I found a great new plugin for WordPress that allows you to display your latest tweets in your sidebar, post tweets from your sidebar or within the WordPress admin and also automatically tweets your new WordPress posts. It seems to have everything you need for your Twitter and WordPress integration all built in.
The name of the plugin is “Twitter Tools” and you can check it out here: http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress
In addition you can add a twitter “Follow Us” type badge to your blog like the one you see here on the right of the page. I used WP-TwitterBadge but there are several out there that all seem to do the same thing.
WordPress 2.8 + allows you to automatically run updates from the WordPress admin. As long as you know your FTP username and Password you can run it automatically and it takes care of all the extra steps which save you time and unfortunate mistakes.
To run the auto update you just log into your WordPress admin and if there is an available update there will be a message at the top of the page when you log in that says something like this:
WordPress 2.8.4 is available! Please update now.
You simply need to click on the ‘Please update now.’ link and choose ‘Upgrade Automatically’. Fill in your ‘Hostname’ field with your domain name (example: morditech.com) then in the ‘username’ and ‘password’ field type in your FTP username and password (This may not be the same as your WordPress username and password). The connection type should be set as ‘FTP’. Click the ‘Proceed’ button and let it run. This process may take several minutes because it is doing a number of things including backing up, downloading the new version, and the actual upgrade with a few post upgrade procedures.
Be patient and let it run. If you run into any problems contact your web host and let them know. Usually if there is a problem it is just file permissions that can be easily updated by your WordPress web host.
Here Matt Cutts explains the in’s and out’s of WordPress and blogging best practices. He tells you about WordPress Security as well as WordPress SEO techniques and best practices. There is advice on how to blog and how not to blog etc. Matt Cutts is a software engineer and head of Google’s Webspam team.
