blog | Mtaram's Daze

I started blogging and tweeting just in december 2009. ( though my twitter a/c was an inactive bot for almost a year). after my friend asked me to join in and start haveing some learning with him www.mtaram.com , I was confused, scary, inquisitive and whatnot. But my friend kept patience, gave me asnwers to most of my questions which I indeed took time to understand. Today, I love to tweet, to blog, and to manage wordpress data. I love to work on website content, layout, color combination and soo much more. During all this we changed the website look and feel. Am sure once you visit , I can look at your valuable comments:). We used some good techniques to make it worth and honestly it helped. I share all those things with my friends and readers:). I am sure it would help them as well .

1) Major Change : You can make a major change to it by adding a new design, or adding a forum to it or something minor like changing a title of a blog post.

2) Add a “back to top” link to footer:Blogs have a tendency to create huge scroll bars. Whether that scroll bar is long because you don’t use the more tag to cut down your posts, or you get a lot of blog comments – the fact of the matter is if you have a huge scroll bar and no easy way to get back to the top, it will annoy us as your readers.

So when a user gets to the bottom of the page and sees the link, when the click it – they go to the very top of the page. It’s very easy to create. Just use this code and add it to your footer somewhere:

<a href=”#header”>Back to top</a>

It’s just that easy. When that link gets clicked, it automatically shoots to the top of the page.

3) Adding ICONS: Every minor detail counts when it comes to designing for a blog. It’s the minor details that make some designs so excellent, and adding icons next to links on your blog can really make some parts of your blog stellar looking.

3)Input Forms :Input forms are used all the time on blogs. To sign up for newsletters, to fill out a comment, and anything else that generally involves getting information from the user.Input forms without style are often very ugly and boring to use.

4) Creating thumbnails for posts : Thumbnails are good to attract people. It looks good and fun. People enjoy thumbnails more and more. It makes them more active than compared to Just text. So lets add some colors and make it match with our layput and design theme.

5)Numbered page navigation :Try putting a list of pages you can visit on the blog. All of those numbers link to a page full of articles on them.Using numbered page navigation gets a lot more posts available to readers, which increases pageviews and can really show off the age of your blog with the more number of pages you have. It is a much more effective method of navigation than the standard “previous” and “next”post links that is standard on many blogs today.

Build a Featured Posts Section for WordPress

Magazine themes are becoming increasingly popular. There are plenty of quality premium themes available, and also some decent free magazine themes, but you may want to build or customize your own. This tutorial covers the process of coding the index.php file to set up a magazine-style front page with a featured post section.

WordPress Sidebar Turned Apple-Flashy Using jQuery UI

Sidebars are often pretty boring. If you’re looking to improve yours, this tutorial goes through the process of using jQuery that expands and reacts to user actions, similar to the Apple sidebar.

How to Make a Featured Post Carousel for WordPress

This tutorial will show you a different approach to displaying featured content. The technique is fairly simple, and can easily be applied to any blog that wants to give more exposure to certain content. This only requires a few coding changes to get the featured content in the carousel.

Building a Better Blogroll: Dynamic Fun with SimplePie and jQuery

This tutorial from Chris Coyier is not exclusively for WordPress, but this could easily the sidebar for many WordPress users. Blogrolls are common sidebar features, but with this tutorial Chris shows how the traditional blogroll can be taken a step further by bringing in feeds from other sites and blogs using SimplePie and jQuery. This technique is especially useful for those who run multiple blogs or a network.

Dynamic Highlight Menu

Nick La of Web Designer Wall has a post with a number of WordPress hacks, one of them being the dynamic highlight menu. Nick shows his approach for creating the navigation menu at Best Web Gallery that highlights the current location for visitors.

Two-Tiered Conditional Navigation

In this tutorial Darren Hoyt provides the code for creating a WordPress navigation menu that shows both parent pages and the relevant child pages. For sites and blogs that have a lot of content and pages, this trick can help to improve user experience.

WordPress Custom Fields: Laying Text Over Your Lead Graphic

WordPress’s custom fields open up endless possibilities for theme developers and bloggers. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to use custom fields to display an image for a post with text laying on top of it.

“Magazine-Style” Horizontal Dropdown Menu

Jean-Baptiste Jung shows another technique for improving the navigation of a WordPress site. The horizontal dropdown menu uses categories and sub-categories to create a magazine-style nav menu.

Integrate a Slideshow into Your WordPress Theme

Smooth Gallery is a MooTools gallery that can add some sizzle to a website. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to integrate Smooth Gallery with WordPress.

Adding Tabs to Your Blog Sidebar

If you’d like to improve your sidebar by adding some tabbed content/navigation areas, this tutorial covers the process of using Yahoo! TabView in your WordPress sidebar.

Create a “Send This to Twitter” Button

As Twitter continues to increase in popularity, integrating Twitter and WordPress will likely continue to become more common. This post isn’t really a tutorial, but it does give the code that you need to add a “send this to Twitter” link or button to your WordPress blog.