Following Twitter’s effort to make it easier for people to follow someone on twitter, they just released today their own “Instant Follow” button. I’m surprised that they just come up with it recently. Facebook has had their own “Instant Like” button a long time ago. With Twitter’s instant follow button, your visitor doesn’t have to leave your website to follow you on twitter. He/she just has to click that “Follow” button and voilla…he/she is now following you on twitter.

To create your twitter instant follow button, go to http://twitter.com/about/resources/followbutton and fill out your information. After that, simply copy and paste the code to your website.

If you are still interested with their old follow button, you can still find them at http://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons

• If you are looking for an area in Google Search, or even a zip code, Google is marking that area on Google Map and put it as part of your search result. In this example below, I was searching for “32503″, a zip code for Pensacola, FL area. 
• This second one is a happy news for Gmail users. Google is now adding more “protection” for people who is planning to attach an attachment, but oftentimes forgot to actually attach the file. Now, if you mention anything about “attachment” in your email body, Google will warn you if you hit the send button without actually attaching anything to your email.
• If you were using Google Webmaster Tool to manage your website, you will now find a new section for Google Instant Preview. The purpose for this is to match if the screenshot Google captured as your website reflects what normal visitors see when they visit your site. If not, it means Google is having some problem crawling and deciphering your website.

I’m sure Google released more updates than what I listed here. If you know more of Google’s interesting updates, please let us know by leaving your comment below.

I recommended you to use http://autopinger.com. It is a one-stop ping service which allow you to ping to many different sites and content aggregators, such as Technorati, Syndic8, Google blogsearch, and many more. The advantage of using ping service like this is that you don’t have to ping all of those content aggregators one by one. You can even setup an account with them so that Autopinger will do the service automatically for you.

As you can see Autopinger.com has quite a few services to ping to. What impressed me was the fact that they also put the health of each service there. It is to let us know, from all the pings that were sent to them, how many of them that were actually successfully sent. If you subscribe with them, they can actually ping other websites for you automatically when they noticed new content is available from your site.

“Ping”-ing should actually increase your web traffic because it means that your website is getting more exposure in the blogosphere. The more exposure you get the more likely people will find you, either through RSS syndication or search engine result. Search engines, like Google, could also crawl your site sooner since it found many links from the content aggregators about your site. So, why don’t you do it? It’s easy to do and won’t take you long to do it.

Does “ping”-ing help your website traffic/exposure? Please share it in the comment section. For me, it lowers the gap time between the time when I posted something until Google actually crawls it, so it increases my site traffic from the fact that people can find my content faster.

However, you want to feature one picture in one spot of your blog post, and the rest in another spot. Before, I don’t know how to do this. Everytime I use the picture gallery, it seems that I have to include all the pictures in my gallery. Apparently, the developers for WordPress have figured out that the need will arise when you need to exclude some pictures from the gallery.

For example, you want to exclude the picture of the shop, or the fourth picture from the picture gallery. You just have to add [exclude="pic-id1, pic-id2, and so on"] to your picture gallery HTML code

and this is the result

Unfortunately, I haven’t found the easy way to get the picture ID. The only way, that I know of, where you can find the picture ID is by going to your Media Library and click “Edit” on the picture you want to exclude. In your address bar, the URL will then show the picture ID. In my case, the URL is “…/wp-admin/media.php?action=edit&attachment_id=311″, so the picture ID is 311. If you have several pictures you want to exclude, find the IDs of the all the excluded pictures and put them inside the “exclude” tag separated by comma, ex:

Also, you might want to check WordPress Codex: Gallery Shortcode for more tags you can use in your picture gallery HTML.

I will share any tutorials or tips about WordPress that I think worthy to be shared in the future. This time, one of my favorite site, MakeUseOf.com has released one useful eBook that you can use to build your WordPress from ground up. It will give you a general overview of WordPress installation, choosing the right plugins, themes, and so on.

If you want to download the PDF file, you can do so by going here.

Do you have any questions? comments? or remarks? Please leave it in the comment section.

I’m not a WordPress developer or anything, but I hope by knowing what WordPress 3 can do for you, you will be able to think of a better and efficient way to use WordPress for your Internet marketing journey (or even for personal use).

Currently, it’s still in Beta version. If you want to test it out, please visit WordPress Blog and download the installation files.

To know about all the new feature of WordPress 3.0, you can see them at WordPress Codex. However, I will try to mention here several new features that I’m most excited about.

• WordPress MU is now being merged with WordPress.org. I’m not too familiar with WordPress MU, but I tried it once a long time ago. What WordPress MU offer is to be able to host multiple blogs under same domain. I would assume since WordPress MU and WordPress.org are combined, you will be able to control the characteristics of each blog within a single dashboard.
• Ability to choose custom username upon WP installation. You can now be registered as the “admin” using different username. Before, this was a security issue, because hackers will know that every blog running on WP will have the username of “admin”. The only thing left for them to find is the password. Therefore, by changing the user name, hackers can’t easily break into WordPress admin page.
• New WP default theme, Twenty Ten. The goal here is to have new theme every year. Even though this is WP default theme, it offers great control options, such as Custom header, Custom Background, Clean Design, Multiple Widget Areas, Cascading Menus, and many more.
  
• Canonical plugin. This is kinda neat, I think. If you have plugins that you have been using for a long time and, suddenly, the author stop developing it, you don’t have to worry anymore. WordPress 3.0 allows the community to take over the plugin supports and trying to develop the new version as new editions of WordPress being released.
• Shortlinks API. When you have those long URL, you might want to use this built-in service in WordPress 3.0. This will work kinda like bit.ly for Twitter, I think.

What do you think? Are you excited yet?

Source: WPBeginner, Dougal’ Campbell, TemplateMonster.

Since Darren has already mentioned things that add value in our conversation, I would share what “NOT” to do when you are blogging.

• Having a text-only post. Have you ever seen a blog post that’s like that? The only thing you see is this long text-only blog post. It’s kinda boring, isn’t it? yeah…I agree with you there. Include images or videos that are related to the post. Stock image sites like Flickr.com can be really useful here.
• Leaving out the meta descriptions empty. This small mistake could cost you a lot. You may have a great article, but if it is not optimized for search engine, you might miss those massive traffic that the search engine could bring to you. If you are using WordPress, simple plugin like All in One SEO Pack could help you to do this easily.
• Not categorizing your blog post under different categories. After you are blogging for a while, you might notice that your blog archive is getting bigger and bigger. This is a good thing, right? sure, it is. However, if you don’t categorize your blog posts into different categories, your readers won’t be able to find articles of their interest easily. You don’t want to have your readers scroll those 20 pages blog posts of yours, do you? Make it easier for them. This is especially true if you are having a thematic blog. For example, you have a blog about cooking recipe. You might want to categorize your blog into several categories and sub-categories, such as Asian, European, Middle-East, etc., so that your readers can find their favorite recipe faster.
• Writing in 3rd person. This is just my personal opinion, but I think you should write in 1st person, instead of 3rd person. If it’s written in 3rd person, your readers will feel like reading a thesis or research paper. There’s no personality into it. There might be several cases where this is an exception, such as scientific blog, etc., but generally speaking, making your blog post personal and in day-to-day tone is important to establish openness between your and the readers.
• Long gap period between blog posts. I’m the most guilty person here, I know. I am trying to do better though. Long gap period will give impression to your reader that you do not or, even worse, never update your blog. Because of this, they will never come back again. However, if every time when a reader come he sees new content, he will find it useful to come to your blog often.

Do you have anything to add? If I ask you, what are the single most important thing to do and NOT to do when writing a blog post, what would they be?

I have been searching for a plugin that can display my blogroll in a page or a post. The reason for this was because I want to create a new page, Internet Marketing Rolodex. I figured that if I have to update my Rolodex page everytime I added new links to my blogroll, I would spend a lot of time. If I can just find a plugin that will help me to do that, it would be great. Lo and behold….I finally found one.

Blogroll Links really helps me to show my blogroll in a page. After you installed it, just follow this format and put it in your page/blog post.

[blogroll-links categoryslug=”insert your category slug here”]

That’s it, easy and simple. You will now have a page/blog post with your blogroll links from the specific category slug.

Official Page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blogroll-links/
Author’s Page: http://www.rajiv.com/blog/2008/02/10/blogroll-links/

• re-arrange the pages
• hide some of the pages based on the need
• re-organize the parent and child pages

Official link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pagemash/
Author link: http://joelstarnes.co.uk/blog/pagemash/