You are a blogger and are glad to see traffic on your website. However, do you have any clues of how does your blog feed look like? How many feed readers you have and are they happy with the feed?

Top blogs have a large number feed subscribers and with services like feedburner, one can optimize as well as monetize a blog feed.

Before getting into all that, one needs to visualize how your blog feed appears on popular readers like Google Reader, Feed daemon, etc.

Quick steps to setup your blog feeds;

1. Go to Word Press Admin panel -> Settings –> Reading. Select Full text for feeds.

   

2. Log on to feedburner and create an account. Add and verify your blog.
3. Head over to Your Feed burner feed management section, click on your feed and select Edit feed details. For Original Feed URL put http://www.yourblog.com/feed

 

4. Go to Optimize -> Summary burner and make sure that Summary burner isn’t active.

   

5. Use  Flagrant disregard Feedburner Plugin to allow automatic detection of your feedburner feed when a visitors subscribes to your blog’s feed.

Now that everything is done head over to Google Reader, or any Feed reader and check out your feed. It should display the full feed!

When you’re done, you’ll have better looking feeds that are easier to read and look far more professional.

Further, you may explore feedburner’s possibilities which include features like monetizing your feeds, analyzing your feed readers, etc.

With feedburner, there is always more that you can do. Burn your feed today, if you haven’t already. Happy feed burning!

If you use a lot of images in your blog, you’ll definitely want to have a Lightbox plugin to jazz up the previews and display of your images.

To give you an example of how this works, click on any of the thumbnails below and you’ll see the lightbox preview window, with the ability to browse all the images.

To do this effortlessly on your WordPress blog, you need to download the Lightbox 2 plugin for WordPress, and upload the entire folder to your plugins directory.

Then, activate the plugin and go to the “Options” page (or the “Settings” page in WordPress 2.5). Here you can select different color schemes but after trying all of them I still prefer the default “black” color scheme.

To activate the lightbox effect, you need to add this code to every link you create:

rel="lightbox"

Of course this can be automated using another brilliant plugin called the “Add Lightbox” plugin. Once you install this plugin, all thumbnail images linked to the source image will automatically use the lightbox preview codes.

If you’re a photographer or have an image-heavy blog, this will make your site seem much cooler!

Ok, this is going way back to the basics. The reason I’m writing this is becasue from my observation in the forum that some people may still not understand how it works.

If you’re using a basic Wordpress installation, the best way to insert an image is to upload it within Wordpress itself. Right below the text input area in “Write Post”, you see this function:

All you need to do is to click on “Browse” and select the image file on your computer. Then, give the image a title and description if you want. When you’re done, click on upload.

If you get an error message when you try to upload, it means that you still need to set the wp-content folder to CHMOD766.

Using the default image uploader you’ll be able to insert thumbnails of full images, but there’s not much options with regards to the size of the thumbnails.

If you’re going to use images a lot, for example in this blog, you’ll need two things:

1. A Flickr account
2. The Flickr Photo Gallery plugin

Once you’ve installed the plugin, you’ll see an additional option called “Photos”. Here you can see all the photos you’ve uploaded and stored in Flickr:

You can then search images (your own or others) by tags, and insert thumbnails of different sizes into your blog posts. These thumnails can then link back to Flickr, or a seperate page on your Wordpress blog.

If you want to align images to the left / right, read this post.