #000000; border:8px solid #ccc;padding:0px;text-align:center;” action=”http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify” method=”post” target=”popupwindow” onsubmit=”window.open(‘http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=DragonBlogger‘, ‘popupwindow’, ’scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520′);return true”>If you enjoyed this post, Subscribe via Email:<p><input type=”text” style=”width:185px” value=”enter email address” onmousedown=”this.value = ”;” name=”email”/><input type=”hidden” value=”DragonBlogger” name=”uri”/><input type=”hidden” name=”loc” value=”en_US”/><input type=”submit” value=”Subscribe” /></p></form>
</center>

Summary:

It is pretty easy to add an email subscribe form in your post and I think it does help increase the number of people who subscribe to your blog. The whole key is to make subscribing as easy as possible and this is one option to help remind readers to become a follower of your blog.

If you enjoyed this article, drop me a comment and let me know if you enjoyed the code and will start using it or are already using it.