I have worked for clients with a wide variety of content management software and strategies — WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, ColdFusion, publishing through programs like Dreamweaver and FrontPage, proprietary systems, using PHP includes, no system at all (using flat HTML files) — and WordPress is by far the easiest for the web developer, the marketing/content person, and the site owner to all use. What does this mean? WordPress allows small businesses to get up their sites faster and more cost-efficiently than ever before. If you need more reasons to try WordPress for your content management, consider these:

WordPress is made for writing.

WordPress allows the user to write in the browser window effortlessly, just like using a traditional word processor. The writer doesn’t have to worry about code or formatting while writing — the code writes itself in Visual Mode and formatting can be added to an article with a few easy clicks later on. When combined with my browser’s built-in spellchecking, I have no need to open a word processing program. WordPress has revision capabilities built right in — it autosaves my work as I type, and it lets me revert back to or compare my writing to earlier versions with a couple of clicks.

WordPress makes drafts simple.

With several save modes on posts — Draft, Pending Review, and Published — writers can work on several articles at once, save them for editorial review, and publish them when they are ready to go. Want to publish your articles according to an editorial calendar but write them in advance? WordPress makes it easy for content makers to write and preview articles before scheduling them for publication. (This article, for example, was written directly into WordPress hours before the publication time!)

WordPress won’t embarrass you with its code.

If you have ever had to look at code generated by most WYSIWYG editors (such as FrontPage), you would know how terrible it is. The code is often several years outdated, bloated with unnecessary tags, and impossible to edit without breaking the rest of the page. WordPress-generated code, however, is not. It doesn’t add anything you didn’t ask it to add, and it doesn’t break any of the premium designs that people pay for!

WordPress is very flexible.

A self-hosted install of WordPress (that’s wordpress.org not wordpress.com) can really be molded into whatever kind of site you want, driven by the powerful WordPress engine. With hosted solutions (Blogger, Blogspot, Homestead), you are limited by the constraints of the system and how it is organized. With DIY builders like GoDaddy’s Website Tonight, you are limited by the design of the software. With WordPress, I have yet to find something I couldn’t build.

WordPress has the backing of a strong community.

Discussion forms, sites dedicated to WordPress hacks, and a strong developer community mean that you will probably be able to find the answer for whatever problem you may come across. A strong user base also means a wide variety of available add-ons and plugins to make your WordPress installation even more useful. If you happen to need something you can’t find already available in a plugin, widespread support also means that you can easily find a web developer capable of writing a plugin or added functionality for you!

WordPress offers thousands of themes and theme frameworks

Years ago, the only way to get a nice site was to build the whole thing from scratch. Now with themes and theme frameworks, you can customize and deploy a ready-to-sell site in a matter of hours. Premium theme sites such as WooThemes, Elegant Themes, StudioPress, and Theme Forest dramatically slash your development costs and deployment times, saving you thousands on your web launch. If you’re just looking for something simple (and cheap!) for a personal blog, there are also many free themes available.

If you want more than six reasons to use WordPress, sign up for the Small Business Essentials free newsletter in the top right. I will be working on an expanded list of WordPress features, and other goodies, to release monthly to my newsletter list. Join today so you don’t miss out!

Flickr photo by Team StickerGiant.

Update

I’ve been contacted by the support department at Akismet, who say they have fixed this problem on their end. I am going to test that theory out today and see if it is true.

In English: I can now share links to quality content from other blogs on my site, and combine those links with my own feed on my Facebook and Twitter profiles. This serves multiple purposes: to add value for my readers, and to increase my reach both through my blog and other social media sites. I will start with an explanation of the whys, and then get into the code in a stepwise fashion.

Purpose, Goals and Reasons

Why would you want to republish a feed? I’ve heard the argument that publishing partial feeds or not publishing your feed encourages people to read it from your site and therefore increases your pageviews. In my experience, the opposite is true—syndicating your content gives you a greater reach, increases your subscribers and your pageviews, and creates new sources of traffic for your site that did not exist before.

My purpose in creating a links feed was to create another source of value for my readers, and to reward other authors creating good content with an additional source of traffic by tapping into my audience. I wanted this particular content—the links feed—to be separate from my regular content unless I was discussing it further, because simple links are not the kind of content my readers have come to expect from me.

As for Facebook and Twitter, I am still trying to use these platforms as a source of developing business relationships. I think that republishing my feed is a good way to increase my reach and continue on with my quest of making business contacts through social media.

If you are interested so far but I lose those of you who are business- but not technology-savy with the code section below, just remember—I’m for hire! ;-)

Creating a Links Feed

1. Enter content using a new post, a new category, and custom fields.

To start, you need something to work with, so you’ll need to make a new post. I made a new category called "Links", with a slug of "links", and put my post in that. The post was relatively simple, following this format:
Post Title [link]
<p><a href=”url”>Title of Post being Linked To</a></p>

I added the designation of [link] to all the article titles for the benefit of the Facebook feed below.

To this post, I added custom fields in WordPress using the Custom Fields section in the bottom of the post editing page. For the key "link_desc&quot:, I put a short description of the article; for the key "link_title", I put the name of the article I was linking to; and for the key "link_url", I put the url of the linked article.

2. Create code to appear in sidebar.

Some people use the sidebar.php template that comes with WordPress and call it with get_sidebar(); I put my sidebars in my header file because I have more than one and call them with get_header(). Regardless of how you have your formatting set up, you will have to find the place where your sidebars appear in order to insert the following code:

<ul>
<li><a href="FEEDURL">Subscribe to the Links Feed</a></li>
<?php $my_query = new WP_Query(‘category_id=CATID&showposts=NUMBEROFPOSTS’); while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>
<?php if (in_category(‘CATID’)) : ?>
<li><a href="<?php echo post_custom(‘link_url’); ?>"><?php echo post_custom(‘link_title’); ?></a><br />
<?php echo post_custom(‘link_desc’); ?>
<?php if (post_custom(‘link_addl’)==’yes’) : ?><br /><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">Additional Discussion</a><?php endif; ?></li>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>

For this, you will need the category number (CATID in above code) for your links feed, which you can find in your WordPress admin in Manage -> Categories. (The ID is listed in the left column.) You will also need to know how many posts you want to display (NUMBEROFPOSTS) and the URL for your new feed (FEEDURL) which we will create and insert here in a later step.

In English, this code means to make a new query separate from the main Loop, use it to pull the posts from your links category, display them in a loop, and then close it all up.

3. Burn the new feed.

My blog runs on the /topics/ slug for category archives, but yours may run on /category/ or whatever else you put in there. To find the feed for your links archive, click on one of your other archives and look at the url:
http://www.yoursite.com/category/business/ (for example)
and then change the category to links (or whatever you set it to be) and add the feed designation:
http://www.yoursite.com/category/links/feed/
This will be the URL that you will burn into a feed at FeedBurner. What you choose to call it, and what other options you turn on, are up to you.

Take the feed address you just created and it back into the sidebar code at the step before this. You will also need this URL for some of the instructions below.

4. Hide the links feed from the rest of the site.

To keep the links feed off the rest of the site, you will need to do some coding for exclusion. Also, if you have viewed the site since making the sidebar changes, you may notice some funny things going on. We will fix both of those right now.

You will need to alter your index file and archives file. To start, add this line directly under the get_header() command in archive.php and index.php for your current theme, which should make it the second line on each of these pages:
<?php rewind_posts(); ?>
This restarts the post counter which may have been changed by adding a secondary loop into your sidebar.

Next, for The Loop on the index page, take out this:
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?><?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
and add this line:
<?php if (is_home()) query_posts(‘cat=-CATID’); while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
where CATID is the links category number you identified above. (Make sure you leave the negative before the CATID!) This will tell WordPress to exclude any post on the front page which contains a post from the links feed.

To complete the archives page, the process is a bit more complicated. I wanted to be able to display the links as an archive if someone clicks on that Category name, but I didn’t want it to display in any other archive. To to this, I opened up archive.php and added the line
<?php if (in_category(‘CATID’)) continue; ?>
within The Loop, after the line
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
where CATID is the id number for your links category. This will make the archives skip the posts your links category even if you are viewing archives by tag.

Now, to add the ability to see the links category back in, in case someone wants to view the entire links feed on the web. After the loop but before the footer, add in these lines
<?php if ((is_category()) && (in_category(‘CATID’))) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
where CATID is the ID for your links category. Between these lines, add another copy of The Loop, including whatever was inside it. What this does is display an archive of the links category, on it’s own, if that option is chosen. Your final double loop will look like this:
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php if (in_category(‘CATID’)) continue; ?>
Do stuff …
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php if ((is_category()) && (in_category(‘CATID’))) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
Do same stuff as above …
<?php endwhile; ?><?php endif; ?>
<?php endif; ?>
where CATID is the ID for your links category.

Upload your php files in the theme and try it out.

Note: If you have many links, this will greatly shorten the number of posts you see on your archive pages. You can compensate for this by increasing the number of posts per page in the WordPress Admin (Options -> Reading).

5. Correct the original feed to exclude links.

Now that the links have their own feed, I wanted to take them out of the master content feed for the site. To do this, I went to the original feed at Feedburner and selected "Edit Feed Details". I changed the original feed from a URL like
http://www.yoursite.come/feed/
to a URL that would exclude the links category,
http://www.yoursite.come/feed/?cat=-CATID
where CATID is the id of your links category. Note: it is important that you have the "-"before the category ID number, or it will only have posts from that category instead of excluding that category.

You may need to resync one or more of your feeds to get them up with current information during this process. This button is found on the Troubleshootize tab in FeedBurner.

And now, for Facebook …

1. Create a new feed in Feedburner using your base site URL.
2. Turn on tracking options for that feed in the Feedburner settings.

I wanted to create a new feed just for use with Facebook. This lets me set Facebook-only parameters, and lets me track the usage of my feed from Facebook. To do this, I went to my account on Feedburner, and created a new feed using the base URL of my feed. (For WordPress, this base feed URL is http://www.yoursite.com/feed/) I gave it a special name, "Small Business Essentials for Facebook", and gave it a special feed name/URL, "http://feeds.feedburner.com/FacebookSBE".

3. Install Blog RSS Feed Reader into your Facebook profile.
4. Configure the application with the special feed you created for this purpose.

I had originally been using my Google Feed in combination with Feedheads for Facebook, but that only works with Google Reader or NewsGator. To use my own feed, I found Blog RSS Feed Reader.

Bonus Points: Twitter!

I used TwitterFeed to get both the new links feed and my content feed into my Twitter updates. (The OpenID login process for TwitterFeed is kind of a pain though, sorry.) This uses my feed to generate relationships and traffic on Twitter as well.

In Summary

For those of you who are WordPress developers and found this organically through Google, I hope it helps! For those who aren’t developers, I hope this gave you some sense of the things that are possible by combining freely available software to work for you.

Questions?

If I left anything out here and this solution is not working for me, leave me a comment and I’ll see if I can work it out.

Additional Information

• Using Custom Fields in WordPress
• The Loop in WordPress
• Advanced Category Excluder Plugin for those who don’t want to touch php.
]]> http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/new-things-links-feed-wordpress-facebook-twitter-feedburner-and-some-geek-code/feed/ 1 http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/am-i-off-your-mailing-list/ http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/am-i-off-your-mailing-list/#comments Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:45:55 +0000 Nikole Gipps http://www.smallbusinessessentials.info/2007/10/25/am-i-off-your-mailing-list/
]]> I felt a little bad when someone asked that. No, you’re all not off my mailing list! I was just taking some time to get work done and refocus this blog a bit. Now that it’s been completely redeveloped (and moved from TypePad to a self-hosted new version of WordPress), I am ready to launch!

PLEASE NOTE: This site now has a new URL. That URL is www.smallbusinessessentials.info. Please update your bookmarks accordingly. If you have already signed up to receive feed updates, those will continue as before without any modifications.

In short, you’ll be hearing a lot more from me now.

In other news:

Recent Launches

Chit Chat and Chew
Chit Chat Brands is a company that helps parents and grandparents bond with their kids using innovative products created by a mompreneur with families in mind. The Chit Chat and Chew line is Corliss’ first release from this new company, and I’m very excited to see what she’ll cook up next!

The Appreciation Station
The Appreciation Station is a product that helps kids "learn to earn". It reduces household stress while teaching children personal responsibility. Diana has also been working with educators in using her products in more specialized applications, like school settings and in working with children with Autism.

Pursue the Passion
Purse the Passion, while not a new site, got a redesign on the front page to include a video summary from Brett & Co. of the Pursue the Passion mission.

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