WCLAX14

Did you know that WordPress is great for blogging!? I’ll be discussing some easy tips to boost your blog from good to great. Topics include enriching your posts with images and other media, sharing your posts via social media, and a few tips to supercharge your site.

Transcript

2. WORDPRESS 4.0 IS OUT! “Benny”
3. WHO IS THIS GUY? Derek Springer
 Code Wrangler, Automattic
 @derekspringer Used to build satellite plugins, now I build WordPress plugins
4. Check it out at: http://wordpress.org/plugins/beerxml-shortcode/
5. WHY IS HE HERE? • Did you know: WordPress is good at blogging! • There are a lot of simple tricks folks haven’t heard about that really supercharge blog posts. • I want folks to know there’s a lot of powerful built- in features as well as dead-simple plugins
6. QUESTIONS!
7. CONTENT
8. ADDING MEDIA TO POSTS • Adding images, video, and audio stimulates your readers’ minds, giving them something more than text to dig through, and a reason to come back. • Media breaks up the text, improves the flow, and makes a long post seem much shorter and more enjoyable to read. • “Show don’t tell.”
 “A picture is worth 1,000 words.”
 etc
9. MEDIA IN WORDPRESS • “An agency by which something is accomplished, conveyed, or transferred.” • In WordPress this includes any rich way of displaying information in your posts. • Text • Images • Audio • Video • Tweets • Calendars • Polls • Embeds Rich Media
10. IMAGES • You’ve probably got lots of experience with this. But! Since WordPress 3.9: • Drop directly into the editor, no need to open media manager. • Resize the image in-editor. • See galleries live in-editor.
11. UPDATED MEDIA GALLERY New in 4.0!
12. AUDIO • Since WordPress 3.6 we’ve had built-in support for MediaElement.js audio and video. • Consistent HTML5 *and* Flash fallback player. • Backfills support for IE6-8 and adds extra media types for Firefox, Opera, & Safari. • Just pop in a link to your audio. • I recommend you embed!
13. VIDEO Just embed!
14. A CAVEAT
15. EMBEDS • Super-easy to embed videos, images, audio, and other content into your WordPress site. • Just paste a supported URL is on its own line. • For instance:
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsXm5RqBztE
 or
 https://twitter.com/WordCampLAX/status/507666828923904000
18. VISUAL EMBEDS New in 4.0!
19. SUPPORTED EMBEDS
 (AN AMUSING HISTORY OF POPULAR WEB APPS) • Blip • CollegeHumor • DailyMotion • Flickr • FunnyOrDie.com • Hulu • Imgur • Instagram • Issuu • Meetup.com • Mixcloud • Photobucket • PollDaddy • Rdio • Revision3 • Scribd • SlideShare • SmugMug • SoundCloud • Spotify • TED • Twitter • Viddler • Vimeo • YouTube • WordPress.tv
20. THEMES
21. NEW TRENDS IN THEMES
23. RESPONSIVE
25. YOUR BLOG WITH RETINA
26. YOUR BLOG W/O RETINA
27. INFINITE SCROLL
28. THE CUSTOMIZER
29. FINDING A THEME
31. WORDPRESS.ORG/THEMES
32. WORTHWHILE PREMIUM THEME SHOPS
33. WHAT TO LOOK FOR •A design you like. •Responsive. •Functionality. •Regular updates. •Documentation.
34. WATCH OUT FOR 
 “KITCHEN SINK” THEMES
35. DISTRIBUTION
37. THE DEATH OF RSS
38. THE NEW SOURCES WordPress has two great options to share your content
39. PUBLICIZE • Share your posts on several networks automatically. • Just Publish the post and it’ll show up in your enabled services. • You can opt-out for any specific post you’d like. • Multiple authors can configure their settings individually on your site.
41. SHARING • Give your readers the ability to easily share your content with Twitter, Facebook, and a host of other services. • Adding to your Sharing Enabled Services is as simple as dragging the button from the Available Services area.You can configure services to appear as icons, text, or both. • Some services have an additional option letting you display ‘Official’ buttons that show the number of times the post has been shared in real time.
42. SHARING
43. INFRASTRUCTURE
44. http://jetpack.me/
47. THAT’S A LOT OF STUFF!
48. TILED GALLERIES
53. RELATED POSTS • Keep your readers engaged by showing them more of *your* posts they will be interested in. • Related content is automatically generated based on the content of the post and any tags or categories if they exist.
 (Must have at least 10 published posts for related content to appear.) • A post’s featured image will appear as the thumbnail.
54. PHOTON • Load your images from the WordPress.com CDN. • Acts on images in posts, pages, and featured images. • Your images will load fast wherever your readers are!
55. GET A SITEMAP PLUGIN! http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
56. UPDATED PLUGIN SEARCH New in 4.0!
57. SOME PLUGINS I RECOMMEND
60. SOME PLUGINS BY AUTOMATTIC Full disclosure: I work for Automattic. But! I still think these are great plugins!
63. MORE QUESTIONS? All Knowledge: http://codex.wordpress.org/ ! Super-nice volunteers: http://wordpress.org/support/ ! Third Party Companies ! http://www.wpbeginner.com/ http://www.wpuniversity.com/ http://www.lynda.com/ http://teamtreehouse.com/
64. FIND YOUR LOCAL MEETUP! http://wordpress.meetup.com/
65. QUESTIONS?
66. THANKS! ! ! ! Slides available at:
 https://speakerdeck.com/dbspringer/wclax14