Importing and displaying feeds in your WordPress themes is a great way to share additional content with your readers. Some good examples include:

The goal here is to make a list of posts in the sidebar that show a number of recent posts. There will be a button you can click which will replaces those links to recent posts with older posts, AJAX style. You can keep clicking the button and keep getting older and older posts. On this site, we currently show 5 recent posts. So this little section shows the 5 posts after that, then clicking the button once will show 5 more older than that, and so on. This quick post outlines six steps to make it happen.

By default, WordPress generates an RSS feed for the comments on every published post. Many sites take advantage of this by displaying a feed link next to the comments area. This enables visitors to subscribe to the comment thread and stay current with conversation. It’s convenient, simple, and super useful. For example, a typical feed menu for many blogs includes the following items:

Going the self publishing route with our book meant that we didn’t have a big fancy book editor going over our text. We of course strive to be the best writers we can be, but we are clearly better WordPress wranglers than we are wordsmiths. If you find any typos or any other kind of mistake in the book, you can submit them here in our new Errata section. We’ll be incorporating all fixes into subsequent releases of the book (which as book buyers, you get for free!). Much appreciated!

Jeff and I launched this blog back in May of this year, after we decided we were going to self-publish the WordPress book we were working on. After weighing all the options, we decided going it on our own was best because we would have 100% control over everything. From the content of the book, to the layout and design, to the blog, sales site, everything. Today, it all comes together!

One of the best ways to ensure strong security for your WordPress-powered site is to secure its foundations during the installation process. Of course these techniques can be implemented at any point during the life of your site, but stetting them before the game starts prevents headaches and saves time. We’ll start with the WordPress database..

I think one of the biggest WordPress myths is that you need a bunch of plugins to control comment spam. Pretty much all of the posts out there on preventing WordPress comment spam are telling you to install some list of “must-have” anti-spam plugins. Some authors insist that you need only a few “choice” plugins, while others advise you to load up on everything you can get your hands on. Such advice is all well-intentioned, I’m sure, but it’s all based on the assumption that plugins are actually necessary to control comment spam. They’re not. WordPress is well-equipped to handle the job all by itself. Plugins may provide additional anti-spam functionality, but they are by no means essential to running a spam-free site.

The month of November is National Novel Writing Month (or #NaNoWriMo). Joel Goodman is participating and thought that the WP Typo theme would be a good fit for it. Joel has expanded upon the theme by adding a settings page with various typography options, better integrated user registration, and some custom design tweaks.

You don’t want to go putting HTML tags directly into post titles. It might show up OK on your own site, but it can be problematic. For example, your titles through RSS will show the tags as next, not render them. I was wishing for a plugin to handle this better, but until then, here is almost-as-simple way to go about it.