10 WordPress Plugins You Can’t Miss
Tags: Blogging, Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins
When it comes to using Wordpress, nothing beats plugins. They make our lives easier by doing the things we don’t want to. They add features that aren’t included in Wordpress and overall make our blogs (and lives) better.
I decided it was time to share some of the best Wordpress plugins I have been using here on Life of Justin. Some of you may already be using a lot of these but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to mention them.
So check them out and give them a try:
1. All In One SEO Pack
By far the most important plugin I have. It does everything you need for great on-page search engine optimization. Now only does it let you change your…
Continue Reading »A New Look For A New Year
Right before 2009 came around, I had the idea of redesigning my blog to celebrate a new year of blogging. Unfortunately, I was swamped the last few weeks with freelance work and didn’t get around to it.
But over the last 25 hours I have managed to put together a brand new look for Life of Justin. I’m pretty much ready to go to sleep at this point for the next 15 hours or so…
Why The Change?
Ever since changing to my last theme, I have been chopping my theme up to the point where I hardly even knew what was going on. I had a ton of templates for each category and different sidebars. Instead of cleaning it up, I just wanted to dump the thing and start fresh.
Continue Reading »Custom Post Excerpts in Wordpress
A reader contacted me this weekend and asked how I got my excerpts on the homepage to look the way they do. So I thought I would share my secret with everyone.
If you have chosen to go with a blog homepage that contains excerpts instead of full posts, this tip will help make them look a lot better .
What’s So Bad About The Default Excerpts?
By default, Wordpress takes the first 100 characters of your post and uses them as the post excerpt. As far as length, this might be fine depending on how long your posts are. The problem, is with the formatting. Take a look at this excerpt:
Default Excerpts
Notice how all of the formatting has disappeared within the post? It simply takes all the words and places them together. This is a problem if you use a lot of formatting, such as H2 subtitles.
Continue Reading »Flickr Photo Album For Wordpress
Last night, I managed to stay up very late and incorporate a huge new addition for Life of Justin. That would be the new Photo’s Page, which can also be accessed via the Photos button above.
The one thing I was struggling to do with this website was incorporate photos. I have thousands of pictures and it becomes very hard to share them with anyone. I have had a Pro Flickr account for a year now and I try to upload my favorite pictures there whenever I get a chance. I really like Flickr because it gives you a lot of options to organize, tag, and share photos. It also allows you to upload very large pictures which not all sites…
Continue Reading »ShareThis Plug-In For Wordpress
Today a new feature was added to LifeofJustin.com that will make it easier for readers to share my posts with others. When I was using Blogger, I had a Digg button on my right sidebar that allowed people to Digg my site but this did not allow people to share certain posts.
Now that I am using Wordpress, tons of plug-ins are available to make things work much better, and more importantly, easier. The name of the plug-in I am using is called ShareThis and it is available for free.
You can visit the creators website at 
ShareThis.com.
Basically, this tool allows me to add the button you see at the bottom of this post to every post I make. Notice…
Continue Reading »New Theme For Life of Justin
Tags: Blogging, web design, Wordpress
This weekend was another major step forward for LifeofJustin.com. I incorporated a new theme that I find to be much easier to use. It also allowed me to incorporate a new ad structure that I learned about in a book I recently read entitled “Get Google Ads For Free.”
The book basically says to create ad blocks such as the ones you see to the right, and then sell the. The money you make can them be used to purchase Google Adwords. Therefore you are getting traffic from Google for basically free since the ad revenue offsets any costs.
It was a lot of work editing the template in Wordpress to look right but I think I finally have most…
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