Greg Rickaby over at Greg Rickaby on WordPress has written an excellent post about how to add Drop Caps to Genesis and Thesis, two of the most popular WordPress frameworks.

What the heck are Drop Caps? It’s likely you’ve seen them even if you didn’t know what to call them.    See Image —->

As Greg rightly points out Drop Caps are becoming quite popular in the Blogosphere. Fortunately, they’re pretty darn easy to add if you’re using either Genesis or Thesis.

For Genesis:

Drop Cap with CSS Pseudo-Class

.entry-content p:first-of-type:first-letter {
	font-size: 40px;
	color: #666;
	padding: 10px 10px 10px 0;
	float: left;
}

To get the code for Thesis click over to Greg’s post and read the rest.

If you’re a WordPress junkie like me, then chances are you’re also somewhat obsessed with WordPress themes. I’m always keeping an eye out for good ones to file away in case I decide to create a new blog or give an existing one a facelift.

Take a look at this list of 41 amazing WordPress themes that Hongkiat has compiled.

Anyone who’s a fan of blogging is likely also a fan of WordPress. WP is no longer just a blogging platform, but a fully customizable content management system. The ways in which you can personalize and customize a WordPress blog are almost limitless at this point.

As a result, hundreds of blogs have sprung up focusing on WordPress and to make the most of it. Here’s a list of my favorite blogs about WordPress:

1. WordPress Hacks
2. WordPress Planet
3. WordPress Tavern
4. WP Engineer
5. WPCandy
6. WpRecipes

Websites and blogs will always be targets for hackers and mischief makers. WordPress is generally pretty secure and the latest version is the most secure yet. However, those with less than honorable intentions will never stop trying to defeat this security, so you must be prepared.

Lorelle of Lorelle On WordPress fame has written an excellent post about what you should do to firewall and hack proof your WordPress blog.

Google’s oracle of all things SEO is a guy named Matt Cutts. He’s an engineer at Google and head of their webspam team. He wrote the original SafeSearch program for Google to protect kids from adult material. The bottom line is that Matt knows what the hell he’s talking about when it comes to Google and how to get better rankings.

Take a look at the following video. Matt Cutts talks in great detail about how to achieve better search rankings with your WordPress blog. This from the 2007 WordCamp in San Francisco, and even though it’s a couple years old the tips he gives remain just as true today.

You know all those blog experts who tell you that adding your blog title to the end of post titles is good SEO? Guess what? It’s not.

I had been noticing for some time that my posts weren’t showing up in search results very well like they once did. It seemed like traffic was slowly decreasing so I decided to do a little experiment. I surfed around the web looking at some of the top blogs in a variety of fields like technology, politics, news, business, etc. I noticed the one thing most had in common (other than great content) was their post titles.

The vast majority of them used this format…

%post_title%

Here’s the format I was using…

%post_title%  |  %blog_title%

So I decided it was time for a change. I went under my All-In-One SEO settings and changed my post titles.

Its been nearly two weeks and I can tell you that my search engine traffic has more than doubled. Each post seems to get a far better search engine ranking when the post title is all by itself. I think Google in particular liked the blog titles attached a couple of years ago, but it really seems like that’s no longer the case.