MaxBlogPress Blog

MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup is reloaded with many more features this time, to ensure you are getting what you want for your popup window. The new, reloaded version 2.0 of MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup is here to satisfy all your needs from “simple popup box” to qualitatively “improved text editor”; you wished to have it improvised and you’ve got it. Check out what’s in store:

Sleek new features:

Add simple popup style in the form of "Simple Box"

In the older version, you were facilitated with only one type of popup style. Since we came up with several earnest requests from your side to have a simple popup box too, we present you an improvised version of MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup this time.

Now, you can have a popup window which is simple yet trendy in style. You can either choose a default popup style or a simple box popup depending upon your personal need and style.

Place ‘close’ button anywhere you like

With this added feature in MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup, you can place the ‘close’ button anywhere you like allowing you max freedom to choose. You can easily add ‘close’ button to your desired position by simply using the tag- %close%.

By just using the tag- %close%, you can determine where you want to show you close button thus ensuring more flexibility with your popup.

Much more improved text editor

More buttons means more power to edit your popup window. Now you can edit your popup window in pretty much the same way you use a WYSIWYG html editor.

With this text editor, you can format your popup anyway you like because of its improved and multiple features.

Easy to spot settings with collapsible blocks

The settings look more organized now. You’ll be able to spot your necessary settings by quickly watching an overview of the entire settings.

The screenshot above shows the collapsible blocks of settings that can give you an entire overview.

As shown above, with the improved MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup, you can see your settings in the form of collapsible blocks that helps you locate your necessary settings.

Show popup only in the specified posts or pages types

This is probably the most awaited feature that promises you that freedom to decide where you want your popup to be seen. Many of you desire full control over the display of popup window on selected pages or posts only. To maximize your control, upgraded MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup help you choose where to show popup and where not.

You can now choose your popup display options like:

Home/archive/single post/category/tag page/ search according to your display needs.

Show the popup only in some specified post/pages

If you’re seeking for even more control over the display of your popup window, hear this. You can now show popups only in your specified posts/pages.

If you want to limit your display window to some specified and limited posts or pages only, then

MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup is the boon.

Advanced options >> Plugin code injecting mode

We understand the fact that messing around with codes time and again is not your piece of cake. Here in MaxBlogPress, we try our best to make our plugins work so that you don’t have to analyze your codes for hours.

The theme developer must put wp_head() function in the theme for other plugins to add code in the header. But usually many theme developers never add that function. Without that function the theme will function without any problem but the plugin can’t insert the code.

For overcoming that problem we started using output buffer caching for inserting the code automatically in the header part of the theme (so that you don’t have to change anything there). But the problem is, if any other plugin is also using output buffer caching then they conflicts with one another resulting into a single plugin only working properly.

To overcome this situation, you are provided the wp_head() mode as well as the buffer caching mode, with the buffer caching mode being the default function. Hence if some other plugin is using buffer caching then you can always switch to wp_head() to avoid any sort of conflict.

With the advanced option choice in the improved version of MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup, you can always choose your plugin injecting mode.

5 Comments »

We have released the brand new version 2.2 of MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. Here is quick demonstration of the new features:

Limit excessive pinging for frequently updated blog

If you have a blog where you publish lots of blog posts in short span of time then this feature is for you.

Let’s say you publish 10 posts within 5 minutes then you are sending 10 pings within 5 minutes. This is completely useless as none of the ping service is going to crawl your blog ten times within 5 minutes. Also, it will appear as ping spamming to them as well.

You can avoid such excessive ping by limiting the pinging within short span of time by using "Limit excessive pinging in short time" feature.

Get rid of useless ping services and save your blog from making unnecessary pings

You might have noticed that many bloggers have their own long list of ping services where they ping. That’s ok and you should ping to as many ping services as it is available.

But the problem is, as the time passes many of the ping services get out of business and no longer accept the ping. Some changes their ping service URL so the old link no longer work. Some even stop responding to any ping made to them.

Regardless of that many blogger keep on pinging the dead ping services which are of no use.

The solution: MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

Now maxblogpress ping optimizer color codes each ping service url so that you can quickly determine which are working and which are not.

If you see any ping service colored as red then that means there is some problem pinging to that service. You can wait for some days to see if its the temporary problem. If it continues to show the error then its wise to delete that ping service and save your blog server from making unnecessary ping to useless ping services.

Know which ping service supports extended ping and which does not

Maxblogpress Ping Optimizer by default sends extended ping to the ping service which supports it. If it doesn’t support extended ping then it simply send the normal ping.

Now, the ping log shows it clearly by color coding it.

1. Green color for the extended ping
2. Blue color for the normal ping

You might be wondering what’s the difference between both type of ping? Well, normal ping is the old format which accepts blog url and blog title only as the parameter. The extended ping is the new format which supports all those parameters as well as other parameters like rss feed and post link.

You can simply remember that extended ping is better and you should send extended ping if the ping service supports it. (Don’t worry about all these technical details. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer automatically handles the best option for you)

Know instantly when the blog was pinged and when it was stopped for unnecessary pinging

Now it’s much easier to quickly scan the ping log and know instantly what was happened when by looking at the colors alone. You can quickly see if the ping was made or not by looking at the color of the triangle pointer.

1. Green triangle is shown when the ping is made
2. Blue triangle is shown when the ping was not made for any reason

Clear the ping log easily

If you want to start fresh and examine the ping log properly then "Clear log" feature is for you. You can simply click on that button for clearing all the ping log stats and start fresh again.

Now you can ping huge number of ping services as well

By default all the php scripts has execution time limit of 30 seconds. That means if your web server is not able to ping all the ping services you have specified within 30 seconds then it will leave the rest of the ping services without pinging them at all.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer increases the time limit while pinging the ping services so even if you have a long list of ping services, all of them will get pinged without any problem.

24 Comments »

Here is a good news…

As soon as we released Max Banner Ads plugin we started receiving many feature requests for the plugin.

We have added two new features which are the most demanded features so far.

New Features Added:

1. Open link in new window option

Now you can make your banner link open in new window by simply checking the “open in new window” checkbox while creating the banner.

2. Theme function for Banner and Zone

Max Banner Ads already provides the flexibility of adding banners in most of the places of the blog without editing the theme. But if you want more control then this is for you.

You can edit the theme and place the function for banner and zone to display the banners anywhere you like in the blog.

(To get the theme code click on the icon which looks like “< >“. You’ll find it beside the zone/banner name in the stats.)

3. Post tag for banner and zone

If you want to display a particular banner or zone in some specific posts/pages only then this is for you.

You can add any specific banner or the zone in your post/page by simply adding the tag which looks likes:

<!–MBA:Zone=zoneID–>

OR

<!–MBA:Banner=bannerID–>

(To get the post tag click on the icon which looks like “< >“. You’ll find it beside the zone/banner name in the stats.)

You can download the updated version 1.1 of Max Banner Ads from here

If you liked this plugin then please make sure to digg and stumble it.

PS: We are planning to add more features in this plugin. Stay tuned for more updates.

Picture this: A visitor comes to your blog through a search engine but instead of clicking back to try for another search result, they simply stick to your blog!

How can someone get glued to your blog if there’s nothing specific related to what they’re looking for?

Yes they can, if you show them you’ve got more to your blog that they just can’t get enough of.

If you’ve noticed, search engine visitors are usually sort of impulsive visitors who want what they’re looking for, within few seconds. If they don’t find anything related to what they’re searching for, they’ll quickly hit back and look for another search result. Who’d have enough patience to go through every blog thoroughly?

But you know what? To make an impatient visitor patient enough to discover your blog exclusively, we have added a new feature in the psychic search plugin.

Everything you pictured few moments ago, you can picture them again, this time for real! Check this out.

But before giving you the details about the feature, lets see what the problem is and how can it be fixed:

Fact 1: People don’t use the right keyword while searching what they want

Most people don’t use specific keywords while searching what they want. They might be visualizing something else but while typing a keyword, they might get vague and use wrong keyword for searching.

So, even if the search engine produces exactly relavant search results for any given keywords, the final results might not be what the users actually want.

Solution: Give the users other possibly matching, similar blog posts which might be the exact posts they’re looking for.

Fact 2: Even Search engines are not perfect to return exactly relevant search results

Let’s say the user has used a right key keyword this time but the truth is- even the search engines are not perfect to return the exact matching results. They will often return unmatching search results.

Well, what if your blog has the exact blog-post that a visitor wants but the search engine is showing another blog post in the search result?

Solution: When the visitor lands on your page, show them other matching blog posts so that they’ll find the exact blog post they want.

Before you wonder how to do all these things and find it out to be way too complex, I’ve come up with a simple automatic solution. Psychic search will automatically do all this for you. It will show the relevant blog posts to your visitors and soon before you realize, the visitors have somehow got glued to your blog!

For example, say you have a blogpost on ” Fitness and health” . Well, when a visitor lands in your blog via search engine by typing “fitness training” , what they’ll see is :

They’ll see related posts related to fitness training in your blog So, if the article on “Body fitness: Putting it First Into Your Lives” is not relevant enough, then instead of exiting out of your page they’ll click the related posts on fitness training. That way, visitors get a vision that you have surplus relevant materials in your blog that they might find useful enough.

There are some more new features added in this latest version of psychic search:

* Searches from search results
You can know the exact search keywords used by your visitors in the search engines.

* Get daily/weekly/monthly report of the searches
Now you don’t have to be login to your wordpress for watching the search report. You can automatically receive the daily/weekly/monthly report via email.

With all this added advantage, you’ll definitely get more. So, download this plugin now, to enjoy all it’s privilege.

25 Comments »

By default Wordpress slugs are ineffective in terms of SEO, forum links, and email links .If you take Wordpress out-of-the-box, it doesn’t do anything to help you make your URLs more effective. Wordpress just takes your post headline and sticks it as the post URL. You keep typing away headlines as looooooooooong as you want and Wordpress just keeps nodding away with you. What you need to do is manually shorten it. If you don’t, Wordpress just doesn’t care.

Here are two problems Wordpress causes by putting post titles as post slugs:

1. Long email links and forum links get broken.
2. It isn’t Search Engine optimized.

Long post links get broken in emails and forums.

If you have sent some of your long Wordpress blog post links to emails and forums, you will know exactly what I am talking about. Take this link for an example.
www.YourBlog.com/2/12/why-did-i-use-such-a-long-and-useless-URL-that-does-nothing-to-promote-my-products-in-google

If you mail this blog post to your readers, you will get complains saying that the link does not work. Even if the post really does exist, the URL will not be clickable in your reader’s mail program. The reason here is that the mail program actually breaks the link into two lines. The URL is too long for the email program. That is why it appears to be broken.

Not only in emails but long URLs also get broken in forums and a lot of other similar places. You talk in a forum about something with all your energy. You paste a link there to your blog post. After a while you notice that the link just doesn’t work. The long URL has again come back to you like instant karma for being lazy.

We now come to a more important problem.

Slugs are not automatically Search Engine Optimized.

Let’s say your slug contains Where should I go to buy vegetables in NewYork. Your main keywords or the keywords that you want a higher search engine rank for, are only buy, vegetables, and NewYork. Then what are the other words like “where should I go to” etc doing to your slug ?

Answer:

1. it’s reducing the value of your main keywords
2. it’s reducing the search engine rank of your important keywords.

Answer number 1.
Unnecessary words reduces the value of your main keywords in your url .
Your URL contains 9 keywords, out of which only 3 are popular. So you are diluting the value of the keywords “New York”, “buy” and “vegetables” by adding “where should I go to” You do not want to aim for a higher search engine ranking for words like “why”, “about”.

You want to aim for higher search engine ranking for words that really matter to your blog post like “New York”,”vegetables”, etc. It is only the main keywords that really matter in your search engines ranking. The lesson you learnt here is: Do not include unnecessary words into your slug.

Answer number 2.
Lower the value of your main keywords, lower your page will show in the search engine result for your important keywords.
This is simply a result of answer number 1.

So remember: After you write a great blog post ALWAYS edit its URL or the “slug” as Wordpress likes to call it. Because as another wise man on the internet once said:
” Headlines Are For Humans, URLs Are For Robots “.

You can edit your post link in Wordpress 2.5 by following this procedure.

1. Go to Write >> Post
2. Write a title in the title bar.
3. Click on the contents textbox.
4. A slug appears below you title bar.



5. Click on the edit button next to the slug to edit your slug.



6. Click on save after you edit the slug.

You can edit your post link in Wordpress 2.3 by following this procedure.

1. Go to Write >> Post.
2. Open the post slug box.



3. Type in your post slug in the textbox.

33 Comments »

I’m so excited that I couldn’t wait anymore to tell you about this…

I remember back around 4 months ago when I was searching for a banner plugin to rotate different banners at maxblogpress.com

I searched a lot and found some banner rotator plugins but all of them were poorly designed, difficult to use and didn’t even have the basic features I needed.

So, I finally sit down and wrote a custom script for rotating the banners and then edited the theme to include the banner in maxblogpress. If you go to maxblogpress.com right now then you will see a horizontal banner just below the header.

Soon after I put that banner I started receiving emails like how I did it and how can they put such banner rotator in their blogs.

Unfortunately, I had to say, you can’t do that easily as I had custom coded that script for maxblogpress. As of now, there’s not any easy to use plugin or any other thing I know which can do that easily for you.

That’s when I decided that I will be creating a banner plugin which will have all the features a user will want from a banner rotator plugin as well as it will be very easy to use.

Fast forward to today… The launch of such banner rotator plugin is quite near. It’s called MaxBanners and we have been working on it since more than a month.

I have tried to make this plugin as ultimate as it can be and included all the features I can think of in that plugin. I’m anticipating it will be the standard plugin for all the wordpress users who want to have banners in their blog.

If you have ever tried to put a banner in your blog then you might have realized it’s not that easy. You might have lots of features in mind for a plugin that will do different things you want.

So, here’s your chance to speak out and tell me exactly what you want. What are the features you need in a banner plugin? If the features you are asking for is missing in the MaxBanners plugin then we will add them in the next release.

You can post the features you want in MaxBanners Plugin here.

63 Comments »

The purpose of this post is to clarify, in simple words, some misconceptions that people have about the registration process of our plug-ins.

Fact 1: You need to register only once.

I was surprised to see that some people think that they have to register every time they activate a new plug-in from us.

That’s not true!

In fact:

If you register for any ONE plug-in, you can use ALL the other plug-ins without going through the registration process again.

It means:

Once your username and email address is stored in our database, you don’t need to re-register.

Doesn’t that make things so easy.  Register only once, use all. That’s our principle.

Let me further clarify my point by showing you an example.

Let’s say you’re a new user. Here is what you did:

1. You downloaded, installed, and registered the ping optimizer plug-in.
2. You sat back, relaxed, and watched the ping optimizer plug-in at work.
3. You wanted some more plug-ins from MaxBlogPress.
4. You downloaded the Favicon plug-in.
5. You followed the installation instructions and  reached the point where you click on the “option” tab and click on the “Favicons”  tab there.

6. You fill in the name and email that you had used during the first time you registered. You hit the “register” button and this is the page you see next.

Were there any confirmation emails to check?

No.

Were there any further links to click?

No.

You get to use the favicon plug-in right away.

So let’s add a few more steps to our list and see what happens next.

1. You complete the favicon plugin installation.
2. You sit back and smile at the beauty of it.
3. You love the plug-ins so much that you want to download ALL the MBP plug-ins at once.
4. You start installing them one by one.

Any confirmation emails to check? No.

Any links to click on? No.

Conclusion:

You need to register only once, to use any or all plug-ins.

Fact 2: You don’t have to register again to upgrade the plug-ins

It’s the same thing with upgrades for existing plug-ins. You don’t even have to see the registration page to upgrade our plug-ins. The plug-ins works right away after it is updated.

NOTE: 
A note for those of you who are VERY early users of our plug-ins . By early I mean, at the time when we didn’t have a registration box inside our plug-ins and you had to register in another way. The method was not very user friendly. If you are such an early user and haven’t gone through the new registration process then you’ll see the registration form JUST ONCE only. After that you won’t see any registration form whenever you update any plugin.

Fact 3: If you have multiple blogs, you don’t need to register separately for each of them.

If you have  2 or more than 2 blogs, you can use the same email address for all of them. There is no need to go through the registration process for each of them separately.  Just type the email address you used while registering your first blog and all other blogs will be automatically registered.

Fact 4: If you unsubscribe from the MaxBlogPress newsletter, your existing plug-ins will still work.

Although the registration process is directly tied with the MaxBlogPress newsletter subscription, you don't have to stay subscribed to it to make your plug-in work. After registration, if you don't like the content of the MaxBlogPress newsletter, then you are free to unsubscribe anytime you wish by following the link at the bottom of your email.

The MaxBlogPress plug-ins you were using will still work fine without any problem.

However, if you unsubscribe from the MaxBlogPress newsletter, here is what you will miss:

• Announcements of new plugins we develop.
• Announcements of updates on existing plug-ins.
• Tips for helping you attract more traffic and more income for your blog.
• Recommendations on blog related software and e-books that help you attract more traffic and more income for your blog. Rest assured that we only recommend quality products which actually help you.

Fact 5: If you unsubscribe from the MaxBlogPress newsletter AND want to install further plug-ins, you need to go through the email registration procedure again.

If you unsubscribe from the MaxBlogPress newsletter, then your existing plug-ins will work without any problem.

But you need to register again if you want to install any new plug-in we develop.

The reason is that once you unsubscribe from our newsletter, your name and email address will be deleted from our database. So if you want to install more of our plug-ins you will have to register again.

9 Comments »

Let’s imagine…

Tomorrow morning you wake up with an amazing psychic power. Now you can see right in your mind, what your visitors are thinking while reading your blog.

You now know exactly what they want to read in your blog. You know why they are leaving your blog. You even know what they were trying to find in your blog and left your blog when they didn’t find it.

Imagine what it could do to your blog?

If you had such an amazing power what would you have done for improving your blog? Where will your blog be today? Will you be able to create the best blog in any topic you want with this power?

How would you have used this psychic power for improving your blog? Post your comments below.

This is not an arbitrary question popped in my head. I’m thinking quite deeply in this question since past 2 days and want to see your view on it.

Later I’ll show you how answering this one simple question can dramatically make difference to your blog.

31 Comments »

You may not have seen this before, but Internet radio has changed dramatically in the last few months with the introduction of Pandora.

Pandora allows users to create their own ’stations’ based on theme or artist. For example, I have a station called “Sting”. Sting is one of my favorite performers, so I created a station that plays his music.

But, Pandora does not just play Sting in my Sting Channel, it plays music similar to Sting then tries to ‘discover’ what music I like by allowing me to rate the music it selects “like Sting” by giving it a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’.

The site is supported by ad revenue, but there is an annual subscription that removes the ads for $39.

Check it out…
http://www.pandora.com

5 Comments »