One of these built-in drag and drop features is the RSS feed widget. I’ve just added it myself on the second sidebar, which now features an RSS feed of my Top 10 EntreCard Droppers.

If your WordPress installation is at version 2 and up, you should be able to see the RSS widget when you click on Design > Widgets on your WordPress administration screen.

Once you’ve added it to the sidebar of your choice, you can then edit the widget to show the RSS feed that you would like to appear on your sidebar, in my case it looks like this:

When you’ve entered the necessary data, click on “Change” and then “Save Changes”. When you go to the front end (homepage) of your site, you should be able to see something similar to what I have under the Communities Badges on this site.

You can have more than one RSS feed on your sidebar, just keep dragging that RSS widget into the spot where you want them to appear and presto!

If you are one of the bloggers who have recently joined the Entrecard network and are now displaying that nifty widget (preferably above the fold) on your blog’s sidebar, congratulations! You have just opened your blog to a new universe of visitors.

There have been claims that entrecard dropping can be addictive. I think that all depends on how much time you have to go blog hopping. I have been on entrecard for almost a month and have received visits I would not have ordinarily received otherwise. I have also, through the Entrecard dashboard, have had the opportunity to visit other interesting blogs I would not have stumbled upon otherwise.

For the Entrecard noob these are the three most important screens on your administration panel, which you see when you are logged into your Entrecard account:

• 1. Your Dashboard – all activity on your account summarized on one page
  2. Your Drops inbox – clickable through a tab on your dashboard, it contains the cards of Entrecard users who have dropped their cards on your widget.
  3. Your advertisers – two columns on the left side of your dashboard, of Entrecard users who have put in a bid to advertise on your widget, and those whom you have approved.

Basically you get Entrecard points by visiting other blogs and dropping your card on their widget. You do that by clicking on the word “Drop” on an Entrecard widget. You will need to click on the word itself, as clicking just beside it may not give you any results.

You also get points when you approve advertisers on your widget. You can accumulate your points and use them to buy your own advert space on other Entrecard widgets.

There are numerous Entrecard strategy experts who can show you how you can use Entrecard account/widget/presence to its fullest potential. Two posts on Turnip Of Power are a must-read for one who has just signed up for an Entrecard account:

• 1. Top 5 Entrecard Tips and Tricks
  2. Becoming an Entrecard Click Master
  3. 2 Firefox keyboard shortcuts for EntreCard dropping

You will eventually read stuff about how Entrecard is actually bad for you as it raises your bounce rate and things like that. But I don’t want to treat Entrecard as just another way to search engine optimize my blog.

I see it as thousands of doorways that have been opened to me, into a blogging universe that I can explore, one card at a time.

Not anymore.

You can design your own logo and branding on Logoyes.com. It takes less than five minutes to come up with a business card design on Logoyes, what will probably take time is going throught the vast number of choices available for your logo, colors, typography and layout.

Clicking on the “Try it FREE” button on the homepage will take you to the logo creator. You can choose between High Tech, Bold and Flair, each Image comes with a number of pre-designed logos for you to choose from. The logo creator is fast and easily navigable–you can’t get lost with the progress bar at the bottom of the screen: Image, Industry, Symbol, Name, Layout and finally, Buy.

Can’t even decide on what image is right for your company? Click on the FREE Image Calculator at the right side of the DIY logo screen.

Logoyes takes the design hassles out of branding.

Just follow the instructions carefully and you will be rewarded with a logo and business card template fit for the Fortune 500.

Just to make sure no one thinks I’m promising this will work with ANY WordPress installation, please read the next couple of paragraphs at least twice. This customization technique will work only and ONLY IF:

1. You have a WordPress installation on a “paid” hosting service on a Apache/Unix Server. This means this will not work on a free WordPress hosting service that does NOT allow you to FTP files into the root directory of your WordPress installation. (Never mind the techie terminology, these will all be explained in the succeeding steps.)

AND

2. You know how to use an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program to upload files into your WordPress root directory, and how to use your FTP program to change permissions (CHMOD) on a file.

Rationale:

Why would we even want to wrestle with FTP and WordPress options to begin with? Much of this has to do with vanity. Why else would they call it “pretty permalinks”? With vanity-permalinks you also get easier indexing by search engines, but that also depends on whether you’ve created your sitemaps and submitted your WordPress blog to the proper directories and search engines. So let’s just stick to vanity for the meantime.

The default WordPress url looks something like this:

In a few steps that “ugly” URL can become

Sexy, yes?

What you will need:

1. A computer with an internet connection.
2. Your WordPress installation on a server that you can access via FTP.
3. A simple FTP Program. I use and recommend FileZilla because it’s free and pretty straightforward to use.
4. A text editor. For this purpose, Notepad will do.

How to do it:

1. Open Notepad.

2. Without writing/typing anything into the new document, click on File > Save As. Name the file htaccess.txt

3. Start your FTP program and go into the root folder of your WordPress installation.

4. Locate the htaccess.txt file you created and upload it into the root folder of your WordPress installation. In FileZilla, you do this by right-clicking on the file htaccess.txt and selecting Upload from the fly-out menu.

5. When the htaccess.txt file has been uploaded, select it on the server pane by clicking on it once.

6. Right click on the file and select Rename. Rename the file to .htaccess

7. When the file has been renamed, right click on it again. This time select File Attributes.

8. Change the numeric value entry to 755, thus enabling WordPress to “write to” the file. (If the later steps do not produce the desired result come back to this point and change the File Attributes to 666 instead of 755.)

9. Click on OK. Close your FTP program.

10. Login to your WordPress administration backend.

11. On the Menu, select Options > Permalinks. You will see the Customize Permalink Structure Screen.

12. Selecting an option other than default will cause an entry on the “Custom Structure” text box. For our purpose, first select “Date and name based” so that the Custom Structure text box reads

13. Click on the radio button beside “Custom, specify below” and then edit the entry in the “Custom Structure” box to read

14. Click on the “Update Permalink Structure” button.

15. NOW, to play it safe, without closing the administrator screen on your blog, open a new browser window or tab to the homepage of your blog. If on the off chance you can’t see your blog anymore, or if clicking on a post or category link gives you an error, click back to the administrator screen and select the default permalink structure again, then click “Update Permalink Structure” again. If you did all the steps outlined above correctly, you should be seeing your new permalink structure when you mouse over your post titles: