As we transition to a new era of computing where people are getting their information via mobile phones, you are starting to see just about every high profile website or blog making their own iPhone app.  But what about the average WordPress user who doesn’t have the time and/or budget to make their own custom iPhone application?

Not long ago I covered a free WordPress plugin called WPTouch which creates a mobile-friendly version of your WordPress blog to display for mobile web browsers.  The unfortunate truth, however, is that outside of clicking on a link from Twitter on their phones, most iPhone, Android, or mobile users in general do not use the mobile web to view a webpage.  In order to maximize convenience for your readers you really need a custom iPhone application.  This is where an app I recently discovered, Wiziapp, comes to the rescue.

What is WiziApp?  Wiziapp is a WordPress plugin that automatically turns your WordPress blog into a native iPhone app in real time, giving easy access to the following within the application: Posts, pages, comments, categories, tags, links, images, videos, and audio files. And if that wasn’t enough, Wiziapp even offers a push notification service to notify iOS users when your website has new content available!

Here is a complete list of the features provided by the Wiziapp team:

• Create and personalize your iPhone application from your WordPress dashboard using the plugin’s wizard.
• Deliver all of your blog content directly to your App in real time.
• Notify your readers about new posts via push notification service.
• Your readers can easily read and post new comments directly from your App.
• Your App will display your images and galleries in native iPhone style.
• All the media you have posted will be collected to video or audio libraries.
• Your readers can easily search your blog directly from your App.
• Playing video and audio using Wiziapp’s advanced players.
• Enable your readers to navigate between posts by categories, tags or author name.
• Integrate with your login system.
• Your readers can easily share your posts and images via Facebook, Twitter, Email or SMS.
• Monetize your App by displaying ads using your own AdMob account.
• Your readers can easily save your posts to their ‘favorites’ list.
• We publish your App to the iTunes App Store and save you time & money dealing with an Apple developer account.
• See daily stats of your App visits and downloads.
• Stay up to date with all iOS and WordPress new features.
• Check out the Wiziapp tour here.

[Continue Reading...]

Thanks to the huge success of the iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, and other mobile devices, Apps have become all the rage.  The problem for many webmasters and WordPress users is that most smaller WordPress websites/blogs can’t afford to have a custom app developed for their WordPress site.  

Of course, thanks to beauty of the open source nature of WordPress, WordPress users have access to all sorts of great WordPress plugins.  I recently found myself debating whether or not to develop an app for WordPress Hacks and decided that first I would look into what free WordPress plugins were available.  My goal was simply to find one which would display a WordPress blog to mobile browsers in a mobile friendly format.  

Based upon roughly 2 million downloads plus great reviews, far and away the best plugin I’ve found to accomplish this is one called WP Touch.  For those that haven’t heard of WP Touch, this WordPress plugin automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects, and will display this theme when your WordPress blog is viewed from an iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung  and BlackBerry Storm/Torch mobile device!

The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your WordPress website to mobile visitors, all without modifying a single bit of code or making any changes to your standard WordPress theme.  The mobile theme also includes the ability for visitors to switch between WP Touch view and your site’s regular theme if that is what they prefer.

If you are looking for a more feature-rich product, I discovered that users can also purchase a Pro version of WP Touch which includes a slew of new features like more style, color and branding customizations, themes, 10 languages, more advertising options, web-app mode, and even iPad support.

Although it is somewhat off the topic of WordPress, I’ve always enjoyed it when blogs discuss their blogging setup with their readers.  After all, the typical blogger ranges from spending an hour a day blogging to doing so as a full time job, making the topic of comfort an important one.  I’ve been blogging fairly regularly for almost five years now and I have to say that thanks to some recent technology, over the past two years or so I’ve found my blogging habits have changed quite a bit and I’ve been able to make some changes/improvements to how I blog.  I’ve now almost completely moved away from using a desktop for my daily blogging routine and find I do most of my blogging now on a laptop or even occasionally from my iPad.

As a result, I’ve spent some time talking to fellow bloggers and getting input on some more comfortable furniture for doing my blogging.  I’ve tried a couple of different things ranging from laptop stands, to chairs/couches or other pieces of furniture, but hadn’t really found anything I could highly recommend to others….until recently.

This past week I had the opportunity to try out a product that isn’t completely new, but that I only recently discovered, called the Sumo Gigantor bag from Sumo Lounge.  My research showed that it had been featured in all sorts of magazines and received tons of great reviews from trusted websites, so I decided to give Sumo Lounge a try.

The closest comparison I’ve seen to the Sumo Lounge chairs is probably the Love Sac, which you may have seen for sale in most malls, however Sumo Lounge actually cuts out the middleman allowing them to make their similar bags available at a much more affordable price.  These well constructed bean couches aren’t built like the beanbags I grew up with, which was a pleasant surprise.  I quickly discovered that the great thing about the Sumo Lounge line of beanbags is that this allows me to comfortably do my blogging in front of my entertainment center or pretty much any room within the house (assuming their is adequate room available).

If you are interested in one for your blogging setup, here are some of the features that the sumo line of chairs boasts:

• Bean bag chairs range from 42″ x 42″ x 34″ to 86″ x 60″ x 40″.
• Includes a removable microsuede cover made with machine washable 100% polyester fiber.
• Each page includes several popular color choices.
• Stays fluffy and full over time (won’t ever go flat!).
• All bags include free shipping and a 100% satisfaction guarantee.

In addition to blogging I’ve also spent some time looking for other ways to enjoy my new piece of furniture.  The logical choice to me seemed to be to put it to the test playing video games.  I enjoy online gaming as much as anyone and decided to spend a few hours playing Call of Duty online with my friends.  Even though it may not have been reflected in my kill-to-death (KTD) ratio, it didn’t take long for me to appreciate the improved experience I was getting by sitting closer to the television.  As a result, I think I can also recommend these Sumo Lounge bags as an excellent gaming chair.  Lastly, I’ve also found that I often have to fight my wife for the Sumo Lounge chair as she often wants to use it for movies/Netflix, and then kids have been begging me to let them sleep in it pretty much every night since it arrived.

Overall I have to admit I’m very happy with my new Sumo Gigantor and can confidently recommend the Sumo Lounge line of bean bag chairs to friends and fellow bloggers.  I know we have hundreds of professional bloggers who read this site so I’d like to hear about your blogging setups.  Let us know in the comments below!!

This guest post was written by Jake Zarobsky, a blogger for Today’s iPhone, custom theme developer, and an amateur photographer. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

Ever notice how many features the standard installation of WordPress lacks? YouTube embedding, stats, and even a specialized Twitter widget? Well, if you have a self hosted blog at WordPress.com, these features are all given to you. In fact, many of these features are forced upon you by the sponsoring company, Automattic. Wanna learn how to get all of that “cloud-power” for your WordPress site?

If you are one of the people who would love to have these features at your disposal and already has a WordPress.com account, keep reading. Otherwise, you’re losing out on a great plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites!

Keep reading to find out more

This guest post was written by Jennifer Nodwell, a coder and website developer since 1997 who works almost exclusively with open source CMS applications like WordPress. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.

If you’ve never had a website go missing, then you’re very lucky. Your host can have a network error or hardware failure that loses your site’s files. A malicious hacker can penetrate your FTP server and replace your site with files of his choice. You might get curious about a new plugin, install it, and break your site to pieces in the process. No words really describe the panic you feel when you realize your website is gone!

If your host allows you to use CRON jobs, you can protect yourself from all those things by running a daily backup of your database and web site files. If you lose your site for any reason, you can put it right back in a few minutes.

A CRON job is script that your web server executes at a specified time. CRON comes from the word chronograph, and it is a time-based job scheduler for LINUX based operating systems. Most WordPress sites are running on such an operating system. If you have access to a CRON scheduler through your hosting control panel or have command-line access to your hosting server, you should be able to write a shell script to back up your database and site files.

The first thing you will need is a shell script. The script will connect to your database, export the whole thing to a file, and zip the file up so you can store it safely somewhere. Then, it will zip up all your website files.

If you have a host panel where you can create and edit a file, you can do this there. Otherwise, open any non WYSIWYG text editor and create a file called daily_backups.sh. The .sh file extension indicates this is a shell script file.

#!/bin/sh
TERM=linux
export TERM
NOWDATE=`date +%a` # Sets the date variable format for zipped file: Sun
clear # clears terminal window
echo
echo "Hi, $USER!"
echo
mysqldump --opt -Q -h your-website-host-name --user=your-db-user-name --password=your-db-password your-database-name | gzip -v9 - > /www/public_html/backups/MySQL-$NOWDATE-yourwebsite.sql.gz

The first line is an indicator to the server for which shell processing language to use. Your server might require

#!/bin/bash or something else there. Use echo $SHELL from the command prompt to determine your shell type if you have command line access.

The TERM instruction tells the server what terminal type it is communicating with; in this case, a text terminal.

Next we create a variable named NOWDATE and use a little script magic to set it to be equal to the abbreviation for the current day of the week e.g. Sun, Mon, Tue, etc.

The mysqldump command will “dump” the entire database including create procedures and insert procedures for all the current data.

Replace your-website-host-name with your website host name for your database. You can find this in your wp-config file if you don’t know it.

Replace your-db-user-name, your-db-password, your-db-name with actual values. Again, these values are likely exactly what they are in your wp-config file.

Replace /www/public_html/ with whatever your hosting account’s root path is.

Replace yourwebsite with some meaningful name.

Now, save the file. You need to set the permissions on the file so that it is executable. If your cpanel has a cron scheduler, just add this file to the list of files it runs. If you need to edit your crontab from command line, see this tutorial.

To back up your site files, as well as your database, add a few more lines to your script.

echo
echo "Zipping wordpress directory structure..."
tar -czf $HOME/backups/$NOWDATE.mywebsite.tar.gz $HOME/public_html/*

Hopefully, you do have a directory outside your public web root so that your backup files are stored in a location that is not accessible via the internet.

The tar command will pack the files up into a tarball for you (like a zip archive).