If you’re in business, trying to get more business or looking for a new job, you are probably using Linked In.  Facebook began as a social tool for university students and has great business uses, but Linked In was founded to help business people network.  I’m finding many of my clients prefer the more formal and down to business atmosphere offered by Linked In.  They’re also finding greater success in connecting with target clientele – especially in more high industries such as purchasing artwork, and custom designed homes.

But like Facebook and face-to-face networking, Linked In is all about connecting and sharing.  Getting your business blog posts out to your Linked In following without a lot of extra steps is a great time saver.  Let’s get started:

1. First, go to your Linked In account (www.linkedin.com) and log in:
   Note this is your personal profile not a business page

2.  Next, you’ll want to edit your profile.  In the navigation at the top, hover over PROFILE then click on EDIT PROFILE in the drop down menu.

3.  Now, to add the application.  Scroll down to near the bottom of the page.  You are looking for the section called APPLICATIONS.  Click on +ADD AN APPLICATION (it’s to the left of the title).

4.  Under APPLICATIONS you’ll see a number of APPS to use.   When you see the WORDPRESS APP, click on it!

5. To the right you’ll see APPLICATION INFO.  Be sure both checkboxes are checked next to DISPLAY ON MY PROFILE and  DISPLAY ON MY LINKEDIN HOMEPAGE.  Then click on the blue ADD APPLICATION

6.  Next you will need your RSS feed.  Typically this is something like:

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/example
• http://example.com/feed.

If you are still unsure, you can click on your RSS icon on your blog, and copy the address

7.  Copy your RSS feed into the LinkedIn Application you opened in Step 5.  Then click on SAVE

8.  You should now see a page of your recent blog posts:

9.  Double check your blog is functioning on LinkedIn by going to the navigation menu at the top of the page, hovering over PROFILE, and clicking the dropdown for VIEW PROFILE.

WordPress has a funny way of making a day challenging.  Especially when you wake up one morning to find all of your RSS feeds suddenly not feeding.  For my blog readers, if this is becoming a familiar rant to you (see Solution #1 and Solution #2), never fear – there is answer if we keep digging and mining for it.

In the past two solutions to our WordPress Remove the Blank Line from the RSS Feed, we added a fix all plugin and we learned how to validate, but the problem refused to remain fixed.  It’s time for a radical new answer. Relax.  This will be simple.

1.  Download the following file:  http://wejn.org/stuff/wejnswpwhitespacefix.php.
Yeah, I was concerned it contained a bunch of viruses, too, but after checking through (and using it on a client’s site), it passes the test.

2.  Upload ejnswpwhitespacefix.php file to your WordPress installation ROOT directory.  You’ll see the wp-config.php file there as well.  You DO NOT want to upload into the theme file or any place else . . .just the ROOT directory of your WordPress.

3.  Edit the index.php file.  You’ll find this in your root directory as well.  Add the following as the second line and right after the <?php
include(“wejnswpwhitespacefix.php”);

While your exact index.php code may vary, you’ll probably have something like this when you’re done:

<?php
include(“wejnswpwhitespacefix.php”);
define(‘WP_USE_THEMES’, true);
require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’);
?>

Don’t forget to save the index.php page.

4.  Reload the RSS Feed and shzammm . . . it’s working again!

Once again WordPress decided to stopped the RSS feed for a client.  There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason.  Whether it is WordPress updates or installing new plugins, occasionally and unpredictably, the RSS feed continues to get a that nasty EXTRA space at the beginning of the XML.

I shared my first revelations here describing how to add the Fix RSS Feeds Plugin to your site.  However, eventually even this plugin no longer solved our RSS feed issues.

One fix is to uninstall recently installed plugins to determine if they are the source.  But in doing this how do you verify the RSS is once again feeding properly?  I recommend using an FEED validator.  The one I used with the most success has been

http://feedvalidator.org

Enter the URL of the website feed you’d like to verify.  You only need to enter the website (www.example.com) – not the feed (www.example.com/feed/).

If your feed is successfully validated, you’ll get a cool icon you can add to your website.

Now we have a way to simply verify our RSS feeds are feeding out the way they should.

Sometimes I forget WordPress is based on a database so it needs a bit of cleaning up once in awhile.  Some of the clutter comes from endless revisions WordPress stores.  While it has saved me many times to have a recent revision of a blog to go back to, having 100 revisions is quite a bit of overkill.  In addition to the text of the post itself, WordPress saves tags, meta information and more.

For revision intensive websites, I’ve begun enacting two changes to rein in the quantity of website slowing revisions.

Install Better Delete Plugin

The Better Delete plugin replaces an old favorite, Delete Revisions plugin, that wasn’t working with the latest versions of WordPress.  Better Delete made some important improvements to better reduce the WordPress database size and speed up the website.

Download Better Delete Plugin

Reduce Revisions Being Saved by WordPress

If you never have the problem of too many revisions, you won’t have to delete them.  After deleting the old revisions from the database, we want to do a bit of preventative medicine to prevent having to repeat this action regularly.  However, it does take a bit of coding.

Find the wp-config.php file.  It’s in the root directory of your WordPress installation).

I added the following code to wp-config.php file:

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 3);
define(‘AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’, 120);

WP_POST_REVISIONS defines the number of post revisions that is saved. I selected “3,” but have seldom needed more than two.

AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL changes the time between automatically saving revisions.  I changed it from 30 to 120 seconds.

Save the wp-config.php file.

You want your blog to go out to everybody and everyone. Without the RSS feed, your website may just be sitting there. Make sure it is work for you and sharing your great content far and wide.

Another great “HOW TO” lesson today.  Sometimes you just need a quick way for customers to give to your non-profit or to support your free work.  Paypal offers a quick resource to enable online credit card transactions without a lot of fuss.  This tutorial assumes you already have a PAYPAL account.  If you don’t, click here for PAYPAL and get your account started.

Sitemaps are important to help search engines know where to roam on your website. While there are lots of ways to generate the sitemap, I’d like to show you how to move it to your website. I’ve also included adding your site map to Google’s Webmaster Tools. By the way, the file for your site map is usually called:

sitemap.xml

If you were able to make this work for you, enter your website in the comments below to let everyone know it worked!

Video is a great resource to add to your blog posts. You can develop a video yourself or you can search for just the right video on YouTube (www.youtube.com) There are other video resources out there, but YouTube is by far the largest. Give this tutorial a try and be sure to post below how it worked out for you.