Today we're going to look at the

shortcode.

How would you like to show previews of posts in other places on your site? Let's say you wanted to show your 4 most recent posts on your home page. It's easy enough! Here's what you'd put on your home page:

That's all you need!

What if you want a little more control? Let's say you wanted to put each of those posts in a separate column. You can use the column shortcodes to create your columns, and then put something like the following in each one:

This would go in the second column. The offset attribute specifies how many recent posts to skip. So in this case we're selecting the second newest post on our site. For the first column, no offset is needed of course, and the third column would be offset="2", etc.

Other attributes that you can use are:

As always, use creatively! Put post previews in your sidebar, on your pages, in the footer, subheader, etc. It's up to you!

Here's an example:

This can be used in your content, title's, and text widgets. By default it will be replaced with(in this case) Google. But if you append ?s1=Ebay to your url, you'll see the text change to Ebay.

Let's look at another example to clarify:

Here the default text will be "Websites are very important!", but if I add ?fiddles=cars to the end of my url, the sentence will now read: "Cars are very important!".

You can specify multiple replacements per page, but don't get to carried away with things! Personalization can be good, but don't end up confusing your users by abusing it.

Note that this does not significantly impact SEO optimization because each page on TitaniumSites has a canonical url defined that does not include the substitution variables. Search engines should always index the page with the default keywords, not the dynamic replacements. This prevents any duplicate content penalties for your pages! Everything on TS is designed to give you the best features possible using the very best practices online!

For those who don't feel comfortable picking out their color schemes, or playing around with layouts to get that perfectly balanced layout, help has arrived! TitaniumSites is dedicated to making the process as easy as possible. Because of that, today we are announcing the all-new theme presets! These strike the perfect balance of great defaults, and yet still giving you the ability to customize your site endlessly! Select the preset that you like the best, and save it. Then you'll be able to change any of the new settings that you want.

These presets work across any of our themes. We think of the themes as defining some of the "big picture" styles for your site, and the presets/site options as taking care of the specific look and feel. Themes cover things like whether the header spans the entire width of the page, and the general layout of the typography(text style). Colors, site width, and page layout are covered in the presets/site options. We feel like this gives the greatest flexibility in creating the most variations in the easiest way. We think you'll agree when you give it a try!

We're releasing this feature with several presets to start with, and many, many more will be added over the coming months!

Look for the Preset drop-down menu to show up in the admin panel on Monday! You'll find it on your Site Options page under the Color Scheme section.

Have a great weekend!

If you go to Appearance -> Widgets in your Admin Panel, you'll see a ton of different locations that you can insert widgets into to show in your website. Add shortcodes by first adding a Text widget to the desired location, and putting your shortcode inside that Text widget. Probably the best place that you can put the related posts shortcode is in the After-Post Widget Area. This will ensure that they show up after every post, including in the blog list, category pages, archives, etc.

Related posts are determined by first looking for other posts with similar tags, and then if it can't find any tags it looks for posts in the same category. Be sure to add plenty of categories and tags to your posts! So what's the shortcode?

Plain and simple! Set how many related posts that you want to show with the quantity attribute, and you're done! See an example of it in use here.

Related posts are a great way to increase the amount of time on your site. You get to show people who are interested in one article - other articles right in line with their interests!

Now get creative! You could put it in your sidebar for single posts if you use it inside the conditional shortcode, or only put it on certain posts in the content, instead of globally in the widgets. It's up to you!

Here's how to enable this on your site:

1. Add your twitter username to the Site Options page under General Info.
2. Get approved by Twitter
   This is pretty easy. Go here: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/validation/validator
   Click Cancel on the popup, and then click the tab on the left hand side that says Validate & Apply.
   Paste a link to one of your blog posts into the URL field, and click Validate. If everything is setup correctly, you'll see the card preview generated.
   At that point all you need to do is click the Request Approval button directly below the URL field, and fill out some information about your Twitter account, and you're done!

For best results, be sure to set a featured image for each of your posts. This is a general good practice when blogging anyway, and ensures that each preview card has a unique image on it. (Featured images are also used for previews already on Facebook and Google+)

Happy Twittering!

Learn about my new show, airing in the next few weeks. Learn more here!

- Andrew

This one allows you to create url's on your domain that redirect anywhere you want. Here's an example: http://titaniumsites.com/facebook will take you to the TitaniumSites Facebook page(who would've guessed!).

Here's how it works. Create a new page with the desired url. In my case, I created a page named facebook, which created a page at http://titaniumsites.com/facebook. Then on that page I put the following shortcode:

Then set the page template to Unbranded Sales Page. This allows the redirect to happen without the template loading, creating a faster redirect. This is a required step!

That's it! Don't put anything else on the page, since it won't be seen. The page is essentially just a placeholder for the redirect!

So what can we use this for? Glad you asked!

• Easy to remember url's. trivette.me/gplus is much easier to remember(and tell others) than https://plus.google.com/115073558164136008184/posts
• Moved pages. Have a popular page that needs to move somewhere else? No problem!
• Affiliate links. If you use affiliate programs then you know that sometimes it's useful to put those links behind your own url's for easier tracking and general use.

Advanced Feature:

By default the shortcode creates a temporary redirect. For you SEO guys and developers, that means it's a 302 redirect. This is useful if you don't want search engines to permanently assume that this page is a redirect. (Maybe you're creating a placeholder page for future use, but want it to redirect somewhere else right now).  But you can change it to a permanent(301) redirect if you like. Just add an attribute called status, and set it to permanent. Here's an example:

Setting it to permanent tells search engines and browsers that this url is just an alias of the redirected url, and will pass page rank from the original url to the secondary one.

Enjoy!

But what if we could deal with small typos automatically, and figure out where they meant to go in the first place?

As you've no doubt guessed by now, TitaniumSites does! If a page can't be found, before it goes to an error page, TS looks to see if there's any pages that's less than three characters different from the bad url. If it finds one, the visitor is automatically redirected to that page! Now of course the domain has to be correct, or it won't get to the TS servers in the first place. But anything after the domain is as fault tolerant as possible!

For you SEO experts, you'll be happy to know that the redirect is a 301(permanent) one, so the bad links pointing to you can still pass rank to the correct page!

Try it out on these links:

http://titaniumsites.com/2013/04/08/predictive-urls/ This is the good url to this post

http://titaniumsites.com/2013/04/08/predictve-ur/This is a "bad" link to this post, but it still works!

With each new browser comes new features that we can take advantage of to make sites faster, and improve the features and usability of our sites. TitaniumSites is committed to using the latest technologies, so that your site operates at it's very best! In order to do that, we have to set reasonable limits on how many old versions of browsers are supported.

For most browsers, this is a non-issue as they have switched to an "evergreen" browser model. This means that those browsers automatically update in the background, keeping you secure and modern with no effort. Chrome is the best example of an evergreen browser. Internet Explorer(IE) is the browser that's bringing up the rear in this case. As of version 10, IE has adopted the evergreen model by default. However, until users update to the latest version, the automatic updates don't happen by default.

TS has made the decision to support back to version 8 of IE. Chrome and Firefox and Safari, along with these versions of IE, represent 95% of the browsers used. We feel that strikes the correct balance that allows us to reach the most people, and still develop modern solutions for the web.

Users who get all the features of the sites they visit, and don't get hacked when they're online are going to spend more time online, and of course spend more money online as well. We all benefit from using secure browsers!

By default every TitaniumSite has what is called a "Browser Upgrade Bar" that shows whenever someone using an out-of-date browser comes to the site. It doesn't interfere with your site's operation. It's just a hint to your technology-challenged users to upgrade.

It also means that if something doesn't work just right on your site in a really old browser, you won't get calls complaining about your site. They'll understand that it's their software, not you!

If for any reason you don't want the Bar to show for your users, you can easily turn it off under Site Options -> Shortcode Information in the Admin Panel.

That's it! What do you think?

Now why would you use this over the embed code that you can get from the Google Maps site? Unfortunately those maps use Iframes which get stripped out of the content editor whenever you're in Visual mode. Using the shortcode means that your map will never be stripped out accidentally when you edit your content in the future.

Give it a try, and see how you like it. The next step for this shortcode is to add the ability to get directions on the same page. When directions are added, it'll be announced right here on the blog, so check back soon!