Finally, presenting the winner of theme battle #3. Tasty Showcase was a template designed by Brad of DemusDesign, who also coded it in XHTML/CSS/JS. I then took the coded template and ported it to WordPress. It has a ton of widgetized areas, including widgetized footers (plural).

Read on to see the features, including how to use the slider, in more detail…

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A number of you have asked me what happened to my “WordPress Weekend Resources” series since I haven’t posted one of those since September 2009. Basically what I would do is roundup some of the top WordPress-related links I found during the past week, and posted them on the blog with my take on it.

I stopped doing it, because I was posting most of these links on my Twitter account already. Although, for those of you who don’t use Twitter, or follow so many people you might miss one of my tweets, I created a new community links page.

This page is an automatically updated list of tweets from my @themelab account with either a #WordPress hashtag and/or a #tlcom hashtag. The “tlcom” stands for Theme Lab Community, by the way. Also, remember it only posts tweets with my Twitter account, so don’t try to spam the hashtags thinking it’s going to show up on that page, because it’s not.

It’s powered by Juitter, a jQuery plugin, which uses the Twitter Search API to pull my latest tweets with that criteria. Being powered by the Twitter Search API, I believe it only goes back seven days, so make sure you check it at least once a week.

With that said, I have a couple questions for you:

• Would you still be interested in WordPress Weekend Resources returning? Although you can get more real-time information through Twitter, it has a temporariness attached with it, as you can only go back 7 days or so with the search API. Blog posts would be more permanent, plus there would be more room for information in the descriptions.
• Would you be interested in a tutorial on how to make your own “Community Links” page template in WordPress? Although it wouldn’t have to be community links, pretty much anything that you can search on Twitter could be put on an automatically-updated page on your site.

Let me know in the comemnts, thanks!

If you have a semi-popular blog, chances are you have a few scraper sites copying your posts directly from your feed. When you catch a site doing this, you’ll probably be pretty upset at first, seeing as they just copied all your hard work, and probably didn’t even give you credit. Instead of getting mad, get even.

In this post, I’ll go over some ways to do just this in WordPress by building links back to your blog (even when the scraper conveniently “forgot” to credit you):

• How to use the RSS Footer plugin to insert links (or whatever other content you want) directly into your feed.
• How to use FeedBurner FeedFlares to insert social bookmarking links in your feeds, plus your own custom-made flares.
• How to install YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) to automatically insert related post links into your feed.

Read on to see the rest, there’s a video too…

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