Fortunately, it is extremely easy to fix your blog so that more people can read it. It’s also worth noting that many people in America speak English as a foreign language. For this reason, translation of a blog becomes important.

Google Translate is the most popular form of translation for a blog. The feature is completely free and can work in one of three ways:

3 Ways You Can Make Your Website Available to the World

1. Add the Website Translator (Drop-Down Menu)

This is a great way to section off your website. For example, if you only want readers to have the option to translate your blog into a different language, you can do that. You can also hand pick which languages you want available. You can select all the languages Google Translate offers, or pick and choose. Once you make all of your decisions on the Google Translate service, a code will be generated for you. Just copy and paste the code into your webpage, and you’re done! Visit the Google Translate homepage for more information.

2. 1-Click Translations for the Toolbar

This is one of my personal favorite ways to translate a webpage. This works great if you have a little bit of extra space on your webpage and know that you only want a few languages available for translation. For example, many businesses know if they have a lot of Spanish speaking readers, so it makes sense to stick with that one language. 1-Click Translations allows the language to be on display (as opposed to a drop down menu), so it works nicely for those who think translation will be a big selling point for their business. The best part: All you have to do is drag the language you’d like found here into your toolbar, and then all readers have to do is click the link.

3. Download Google Toolbar

Although this option does not have as many language choices as the other options, it is extremely beneficial for those who speak English as a second language. Many people want to read a website in English, but get caught on a few words. The Google Toolbar allows readers to put their cursor over a word and instantly see the word in a different language. This service is also free, and can be downloaded here.

Common Concerns with Google Translation

• Comments – Many people get nervous about translation because of the comments. If a blog is read in a different language, then won’t the comments be in that same language? In some cases yes, but in many cases no. You will be surprised to find that although a reader may read something in a different language; they feel comfortable writing a comment in English. If you do get an occasional comment in a different language, it only takes about ten seconds to translate that comment into English. You can use the Google Translate website by copying and pasting the comment in the box on the left. There is a dropdown menu up top where you pick the language of the comment (or have it detected) àEnglish, and then hit “translate” to see what the comment says. You can even type in your own comment and translate it into the reader’s language if you wish!

• Conversion – It is also worth noting that the translation is never perfect. Because languages do not always follow the same format (ex: sentence structure of subject, verb, object), it can be tough to translate perfectly. However, the translations will get the main point of the website across. If you have ever read writing from a non-native speaker, you will sometimes hear mistakes here and there; however the message is clear. Your translations will be very similar in this sense.

Translation of a website is truly one of the easiest ways your company can optimize its website. It doesn’t take up much space on a webpage or involve more than 5 minutes of work, so it’s a great little trick if you’re looking for something to spice up your website. There is no better time than the start of a New Year to try something different, and I think you will find that this is an aspect of website optimization that you’ll enjoy.

Photo Credit: cuesportnews.com

Amanda DiSilvestro is a writer on topics ranging from social media to employee background checks. She writes for an online resource that gives advice on topics including document software to small businesses and entrepreneurs for the leading business directory, Business.com.

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Let me give a nice example. A couple of months ago I created this niche blog about the Eee Reader. I was anticipating that Asus might release its latest gadget within the year and since the eeereader.net domain was still available I immediately grabbed it.

I’ve got a couple of post put up but never really bothered to post regularly on the blog. But when things started to heat up in the ebook market, I decided to do some posts covering the latest news.  That’s when I decided to add the Retweet button at the end of each of the post in my blog.

I decided to tweet some of my posts from the blog to Twitter. And guess what? some of the people who are following me actually Retweeted some of my Tweets although I didn’t ask them to. They did it voluntarily.

And what did those ReTweets do to my blog? I checked my Google AdSense account and noticed a spike in AdSense impression for that particular blog. In fact, its impression even surpassed the AdSense  impressions of my other older blogs.

For the past couple of days, the blog I’m referring to has consistently generated ample AdSense impressions. I just installed a stat plugin to find out how the blogs is doing in terms of  page views in relation to the number of times the posts are being ReTweeted.

Aside from ReTweet, you might also want to check out the Facebook Sharing widget which was recently rolled out by Facebook and see which of these two social media services will work wonders for your blogs.

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If you’re among the many bloggers who are using WordPress.com to host your blogs either as a free or premium account, WordPress got some good news for you. All WordPress.com blogs are now mobile-friendly, well at least for the iPhone and Blackberry devices.

Being mobile-friendly means that all blogs hosted on WordPress.com can now be displayed using an optimized WP Touch theme, provided of course that readers are using the iPhone or Blackberry devices when viewing your blogs. Readers with these devices will have easy access to blog posts, pages and archives. In addition, they will also get access to a fancy AJAX commenting and post loading interface. The mobile theme will also scale down blog headers to fit it on the screen of these mobile devices.

But how about your blog readers who are not using the iPhone and Blackberry devices? WordPress.com will be using the modified WordPress Mobile Edition to display your blogs.

Now, take note that this will be the standard default settings for all WordPress.com blogs. So, if you don’t want this feature activated you may disable it by going to Appearance – > Extras in your WordPress.com dashboard and disable “display a mobile theme when this blog is viewed with a mobile browser.”

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If you’re looking for an effective solution to help get your blog noticed then the Contextual Partnership Plugin for WordPress bloggers could be well worth consideration. Perhaps the most attractive aspect is that there is no cost involved.

According to the developers the plugin is designed to;

Drive more targeted visitors to your blog (or blogs) by strategically linking your blog to and from other bloggers participating in the network. The exact method used to achieve this remains confidential but apparently it’s not a basic reciprocal link exchange – nor the more common 3 way linking arrangement often seen between bloggers.

Enhance the user experience for your blog visitors by providing them with links to other high quality blogs for further information on subjects of interest (and it can do this without you actually loosing the visitor which is a great feature).

Indirectly increase your search engine rankings by building highly relevant incoming links to your blog for keyword terms you define, related to your own niche market.

Not a bad indirect benefit at all.

To better understand how the network works, first you need to know what a “contextual link” actually is. A contextual link is simply a link “within content” of a blog post and “within context” of specific keyword terms in that post. For example the term “dog training” found within a blog post becomes a link out to another blog (related to “dog training”) within the network. Contextual Links are found all over the internet – bloggers interlink their own pages contextually, there are paid advertising programs that allow you to place contextual advertising links and earn per click, and bloggers naturally link out to other websites they find useful “contextually” as well.

This is the key to the “Contextual Partnership”. When you install and setup the WordPress Plugin, you’re asked to provide the URL’s you wish to advertise on other partners blogs, and the keyword terms you want those blogs to use to link back to your own. When a match is found within the network for the keyword terms you provide (and assuming it meets with the Contextual Partnership’s strategic linking methodology), a link back to your blog is assigned, and your account has a credit removed.
The amount of credits your account holds appears to be directly related to the number of links you’re providing to other partners in the network for the keyword terms they themselves are looking to use to advertise. Apparently for every link you provide for another partner, you earn 1 credit. That 1 credit is then “cashed in” to assign a link back to your own blog from other partners whenever a match is found for your own keyword terms. So if you already have 100 posts in your blog, and each of those pages finds a match to provide a link to another partner, then technically you could receive 100 incoming links to your blog as soon as you’ve been approved to participate in the partnership. You also continually earn more points and incoming links as you continue to blog and add more posts just like you usually do.

That’s the basic overview and you’ll find more specific information on the plugin website including details of many features not mentioned here (like the ability to select specifically which blog posts you want to include – or nor include in the network)…

http://www.contextualpartnership.com

Uptake by the blogger community seems to have been extremely good and this new service looks to become very popular. In the first two weeks of launch the partnership already had over 54,000 individual places to place links throughout the network, and within the first 4 weeks over 10,000 advertising links had been allocated between network partners. This is most likely a result to how easy it is to actually setup the plugin and participate – it literally takes 5 minutes to install and setup – although approval can take anywhere from 24-72 hours depending on the moderation queue as only high quality blogs are accepted to participate to keep out the splogs and spammers.
This seems to be one of those services worth giving a shot for a few months, and by the looks of things the developers have some exciting new features in the pipeline to make things even more effective for partners in the future.

You can find out full details and download the plugin below…

http://www.contextualpartnership.com

Or alternatively you can download the plugin directly from WordPress…
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contextual-partnership-link-exchange-plugin/

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While I am talking about it endlessly elsewhere, I wanted to cover one of the key differences that I think coders will really enjoy in using WPUnlimited: traditional theme files.

So you might be asking yourself why traditional theme files is important or worth mentioning, but one of the issues I have always had with Thesis, a theme I enjoyed was the fact that opening header.php didn’t really give me a normal WordPress header.php theme file. It was just a call to another PHP file, making the whole customization aspect a nightmare for a beginner programmer.

A good example of the difference is to look at a popular WordPress theme’s index file, which only includes something along the lines of: html_framework();

Just that one line… no mention of includes for headers or footers, no loops, nothing.

This leaves someone looking to customize how posts are displayed with the horrible task of digging through files to see where that PHP code is, and how they can manipulate it.

WordPress Unlimited’s theme files look very much like you’ve seen since the Classic theme was created, with easy to understand header, footer, and index pages that makes editing the theme easy for anyone immersed in WordPress already.

As a side note, WPUnlimited also has a great affiliate program, so if you enjoy the theme, I’d love it if you passed it on to your friends, and earned yourself a 40% commission on any of your sales. Even if you don’t buy WPUnlimited, you can sign up for the affiliate program. Check it out, it could be a great opportunity to promote the next amazing WordPress theme.

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I think this is ridiculous. I, for one, am glad that I use custom themes, and Thesis, a great premium theme. I wish that Thesis was able to be part of the WordPress theme directory to take advantage of the update and upgrade system now in WordPress core, but since Matt doesn’t agree with their business model, he punishes them directly.

Matt blames theme creators for not thinking creatively when it comes to building a business around theme development, but if he keeps cutting off their arms when they try to find ways to build a business, eventually, they will give up and move on to something that gives them a better return on investment regarding their time.

Maybe this issue will become the seed of a new mass exodus to another publishing platform? Do I hear Habari waiting in the wings? I’ve been told numerous times that Habari will let theme developers easily build a business around their themes for that platform.

This all wouldn’t bother me so much, except that Automattic is making huge boatloads of money off of WordPress and that is in large part thanks to all of the community support the platform gets.

More Reading:
Automattic putting the boot to premium theme developers
WordPress.org Pull 200 GPL Themes
200 Themes Removed From WordPress.org – Matt Explains Why
More Hypocrisy from Mullenweg and WordPress with new themes jihad

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Their understanding of the niche they were trying to fill was part of the reason they didn’t need me sticking around as their Community Manager and I am happy today to announce that they have launched their WordPress plugin for PicApp.

Even better, it is in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory, so it will be easy to keep track of any updates and over one thousand people have already downloaded it.

Having hard time finding affordable, yet high end, images for your blog? problem solved. Access millions of updated images, of any topic (news, celebrity, sports, events, creative and more) directly from your WordPress environment and add any image easily to your post. The images, legal and free to use under the license terms, will enhance your blog content, improve its SEO and attract a significantly larger readership.

Moving PicApp from a destination site where you have to do everything, and bringing it inside the WordPress administration panel is genius, and PicApp deserves huge kudos for doing this.

If you haven’t given PicApp a try before because you felt it took too long to add the images you wanted to your blog, check out the new PicApp WordPress plugin.

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The winner will get a free custom WordPress theme from the team at Blog Design Studio, and the writing project runs until the end of November, so I suggest you get over there if you want a chance at winning a custom WordPress theme.

What do you need to write about?

Here are some of the examples of topic :

1. How blog design will change your blog’s value?
2. Why a blog design is important for your blog’s authority?
3. 10 tips to keep in mind before you get your blog designed!

For more details check out their post on Blog Design Studio.

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For those of you that don’t know the situation, PodPress 8.8 doesn’t work, out of the box, with WordPress 2.6, as the post revisions feature has broken it. There are other issues with 8.8 as well, but the revisions issue seems to be the most common. Many people have taken to disabling the post revisions feature, which requires changing core code or adding another plugin to your WordPress installation.

PodPress 8.9 was due out over a month ago, even taking the announced delay into account. When you have such an important community feature ruined by a single plugin developer, it is a shame for everyone.

With this in mind, I hope you all try out the alternatives, and let me know how they work for you. If you have been waiting to upgrade your blog for a working PodPress 8.9, please wait no longer as there are just too many WordPress security risks to be running a version of WordPress before 2.6.

PodPress Alternatives

Podcasting – A Google Summer of Code Project
Blubrry – A recent plugin development getting huge attention.

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The amount of server resources used by WordPress varies wildly for these people, with some coming across horrible performance walls with less traffic than myself, and others having much lower usage levels on their servers than I do. The part that bothers me so much is that there isn’t a nicely compiled guide out there to performance tune WordPress hosted blogs.

Sure, there are caching plugins, but going beyond that Matt Mullenweg has said that Automattic has helped hosting environments with their situations so that they can better support more traffic with the resources they have available, and so why isn’t there a basic server performance guide for WordPress? A best practices guide when setting up a server for displaying the PHP pages that WordPress needs to generate, or dealing with MySQL calls, or best practices for caching. Which applications should we be using to get the most performance from our WordPress blogs?

If there are so many great tips out there for making WordPress run effectively in high traffic situations, where is the organized guide for web hosts, or server owners? This could resolve so many issues that my friends are having, and help me reduce the load on my own VPS. Sure, it would take some time to compile, but the guides out there for serving up PHP pages and optimizing MySQL are currently difficult to understand, with little information on the overall benefits with relation to WordPress itself.

Come on WordPress ninjas, it is time to write a best practices guide for server administrators.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on WordPress
• Top WordPress Plugins For Every Type of Blog – The Best of the Best!
• Thesis – a WordPress Theme Design Worth Considering
• WordPress 2.6 Goes Live

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