As you might have noticed, I include the latest photos from my Instagram feed in the footer of my blog. I’m no Instagram celebrity, but including the Instagram shots help my readers get a glimpse of another side of me, namely my experiences as a padel player competing in Spain and my journey in this sport.

Spotlight for WordPress offers a simple and effective way to add your Instagram feeds to your WordPress site.

Instagram has become one of the most used social media platforms. It is now becoming as important as ever to harness its power and use it to your advantage. By integrating your Instagram feed on your site, you can increase social engagement and brand awareness while also building social proof.

As one of the main social media platforms in 2020, Instagram is a place where you can connect with your audience in a very different way than you would on Twitter or Facebook. While Twitter is mostly used to express your views and Facebook to connect with friends and family, Instagram is unique in that it is a space where you can tell your story. Used in the right way, Instagram can be a very powerful tool for bloggers, businesses, and brands alike.

Instagram for me is a place where I can share my passion for sports – in particular my padel and tennis journey. It is a way to showcase a different side to my personality that adds a personal touch to my blog. In this post, I will be taking you through the process of installing Spotlight on your website, just like I’ve done in my footer. Let’s get to it.

Whether you have a blog, product or service page, run events, or a business, Spotlight can help you take your Instagram game to the next level.

Instagram itself, surprisingly, does not make it very simple to embed such a feed and customize it on your site. Instead, we have to use WordPress plugins that facilitate this task. My favorite plugin for this is Spotlight, so in this post, I’ll review Spotlight for WordPress and cover some of its best features.

[Read more…]

Starting a blog is a fun and rewarding experience. However, on the other hand, it can also be portrayed as being as daunting as it is interesting. Often, people are very interested in starting their own blog but struggle to get to grips with how to go about starting one from scratch.

The purpose of this post is to provide you with insight and guidelines into how you can start your own blog using one of the most powerful platforms for this purpose – WordPress.

STEP 1 – WordPress as the chosen blogging platform

WordPress is a self-hosted platform and is one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) available. Millions of posts are created using this platform and it can be used for building many types of websites, ranging from a personal blog to business-level sites. The main advantage of WordPress is its user-friendliness, easy to understand interface, as well as being completely customizable.

The WordPress software can be downloaded from wordpress.org.

STEP 2 – Choosing a Web Host

Once you have decided to use WordPress as your blogging platform, you will need to choose a web hosting company to host your site. Web hosting can be a very complicated and technical topic, and it’s what trips most new bloggers up in their initial steps.

My suggestion is to keep things simple and don’t get too obsessed about finding the best possible host and configuration.

You will see that thousands if not millions of bloggers out there start off with a platform like Bluehost. The reason is that this company has been in the industry for over twenty years and provides one of the most simple ways to starting a WordPress blog and keeping it running without any issues.

If you choose Bluehost, you don’t even need to download WordPress yourself, instead you can use their interface to get it installed, with the big advantage being that you can get started in 5 minutes without worrying about MySQL databases and editing any PHP files.

Get a Bluehost hosting account

Here’s a quote from my cousin, who was able to get his own blog up and running after a short chat with me that consisted of me telling him the guidelines that I’m sharing with you in this blog post:

I have personally just started WordPress an Bluehost for blogging and was able to understand how to use it and its functions fairly quickly! The main reason for this is that the back end is intuitive, straightforward and relatively easy to navigate around. Moreover, there are many fora, tutorials or blogs which can help one acclimatise to this CMS.

One helpful site for tutorials is www.lynda.com, offering basic and more advanced tutorials WordPress guides. Check it out!

STEP 3 – Selecting a topic for your blog

OK, so you have decided to create your own blog. Now you must determine what your blog will be about.  What topic best suits the need for creating this blog? There are many topics one can select. It is important to keep in mind that you don’t need to necessarily pick a topic that is seemingly the most popular, but you may also opt to select a topic that is interesting to you, enjoyable and one in which you are interested in learning further.  However, do remember that if you manage to strike a balance between the two aforementioned approaches, you will increase the likelihood of increased traffic to your blog!

Keep in mind also that you need not be the expert in that field when you first start out!  You need only have a keen interest and passion for the topic and ultimately learn as you go along.

One other important factor to keep in mind is that the blog topic chosen should not determine that your entire blog will be tied to that topic.  Feel free to switch around a few topics or spread your topic into other areas of interest.  Feel free to experiment and mix it up a bit. Ultimately, you will definitely find the topic, or topic, which will definitely be to your liking and best matches your interests or passion.

So we have so far determined that we want to start a blog, identified WordPress as our blogging platform and chosen our web host. We also identified our chosen topic of interest. Let’s move on to the next steps…

STEP 4 – Setting up your WordPress blog

In order to start your blog, you need a host and a domain name.

The domain name is the main URL, or the address, for your website.  Choose wisely as this is what will identify and distinguish your blog from others!  The following are a number of tips when selecting your domain name:

• Keep the name simple and relevant to your blog
• Keep it as short as possible
• Make it easy to type and pronounce
• Avoid using number and symbols, like hyphens, as this can make it confusing and hard to find for your visitors
• Try to use words that can be easily picked up by search engines to improve your visibility on the web

We touched briefly on hosting earlier, and I hope you took the chance to get that set up right away. If you did, then great, you can skip to the next step.

If you’re still unsure, let’s talk a bit more about web hosting.

Every website needs web hosting in order to function.  Without having a web host you would not be able to take your blog live on the web.  The web host’s function is to store your files and data on their servers so that people visiting your website can access the content of your website using their web browsers.

There are a number of different web hosting options available.  Below is a shortlist of hosts I’ve tried over the years and can recommend for beginner bloggers:

• Bluehost
• Kinsta
• WP Engine

So if you want to compare and contrast, by all means, visit those hosts and take your pick. You can’t go wrong with any of them. 

STEP 5 – Customizing your blog

So you have now taken your website live on the web! The next step is to start customizing your blog’s design to make it visually appealing, easy to navigate, and attractive to your visitors.

Themes

WordPress gives you the ability to select amongst thousands of themes for your website.  There are free themes and the premium themes which often provide more advanced features and functions for your website.  Navigate through the library to select the theme which best suits the content of your blog.  Keep in mind that when selecting a theme try to opt for a theme that is simple to use and offers a clear and clear design for your visitors to view and navigate through.

The following are a couple of good WordPress themes and page builders suitable for blogs. My favorite combinations are:

• Studiopress
• Elementor

Plugins

Plugins are a function in WordPress that have the ability to improve the design and functionality of your blog.  They are essentially add ons that you can install on your site that focus primarily on adding new features to your site.  The type of plugin required depends on the type of blog you are writing and the type of extended function that you are after.  Much like themes, there are a plethora of plugins available to the community. For blogs, in particular, you can check out plugins like Spotlight (Instagram and Social Media) as well as WP RSS Aggregator (importing news items from other sites via RSS).

STEP 6 – Writing your first blog post

Congratulations! You have set up and customised your WordPress blog.  Your next step it to start writing your first blog post!

To write your first blog post, click on the Posts menu in the left hand menu of your dashboard, then select Add New.

To begin with, start with choosing a title for your blog post.  Posts are structured into various ‘blocks’  Each block you add can contain different types of content.  For example, text, images, videos, headers, lists, etc.  Proceed by writing your blog and inserting the different types of content as necessary for your blog.

You may notice that on the right hand side of your dashboard when writing a blog there is an option to assign ‘Categories and Tags’ to your blog posts.

Whilst writing your blog post you may choose to save the blog as a draft or to preview it as it will look on your website.  Furthermore, when you have finished writing your blog you can click on the Publish button to make your post live on your website, either immediately or set it to go live on a certain date and time.

Once you have written and published your first post, set yourself a timeline as to when you would like to start publishing your next posts to your blog.

Happy blogging!

Let me know in the comments section if you have any questions about starting a new blog and I’ll be happy to help out. It can certainly take a lifetime of learning to run a successful blog, but now it’s easier than ever to get started thanks to hosts like Bluehost and the WordPress software.

Over time I’ve built and run several blogs and so far I’ve always relied mostly on organic SEO for my traffic. I’ve managed to ramp up traffic through good content over the years that has been picked up by Google, but lately I’ve been wondering whether it makes sense to use social sharing plugins or services.

I’m aware of Buffer, Hootsuite, Missinglettr, MeetEdgar and some other WordPress-specific plugins such as Nelio and Social Web Suite.

So far I’ve only auto-published across FB and Twitter using a plugin which basically posts to those two platforms as soon as the post is published on my blog. I’ve briefly tried tools like Buffer and Missinglettr in the past but abandoned them soon after due to getting little results for my efforts.

I suspect that these tools are great for sites with higher traffic or a different kind of audience, as I don’t see my sites getting more traffic if I just retweet posts or repost with different titles and content (a la Missinglettr).

Judging by the popularity of these tools, however, I had a suspicion that I might be wrong.

[Read more…]

If you buy ebooks for Amazon’s Kindle, you’ll have realized that they come with copy protection called Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Unfortunately, the Kindle format is not compatible with all other ebook reading devices, so you’ll run into trouble if you want to use a tool like Calibre to convert your purchased books into a format compatible with your reading device unless that device happens to be a Kindle, in which case you’re good.

The solution is to use two plugins for Calibre as detailed in this excellent guide. Since I’m on a Mac, I could not get an older version of Kindle to work on Catalina, so I installed a virtualized Windows 8 and I was able to set up everything without a glitch.

Notes

• If Calibre gives you an error like `ERROR: Unhandled exception: InvalidPlugin:The plugin in C:\\Users\\Me\\Downloads\\DeDRM_tools_6.6.1.zip’ is invalid. It does not contain a top-level __init__.py file`, you’re trying to load the full archive folder into Calibre. Instead you need to open up the .zip file you downloaded and drill down a couple of levels. Using this example the file you want is C:\Users\Me\Downloads\DeDRM_tools_6.6.1.zip\DeDRM_calibre_plugin\DeDRM_plugin.zip.
• If you’re trying to de-DRM Amazon’s newer .kfx files, you’ll also need to install the KFX conversion plugin(link is external).

One of the things I did this year was to buy a decent multipurpose backpack (The North Face Borealis) that I keep packed and ready to go.

This is one of the productivity hacks for this year. Instead of having to fumble around for stuff everytime I need to travel or leave the house to make sure I have everything I need, I just keep my bag stocked and ready. This applies to my travel cosmetic bag too. It means I have to own two copies of certain items, but it saves a ton of time and worry.

My Backpack

• Macbook 12 inch – still my favorite for travels and coffee shop work sessions
• Macbook power supply and chord
• iPad Pro 12.9″
• Two pens (one multicolor)
• Small notebook
• USB pen drive with attached USB-C adaptor
• Smartphone/Kindle holder
• Credit card wallet
• Hand cream (Cicaplast or L’Occitane)
• Raw Bite energy bar
• Pair of lenses
• Packet of tissues
• W5 wipes for glasses
• Hand sanitizer
• QCY wireless earbuds (I own several pairs of these as they are quite cheap, and just leave a pair of each in different places for convenience)
• Rode microphones (in case I want to interview someone)
• Round band aids (in case I have any sores while walking; sometimes one of my toes gets a bit bruised during padel matches)

I experimented with using the iPad Pro as my only device when going out, but I found it hard to get used to working on iOS. It’s doable especially for simple writing activities, and it feels more powerful than my Macbook, however, I just never felt 100% comfortable.

The new magic keyboard that Apple released this year feels really good, and the addition of the trackpad really gets it close to a laptop experience. In addition, you get a really nice camera, which is great for video calls, although I don’t like the weird angle that much. I tried out the keyboard for a week and felt good with it, and I especially like the fact that the base of the device is always cool, perfect for working on your lap during summer months. In the end, though, I returned it as I prefer the Macbook. I just wish the Macbook was more powerful and had more screen space. That would probably put me in Macbook Air territory, but the Air is not as handy and lightweight as the Macbook, even though the difference is small.

The great thing about working with the Macbook and the iPad is that I can easily have a dual monitor setup even when working in cafes or coworking spaces. That makes it excellent for productivity as I like working with dual monitor setups. All I need is a cable and the new Sidecar functionality on MacOS Catalina. Alternatively, there is the Duet app which works very well for me too.