Another Friday calls for our second installment of our awesome Wired Weekend series where we bring you our favorite blogging tips from around the web.

The thing that makes this series so great (besides how useful these links are) is that we select articles from our community and feature them in the post. We collect our favorite articles from your web/blogging blog and post them here.

All you need to do is participate in our community throughout the week for us to notice your blog, and if we like your stuff – consider it added to our Wired Weekend series.

Notable Mentions of Blogussion

Check out what blogs are talking about Blogussion this week!

• Creative Bookmarks: Best of the Web October 2009

Tutorial9 featured our article How to prepare a guest post in 5 simple steps in their monthly link roundup post.

• 80+ High Quality And useful Resources – Best of the Web October

Smashing Apps also featured How to prepare a guest post in 5 simple steps in their monthly link roundup post.

• Add a Custom Feedburner Count to your WordPress Blog

Shane Jeffers expands on our tutorial How to display your Twitter and RSS count on your blog with some cool CSS tricks.

• InternetHow’s favorite blog posts of the week

A great roundup post where two of our posts (169 marketing tips and how to connect with your community) were featured.

• Talented Thesis Theme Designer For Hire: Live Portfolio Here Now

A post that showcases the design of Blogussion and other works by myself. Also, this blog is going to put up a list of 100 Reasons Why Blogussion is an Amazingly Successful Site soon. We cannot wait for this list to come out!

Blogging Tips From the Community

Amazing articles hand picked from our community of commentators.

• Personal Branding with Photos and your name

An article that stresses the importance of getting personal with your community and the impacts of not sharing basic info such as your name and photo!

• My blog’s 2 month journey so far

A fun type of post to read, check up on what the Teen Blogger Kid is up to and how his blog is doing after two months. When I read this, it really made me remember starting this blog and how much fun that was!

• 5 Kill WordPress plugins

A list of really great plugins for WordPress. My favorite from the list is called After the Deadline which is the best spell check around right now.

• Top 5 myths about making money blogging

Making money blogging is no easy task for most of us, and with so much advice out there about how to succeed in earning – what’s right and wrong? Well, I’m pretty sure this post is dead on with the myths it exposes.

• Do Unto Others’ Blogs As You Would Have Them Do Unto Yours

A great post that explains how important it is to get active on other peoples blogs. Another idea this post makes me think of is the concept of giving more, and hope to get something in return.

• Want to Become a Problogger? Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone

A post that shows how unlikely it will be for your blog to find any success if you do not get out there and try new things.

Blogging Tips From Twitter

A collection of great blogging tips that we found on Twitter this week.

• Let Google Tell You What Topics to Write About

A great article by @Dennisyu where he talks about learning what Google already gives you authority for and maximizing it.

• Market It Write

@Laynefisher tells us 4 valuable lessons she’s learned about writing and marketing from trying to write a novel in a month.

• Five Ways to Immediately Enhance Your Online Productivity

@MattChevy is not only a good friend but also an excellent blogger.  These tips are invaluable for blogging well.

• 8% of the Internet Account for 80% of the Clicks

Tweeted by @JeffWend This article changes the way I look at the internet for sure.

• Falling Off the Shoulders of a Giant

@Simplicitysqd Talks about the changing landscape of the internet and its effect on bloggers.

Blogussion Weekly Recap

Just in case you missed them, here are the four posts that were published into Blogussion this week.

• Five Points to a Successful Blogging Event

A guest post by Arie Rich where she talked about how to plan a working blogging event.

• How Bloggers can prepare for the Future of Journalism

Blogging is changing rapidly every day, and Everett Bogue talks about how you can prepare your blog for these changes.

• The Best users are the Biggest Winners

A post that talks about how important it is to get involved with your readers and how you always get back what you give out!

• How to setup a “Favorite” posts section and bring life back to old posts

A highly detailed tutorial about how to create a “favorite posts” section just like ours and bring traffic back to older posts.

That’ll do it!

I hope you guys enjoyed this roundup! We found a lot of great articles from around our community this week and are really glad we have such intelligent bloggers participating in our community.

Stick around because Monday we will start publishing new, great content! Then, as soon as you know it – another Friday comes by and it’s another Wired Weekend all over again!

Related posts:

1. Wired Weekend #1: The Best Blogging Tips From Around the Web

2. 8 Blogging Tips for Teaching and Learning Online

3. Tips for making a mark in the community with guest posts

One very well received new feature of our new design here was the “Favorites” section that I setup in our sidebar. Basically, it is a part of our blog where we selected our favorite articles that were no longer in plain view for our readers and made them more easily accessible.

Before I redesigned Blogussion, I wrote a little about this idea of creating a favorite post section in my article with tips on how to drive traffic to old posts. Some people really liked the idea, and I loved the idea myself – so I implemented it here.

I really think this is just an amazing way to keep old posts into circulation, and it has proven itself to do so. The two major effects we have seen so far from posts listed on this page are:

• Posts on this page have received more views and comments
• Their activity on social networking sites such as StumbleUpon was up from before this page was created

Charts are always a great way to back statements up, and here is a screenshot from Analytics for posts with the highest pageviews this week:

Posts buried pages back are now within the top 5 most viewed posts for the week

I hope that the above is motivation enough for you to follow this tutorial and implement this idea onto your blog. This is a really great way to put the spotlight back onto old posts. Now, I’m going to teach you how exactly to do it! It’s a pretty simple thing to setup really, so it shouldn’t take you very long. Alright, let’s get started!

Step 1: Create a Category

I told you this was going to be easy. For step one, all you need to do is create a category! Call it something like “Favorites.” This category is the key to setting up your favorite posts section on your blog.

Once you have setup this category, it’s time for you to start populating it with posts. So, what you need to do now is go through your articles and pick out your favorite ones. Once you find your favorite posts, just add them to your “Favorites” category.

This process may sound tedious, especially if you have almost 250 posts like we did (I love bragging). But, oddly enough I found it rather enjoyable to go through all of the old posts on this blog and pick out the best of the best.

Step 2: Downloading the “Latest Posts by Category” Plugin

I chose to use a plugin by a blogger I respect a lot, Alex Cristache from Blogsessive. I use his plugin both here on Blogussion, and my other blog Asnio. It’s a super plugin, and makes setting something like a favorite posts section in your sidebar super easy!

Just click the awesome box below to go over to Blogsessive page and download it real quick. Don’t forget to come back now!

Setting the plugin up is easy, and lucky for all of us Alex has written a highly detailed instruction manual for using the plugin. Don’t forget to check that out in the plugin folder included in the download.

Step 3: Setting the Plugin up

If you have a widgetized sidebar, then you can simply throw in the widget wherever you want. If you don’t use widgetized sidebars, I recommend you read the documentation over at Blogsessive so you can find all of the codes for inserting this manually.

Configuring the Widget Options

Lucky for those of us with widgets, customizing the output of this plugin is as simple as checking a few boxes.

In your Widgets panel, you will find all of the options for customizing this widget. But, the one important thing that you do is select your “Favorites” category under the Categories to display: section in the options.

Now that you have checked the box and saved the settings, you should see the list of your favorite posts on your blog. Like I said, there are many other options you may want to check out to make the best use of this plugin.

A great thing about this plugin is that it leaves plenty of room for customization. By default, you just have a simple list of these posts. But, with a little CSS you can make the output look great. I’ll share with you a few tricks I did to make my list look so great here.

Again, I highly recommend you read the documentation Alex wrote so you can get the full idea of how this plugin woks.

Can now hold more content with less scrolling

Splitting the list into two columns

All it takes to split these posts into multiple columns is a little CSS. Lucky for us, this plugin comes with its very own class names which makes styling it extremely easy. Alex really thought of everything when he created this plugin, I’ll tell you that much!

So to split these lists into columns, open up your stylesheet (usually style.css) and add the following lines of CSS in there:

li.lpbcWidgetPost {
	float: left;
	padding: 0 0 1em 1em;	/* adds spacing to the right and bottom of each item */
	width: 45%;		/* will probably need adjusting depending on the width of its parent */
}

Now, this is the part where I think I will lose some people – so don’t be afraid to ask me any questions about this in the comments section.

But basically the whole idea is to float all of the content within the <li> tag to the left, which will then align everything horizontally rather than vertically. You add a little padding to separate the content, and add a width so you can limit how many posts show per line. You can decrease this width so you can have three or more columns if you wish.

Thesis Users: Add Special Styling to your “Favorites” page

As you can see, the formatting at the top of our favorite posts page has a different formatting at the top then the rest of the category pages here have. I added these extra things to that page so people who visit it knew what kind of content was there.

Luckily this is very easy to change around and if you use the wonderful Thesis Framework, all you need to do is add a little code to your custom_functions.php file:

function custom_archive_info() { if (is_category('favorites')) { ?>
 <div>
 <div>
 <h1><?php single_cat_title(); ?></h1>
 </div>
 <div>
 <!-- CONTENT HERE -->
 </div>
 </div>
<?php }
else
 thesis_default_archive_info();
}
remove_action('thesis_hook_archive_info', 'thesis_default_archive_info');
add_action('thesis_hook_archive_info', 'custom_archive_info');

Code used from Sugarrae’s tutorial

Hoping for Similar Results

This technique has worked pretty well for us so far, and I would love to know what you guys think of it as well! I do hope that this was an easy tutorial to follow, and I am trying to improve my tutorial writing skills since the last one I wrote about how to create the orange RSS box we have here.

Good luck, and let us know how this technique has effected the traffic to old posts on your blog!

Related posts:

1. Looking Back into the Past – 20 of my Favorite Articles on Blogussion

2. Very Straightforward Methods to Draw Traffic Back to Old Posts

3. Tutorial: Create a Very Informative Archives Page