Post under WordPress | By LGR | On July 26th, 2009
This WordPress weekend project is not for everyone, but depending on your WordPress website it might be exactly what you are looking for. WordPress by default does not include pages in the RSS feed. This makes perfect sense if you are using WordPress mainly as a blogging platform, but what if you are using WordPress for more than just blogging but as a content management system to run your website? It then makes sense that you might want to include pages in the RSS feed to let people know when you add a new page to your website.
This is where RSS Includes Pages comes in handy. Simply install the plugin and your pages will automatically be included in the RSS feed, so your subscribers will know when you add a new page to your website. There is not a lot of features or fancy options for this plugin, it does exactly what it says it does, adds your pages to the RSS feed. If you do not want some pages you can modify the publish date to a later date so it is not published in the feed. It might be nice if the plugin gave you an option on the pages editor about whether you want it included in the RSS feed or not, but sometimes keeping it simple is best.
If you are looking for an easy way to add your website pages to your RSS feed with WordPress take a look at the RSS Includes Pages plugin. It has come in handy for a few clients I work with that use WordPress as a content management system and not just for blogging.
Post under Website Monetization, WordPress | By LGR | On July 15th, 2009
If you are thinking of doing affiliate marketing from your WordPress blog you might have come across a plugin from MaxBlogPress called Ninja Affiliate. A couple of high profile blogs, like Daily Blog Tips and Problogger, have made posts about it and it does look like an impressive plugin. I have not personally used the Ninja Affiliate plugin but I have read about it and it does look impressive making it easy to automatically link keywords that you specify in your blog post to your affiliate links, while at the same time displaying a friendlier URL for your readers. This is a great way to help increase your affiliate sales and at the same time make it easier to manage your affiliate links. Did you know that you can get much of the same functionality of the Ninja Affilate plugin by using a couple of free GPL WordPress plugins instead of spending $97.00?
One of the great features of Ninja Affiliate is it ability to automatically turn keywords that you specify into affiliate links. For example if I type the keyword “Mozy online backup“, (you all know I like Mozy right), the keyword Mozy online backup will automatically be turned into an affiliate link leading to the Mozy website. It saves time by automatically linking keywords to affiliate links. There are a few plugins that offer similar functionality that you can try.
I have not personally tried each of those plugins, but I have used SEO Smart Links and BlogMechanics KeywordLink on other WordPress blogs and both are good plugins. If you want to limit the number of affiliate links per keyword you might want to look at SEO Smart Links first. The BlogMechanics KeywordLink offers the ability to link the keyword once or all the time. This can make it harder to control how often the keyword is linked. SEO Smart Links offers a little more control over linking limits.
That takes care of part of the work. Creating nice friendly URL’s for your readers to see instead of some long affilaite link can be done with a plugin that I recommned that every WordPress blog have installed. The WordPress Redirection plugin. This plugin helps you to manage 404 error redirection, changing post permalinks, and it can be setup to manage custom affiliate links.
The WordPress Redirection plugin allows you to create groups so you can manage your affiliate links. You can create a custom group using the WordPress Redirection plugin called “Outgoing” or “Recommended”. You can then create redirection links using your affiliate links and add them to your “Outgoing” or “Recommend” group. This allows you to easily manage all of your affiliate links in one place. To create your reader friendly URL’s simply decide on a URL structure for your links. If you noticed my Mozy online backup keyword link links to http://www.lgr.ca/go/mozyonlinebackup.html, this link then redirects to my Mozy affiliate link. This is much friendlier than the Mozy affiliate link. If your affiliate link needs to be changed you now have one place to edit the link and all your keyword links that are using that URL will be redirected to the new URL. This is much faster than hunting through hundreds or thousands of posts to change your affiliate links.
It is best practise that affiliate links should be nofollowed so the search engines do not follow them. This can be done in two ways. Depending on the keyword link plugin you choose you might be able to add the nofollow attribute on the link itself using the keyword link plugin. I know that both SEO Smart Links and BlogMechanics KeywordLink allow you to do this. You can also add your custom URL’s to your robots.txt file to prevent the search engine spiders from following your affiliate links. For example I could add the following line to my robots.txt file:
Disallow: /go/
There might be other features that the Ninja Affiliate plugin can perform that I have not covered. It does appear that it has more statistics built in than is available in the Redirection plugin. The Ninja Affiliate plugin does offer all of the management in one place, while with this method you will need to go to multiple places to manage your keywords and links. Nothing a couple of opens tabs can’t do mind you. If you don’t want to spend the $97.00 to get the WordPress Ninja Affiliate plugin you might want to give this technique a try. It can help to boost your affiliate sales and provide you with an easy way to manage your affiliate links.
What do you use to manage your affiliate links on your WordPress blog?
Post under WordPress | By LGR | On June 24th, 2009
Once upon a time I wrote two posts: Bloggers are not Webmasters and Webmasters are not Bloggers. I remember writing those two posts and recently I went back and reread them. It is always interesting to go back and reread some thing you have written almost two years ago. I know that I made a sweeping generalization in those posts, but I remember doing it to try and make a point, that we all have different talents and we should focus on doing what we do best.
When I was in University and money was tight I would do much of my own car maintenance. Mechanics were expensive and I had more time than money. I would change my oil, replace spark plugs, replace starters, alternators, fix brakes and the list goes on. At some point I ended up getting stranded on the highway in -30 Celsuis weather and needed to get my car towed back to the city. I had checked the car before the trip but I did not look very closely at the belts and sure enough a belt ended up breaking. Being a car mechanic was not something I was very good at and to be honest with you I never really liked doing. It always took me much longer to get something done than if I had just taken it into the repair shop to begin with.
Anyone can learn how to FTP, install plugins, manage widgets and learn some basic HTML, but there are times when calling a website mechanic will be faster and easier to help you accomplish your goals. Whether it is to improve your theme, install a new plugin, integrate a new feature to your website or help with your SEO. You need to know when is the right time to call someone.
With WordPress 2.8 recently being released I have been busy upgrading and updating websites and blogs for my clients. Many of them manage their own sites. They update them regularly with new posts, edit pages and add new photos. They know their business and readers, and they also know that the fastest and easiest way to make sure their installation of WordPress is up to date is to let me upgrade their software. From making regular backups of the WordPress database and files, upgrading plugins and WordPress itself I offer many service options for my clients. It allows my clients to focus on what they do best and it lets me do what I do best.
If you are in need of a website mechanic to take care of some of those regular technical tasks drop me a note I will be happy to help so you can focus on what is most important about your website.
Post under WordPress | By LGR | On June 11th, 2009
The great team at WordPress has been busy prepping WordPress 2.8 for release. It seems like I just noticed that WordRress 2.8 Release Candidate had been released and now it is the full release. You can read more about the release at the WordPress blog: 2.8 Release Jazzes Themes and Widgets. They also released a snazzy video highlighting all of the new features. Personally, I am looking forward to the new syntax highlighting.
Before you upgrade be sure to backup your current installation by backing up your database, and at least your wp-content folder. You never know what might or could go wrong. You also might want to check out the plugin compatibility list to see if your favourite plugins are compatible with the new version.
For the clients that I support I will be going through and checking your sites and backing them up before upgrading. I will let you know before I upgrade your website. If you are a WordPress user and don’t want to deal with upgrading your blog, feel free to contact me and let me take care of the messy details of upgrading your blog for you.
Post under WordPress | By LGR | On June 6th, 2009
This website and blog has gone through a number of changes since I started it in February 2007. The blog was originally on Blogger on a sub domain, then moved into WordPress on the same sub domain. Eventually I merged the original website and blog together, and most recently I changed servers, add that up with blog being online since 2007 and there are bound to be some broken links.
I have talked about checking for broken links in the past, and it is one of the things I do quite regularly for clients. Running link checkers on a website is great, it will give you a listing of all the broken links to external sites that exist. The old way of running a link check would then mean you would have to open the page that has the broken link, find it and edit it or remove it. Wouldn’t it be great if you could run a link check, and then fix the link all at once without having to go searching for the page and the link? The WordPress Broken Link Checker plugin will let you do this and makes running a link check on your WordPress driven website and blog an easy to accomplish task.
It has been awhile since I have run a link check on my website so I thought this would be the perect time tom try the Broken Link Checker plugin a try. I have to say I am impressed. It shows that I have 1709 external links and of that there are 57 broken links. Finding the broken links is nice, but once the broken links are found you have some additional choices on how to manage that link. You can click on “Details” to find out more about the link, how many times it has failed a link check, the HTTP code the link returns and all kinds of great geeky good log information. You can choose “Unlink” which remove the link from all posts, great for those links that you know are simply gone. You can click “Exclude” the link from being checked. You can also click “Edit URL” which will allow you to edit the URL and quickly and easily fix the link if you know what it is. This is be far the nicest feature, allowing you to quickly and easily fix the broken link without having to open the post editor and search for the link. In the event that Broken Link Checker has found a link that it thinks is broken but is actually correct you can choose “Discard” to mark the link as valid.
The Broken Link Checker also can add custom CSS to broken links so your readers can see that something is not quite right with the link. The default CSS is to put a strike through on the broken link but I am sure the more creative types could make it do more. That comes in handy because there are times when you might not want to remove the link. For example on my The Really Big List of Social Bookmarking Websites post you can see which social bookmarking sites are no longer available.
The default for link check is every 72 hours. I did not run any kind of test to see what kind of load the plugin puts on the server. Blogs on shared hosting might have an issue with the plugin, so if you install it you might want to increase the number of hours between runs. Something to be aware of if you install the plugin.
Now that I have the list of broken links I guess I need to fix some of them up at least. Check out the WordPress Broken Link Checker plugin, a great weekend WordPress project to improve your WordPress powered website and blog.
Post under WordPress | By LGR | On May 9th, 2009
Blogs make it easy to add new content to your website. Adding new, regular articles helps to bring people back to your website, can improve your search engine rankings and help you connect with your clients and customers. The one problem I have had with blogs is older articles can become hard to find. Sure there are categories, tags, author and date based archives to help people, but if you have a rather large blog it can still take considerable amount of time for people to find more articles that they might be interested in. There is also the search feature that is built into WordPress available to people, but as I have talked about before the default WordPress search is not the best at actually finding what you are looking for. This is where the similar posts plugin can be very useful.
There are several similar posts plugins available and there are several tutorials on the Internet showing you how you can create a similar posts section without a plugin, but the similar posts plugin I prefer to use is, aptly named, Similar Posts. The Similar Posts plugin will create a list of posts it believes are related to the post the reader is currently reading and insert the list below the post, so when the person is done reading they can browse to another similar article that they might be interested in.
The length of the list is customizable and if you have a rather new blog you might only want to offer five additonal posts. Once your blog ages and you have a larger collection of posts you can increase it. The plugin also offers the ability to add a similar posts section to the bottom of you RSS feed, so people that have just recently subscribed to your blog will be given suggestions for other articles from the past that might interest them.
Giving your readers suggestions of other posts to read from your blog is an excellent method to help increase your readers interaction with your website. It gives them more opportunities to comment and take part in your website and can lead them to becoming a regular reader, a subscriber and a regular contributor. It also helps to bring some of the great content you wrote earlier to the forefront in your newer posts. Similar Posts is a great plugin to take use to easily improve your website and blogs ability to have your reader stick around.
Post under WordPress | By LGR | On April 18th, 2009
I am a statistics junkie, I can’t help myself. I like to know how people found my site, where they went, what they clicked on, where they are from and the list goes on. It is probably not surprising that I use Google Analytics on my site, and I install it on most of my clients sites. Google Analytics provides people with an easy to use and see statistics package and for the price is perhaps the best you can get.
It has happened more than once though that I have edited a theme and forgot to include the Google Analytics code back in the footer of the WordPress theme. Then I look at the stats and go “what the *&%$!” It is then that I realize what I did and I have to go back and edit the websites theme footer file. Well no more, I have start using Ultimate Google Analytics and I no longer have to worry about making my silly mistake. The plugin will automatically insert the Google Analyitics code into the footer for you, all you need to do is provide it with the Google Analytics ID.
Some of the other great features of the plugin include the ability to add tracking code to all external links and downloads. Add an external link and the proper code will be automatically added to the code so you can track how often it is clicked inside Google Analytics. The reports are viewable in Google Analytics in Content. The default for external links is Outgoing, but you can define a different name if you desire.
Outgoing Links in March 2009
It can also track links to files that you offer for download. Have a PDF file that you want to know how often it is downloaded and Ultimate Google Analytics will automatically insert the code to track the number of times people download PDF files, zip files and a whole list of file types. You can add or remove types that you use on your blog.
According to Google the best place for the Google Analytics code to be placed is in the footer just before the closing </body> tag. The reason for this is so the Google Analytics code does not slow down the loading of your web pages if the code is placed in the head of your web pages. The Ultimate Google Analytics plugin will automatically place the Google Analytics code in your footer, but if your themes footer file does not call the wp_footer() function the plugin will insert the code into the head of your page so you will continue to recieve your stats. If at all possible it is best to make sure your themes footer does include the wp_footer() to ensure the code is inserted in the best location.
Having the best statistics available from your site will pay off very quickly. It will allow you to see how people are finding your website, give you ideas for new blog posts from the keywords that people use to find you and let you see what people find most interesting. Take a few minutes and try out Ultimate Google Analytics, I know it has helped me know more about my website visitors and how to improve my website.
Post under WordPress | By LGR | On April 11th, 2009
One of the things I like best about WordPress is how easy it is to extend it with new plugins. You can add new features and tweak many different things on your website with just a few clicks by adding a new plugin. Recently I thought I would add a new plugin to the website to offer the people that comment a chance to let other visitors know about their latest blog posts. The plugin is called CommentLuv by Andy Bailey.
CommentLuv is a great plugin to show that latest blog posts of the people who comment on your blog. This can encourage people to comment on your blog and help build community on your blog as well as giving back something to the people that take the time to add to your blog. CommentLuv works with AJAX to perform its magic. Simply fill in the URL of your website or blog and CommentLuv will check for a RSS feed and give you to option of including a link to your latest post with your comment.
Because CommentLuv uses AJAX to accomplish its task it does insert some additional code into your blog posts including some additional Javascript and CSS file. This does add some additional requests and download weight to your blog posts but it is not to excessive. There is also the possibility that there could a conflict with another plugin but so far I have not found any problems.
If you are looking for a fun weekend project to add something to your blog, take a look at the CommentLuv plugin. It gives you a chance to highlight the blog posts of the people who take the time to add to your blog by commenting. You might even come across a blog post or two you want to read.
Post under WordPress | By LGR | On March 30th, 2009
by msc-???t?????g? (busy)
Photos can add a lot to a blog post, and I know I am not one of the best examples since many, if not most of my blog posts do not have images with them. There are many places that you can find stock photos for your blog, but it still requires going to that website, searching, downloading, uploading to your blog and inserting into your post. When you have limited time to blog you need to make the most of of your time and that does not always include searching around for images.
There is an alternative to doing all of the searching for stock photos for your blog, use photos from Flickr. Many of the photos on Flickr are licensed under a Creative Commons and you can use them to enhance your blogs posts. There are a number of benefits to using photos from Flickr:
- You have access to great photos from around the world.
- It can save you bandwidth.
- It can reduce the requests on your server.
There are several WordPress Flickr plugins available, but the one plugin I am currently testing is the WordPress Flickr Manager. The plugin allows you to manager your entire Flickr account from inside of your WordPress dashboard, including uploading new photos, inserting your photos into your blog posts and search photos that are available to use via the Creative Commons license.
The one feature I wish the plugin had was a better search for Creative Commons photos. The public photo search returns Creative Commons licensed photos but it would be nice to have an option to limit the search to Creative Commons photos that are allowed under various circumstances. For example photos that are allowed to be used commercially.
If you want to merge your Flickr account and make it easy to add Flickr photos to your WordPress blog take a look at the WordPress Flickr Manager. It might be just the thing you are looking for. Oh, and if you are wondering if this means that I will be adding photos to all of my posts now? I’ll try to add a new one occasionally.
Post under SEO, WordPress | By LGR | On March 20th, 2009
As great as WordPress is for search engine optimization there are ways of making it better. I have a list of several WordPress SEO plugins that I like to install and use on the WordPress sites I work on but it is always nice to have a list of SEO plugins that are available. Thankfully Mashable has put together a great post of 20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress. Many of the plugins I like to use are on the list including the All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps. There are also a few that I have not heard of but will have to give a try and see how they work.
One of the plugins that caught my eye was Simple Tags. When I started this blog I was on Blogger and was using FTP publishing to publish it to my server. Blogger offered labels and when I switched the blog to WordPress the labels where switched over to categories. Over time and with the closing of Epiblogger the number of categories have grown. I hope to clean up the number of categories at some point this year and start using categories and tags. I have not been looking forward to that task, but perhaps Simple Tags will help me accomplish it. Does anyone have experience with Simple Tags and how well it auto generates tags for posts?
If you are interested in WordPress SEO take a look at the post and some of the plugins they talk about and try some of them out if you want to improve your WordPress blog search engine optimization.
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