Here’s Eva Vesper from Web Hosting Search - a small, independent web hosting review site. She will be presenting her view of the web design revolution: what was then, and what is now. Enjoy!

Just like fashion, web design has its seasons. Seven years after the bubble burst, the Internet rose once more, becoming a natural and easy exchangeable way of communication. In a short period of time we have seen trends come and go and user patterns change dramatically. Let’s

Web Design 2.0

As the Internet is getting older and its passengers more experienced and regular, things are slowly changing. Extravagance is trashed for functionality and ease of use, demands are increasing and so is the number of web devotees. Web standards are to be taken seriously (though only a small percentage follows it to the T). Design has become an aesthetic experience: how it looks, feels and functions is very important today.

Less Flash

A couple of years ago web design was a craft measured by your flash skills and how much animation you could fill into a design template. People wanted big bright lights, sounds, and motion to decorate their sites. But now, flash design is out. It is bulky, not completely followed and indexed by search engines, and when flash design goes wrong - it goes terribly wrong. Few sites have implemented flash design in an appealing and user friendly way.

Less Image Links

The transition back from flash to proper script languages like HTML or PHP is a “Web Design 2.0″ necessity because now, web designers are coding for the ease of search engine spiders, mainly Google. Image links are also difficult to deal with in a website. Remember in the 90s, most sites had the “enter” icon or the flying envelope icon for “email me”? We all know those cheesy icons are dead but so are useless image links. Banners are great but when a site puts up more than a dozen, it degrades the site and lowers the standards.

More Glassy Icons

One type of graphic that seems to be here to stay is the shiny and glassy icons. Buttons in particular are these days often designed to look encapsulated in glass. A little detail that has stuck around, both appreciated by designers and web users.

More Professional Image Content

Since it is text content that registers the best with the search engines, that’s where the focus lies in web design as well as SEO. But in the future website dynamics more images/photos will take a bigger role in creating quality content. Not only will the demand for better web copy increase but also the demand on better graphics and digital image content.

Cascading Stylesheets (CSS)

When it comes to developing website and applying web design of the 21st century, CSS stylesheets and CSS developers are setting the standard. By CSS we are talking about proper CSS, separated stylesheets. For too long content has been mixed with presentation. For too long, class and id (CSS terms) have been confused with each other, thus incorrectly used. The way led by the World Wide Web Consortium, the time for a proper CSS standards has come. Web browsers are urged to get in line and so are you.

Separate Top Sections, Strong Colors, Bigger Text

Strictly talking web design (2.0) of the new internet, it’s all about the above mentioned features. A clear separated top section or header covering the main page in width and normally going up to 200px in height with a strong color and distinct logo. A color scheme with stronger and brighter colors to more efficiently draw the attention of the visitor’s eye. Blue and green are two popular colors used by many web designers, as they reflect trust and honesty and adds credibility to the website.

Both general content and headers, are typically of a larger size. This in consideration of how our eyes adapt to reading on computer screens. Text in larger sizes has been proven not only easier to read but highly appreciated since it allows the visitor to not sit so close to the computer screen.

Center Alignment

With left alignment being the typical structure in the old days, having your website centered in the web browser window is today’s standard. This stimulates the feeling of space on the website, making it easier for visitors to navigate. Center alignment is very common amongst blog websites and it also works well with the user scrolling.

Your Thoughts?

So there you go. Fashion may be temporal, but there are always some classics, and some things which carry on for ages… What do you think of the matter? Any changes, between then and now, you can think of?

Contributed by: Eva Vesper of Web Hosting Search. She’s one of the social media folks that twitters away in her spare time; okay work time. When she’s not twittering, she works at WHS: a guide dedicated to findinggood web hosting. Confused, lost or hate your provider? Stop by and drop a question to Eva.

If you’re like most bloggers, you started a blog, just because “everyone else was doing it”, right?
But have you ever really wondered: what does blogging mean to you? How special is it to you?

In this post, I’m going to share with you some thoughts on why blogging is special to me, and what it means to me, as I think it’s about time I did so, to gain some focus and insight on what my blogging really means to me. Feel free to share your own thoughts

The Satisfaction

Blogging is very satisfying, at least for me. Whenever I get a question from a reader, I feel that people consider me to be worthy of asking. And when I get a reply from a thankful questioner (after I’ve solved the problem), that puts a smile to my face.

It’s also about the pride I feel when I see my RSS subscriber numbers increase day by day, and the traffic numbers go up week after week. In other words, its like the satisfaction and pride you feel when passers-by stop to buy lemonade from your stand. You feel a sense of accomplishment, don’t you? (If you’ve ever operated a roadside lemonade stand, you know what I mean )

Also, it is about the honor I feel when I think about all those loyal readers, who read this blog regularly, and recommend it to their friends. it gives me a sense of authority: a thing which can take an entire lifetime to accomplish.

Moreover, when your content gets the flood of traffic from social media, and gets voted up, and gets linked to, don’t you get that special feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction and joy?

The Pride

Besides the satisfaction, it’s also about pride and sense of fulfillment. It tells me that my content is something that is worthwhile, something people are ready to spend their time reading. I feel proud that I’m doing something constructive, helping myself stand up on my own two feet, while most other people my age waste their time doing nothing.

Also, it’s about the kick. To tell people proudly: ‘I’m a blogger!’ is what makes me more proud than ever. Even though most people don’t get who a ‘blogger’ is, it still leaves an impression on them, and build respect for me.

The ‘kick’ gets even more enjoyable when I tell people that blogging is something you can earn from, and something that I earn from. Their jaws drop in awe and admiration. What could be more elevating?

The Money

Yes, it’s also about the money.

Money is not my primary goal. Nor do I blog only for money. Neverthelesss, it still feels nice to earn some money. It tells me that what I’m doing is profitable (I don’t care how much the money is), and that my effort and determination is paying off.

Even so, money isn’t the primary factor I use to judge this blog’s success. Many successful bloggers don’t earn any money from their blogs (they don’t monetize it). For many people (including me), the important thing is the readership. Money comes as a “side benefit”, if you will.

Different bloggers have different goals, and different ambitions. For some, money is the thing. For others, it’s not. What do you think?

What Does Blogging Mean To You?

So, what does blogging mean to you? Inspire us with your story! We’d love to hear.

You can be as brief or as detailed as you like.

Cover image by Jeff Belmonte

It’s been a while since a post about WordPress here at PBF: so here’s Rajeev Edmonds from mintblogger.com, explaining how to create a 404 page that kicks butt

More than occasionally, a reader may follow an invalid URL pointing to a page on your blog and may end up landing on a page displaying a blunt, non-sassy “404 - Page Not Found” message, only to press the browser’s back button. The question is, how do you avoid the visitor from pressing that back button? You cannot stop him or her from landing on a 404 page, can you? Time for damage control.

Almost every WordPress theme comes bundled with a 404.php file. Usually, it shows the ‘Page Not Found’ message, and that’s it. What you want is to renovate that empty 404 page, to help your lost visitor find his or her way around. In other words, your 404 page must act like a compass, guiding the lost soul…

The best strategy is to showcase the best content of your blog. You can categorize it by category or month. The code is real simple, and easy to implement. Just add these lines to your 404.php file:

The first piece of code prints out a list of all the categories on your blog. The second piece lists out
your blog’s archives, categorized by month. If you want to, you can substitute months with =postbypost, to show all the posts ever)

The following is a basic layout of a customized 404 page, that consists of several sections serving useful information to the visitor:

You can make changes in these sections according to your preferences. Integrating Google Custom Search gives an added option to the reader to search for what he is looking for.

If you are not good at PHP or CSS, but still want to make a highly customized 404 page, let this excellent 404 plugin do it for you. It gives you the flexibility to edit and customize the 404 page with ease. There you go. Something for the non-technical people!

Context Sensitive Dynamic 404 Pages

Here is one more approach to design a killer, useful 404 page. Suppose a visitor lands on your blog through, let’s say, http://www.yourdomain.com/ajax-tools, and interestingly your 404 page pulls the keyword from the URL and serves the relevant content dynamically from the database: interesting!

Douglas Karr has done exactly the same and has explained this technique. His experience tells that after implementing this solution almost 83% of his visitors were retained.

One mistake that we often commit is to write 404 on this page of ours. You should avoid it and must personalize the page as if it’s a normal page filled with juicy content. Another good option to make the page more lively is to add some relevant video and illustrations. Adding your contact information at the end of page or a link to your contact page also gives an extra option to retain the visitor, and a contact point.

Darren Rowse has designed an excellent 404 page on his blog, showcasing the best content, a section for newbies and of course, the Google Custom Search box.

Have you customized your 404 page ? If yes, what other methods you use to make it more attractive for the lost visitor?

First image credit: http://flickr.com/photos/filicudi/

Blogging is a task that can eat up all your time. You don’t seem to have enough time to do all the blogging related tasks you have to do, and you don’t have time left over to attend to non-blogging responsibilities (like your ‘other’, offline life?).

Time management is about doing more work in the least amount of time. It’s about doing work effectively, and it is essential if you wish to reduce the time spent on your blog (while increasing productivity), and have time left over to tend to other things too. This article is just about that. Here are a few tips to help you manage your blogging effectively, and set it on autopilot, so you have more time for things that matter (besides your blog ).

You Don’t Have To Post Daily

Really, you don’t. Why not decrease your posting frequency from five times a week, to only, say, two times? Not only will this do you a favor (by giving you more time for other things), it will also do your blog a favor. It will allow more exposure to posts, and also help you pile up posts for the future (you could save those extra three posts for the future, couldn’t you? ).

Pick suitable days to post. By ’suitable’ I mean the ones with the most traffic potential. It is generally agreed that Monday is a good day to post, as it’s the start of the week, and if you time your post perfectly, you can land it at the top of your readers’ feed readers.

Also, late Tuesday or Wednesday is a good time to post, as it gives enough time for readers to find your content (since the last day or so), and it’s not the weekend yet, which means that there will not be the drop in traffic associated with weekends.

As you know already, posting on weekends is usually less profitable than posting on weekdays, because of the drop in traffic…

If you have a topical (or ‘urgent‘) niche, like sports or news, you have a particular advantage, and a disadvantage. The advantage is that you can post on any day, and since the information is topical, it is urgent, and people cannot afford to miss it, so you will not probably experience a drop in traffic, nevertheless of the day you post it. So, you can safely post on any day. The disadvantage is that most topical niches demand constant attention, and you should be posting like multiple times a day, to keep up with competitors. That’s bad for you, since you’re trying to decrease your posting frequency, right? Why not hire people to write for you, and fill in for times you cannot be available? (I discuss this later in this article, so read on!)

The point is, find the best days to post, and determine the number of times to post in a week. No matter times you decide to post in a week, I suggest spreading your posts out over week, to guarantee the most exposure. The most important thing, is to experiment with different posting frequencies, to fine tune your schedule, for maximum profit.

Writing In Your Free Time, For Busy Times

Once you’ve decided upon your posting frequency, you want to write your content as well, right? It is important (and it is the best strategy), to give some structure and organization to your content production process.

Why not have your posts written in advance, set to publish automatically on a designated date? Suppose you have Wednesday as your day to post. But, you’ll be terribly busy with other tasks (aka real life). But you have weekends free: why not write your posts over the weekend, and pre-post it to automatically publish on Wednesday? Most blogging platforms have a pre-publishing function, which allows you to set a date (in the future) to publish your post, and the post is automatically published when the time comes. Neat, eh?

The greatest advantage of this method is that it doesn’t limit you. You can still post on ‘terribly busy’ days, by taking advantage of free time you have.

Moreover, why not write a post or two extra, if you have the time, and schedule it for the next week? This way, you set up a buffer for yourself, by already having content ready, to counter emergencies when you’ll not be able to write content (like a faulty internet connection…).

This technique is a pillar of time management, at least for me. Instead of wasting your free time, you utilize it for something constructive

Delegate, Hire: Get The Work Done!

Huge, successful companies are not usually (there are exceptions) a one man show, are they? It takes the combined effort of their many employees to make their business a success.

Earlier, I discussed a disadvantage of a decreased posting frequency for news, sports, etc blogs, that such niches demand constant attention, and having a decreased posting frequency might hurt your blog. The solution? Hire writers!

You can fairly easily find good, trustworthy writers to report and write for your blog, and fill in for times you’re not available. Places to look for writers are plenty: Elance and Get A Freelancer, and so on.

Another advantage to having writers is that it prevents monotonousness. It gives your blog a different voice and opinion, and makes it a more vibrant place. And who knows, the writers that you hire might be better than you!

Guest Blogging

Why not allow guest bloggers to write for your blog? Most bloggers will be more than happy to write for your blog (for free). This will allow you to save your posts for other times (thus helping set up more buffers)! And, it will also allow you to get off the computer, and manage other tasks.

Getting bloggers to guest blog on your blog can be both easy and difficult. The easiest way to start off would be to shoot an email to bloggers within your niche, asking them (politely and nicely ) to guest post on your blog. Doesn’t matter if some reject. One or two might accept you!

A word of caution though: if you’re stringent about publishing only quality content on your blog, be ready to reject some candidates. A post sent to you might not be up to the standard, so you may have to reject it… be gentle but firm, and offer the blogger another chance to improve the post and send it again. Help him or her; do not just flatly reject

Eliminate, Eliminate, Eliminate

Often, the things that eat up a majority of your time are secondary, and unnecessary. Eliminate, or reduce them to save time, and increase productivity.

Don’t check your stats every five minutes. Check them once a week. Don’t waste time on social networks (like Twitter or Plurk). Get on, and get off. Get online, write a post, and get off. Don’t wander about, wasting precious time. Moderate comments once a day (or even better, turn comment moderation off).

Set a specific time for tasks. For example, an hour every day to check email. An hour a week to check stats. A hour everyday to catch up on social networks. I know, it’s harsh, but it’s the best way to go.

Identify things that eat up your time, and figure out how you can eliminate or reduce them. Keep fine tuning, working, and you’ll figure out a perfect schedule, and method of managing your time effectively

If you’re persistent, hard working, willing to learn from past mistakes, and determined , you will learn to do things in the least time possible, and set your blog on autopilot, churning out profit, and productivity, while you tend to other tasks. It’s like being everywhere at once. Wonderful, isn’t it?

Add To The List!

You have probably taken a time management course or read such a book. What do you have to add to this list? How would you decrease the time spent on your blog, while increasing productivity? Any tips are welcome!

It’s Blog Action Day today, and thousands of bloggers from all over the globe have united to discuss the issue of poverty, which unfortunately exists in many parts of the world.

It’s Everyday Life For Me

I live in a third world country. Though I am quite well off than many people (fortunately), I see poverty and its effects everyday. The homeless man sleeping (or trying to) on the fragile footpath dividing the freeway; women braving the scorching heat to stand in kilometre long queues outside convenience stores to buy flour; and the list goes on.

The point is, poverty is something that must be solved, and you can help do that by playing a part, no matter how small or big it is. The Blog Action Day site has a list of 88 things you can do, to help fight poverty. One of them, is FreeRice, which is a vocabulary game, where you match words with their meanings, and on every correct answer, you donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program to help end hunger.

Be it blogging about it, or donating to charity or spreading the word, you can play a part in resolving the global food crisis. You might turn your nose up at it, and say: There have been similar initiatives before and they failed, and this, and that, but remember, they all have helped feed millions of people worldwide, or at least raise awareness about the issue.

If you’re a blogger, and have not yet signed up, I strongly recommend you do so, and blog about it, and help by playing your part!

Why?

“But why?” you ask.

Because the voices of thousands of bloggers will be aligned, to point to one issue: poverty. To discuss it. To find solutions. To inspire. To raise awareness.

Agreed, this may not solve this crisis completely, but, it will help feed, clothe, and bring a smile to the faces of millions of hungry and poor people, won’t it?

No one deserves to be poor, do they? The stage is yours…

Welcome to another round of the Monday Questions. Enjoy answering this one!

To succeed in any profession, you must set goals, that you can work through to, and feel happy and confident upon accomplishing them. If you’ve ever given an interview in your life, you might remember this question:

Take a pen and paper, and write down exactly where you hope to see yourself and your blog in the next five months. Be sure to write down the goals too. Maybe you aim for 500 more RSS subscribers? Or an increase in traffic? Anything that comes to mind…

What this question will do is (hopefully) make you realize what actually your goals are, and also give you a definite path to follow, to reach those goals. It’s like getting a map. You’ll not be groping around in the dark.

Once you write down all your goals and aims, stick this piece of paper somewhere you can always see (and read too!) it; for example, next to the computer. Reading this list daily will allow you to refocus yourself, and maintain that focus, giving you the confidence and helping you to achieve those goals.

This question not only concerns your blog, but you as a blogger too. What are your aims for yourself? Do you want to become a better writer? Or a better photographer (if your blog is about photography)? And so on. So, this question serves a dual purpose. Good, isn’t it?
Note: Five months seems to be a short time, so you might call this a short term goal. You can rephrase this question too, to make it a long term goal

Do share those goals with us too!

WordPress is such a wonderful blogging platform to work with. The possibilities are endless. In this post, I discuss using custom fields (or otherwise) to display ads on only selective posts.

In my last WordPress tutorial, I discussed a custom-fields based ad revenue sharing system. Whether you have a single authored blog or not, you do sometimes may wish to not display ads in particular posts (such as press releases, or announcement posts). Mind you, I’m talking of in-post ads here (not those in the sidebar or anywhere else). There’s a simple way to do that, using a few lines of code. Read on!

Step 1: The Code

First, place this code where your ads normally go (above and/or below the post):

Substitute the <!– SUBSTITUTE AD CODE HERE –> part with your ad code.

Now to explain: First, what the code does is that it gets the value of the custom field with the key ads (this you define in the post). It assigns this value to a variable ($ad_display). If the value is equal to no, the code will not display the ad. If the value of this variable is not equal to no, the code will go ahead to display the ad. Simple enough?

Step 2: Define the custom field

This code works in such a way that you don’t need to define a custom field every time you write a post. You just need to do it on the post you don’t want the ads in. If the custom field is not there, the code will show the ad.

So, for a post you don’t want ads on, just add a custom field with the key as ads, and value no:

So, any post that has this particular key/value combination does not contain the ads. But, a disadvantage of this solution is that it won’t be applicable to previous posts of a similar nature (you will have to manually edit all of them). Perhaps another solution can help?

Identifying By Category

Suppose you have categorized all such posts under a particular category (like news, for example). You know all the posts in this category should not contain ads. So instead of using custom fields on every post in this category, why not check whether a particular post is from this category, and display ads accordingly?

Use this code:

If you notice, this piece of code is similar to the above one, with just a few changes

And replace category-id with the ID of your particular category. Now what happens is that the code checks whether the current post is under the category with the ID that you specify here. If it is from that category, it doesn’t show the ad. If it’s not, from that particular category, it goes ahead to show the ad.

And that’s all you need to do. The advantage of this solution is that even older posts under the same category get affected, and you don’t have to go about editing each one.

Using The Two Together

Suppose you want the best of both worlds. You want to use custom fields as well as category identification. That’s easy. Use this code:

Remember to substitute category-id with the ID of your particular category. Now, we put both the custom fields part and the category identification parts into one, using the || logical operator. What this does is that it checks if the current post has that particular key/value combination or if it is from that particular category (the category ID of which you supply) ? If any of these conditions return true, the code doesn’t show the ad. If neither of these conditions is true, the code shows the ad. Simple enough?

The Sky Is The Limit

This technique that I just showed you isn’t only applicable (or practical) for displaying ads. You can use it for so many other tasks, such as displaying information about a press release, and so on. The sky is the limit!

What do you think of this tutorial? Was it helpful? Do you have a better way of accomplishing the same task? We’d love to know!

It’s time for another Monday Question, folks!

This week’s question for you is:

All of us, as bloggers, are at times troubled by something related to our blogging. It could be anything: getting the traffic; converting readers; writing content regularly, and so on.

So today, I want to ask you : what is it that troubles YOU about your blogging? And how do you think you’ll solve this problem of yours? Or what could you do?

Please do answer, as it could help all of us!

Note: This list is not in any particular order:

1: Probama

Probama is a pretty popular theme among pro-Obama political bloggers. This theme is easy to use: it has a built in control panel which allows you to add videos, images, podcasts and so on. It allows you to display videos on your blog (which is important for political blogs), and integrate the BarackObama.com RSS feed in your site.

It even has an editable PSD header file, for those who want to adapt this theme for other niches, or other political figures. Download this theme here.

2: Political Blue

Political Blue is clean and easy to navigate. It also allows you to display videos in the sidebar. It is available in an orange tone too. Get it here (scroll down the page to find it)

3: Independence Day

Independence Day is a clean, red and blue political theme. However, it is limited in the number of customization options one has. For one, you cannot add videos in the sidebar. But that can be hacked, cannot it? Get it here

Magazine Style Themes

Magazine style themes can easily be customized to suit a political (or political news) blog. Although the following are not really politically oriented, they can be easily adjusted and customized to be made into a political theme, and quite a powerful one, at that:

4: Structure

Structure is a clean and well organized theme. It has several different items on the front page (thus the word ‘magazine style’), and it utilizes the DOMTab navigation technique to present more content in a neat and compact way. It has a clean and customizable sidebar. You can show your photos and add a video too, if you want to. All these things make Structure a great theme and very easy to convert into a political theme. Download the Structure“>Structure theme.

5: Mimbo Theme

Mimbo is a pretty popular WordPress theme which makes immense use of WordPress’ very helpful template tags, to make it a magazine style theme to be reckoned with. This theme is somewhat minimalistic, but it is clean and very usable, and in the words of the theme designer himself: ‘a clean, grid-based starter layout for designers to install and style to their own liking‘. Get it now.

BONUS: Thesis

Note: Thesis is not a free theme. But it is good and robust enough and worth the money. And worth a mention here too!

Built by acclaimed web developer Chris Pearson, the Thesis (aff) theme is one serious theme that means business. With robust structure and organization, this search engine optimized theme is the theme for serious bloggers (political or otherwise).

Thesis has its own extensive options panel, which allows you to configure everything on your blog from font size to typeface to colours. You control pretty much everything related to blog design, from one place. Thesis is very multimedia friendly too, with several options for you to optimize and spruce up images and videos.

Thesis can easily be customized for your political blog. With all its SEO power features punch, it is a viable route to take. Get Thesis now! (aff).

Your Suggestions?

Are you a political blogger? If so, what political theme do you use? Do you have any suggestions for this list? Please do share!

And oh, don’t forget to stumble or save this article to Delicious!

There are many multi author blogs around with paid authors. Posts by different authors have specific ad codes (usually CPC, like AdSense) which are connected to their own accounts, so they make money off clicks on ads contained in their posts.

Many multi-author blog owners implement this system of ad revenue sharing system using a plugin (WordPress), but it is always faster and better to do things using the WordPress core itself, rather than using plugins. This tutorial tells you how to easily implement an effective ad revenue sharing system.

What Will Happen?

What we will do is that we will request from our database, information about the current post. We will then extract the author ID from that information. We will use conditional PHP tags to check this value against a pre-defined set of values (author IDs). If this value matches with any of the predefined ones, that particular author’s ad code is displayed. If the post is by a different author, we display the ad code of that particular author, and so on.

There are, as always, many ways of doing something in WordPress. You can do this via a plugin too, but this is the way I find most efficient…

Let’s Begin

We’ll work in our single.php file. Insert this code where you want the ads to go:

Edit the Code

Before I explain, you have to edit the code to make it work:

Substitute each entry in bold in the above code with the author ID of each author of your blog, like ...if ($author == "2")… for the author with ID ‘2′ and so on.

Now to explain:

Getting The Author ID

First, we get the current post’s ID ($post->ID) and assign it to a variable ($post_id). Next, we get the post author’s ID by inputting the post ID into the get_post reference function. This reference function is very useful, as it returns many useful attributes about a particular post (like date, author, comment count, etc).

Anyways, we also assign the post author ID to a variable ($author). That’s half the work done.

Checking Using Conditional Tags

Now, in the next step, we check the returned author ID against a predefined value. If it matches, the respective ad code is displayed.

The if ($author == "author-id1“) part checks to see if the value we extracted from the current post’s information matches the predefined value. (Remember to change author-id to the real author ID). If it does (meaning that the post is the author with that ID), the script goes on to display the ad code of that particular author.

To explain, suppose the post was written by an author with ID 5. We already have the value 5 in our code, like so: if ($author == "5"). Now, the author ID we got from the post is 5, right? And it does match up with the standard we set in our code, doesn’t it? So, this script goes ahead, and displays the specific ad code for that particular author.

Now, if the author ID doesn’t fulfill with our first condition, the code continues on, until it finds a match. If it does, it stops right there and displays the specific ad code. If it doesn’t find a match anywhere (.. else {… ), the code does something else (that you specify). Simple as that!

Note: Notice the double equals-to sign (==) there in the code. This is vital: it means that we are comparing the two values. A single equals-to sign would mean we’re assigning a value. That’s not what we need! (This is a blunder committed by so many advanced and beginner coders [including me]! ). Beware of that.

The Benefit of This Solution

The benefit of this solution is that it’s an intelligent script. You just need to fiddle with it once, and it’ll work forever. You could do this using custom fields too, but that would be too clumsy (who wants to add a custom field every time they write a post?)

And if you get more authors, you simply add a few more (copied and edited) lines of code, and that’s it!

What Do You Think?

Do you operate a multi-author blog? Is this tutorial helpful for you? Please do let me know! And oh, Stumble, Digg, or save this article to Delicious, to let other people know too!