Introducing my Meta Blog and Three Posts on Blogging

I’m trying something a little different this week. It won’t take the place of my Sunday roundups, it’ll just be a way for me to provide some useful content (I hope) for readers who are also bloggers or who might become bloggers.

As some of you have noticed, I have a site hire.financefreelancelife.com where I offer blog consulting services. I’ve also started a Meta blog, or blog about blogging, over there.

These articles are more in-depth than a lot of about-blogging articles; they’re very focused on a particular topic, like using WordPress’s PHP tags right. If you’d like to subscribe, you can do so at http://feeds.feedburner.com/mrsmicahonblogging. But I’ve decided that I’ll also do a weekly roundup of the articles over here on Saturdays (unless I get a lot of complaints…and please let me know if you don’t like the idea).

Without further ado:

• The Best Plugins for a New WordPress Blog

  One thing I get asked periodically is which plugins I recomend to new bloggers. I came up with a list—not of all the plugins I use but of all the plugins I think any new blogger could use. I tried to stay away from ones that are limited towards people who want to use Twitter with their blog, etc. I may add more in the future.

  This article got me so excited, in fact, that I created a .zip file with all the listed plugins in it. I call it the “WordPress Plugin Starter Pack.” It can be downloaded from the post or from a download page which explains more about how to use it.

• How to Deny Access to Spammers and Create a 403 Error Page

  If you have problems with a persistant, live spammer, this shows how to take their IP address and block them. It can also be used to block trolls…or really anyone you want. It also explains how to put up the 403 error page that a blocked person will see. I created a special one so that people would know what had happened and if a legitimate person ever got blocked accidentally, I could unblock them.

  If you want to give it a shot, consider asking if one of your regular commenters will play along…but be sure to unblock them afterwards!!!

• Changing the Header in the Cutline 3 Column Split (or Right) WordPress Theme

  I use the Cutline 3-column split on this blog. You may have noticed, however, that I don’t have the standard extra picture in the header. This post explains how I got rid of it and how to make your site look nice after you’ve removed it. If you simply delete the code which contains the images, it leaves you with some dark lines up against each other.

  I hope it’ll be useful to those who like the Cutline look but aren’t as thrilled by the amount of space taken up by the header.

That’s all for this week, folks! Next week, I should have at least one post about using conditional php and wordpress tags to mix things up on your site. It might sound intimidating, but I hope I’ll present it in a straightforward, easy-to-use way.

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