I’ve been a huge fan of the WordPress for iPhone app ever since it debuted many months back. While the old webapps — for iPhone and other phones — made mobile blogging feasible, if a bit of a chore, the native iPhone app made it incredibly easy to post photos and other contents quick and easy.

The latest update to the app, v 1.2 includes a ton of new features, which make it even more user friendly. Here’s a quick overview, via WordPress.tv

As the video explains, here are some of the great new features:

• Landscape mode with extra wide keyboard

• Link creation help (as soon as you start typing www or http, the app will help you create a hyperlink on the fly)

• Comment moderation

• Photo resizing options

In order to enable mobile blogging from your iPhone, you’ll need to enable “Remote Publishing” on your blog. To do this, go to SETTINGS –> WRITING and check off the options under Remote Publishing, then click “Save Changes.”

And, of course, you’ll need to go to the iPhone App Store to download the application. It’s completely free.

You may have heard me mention before how you can speed up your blog with a nifty little addition to your browser called Google Gears. If you haven’t pulled the trigger on Gears yet, or don’t remember how, be sure to check out this little tutorial.

It will only take you a couple minutes to set up, and it’ll make your entire WordPress blogging experience infinitely faster.

Incidentally, though I grabbed the video that explains installing Gears in Internet Explorer, it works in most other browsers, too. For example, here are similar videos about setting it up for Firefox and Safari, courtesy of WordPress.tv.

I recently did a version of this presentation for the editors at the Courier-Post, and wanted to share it with anyone else who is interested in learning more about our blog strategy. For anyone who’s already blogging heavily on WordPress — most likely, everyone who is checking this site — it’ll seem like very basic stuff, but it’s important that everybody in the newspaper business understand the importance of blogs as a publishing tool.

Not a fad, not a threat, but a tool at our disposal — much like cameras, tape recorders, and even keyboards. Anyway, that’s what I set out to explain. Since I’m making this presentation public, I cut out our traffic numbers and kept this mostly to the big-picture stuff — e.g. what makes for a good newspaper blog, how to promote and reverse-publish from blogs, and what our ultimate goal for the blogs is (spoiler alert: 20% of overall traffic).

Incidentally, if you’re curious how I created this, I did the presentation in Keynote and recorded the audio and video screencast of it using Screenflow. Enjoy.

Why Blogs Matters from Ted Mann on Vimeo.

You may have heard the term before — Sticky Post — but what exactly does that mean?

In a nutshell, it’s a way for you to take an important post (be it an announcement, one that’s getting a lot of traffic, or some other kind of content you want to draw attention to) stay firmly attached to the top of your blog. That way, nobody will miss it.

Of course, this defies the blog’s usual reverse chronology structure (with the most recent content appearing first), but it’s a useful new feature of WordPress 2.7 that can and should be used (if sparingly).

Here’s how to make a post sticky:

1. When you’ve finished writing and editing your post, find the little “Publish” module. Click on “Edit” next to “Visibility”

2. Check off the box to “Stick this post to the front page.”

3. Click Publish (or Update, if it’s a post you previously published)

One other quick tip: I suggest adding “STICKY:” to the start of your post’s title whenever doing this. That way, your readers won’t get confused as to why an older post is appearing at the top of the blog.

And of course, don’t forget that eventually, all posts should become un-sticky. Eventually, go back, edit that post, and uncheck the sticky box when the post no longer needs to stick to the top of your blog.

Another excellent tutorial from WordPress.tv about one of the new features of WordPress 2.7: The ability to quick edit posts, without having to go in and manually edit every one of them.

In short, this feature allows you to rapidly add a category, apply tags, change an author, or change post status to posts (either a single one or a batch) all from the Manage Posts screen.

I’ve said it many times before: the single best thing 5-minute thing you can do to help boost your blog’s search-engine mojo is to add links to your blogroll. Lots of them.

The more sites you link to, the more will link back to you, and the higher your ranking will get. Trust me, it works. And it doesn’t take more than a couple minutes.

If, however, you’ve reached the point where you’ve added so many links to your blogroll that it’s staring to get unwieldy — 20, 40, 80! — it may be time for you to divvy up those links into smaller widgets. Usually bloggers do this by assinging the links different categories. For example, on the LoHud Yankees blog, Pete Abraham separates out “Other Beat Writers,” “Yes Network Blogs,” “Fan Blogs,” “Cool Sites,” and so on. Another blogger I knew in Westchester had a religion blog and subdivided his blogroll by religious demonination.

On Kevin Callahan’s Into the Outside blog, he devides up his link list like so:

That’s just a small snapshot, by the way. The full list is about 5x that long.

In order to enable grouped links, you’ll need to activate a plugin that enables this function and adds the widget to the sidebar. That may sound intimidating, but it’s actually quite easy. Below is a video — creating with my snazzy new screencasting software, ScreenFlow — to show you how to do it.

Ever wondered what that “Meta” widget in the sidebar is? Aside from being an easy way to find the login link for your blog, it serves a few other useful purposes. This video from WordPress.tv sums them up pretty nicely.

On the one hand, I’m thrilled to report that WordPress.tv, the new tutorial site launched by the folks behind your favorite blog software, is one of the most slick, pragmatic, useful tools every created to teach people the in’s and out’s of WordPress.

On the other hand, I’m left wondering why did I spend soooo much damn time creating my own little tutorials here? And why oh why did I just fork out $80 for a snazzy new screencapture software. D’oh!

Oh well, the more screencasts, the merrier.

What’s especially great about the ones on WordPress.tv is that they’re extremely good quality. If you ever found the out-of-sync audio and hard to read video on my Viddler demos frustrating, the ultra-crisp HD quality demos on the new site will surely be a welcome improvement.

Here’s a quick intro to WordPress.tv

I’ll continue to create a handful of screencasts for features not covered on WordPress.tv. And now that their content is available, I’ll link to that, too.

Just one thing to remember: Most of the videos are filmed with WordPress 2.7, which we haven’t been able to upgrade to yet, since it’s not available for WordPressMU yet. Should be any day now.

WordPress.tv

This post is only intended for advanced users — i.e. Blog Czars, Online Editors, and Developers. If that doesn’t include you, by all means, you’re still encouraged to read and learn. But keep in mind that these instructions are very specific to our installation of WordPress MU and will differ somewhat with regular WordPress.com and WordPress.org blogs (which are generally a little easier to get up and running).

Step 1: Gather all the info and graphics for your new blog

Just some of the elements you'll need to have on hand before starting

I have a simple punch list I use:

• Blog Header Graphic — This should be a 525 x 150 px JPG image, with the resolution set to 72 dpi. It should be saved with the same name as the blog path (e.g. rutgers.jpg)
• Blog Button Graphics – You’ll want to create two buttons, one large and one small. The large one is typically a 100 x 100 px GIF, set to 72 dpi; The small one is a 60 x 60 GIF, also set to 72 dpi
• Mug Shots of the Authors – The images are usually done at 75 px wide, saved as JPGs, and formatted with the author’s username (e.g. tmann.jpg)
• Blog Name
• Blog Tagline, or description — One or two sentences summarizing what the blog will cover
• Author email addresses — If they prefer non-Gannett emails, be sure to use whatever they like
• Author bios – Usually a couple sentences, written to go in the “About the Author” box
• Meta Tag information — A new piece of information we want to start collecting. This is just keyword information to help search engines better index the blogs
• List of desired sidebar elements – Do the authors want polls? Flickr feeds? Twitter tools? Etc.

Got all that. OK, now you’re ready to get the blog set up. The full list of instructions is after the break.

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