SidekickBlog

I have set up a Facebook fan page for Recipe Mobile.  This week, Facebook updated their business pages to make them look more like user’s profile pages.  They now have a ‘wall’, a photos and other media page and a ‘boxes’ page which can hold all kinds of applications.  Also, updates from fan pages will show in fan profile streams.  This increases the potential of exposure significantly.  Building a facebook page for your business or website is also the first step towards advertising on Facebook. (continue reading…)

I’m glad to inform readers that both Recipe Mobile and its companion Sidekick Blog are now CommentLuv enabled.  I have been considering implementing this great plugin but was concerned that it would attract comments by people just looking to promote their website without adding any value via their comments.  However, in the end, I realized that although it might generate a few junk comments, this is a good way to give back a little to our valuable readers and hopefully generate some good discussions.  Please test it out and I hope you are able to generate some traffic to your own websites by commenting on ours.  I also will be researching a good solution to make the comments of our regular readers ‘dofollow’.

I just edited the search box at Recipe Mobile to remove the search button that used to appear under it.  The ‘Search’ button takes up too much space and is frankly unnecessary.  

Most internet users know that if you fill in a text box and hit enter, the website will see that as a click on the button tied to the search box.  Some quick searches on Google got me to Bavotsan.com.  Along with with various other PHP tips, the blog also contained a smart way to edit the php code that controls the search box.

The short tutorial on Bavotsan.com uses the default WordPress theme which contains a file called searchform.php.  However, since my theme does not have this file, I had to look around for the appropriate code to edit.  Since the search box shows up in Recipe Mobile’s right sidebar, I looked in the file sidebar-right.php in Appearance->Themes in the WordPress admin menu and found the appropriate code there. 

This is what the new search box looks like now.  The text to ‘Type and Hit Enter’ shows up in the search box when it is not being used to educate the few users who might not be net savvy.

WordPress celebrity Alex King just sent out a twitter update about the latest beta release of his excellent WordPress Mobile Edition plugin.  This plugin enables WordPress blogs to auto-generate a stripped down mobile version when being accessed by mobile browsers. (continue reading…)

If you are looking at my homepage, you can see that it is experiencing problems with the formatting (the sidebar has been displaced down by an earlier post).  I am trying my best to track the issue and resolve it as fast as possible.  Fortunately, individual posts seem to be doing fine.  Please check back later if you are experienceing difficulties navigating the homepage.  I apologize for the inconvience. 

Update: After removing most display plugins and all the widgets, and then delisting each post one by one, I tracked down the problem to the Tracer blog post.  Moving the Tracer logo to the left side of the text from the right seems to fix the problems.  Cropped some of the oversized images while I was at it.  

A big thank you to all my twitter friends the ones at the CMF Forums who checked out the website after I asked for help.

If you are not familiar with CMF Ads, please see my other blog post on adding CMF Ads to your blog.

CMF Ads has a great forum.  The community is very close and I have used the forums a few times to get help on topics both CMF related and otherwise.  Also, this is a great way to improve your visibility within the CMF Ads website if you are still waiting for your first advertiser.  If you are an advertiser, it is also a great place to meet publishers who share the same interests as you so that you can find the right websites to advertise on.

While you are posting on the forums, you might as well advertise your blogs for free by adding them in your signature.  There was some confusion while I was trying to add a signature so I thought I would post a short tutorial here. (continue reading…)

Do you create great content on your blog that is useful to a lot of people?  Do you post beautiful photographs on your website?  Then you probably have a lot of people copying text and images from your blog to use elsewhere.  They may or may not attribute it back to your blog by adding a link.  

Tracer is a script designed to let you track this copied content and also provide all kinds of usage statistics for it.  Best of all it will add an automatic attribution link back to your post so that content you have created can result in traffic to you regardless of where it resides.  And to top it all it promises to let you do all this for free.  Definately a must have for all the content creators out there.   (continue reading…)

Tamal Anwar (@tamalanwar on twitter) sent out a tweet about this RSS Feed directory list.  It has a huge number of of rss feed directories that you can submit your blogs rss feed to to create backlinks of your latest posts.Technorati Tags: SEO, RSS

Found a new WordPress plugin TDO Mini Forms, that enables user generated posts.  Ill try it on the Submit-A-Recipe page of RecipeMobile.

My wife loves to cook and is indeed a fantastic cook. Her food gets better everyday and she invents amazing recipes all the time.  Since a lot of people were asking about her recipes and she would have to email them or tell them over the phone, I decided to start a wordpress blog for her where she can upload these recipes.

RecipeMobile is now about a week old and is fast growing into a complete cooking website.  She has a bunch of great recipes there and is planning to start uploading cooking tips and other cooking related content.

I have also put up a form where visitors can submit their own recipes to be published under their name on the website.  Lets see how things go.