If you’re a smart blogger, you know you’ll get more return on your investment if you spend more time creating shareable content than sharing your content. If your readers love your content, they will pin it and like it and share it–and you can’t put a price on reader-generated promotion. It doesn’t matter if you…
In my search for the perfect solution to common RSS feed challenges, it was the beauty of Mad Mimi’s RSS emails formatted for “clean display” that finally gave me the inspiration. I’d spent hours trying to customize my MailChimp RSS campaigns to include a featured image along with the excerpt, but to no avail. (Then there is the constant frustration of extra-wide post images making the MailChimp email body drastically wider than the email header.) And even if I could get my emails to look how I wanted them to (just like Mad Mimi’s!), that still left the question of my RSS feed. That’s when I realized the solution was to start at the source and customize my WordPress RSS feed.
But customizing my WordPress RSS feed was a lot harder than it sounded. Until WordPress developer Robin Cornett took her plugin Send Images to RSS and made version 3.0 rich with all the features I’d hoped for an in RSS plugin–and more!
Here’s how to know Send Images to RSS is for you, and the details on how I set it up to create a beautiful custom RSS feed summary.
I’ve been in a quandary about partial feeds versus full feeds ever since I knew what an RSS feed was. As a reader, I liked the ability to consume an entire post from within my feed reader or email inbox, especially when I didn’t have an internet connection at home. But as a blogger, I wanted to get readers to my site, where they could comment on posts, and of course, click on affiliate links and generate ad impressions.
But wait, what is the difference, you ask? WordPress offers two default options for displaying your RSS feed: summary or full text.
The truth is, I don’t like either option. But there’s an alternative.
by Gretchen Louise with Kelly Kathleen Many WordPress bloggers ran their plugin updates in early December to see a notice announcing the discontinuation of their favorite suite of related posts plugins: nRelate Related Content, nRelate Most Popular, and nRelate Flyout. We had until 5pm EST on December 31, 2014 before the nRelate plugins and service stopped…
If these 31 days “inside” WordPress have left you with more questions than answers, then you’ve come to the right place. I’ve compiled some of your most FAQ in this post. And when you have more? Just comment and ask! I’ll do my best to answer them. Social Media & Blogging What’s the best way…
You don’t have to be a social media ninja to be a successful blogger. In fact, your blog posts can go viral without you ever having to share them on Facebook or Twitter. All you have to do is make your posts shareable. (And have quality, compelling content worth sharing, of course.) Here are ten ways…
Your tech-savvy blog readers can subscribe to your blog using an RSS feed reader like Feedly or Bloglovin’, but the rest of them might not even know what that little RSS symbol stands for, let alone how to use it. (Don’t miss the 5 Minute Guide to RSS Feeds in WordPress.) The key to getting…
What is an RSS feed? RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is the latest content of a blog surrounded by special code that makes it available for “syndication” across the world wide web. Using a popular feed reader like Bloglovin’ or Feedly, or any number of other apps or programs, your visitors…
A cache plugin creates a “cached” or pre-loaded version of your WordPress site’s pages that can be quickly accessed without checking the host files and database to see if there is newer information. Or, in the more technical terms of a WPMU blogger, “Caching is reusing data from previous requests to speed up subsequent requests.” By…
When it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), WordPress is top of the line. And if you use a theme from a professional source like StudioPress or WooThemes, your theme is designed to take advantage of the power of WordPress SEO. But if you want to really optimize your site’s SEO and take it to…
I’m delighted to have my friend Trina joining us today to talk about how much she loves Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin. I hope you’ll enjoy her enthusiasm for serving her readers through SEO as much as I have! -Gretchen SEO strategies and my blog have not been friends for very long. I blogged for 6 years…
A WordPress shortcode is a code word or phrase enclosed in square brackets: [sampleshortcode]. Depending on the shortcode, its output can be customized by parameters: [sampleshortcode category=”tech” display=3]. You see the code in the brackets when you are editing the post or page (no matter whether you’re in the Visual or Text editor), but when…
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