Since Twitter became popular, many bloggers like to display recent twitter tweets on their website or blog. To display most recent twitter tweets, simply copy and paste the following code to your sidebar.php file.

<?php
// Your twitter username.
$username = "TwitterUsername";
// Prefix - some text you want displayed before your latest tweet.
// (HTML is OK, but be sure to escape quotes with backslashes: for example href=\"link.html\")
$prefix = "";
// Suffix - some text you want display after your latest tweet. (Same rules as the prefix.)
$suffix = "";
$feed = "http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:" . $username . "&rpp=1";
function parse_feed($feed) {
$stepOne = explode("<content type=\"html\">", $feed);
$stepTwo = explode("</content>", $stepOne[1]);
$tweet = $stepTwo[0];
$tweet = str_replace(”&lt;”, “<”, $tweet);
$tweet = str_replace(”&gt;”, “>”, $tweet);
return $tweet;
}
$twitterFeed = file_get_contents($feed);
echo stripslashes($prefix) . parse_feed($twitterFeed) . stripslashes($suffix);
?>

Thanks the awesome code from WP Hacks.

There are 2 ways to highlight author’s comments, one is use highlight author comments wordpress plugin, another idea is without wordpress plugin. If you don’t want to use wordpress plugin to highlight author’s comment, you can follow the below few simple steps.

First, you need to open styles.css and add the following into this file.

.authorstyle { background-color: #B3FFCC !important; }

Second, open comments.php, find and locate the following code.

<li <?php echo $oddcomment; ?>id="comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>"></li>

And then replace with

<li class="<?php if ($comment->user_id == 1) $oddcomment = "authorstyle"; echo $oddcomment; ?>"></li>

Please note that you must change 1 to the user id of the author. Thanks to Matt Cutts for this tutorial.

There are 2 ways to exclude certain categories from your blog, one is use wordpress plugin named Advanced Category Excluder. This plugin was born because there was a no other real alternative to enable content sparationd and some CMS like functionalities in WordPress. The main goal was, to enhance WordPress’s functionalities, to hide some unwanted categories, from defined parts of the blog.

The alternative way is without plugin, you can add the below code inside the loop then it will work.

<?php
if ( have_posts() ) : query_posts($query_string .'&cat=-1,-2'); while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
?>

If you have problem with hosting service or your wordpress blog has taken lots of time for loading, perhaps you can consider to install WP Cache wordpress plugin to generate static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

My web hosting is quite reliable,so far I don’t think I will need this plugin at this moment. If you need to speed up the loading of your blog and your blog always hit Digg.com’s frontpage, then you are encourage to activate this plugin.

Many readers seldom browse through our old post to read them out, but installing wordpress plugins like Pagenavi and Related Posts can help to give a new life for your old posts. There is another way to make your old posts have a good chance to read by reader, that is to display random posts on your sidebar.

To display random posts on your sidebar, simply copy and paste the following code to your sidebar.php.

<?php
query_posts(array('orderby' => 'rand', 'showposts' => 1));
if (have_posts()) :
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
the_title();
the_excerpt();
endwhile;
endif; ?>