This guest post was written by John Pratt who blogs about blogging, WordPress, and his life as a webmaster. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

There are a lot of unethical “content spinning” plugins for Wordpress and other blogging platforms on the web. But for those of us with legitimate blogs, after about 100 posts your content starts to get lost. Most of it is still good, and most of us have multiple blogs as well. Why not “bring back” a post from the archive to the home page on a regular schedule and reuse that old content again? Before I had this plugin I longed for something that would effectively rotate my blog posts out of the archives and back onto the front page of my blog. Not every blog will have a need for this, but I have quite a few blogs, and I can’t always work on every one every day (or even every week). The blog paradigm means that the newest things are on the homepage scrolling down to the oldest, and when the content doesn’t change it makes you blog “stale”.

Being able to recycle your blog posts takes a marketing tip from fast food restaurants. Do you ever notice that certain things “come back” on a regular basis? Every year for Lent, all the fast food restaurants being back the “fish sandwich”. You see McDonald’s bring back the “McRib” and the “Monopoly Game” about once per year. They take things in and out of the rotation to keep it fresh, and if your blog posts stand the test of time, there’s no reason that they can’t be rotated too.

I have a fun site called “Top Jokes that’s been live with jokes for about 8 months or so. I used to posts a joke or more every day, in fact there are now more than 500 jokes. This type of site doesn’t pay very well, as far as a CTR, and the traffic isn’t so high either. But I don’t want to get rid of it because like all web real estate “it grows over time” – I just want to minimize the amount of time I spend on it. I’d like to post maybe a half dozen jokes per month and rotate old jokes from the archives to the homepage at the rate of one per day.

Enter the brilliant plugin by Dagon Design Scheduled Post Shift Plugin for Wordpress. It’s a very simple, very easy to use plugin. Once you install and enable it – just set the options:

Just enter the number of hours between post shifts, and at that time it will rotate your oldest post in your Wordpress blog to your home page by changing the published date to current time. Once per day enter 24 hours, twice per day 12 hours, every two days enter 48 hours, etc. The second option you can leave blank, but if you enter a category ID only posts from that category will be rotated. You could use this to your advantage in an interesting way by creating a dozen or so posts, and give them dates from a year ago and assign them to a “sponsors” category. Then enable Scheduled Posts Shift for just the “sponsors” category every 24 hours (if you post every day) or whatever your post schedule is to have “recommended” or sponsored items cycle through your home page regularly. This could be a very interesting way to monetize your blog.

However you use it, Scheduled Posts Shift can help you to automatically recycle your WordPress blog posts and keep all that hard work and those archives you’ve built up over time producing both traffic and income for years!

If by chance you’re using data based permalinks – will need to remove them and use just the post (/%post%) so the URL of your posts doesn’t change when the old posts are “shifted” to the home page. Read How to change permalink structure seamlessly if that situation applies to you.

One thing I’ve always loved to do is set up my blogs comments to display alternating background colors (although ironically I have not done so for this site yet). I’ve always felt that this helps give the comments a little more separation from each other and improve the overall look of the blog.

Because WordPress is full of loops (homepage, category, tag, etc.), this same theory can truly be applied all over your blog. David of CyberCoder posted yesterday a great hack to alternate the background of your blog posts. Here are the steps you need to take:

Create a loop counter. Right before the Loop begins set a variable to zero.

<?php
$x=0;
if (have_posts()) : ?>

At this point I would want the Background Color to change, insert code to test for an even number post, and if this is true, add an inline CSS style for the background that would override the stylesheet.

<?php if ($odd = $x%2){?>
<div style=”background-color:#404040;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px;”>
<?php }?>

Then, where the background color should return to the original state, run the same test for the even numbered post and close the div tag set by the Inline Style.

<?php if( $odd = $x%2 ){?>
</div>
<?php }?>

The final step is to add 1 to the counter for each post, which is done at the end of the loop.

<?php
$x++;
endwhile; ?>

Thanks for sharing this trick David!