There is no way to stop the public from viewing your blog posts unless you set a password for each of them. The privacy settings only allow you to block search engines, but not normal visitors.

But on WordPress, when something is lacking, there is always a plugin to compensate it. For this purpose, you can try using Registered Users Only.

Upon installing, all URLs to your blog will be redirected to the login page. Only registered users are able to log in and view your blog posts. That being said, if you wish to keep your blog posts only to yourself and no one else, you should disable user registration (General Settings > Membership) on your blog.

There are other similar plugins, but I have only tried this one and it works great.

©2010 SheepTech

Making WordPress Blog Private

Smashing Magazine started releasing WordPress themes since 2007, but there isn’t any easy way to see all of them on one single list as far as I’m concerned. To make life easier for you, I have compiled all (if I didn’t miss any, that is) the WordPress themes released by Smashing Magazine, all the way from the first theme dated in year 2007 to the most recent one released in February 2010.

designPile [Demo] {February 20th, 2010}

SimpleFolio [Demo] {February 7th, 2010}

Christmas and New Year’s Eve WordPress Theme [Demo] {December 21st, 2009}

Glassical [Demo] {November 7th, 2009}

Creative by Nature [Demo] {July 30th, 2009}

Paper Wall [Demo] {July 10th, 2009}

Gallery [Demo] {May 4th, 2009}

Magazeen [Demo] {February 23rd, 2009}

Compositio [Demo] {February 18th, 2009}

Vintage and Blues [Demo] {January 28th, 2009}

Atlantic [Demo] {January 5th, 2009}

Viewport [Demo] {December 29th, 2008}

Christmas WordPress Theme [Demo] {December 24th, 2008}

Black Magic [Demo] {November 10th, 2008}

Color Paper [Demo] {October 30th, 2008}

Cellar Heat [Demo] {October 20th, 2008}

Simple Ornate [Demo] {October 1st, 2008}

Agregado [Demo] {September 8th, 2008}

Notepad Chaos [Demo] {August 20th, 2008}

Infinity [Demo] {August 8th, 2008}

Fervens [Demo] {August 5th, 2008}

Tigerpress [Demo] {July 28th, 2008}

WordPress Fun [Demo] {July 16th, 2008}

Dilectio [Demo] {December 21st, 2007}

©2010 SheepTech

Free WordPress Themes released by Smashing Magazine

How often do you see an amazingly beautiful WordPress theme, only to disappoint when you discover its price tag? If content is king, I would say design is queen.

Why is appearance important? Just imagine Obama campaigning for his presidency in just sandals and short pants.

There is definitely no shortage of good WordPress themes, but the free ones are used by so many other blogs that it has lost its uniqueness, while for the premium ones are sometimes just to pricey.

Now what about this—join a premium WordPress themes giveaway which will guarantee you a win if your blog has a PageRank of higher than 2? That’s exactly what ThemeGrade is doing.

Blog about the contest on your PR2+ blog and ThemeGrade will pay for your premium WordPress theme. You can choose from either of these designers:

• Elegantthemes
• Woothemes
• Wpzoom
• Modthemes
• Wpnow
• Obix-Design
• Richwp
• Vivathemes
• Prothemedesign
• Themejam
• Signaturetheme
• Organizedthemes
• Gabfirethemes

Act quick if you want to enter the contest because once are enough eligible participants.

You can read more about the details of the contest here.

Update: ThemeGrade has listed me as one of their winner. It’s this easy to win

©2010 SheepTech

ThemeGrade Premium WordPress Theme Contest

If you are thinking the same, here’s how to disable it. I’m unsure if it’s the best way to do it, but it works at least.

How to disable Info Panel from CommentLuv

1. Go to your “Edit Plugins” page (http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/plugin-editor.php)

2. Select “CommentLuv” from the dropdown menu. You should be on the “Editing commentluv/commentluv.php (active)” page now.

3. Search for <span class=”heart_tip_box”>. There are two instance this code will appear in the php file. Do the same for both of them. It looks like this:

$commentcontent .= '<span class="heart_tip_box"><img src="' . $this-&gt;plugin_url . 'images/littleheart.gif" border="0" alt="My ComLuv Profile" width="16" height="14" /></span>';

4. Remove the code in red from it. It should look like this now:

$commentcontent .= '<img src="' . $this-&gt;plugin_url . 'images/littleheart.gif" border="0" alt="My ComLuv Profile" width="16" height="14" />';

5. Click on the “Update File” button. Now search for <span class=”heart_tip_box”> again. If it’s gone, the lovely heart icon will now probably not prompt the info panel when you hover on it.

Let me know if it works on your blog too.

©2010 SheepTech

Disable Info Panel from CommentLuv

Top Commentators plugin on the other hand, as its name suggest, will list the top 5 commentators at the sidebar. As the comment activity on this blog is low, it’s not at all difficult to get on the list. The highest commentator at the point of writing has just 2 comments, the rest being just one.

For the time being, all the links are nofollow. I might consider do-following in the future, depends on how things go.

Alright, start commenting already

©2010 SheepTech

CommentLuv & Top Commentators Enabled

• Increased clicks – your hidden affiliate link won’t scream “I’m making money out of you” as loud as the default affiliate link, increasing the likelihood of being clicked.
• No leaked commissions – visitors will not go to the product page directly by typing the product page address in their browser. This will ensure that you will get paid for every single customer you refer.
• Better SEO – too many naked affiliate links might result in less trust search engines are willing to place on your blog
• Less ugly – obviously, your custom affiliate link will definitely look less ugly than the default one provided

To hide affiliate links on WordPress, you can either do it manually by creating individual php files for every affiliate links, or use WordPress plugins. I opted for the latter for its convenience and the additional features they are offering. I am using two free WordPress plugins to achieve features similar to the WordPress Link Cloak plugin that cost $77.

Pretty Links – Hide Affiliate Links, and Track Them

What Pretty Links do:

• Create custom links using your domain name to redirect to any target URL. You can use this to hide your affiliate link. (e.g http://sheeptech.com/product > http://product.com/signup/signdown/up/down/affid=12345678)
• Track hits, uniques, clicker’s IP address, referral page, click time, browser, operating system for every single custom link you have created. It’s optional though.
• Group created custom links to organize them. Useful if you have countless of affiliate links on different niches.
• Bookmarklet that can be used to easily create an URL using your blog’s domain that will redirect to the page you are currently viewing. Think bit.ly’s bookmarklet.

With this Pretty Links, you can easily manage your affiliate links all in one place on your WordPress backend. To hide an affiliate link, you just have to do is enter the target URL, enter your preferred slug, and click create! Sounds much easier than creating a php file and uploading it via ftp. Not to mention you don’t get to track clicks that way.

Automatically Insert Affiliate Links to Keywords in Blog Posts

I use SEO Smart Links for this purpose. You won’t want to link relevant keywords in all your existing blog posts to your newly created cloaked affiliate link, one at a time. SEO Smart Links automate this process and all you have to do is let it know what keywords and where to link to.

Say you are an affiliate for HostGator, you can make the plugin to look for keywords like “hostgator, web hosting, blog hosting” in your existing blog posts and have all those keywords automatically link to your HostGator affiliate link.

Besides, SEO Smart Links can also interlink between your existing blog posts, which will boost the number of relevant internal links. I’m unsure how this works though, since I have never see it in action.

How do you hide your affiliate links?

©2010 SheepTech

Hide Affiliate Link: WordPress Plugin

While the plugin is released by MailChimp with the intention to bring its customer’s email campaign statistics and Google Analytics together into WordPress, it is totally fine if you just want to have data from Google Analytics and ignore the MailChimp part.

Have a look at their introduction video:

After installing the plugin, you can make it fetch data from Google Analytics by simply granting the plugin access to your Google Analytics, there is no need to provide your Google account credentials.

There are 5 sections of statistics displayed on the Analytics360° page, namely:

1. Site Traffic – displaying graphs of your website’s traffic. A brown dot is used to indicate the days where new blog posts are published. If you are running MailChimp campaigns too, blue dots will be used to indicate the days where emails are sent. There are 3 graphs available, namely all traffic, organic and referral.

Under the graph, there will be other statistics including:

• Visits
• Pageviews
• Pages/Visit
• Bounce Rate
• Average Time on Site
• % New Visits

2. Traffic by Region – Hover over a country on the world map to see how much traffic is coming from that specific country. Countries that have higher traffic have a orange-brown tone, while those with lower traffic will be bluish.

3. Referring Traffic Overview – a pie chart representing website traffic, showing percentage of traffic sourced from search engine, referring traffic and direct traffic.

4. Top referrers – showing top referrers to your blog, including search engines and any other websites. There are 4 columns on the table, namely source, visits, pages/visit and average time on site. You can click on a search engine to view the top keywords that sent the most traffic to your blog.

5. Top content – a list of your blog posts that receive the most traffic. Four columns on the table, namely Pages (blog post), pageviews, unique pageviews, and average time on page. Just like the top referrers list, you can navigate to second or third page to see top content beyond the top 10 list.

I am definitely delighted to have this plugin installed on my WordPress blogs. It brings some of the most crucial data from Google Analytics, right to my WordPress dashboard, without needing me to login to my Google Analytics account.

If you are using Google Analytics too, and like me, hate to sign into the Google Analytics account (I consider it tedious), give this plugin a try. From your WordPress admin panel, just simply navigate to Plugins > Add New, then search for Analytics360″ and click on the install button.

©2010 SheepTech

Analytics360° – Google Analytics to Your WP Dashboard

The good news is you no longer need to be a downloading and uploading maniac in order to install WordPress on your server without the use of Fantastico or its equivalent, thanks to the 4.35 KB EasyWP php script.

EasyWP is a single php file that automatically downloads the latest version of WordPress to your server, extracts the archive (on your server), and takes you to the built in WordPress setup process.

Here’s how it works:

1. Download easywp.php
2. Upload easywp.php to wherever you want WordPress to be installed
3. Point your browser to the script (eg. www.example.com/easywp.php) and complete the installation

Voila!

(via DBT)

©2010 SheepTech

Automated WordPress Installation (without Fantastico)

Among the video contents that can be found are tutorial videos to help new WordPress users and WordCamp footage videos. Besides videos, slides used in WordCamp, presentations made by WordPress gurus and interviews are also being uploaded.

Welcome to WordPress.tv

If a picture worth a thousand words, how many words do a video worth? This will definitely be more helpful to a WordPress newbie, watching video demonstration rather than reading confusion tutorials in text form.

Those WordCamp footage can be juicy too.

(via Jaypee)

©2010 SheepTech

WordPress.tv: Visual Resource for All Things WordPress

The moment SheepTech is up again, I see a rollback, with posts on the 19th and 20th gone, and I don’t have any backups! Fortunately after a while later those recent posts are fully backed.

The next thing I do is to download the WordPress Database Backup and install it right way on all my active blogs. It will now send backups automatically to my Gmail daily (7GB free space in Gmail, no worries).

The shock of not having any backups, though short and temporary, is enough to prove the helplessness.

If you are not doing any backups, go install the plugin already. Schedule it to send backups to your email daily, it’s just a one-time-work. Seriously. Shit happens.

©2010 SheepTech

8 Hours of Downtime on SheepTech