So for those who want to add Flash animations to their post, here’s how to do it:

1. Download the Kimili Flash Embed plugin for WordPress.

2. Upload your Flash file (.SWF) manually to your web server using an FTP client like Filezilla.

3. Insert the following code in your post:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://yourdomain.com/pathto/video.swf" height="250" width="400" /].

Of course you can set the dimension to whatever suits your needs. And while the full URL to your SWF file isn’t necessary, it’s better to include it otherwise people who read your posts through an RSS reader won’t be able to see your Flash movie.

This may be useful but if you need a little more control, here’s how to dynamically add pages to your WordPress sitemap:

1. Edit /wp-content/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/sitemap.php

2. Find the line that reads:

$this->AddElement(new GoogleSitemapGeneratorXmlEntry(“</urlset>”));

3. Just before this line, insert:

include(“mysitemap.php”);

4. Create a new empty file into /wp-content/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ and save it as mysitemap.php.

5. Insert the following content into your newly created file:

<?php

$this->AddElement(new GoogleSitemapGeneratorXmlEntry(” <url>”));

$this->AddElement(new GoogleSitemapGeneratorXmlEntry(“\n <loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/document.html</loc>”));

$this->AddElement(new GoogleSitemapGeneratorXmlEntry(“\n <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>”));

$this->AddElement(new GoogleSitemapGeneratorXmlEntry(“\n <priority>0.5</priority>”));

$this->AddElement(new GoogleSitemapGeneratorXmlEntry(“\n </url>\n”));

?>

6. Once your done, upload sitemap.php and mysitemap.php to your web server.

Of course the iteration process has to occur between the <url> and </url> entries (the part identified in red). You can dynamically add pages using an SQL query for example.

The sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files will automatically be updated with your dynamic entries next time your rebuild your sitemap.

Making a video does not only benefit your visitors, it benefits your website as well: publishing your video through a high-traffic site like YouTube.com can bring loads of traffic to yours.

This tutorial will show you how to create a video for your website / blog.

Get A Screen Capture Software

Techsmith makes their available screen capture software, Camtasia, available for free at http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe. Now before you go through the installation, get your free registration key here: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/pcpls.asp.

Record Your Video Tutorial

Launch Camtasia Recorder (Start => Programs => Camtasia Studio 3 => Applications => Camtasia Recorder) and click on Capture => Window. Select the window you wish to record and hit the F9 key.

Camtasia is now recording the active window. When you’re done, hit F9 again. From the Camtasia Recorder menu, click on Capture => Stop.

At this point, there are some nice features you can use such as adding voice narration, transition effects and captions. From the Camtasia Studio window, click on Produce video as… from the left menu.

From the Production Wizard window, select to export your video as an .AVI file. Click “Next” until you get to specify the video size. If you want to publish your video on YouTube, select 640×480:

You can also include a watermark with let’s say, the name of your website. This watermark has to be a .GIF file with a transparent background. Alright, finish on with Production Wizard by hitting next and saving the movie to your hard drive.

A 15 seconds movie at 640×480 will take about 1 Mb of disk space.

Getting Your Video On YouTube

Now it’s time to get your video online. Visit YouTube.com and sign up for a new account if you haven’t already done so. You can also use your Google account. Once logged in, click on My Account and then the Upload videos button.

Broadcast Your Video On Your Website

When you’re done uploading your video on YouTube, a text box will appear containing the HTML code to embed in your webpage or blog post.

That’s it, you’re done! You’ve got a nice video tutorial on your website.

Don’t forget to use relevant keywords on YouTube as this can drive traffic to your website.

RSS means “Really Simple Syndication”. It is a web feed format used to publish frequently updated content like blogs, forums, news headlines and podcasts.

As A Reader

An RSS feed allows you to read all your favorite news or blog posts from within a single interface called an RSS reader (or an RSS aggregator). This can be web-based or it can come as a software. There are plenty of free RSS reader in both web and software format. I tend to like web-based reader more cause you can access it from anywhere.

Here are a few web-based RSS readers:

• Google Reader
• Newsgator
• My AOL
• Rojo.com
• Bloglines
• Pageflakes

And a few software-based readers:

• Feedreader
• Blogbridge
• FeedExplorer

Once you’ve chosen your RSS reader, you need to subscribe to a feed. Go to your favorite blog and look for the RSS feed icon . Click on it and copy the URL from the address bar to your clipboard (for example http://feeds.feedburner.com/thewebmasterscafe). Now let’s say you’re using Google Reader, log into your account at http://www.google.com/reader. Click on the “Add subscription” link.

Paste the feed URL into the text box and click on the “Add” button:

And now you can read all the blog posts from your online RSS reader:

As A Content Publisher

If you’ve got a blog or if you run a forum, you can publish a feed of your content. This allows you to gain regular readers and know them better by analyzing your feed’s stats. Syndication sites like Feedburner even gives you the opportunity to monetize your feed with Google AdSense.

RSS feeds are not only useful to content publishers. You could also use an RSS feed to publish your product catalog to your retailers for example.

Installing a plugin for WordPress is pretty easy:

1. Extract the files from the archive you’ve downloaded.
2. Upload the plugin file (when it’s made of a single PHP file) or the directory (when it’s made of multiple files) to your blog using a FTP client. The plugin file (or folder) must be uploaded into /wp-content/plugins.
3. Enable the plugin from WordPress control panel (http://www.yourblog.com/wp-admin). Select the “Plugins” tab and activate the plugin from the list.

Some plugins may require that you set some configuration values by editing them with your favorite text editor. Just look for a file named readme.txt, install.txt or any other text file that may contain the installation instructions for the plugin before you upload it.

My Favorite WordPress Plugins

While their might be some better plugins out there, here are those I mainly use:

• wp-cache: This plugin is great to help you improve your blog’s performance. It caches WordPress’ pages in the database for some time. So instead of processing all the information each time a visitor comes to your blog, it serves the page (which has already been built) from the database.

  Be careful when using this plugin as it can interfer with other plugins. Some plugins require to be executed every time a page is accessed in order to function properly. As this plugin caches your blog’s pages, some plugins may not be executed everytime and could cause unwanted behaviors.
  

• Social Bookmarks: This plugin appends social bookmarks links to the end of your posts. You can choose from tens of social bookmarking sites to add to your blog.

  Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. A social bookmarking system (like StumbleUpon.com) allows users to save links to their favorite webpages and share them with other users who can rate these bookmarks. Social bookmarking can account for a great deal of traffic if used efficiently.
  

• Akismet: While this plugin comes with WordPress, it’s still a very useful to block unwanted comments (spam) on your blog. This plugin requires that you get a WordPress.com API key in order to function properly. To get your API key, just follow this link, signup for a WordPress account and you’ll get the key in your welcome email.
• Custom Query String UTW: This plugin allows you to specify how many posts per page are in shown in different parts of your site. For example, you could have 3 posts shown on the frontpage, 5 posts shown in category pages and 10 posts shown in the archive. Without this plugin, you’d have to use a single value for every part of your blog.
• Feedburner FeedSmith: This plugin redirects your blog’s feed to Feedburner.
• Full Text Feed: Allows you to display the full content of your posts in your RSS feed while displaying only a summary on your archive and category pages.
• Get Recent Comments: Encourage your readers to comment your posts by displaying their comments on your blog’s sidebar.
• Google Sitemaps: While this plugin doesn’t bring much to the visitor experience, this is a must have in my opinion. This plugins builds a sitemap file from your blog’s pages and pings Google automatically when a change is made to it.

  A sitemap is a text file in XML format that contains links to all the pages from your website. This file is usually located at the root of your website and is usually named sitemap.xml or sitemap.xml.gz. Although only Google and Yahoo allow sitemap submission, other search engines (like Live.com) will look for this file and pick it up automatically (if you’re lucky). When a search engine picks up your sitemap, it then knows the entire structure of your website, making it easier to crawl it and index it.
  

• MyAvatars: Displays your visitor’s MyBlogLog picture next to comments they leave on your blog. I’ve already made a post about a bug in MyAvatars and how to solve it.
• Related Posts: Propose other relevant posts to your readers and encourage them to stay longer on your blog with this plugin.
• Show Top Commentators: Encourage more feedback and discussion from readers, by rewarding them every time they post a comment.
• Subscribe To Comments: Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
• Tiny MCE Advanced: Now this a plugin I really love. It adds lots of functionnalities to WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor. Read WordPress Advanced WYSIWYG Editors.
• WordPress Duplicate Content Cure: Since some of your content may be appear in more than one place on your blog (i.e.: in categories, archives, etc.), you may get penalized by Google. To prevent duplicate content to being indexed by Google, this plugin adds the “nofollow” meta tags to duplicate pages. Another must have.

If you’ve found some useful plugins too, post them here!

Anyway I know I’ve probably stolen a few stock images myself at some point but I now use free image banks.

What Can You Do If Your Content Is Stolen?

As a webmaster, blogger, designer or whatever, if your content is stolen, you can always file a DCMA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act).

• DMCA definition at Wikipedia.com
• DMCA – What does it mean for webmasters? – Blogcast from shoemoney.com
• 12 U.S. Laws Bloggers Should Know

You can find out if your content has been reproduced by using CopyScape.com free service. Simply type in the URL of the page you want to verify and see where it’s being used.

You can also add a Copyscape.com banner at the bottom of your webpages. Not that it really protects you or anything but it let your readers know you are aware of content stealing.

Protecting Your Images

As stolen images cannot be detected by services like copyscape.com, you have to add a signature to them. This signature is called a watermark. This can either be visible or not. The thing with visible watermark is that they can easily be removed. Here are a few links on how to add watermarks to your images:

• Create a hidden watermark in images - Photoshop Tutorial
• Watermarking Images in Macromedia Fireworks

Where To Get Free Content And Images

And if you’re tempted to steal someone else’s content always remember there are free online resources.

• EzineArticle.com
• ArticleCity.com
• ArticlesFactory.com
• eZINESearch.com
• 8 Great Sources For Free Stock Photos from DerekBeau.com

Often I discover some nice resources and sometimes I discover some that sucks.

Today I just saw http://blogging-oriented.blogspot.com in my stats and took a look at it.

Guess what? This is the content that I saw on the home page (or at http://blogging-oriented.blogspot.com/
2007/11/how-to-add-favicon-to-your-siteblog.html) :

Except for the first sentence and the screenshot, the post has been copied word-for-word from my post located at http://www.thewebmasterscafe.net/web-design/adding-favicon.html! Talk about not being able to create your own content!

There’s No Get-Rich-Quick Method

I guess that with all the make-money-online craze that’s been going on lately on the web, people are putting up websites and blogs in the hope of making a quick buck. Well guess what? You just won’t make it that way. If you’re in to making it online on a professional level, provide your own unique, original and useful content.

Do Not Steal Content

If you can’t write for yourself, there are plenty of online resources that will provide you with some content. If you don’t mind having unoriginal content (i.e. if you don’t care about your website), go get some free articles online. There are plenty of websites that provide free content for you to publish:

• EzineArticles.com
• ArticleCity.com
• IdeaMarketers.com

If you are a little more serious about your online business, then hire a freelancer. There are plenty of people waiting to write for you for a few dollars. GetAFreeLancer.com comes to mind. There are other freelancing sites out there.

Ask For Permission And Give Deserved Credit

If you really have to use somebody else’s content (full or partial), ask for their permission. And if they’re ok with it, at least give them the credit they deserve.

And most of all, ask yourself is blogging right for you?

When people comment on my blog, I like to see who they are. It gives a more personnal vibe to the post. This can be possible using the WordPress plugin developed at Napolux.com. Installing the plugin is pretty straightforward:

1. unzip it’s content
2. upload the MyAvatars folder to your plugin directory
3. enable the plugin

When you’re done, add the following code to comments.php in the comment loop:

<?php if(function_exists(“MyAvatars”)) MyAvatars(); ?>

For my part, I’ve added it right before:

<?php comment_text() ?>  

As reported by Zac Johnson, the MyAvatars plugin may generate a stack overflow error in Internet Explorer 7. You can solve this problem by removing the Javascript code in the avatar’s image tag.

If you don’t want to bother with this, you can download the fixed plugin here: myavatars.zip

I just want to point out that if you are using OpenAds within your WordPress theme, using OpenAds’ PHP invocation code will result in not rotating between banners associated to your publisher zone until the cached pages are expired.

The only workaround is to use the Javascript invocation code but keep in mind that this may alter your website performance.

Integrating Javascript to your content is made impossible as the editor breaks the code and while you can enter some HTML code, it may be broken too as the WordPress editor replaces some tags. For example, try adding a <div> and you’ll see that upon saving your post, <div> will be changed to a <p> tag.

TinyMCE Advanced Plugin

WordPress uses TinyMCE, a Javascript content editor. If you’d like to keep using TinyMCE but would like to get advanced features, there’s the TinyMCE Advanced plugin available for free. This plugin adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Full Screen, IESpell, Layer, Media, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras. Together these plugins can add over 40 new buttons to the toolbar.

You can install this plugin the same way you install any other plugins: 

1. download TinyMCE Advanced
2. unzip the archive
3. upload the tinymce-advanced directory to your wp-content/plugins folder
4. activate the plugin

TinyMCE Advanced gives you the possibilty of customizing the toolbars. Go into Manage => TineMCE Advanced and simply drag the toolbars you want to add to your editor.

What I really like about TinyMCE Advanced is that it can import your theme’s CSS styles.

Advanced TinyMCE Editor Plugin

There is also another WordPress plugin available at http://www.mkbergman.com/?page_id=383. This plugin adds up to 60 buttons to your WordPress editor. Installation is pretty much the same as the previous plugin.

Other WYSIWYG Editors

While it’s possible to disable TinyMCE to replace it by third parties editors such as FCKEditor, I still haven’t found one that’s working perfectly out of the box. FCKEditor is in fact one editor I’d like to see integrated into WordPress as a plugin as I am using it a lot for custom PHP applications I develop.

Still you can try it out but backup your database as using FCKEditor and reverting to TinyMCE may break your post layout.

• Dean’s FCKeditor for WordPress plugin 1.0
• Editor Monkey 0.3 using FCKEditor and TinyMCE