Archive for the ‘WordPress Tips’ Category
by David Peralty on May 21st, 2009
If you’ve got a blog, you’ve almost certainly got some form of an “About” page setup. Unfortunately, most people don’t put a lot of effort into that page, and they really REALLY should.
I just saw a wonderful article about just how to spruce up “About” pages, over on WritetoDone called, “Five Tips on How to Write a Fantastic About Page“, and it’s well worth checking out.
It’s actually written by James Chartrand from Men with Pens, and it’s got some really good tips.
Here’s a taste of what’s included in the post…
There are some rocking blogs out there, and there are great sites full of entertaining info. But sometimes, you click the About page of one of these sites, and you’re jarred from that greatness thanks to content as dry as breadcrumbs. Be consistent with the voice and style you use throughout your site, and reflect the same personality on your About page.
There are 5 major tips (with detailed descriptions and examples for each) and some questions at the end to get your thinking about what YOUR “About” page should tell the world about you. Your readers will be infinitely thankful if you read James’ tips and put them into practice.
A good “About” page won’t necessarily mean a lot more readers(though it might if it’s REALLY good), but a bad “About” page can kill a blog outright. It’s worth the effort, trust me.
Categories: General, WordPress Tips
by David Peralty on May 4th, 2009
vAssistant Services, a provider of WordPress coaching, consulting and tutoring, is having a free teleclass on May 7th.
From vassistantservices.com…
No matter where you are with your site/blog, you’ve probably got some questions.
This week, get them answered.
Whether you’re struggling with the concept of how to accomplish something on your site, or the actual “how to” to get it done, bring your questions to this call.
Sounds like it could be pretty interesting for anyone looking for some advice on how to push their WordPress blog to the next level. You can get more info and register for the call right here, and don’t forget to check back for when they start accepting questions to be sure you get any questions you might have submitted to be answered. It’s a great opportunity to get some free WordPress related advice you’d normally have to pay a pretty penny for.
As an added bonus, they’ve got a free ebook about WordPress you can download from the same page, and actually pretty good. A bit on the “beginner” side, but useful none-the-less.
Categories: WordPress Tips
by David Peralty on April 29th, 2009
Weblogtoolscollection.com just posted a list of 9 ways to make your blog “Smart”, and though the list is definitely targeted at WordPress blogs, many of the ideas can be implemented for any blog.
There’s a lot of great ideas, such as showing a custom “about” text for new visitors, how to deal with people using adblocking, and some ideas of how to increase user interactivity with your blog.
Out of the 9 tips, I say my personal favourites are the ones dealing with selective advertising and returning customers, but they are all pretty good ideas depending on the situation.
Are there any ideas you’d add to or remove from the list?
Categories: Blogging Tips, WordPress Tips
by David Peralty on February 2nd, 2009
So I was talking to a friend of mine, and he wanted to start offering performance based incentives for his writers, but instead of offering them at a per author level, he wanted to offer them incentives as a group, which made good sense to me.
His concern, though, was his own posts and how they would effect stats. He wanted to make sure that he was basing his incentives on the traffic received to the entire site, except people going to articles written by him, the administrator.
He asked how he could track such a thing easily while still getting lots of detail like he was used to in Performancing Metrics. There is a really easy way to do this. First, add a second site on Performancing Metrics that will be used to track everything but your own posts.
Then in the footer, next to your other Performancing Metrics javascript call, add the following code:
< ?php if(!is_author('admin') { ?> place Pmetrics JavaScript Here < ?php } ?>
This way it will check to see which author it is, and if it is anyone other than the administrator, it will show the Pmetrics JavaScript and track actions on that page. This is great because it should not only discount traffic to single posts made by the admin, but also any traffic going to pages created by the admin.
Thus, the traffic you see under the new account in Pmetrics should be everything, except the traffic to your own posts if you are the Admin. So next time you write a post that gets on Digg, it won’t count towards your writers statistics, messing up your bonus incentive system.
Categories: Blog Statistics, WordPress Tips
by David Peralty on January 28th, 2009
I don’t know how much credence I give to the idea that WordPress is inherently insecure by default, but I do understand that people want to take steps to further protect their blogs. Smashing Magazine has put up an article relating to securing your WordPress admin, and while this won’t make your blog secure if you are making other security mistakes, it can be a great last step in a comprehensive security audit.
Here is one of their ten tips:
Choose strong passwords
Our recommendation for a secure WordPress password is that it be at least seven characters long and include uppercase and lowercase characters, numbers and symbols such as ! ” ? $ % ^ & ).
If you are worried about your blog, and want to take as many precautions as possible to maximize your protection from intruders, I’d suggest enacting at least five out of the ten items on this list and look for more security related posts to help control every entry point into your WordPress blog.
Categories: WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tips, WordPress Tutorials
by David Peralty on January 27th, 2009
For the last few months, I have been working on College Crunch, a site devoted to online colleges, college life, and more.
When we started the project, I knew it was going to be large in the number of pages and whatnot it used, but we decided to go with WordPress because it was a platform we knew well. Installing the blog, getting some plugins set up, and having a designer make it all look pretty was easy, actually using WordPress on a day to day basis has had some drawbacks.
Managing Pages
When you have hundreds of pages and posts, set up in WordPress it can become annoying to manage. Slowly wading through the pages, or trying to search out what you want can be frustrating. The page management feels incomplete. Also, moving many pages from being a sub-page set in one area to being a sub-page set in another area feels awkward.
I have tried out numerous page management plugins, but they have either caused errors, or left something to be desired.
Listing out Sub Pages
As I created more and more pages, I needed to list them out, and doing the xhtml link for each page I added was a pain. I had to install Exec-PHP to allow me to add some PHP to the pages, and using built-in WordPress functions, I was able to automate the process.
The code I used to list out child pages:
< ?php
global $id;
wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=$id&show_date=modified
&date_format=$date_format&sort_column=post_title"); ?>
Blog Posts are Less Important
Blog posts are only a small piece of the site. We knew we wanted to have a blog section, and that it was really going to be used to drive traffic and links, more than comments and community, but we left comments open and moved the blog section to the College Crunch Gazette. This left us able to use the front page for a variety of things.
We highlighted the blog posts pretty heavily on the front page, though only a percentage of our visitors come from the front page anyways.
Post Images
Each one of our blog posts have an image attached to them so that on the front page we can use the Post Image plugin to highlight posts in an effective way. The posts that don’t have an image automatically show a graduation cap image on the front page. This has been great at drawing attention, but looks bad if the trend is to not include an image, as I am bad for not doing.
Search
I am not a fan of WordPress’ built-in search, and even after taking some ideas from Joost de Valk’s make search suck less post, I am still not happy with the type of results it gives. I might push for us to switch to Google’s Custom Search, and integrate it as best as we can into the design of the site.
Conclusion
WordPress is very malleable, which is great, but it doesn’t come with very many, or very well thought out CMS features and that has been more than a little frustrating.
Sure, we could have gone with another platform to run the site, but that would have meant a learning curve, and learning curves slow down site development and launching. I really hope that more people take the time and energy to develop plugins for WordPress that will allow it to act more like a CMS, and that College Crunch will be able to continue without too much frustration until they exist.
Categories: WordPress Tips, WordPress Tools
by Mark on January 27th, 2009
Competition is tough these days on the internet. With millions of websites existing on the world wide web today and each trying to get a share of the advertising pie, a site should not just be left on its own after being created and kept running online. Websites need to be constantly monitored in order to drive traffic and achieve its business goals particularly for the ecommerce sites.
One vital aspect of websites that need to be kept track of pertains to demographics. Webmasters should take it upon themselves to determine the type of people that visit their sites as well as their attitudes. I know of certain software applications that can do this and there’s also an analytics service meant for such purpose.
I highly recommend Crowd Science Demographics which is a very helpful tool. With this new analytics service, webmasters, publishers, bloggers and even advertisers can now do an in-depth analysis of their site’s demographics and their attitudes towards products and services. What this service does is create questionnaires to survey a website’s visitors and then from the answers, comprehensive profiles are made giving publishers and bloggers an opportunity to know their audience well. The information gathered spans more than just the IP addresses of the target audience and page views because demographics and attitudes of a small number of visitors on specific subject matters are also known.
I’m sure those engaged in internet marketing including blogging are aware of the importance of being able to know and understand your target audience as well as the current market condition in an effort to successfully achieve specific goals. This is where marketing research proves valuable. Crowd Science recognizes this need and utilizes research techniques in a non-intrusive way. It makes use of surveys through questionnaires to gather the right information.
Of course, the questionnaires are well constructed, short and straight to the point in order to really get the truth. The main goal is to keep the visitors engaged during the survey and not bore them.
The whole process is simple. To avail of the Crowd Science Demographics service, all you need is to sign up for a personal or premium account then add your site and tag your pages. And that’s it. No need to worry about anything else.
By having an account, you can then gain access to a lot of great features. There are four types of invitations and colors to choose from. Users have also full control of their data through the account interface which they can view either by hour-in-day or day-in-week. They can decide who else should be given access to the data and in what form such as in bar charts or in pie format.
I would also like to point out here that users of this analytics service can customize their questions in their demographic questionnaires. In other words, you are free to ask your visitors anything you want and get the results together with the main demographic information. You have a choice between using a multiple choice and one answer question and a multiple choice and multiple answer question.
The greatest benefit that I like is that Crowd Science can keep track of not just one but multiple websites. These sites can be organized in various ways such as by groups or topics. Additionally, users can check out reports according to a specific audience subgroup either by age, gender or group.
Crowd Science is a must-tool if you really want to get to know your audience better and attract more people to your website.
Categories: General, WordPress Tips
by Ade Magnaye on November 22nd, 2008
We all love WordPress, but sometimes it can get just really, really slow. And no matter how we look for the cause, sometimes there’s just no way to figure out what’s been giving your WordPress installation the hiccups. Thank goodness somebody came up with WP-Tuner.
WP-Tuner for WordPress is a powerful and easy way to answer hard questions about why your blog is slow or cranky. What’s causing the slowdown? Is it a plugin? Is it your host? This plugin will help you find out. One problem, though, with this particular plugin is that it’s not for the novice. Advanced WP users will be able to understand what the plugin tells them, but it may not be that obvious for everyone.
WP-Tuner is recommended to be used by:
- WordPress site administrators
- WordPress plugin and theme designers
- WordPress developers
WP-Tuner can also be used with a number of advanced ways, like hooking any WordPress action to it. You can even use it to time anything at all in WordPress.
Installing WP-Tuner is as easy as installing any other plugin: upload using your favorite FTP client, and activate via the plugins page. Be sure to read the plugin’s readme file and the associated help documents before using it.
Used with a bit of common sense, this powerful plugin will help blog administrators as well as software developers improve their WordPress blog performance.
Categories: WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tips
by Ade Magnaye on November 15th, 2008
The other day I opened up my blogs and I saw that they had this huge influx of comments. As this was rather unusual, I checked the moderation queue and to my surprise, I found a huge number of comment spam. Weirdly though, the spam contained none of the usual links, and instead found a random string of letters and numbers, like “j2miob2e5gylwz9w”.
As if that wasn’t weird enough, it seems that the spam got through Akismet multiple times. The spam messages came from these IP addresses:
- 94.102.60.150
- 94.102.60.151
- 94.102.60.152
- 94.102.60.153
Searching Google with the IP addresses brings up a lot of discussion about the spamming incident. Apparently, this has happened to a lot of blogs over a short period of time, and most, if not all, of the affected blogs were on WordPress.
So, what on earth was that about? It seems like somebody’s testing a brand-new spam tool that actively tagrets WordPress blogs. I’ve already blocked the said IP addresses via .htaccess, but who knows when the next spam attack will come?
This is probably the best time to brush up on some basic comment spam prevention tips. WordPress has some built-in spam prevention features, like:
- Keep comment modderation on; make sure that people need to have a previous comment approved first before they can successfully comment.
- If a comment has more than two links contained in it, it should be automatically moderated.
- Fill out the “common spam words” form in WordPress so that comments get moderated when anything within the comment (including the author URI, author name, author email and the body of the comment itself) matches the words in the blacklist.
- Akismet may not be built in WordPress by default, but it is included in the installation and installing it is the first thing I do when setting up a new blog. It still is the best spam filter out there.
If you have other anti-spam measures you implement on your blogs, just drop a comment and tell me about it.
Categories: General, WordPress Tips
by jim on June 26th, 2008
As I have promised in a previous post here, I’d like to share with you that useful little plugin that allowed me to automatically update/upgrade my WordPress blog version. Thanks for being patient. I intentionally wanted to post this at the end of the month.
OK, I used: Wordpress Instant Upgarde by Zironoa .
Here’s a little blurb from their homepage:
How does it work?
The InstantUpgrade plugin downloads the latest WordPress version from the WordPress server and unpacks it at your server. In the next step, it deletes all of your old WordPress files (except wp-content/ and wp-config.php) and puts the new files into your WordPress directory. Finally, it runs the database upgrade script. That procedure is exactly what the official guide proposes, only 30 times faster and with you leaning back.
Is it safe to use?
Yes. The plugin interfaces are very intuitive, everything is well explained. Before the upgrade process, comprehensive checks are performed to ensure that nothing can be broken. As for security: The plugin cannot do anything that you or your webserver couldn’t do anyway. So, yes, it is safe to use. (However, bad things can *always* happen, so you should always have backups of your database and files.)
I encountered a few snags along the way, though. Snags like directory permissions (mostly writing privileges), but that was because I changed write privileges as my WordPress blog needed a little more security. For standard WordPress installations though, the plugin install and activation was very smooth.
Zirona noted that you should not use this plugin if you installed WordPress via Fantastico. The only harm that may happen to you is that you cannot use Fantastico to update/upgrade your WordPress anymore. You’d be using this plugin from thereon. Well that’s all the harm it did me. 
Suggestions:
- I would suggest that you install another WordPress blog to test the plugin first. I have one that just sits there for this purpose. So everytime a new plugin surfaces, and I believe is useful to me, I install it on that test WordPress site first. Don’t worry about overcrowding your hosting account, hey most hosting accounts have the basic 5GB standard package anyway.
- I would suggest that you BACK-UP your data first. Everything …. texts, images, your database… hey you better backup your directory tree even through FTP. I did. Believe you me that backup is hard work… but definitely worth it!
Categories: WordPress Tips
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