Welcome to the second edition of Weekly WordPress Roundup!

Sorry for the late posting!  I was busy making lemonade from life’s lemons…

What Is It?

Weekly WordPress Roundup is a hybrid between a blog carnival and a weblog.  Every Monday morning the editor of that week’s roundup makes a single post linking to the “best” WordPress articles they’ve come across that week.  The choices are made from their own web surfing and from articles submitted via the Roundup’s blogcarnival.com page.  If you’re interested in hosting the Weekly WordPress Roundup, just drop an email to: philaahzophy@gmail.com

On To The Entries…

General WordPress News-

Our first entry comes from Jackie at Internet Marketing Strategy For Moms and even though it was posted last October, it’s still very relevant today.  The title pretty much tells the story: WordPress.com Deleted All Of My Blogs.  Apparetnly the folks at WordPress.com decided she was a splogger simply because she linked out to her other blogs.  Not good news.  And it’s not a problem that’s going away.  It was a full year ago that I posted Isn’t Freedom Of Expression Worth $5 Per Month? right here at Philaahzophy.

Looking for work?  Well, according to the WordPress Publisher Blog, oDesk Reports “WordPress” Fastest Growing In-Demand Skill in 2008!  So it seems like your blogging skills can pay off in the “real world” as well.

WordPress Plugins-

Madeline Begun Kane submitted her brief article on the wonders of the WP-SpamFree plugin titled Life-Saving, Spam-Fighting WordPress Plugin.  I didn’t investigate WP-SpamFree during my own recent search for a comment spam solution, because it’s listed as only being compatible up to WordPress 2.6.2.  If you know that it’s been upgraded for (or is compatible with) 2.7 then I’d love to hear about it in the comments section below!

WordPress Tips-

As I’ve started exploring the limits of what can be done with WordPress I’ve found myself coming closer and closer to altering the core Wordpress files.  Since any changes to the core will have to be redone manually whenever a new update comes out, this is a very bad thing.  Luckily, the folx over at Cats Who Code have an elegant solution in their How To: Overwrite Core WordPress Functions.

Mike Mueller recently posted a great overview on Setting Up Your WP Blog at his Mike’s Minute Real Estate Blog.

WordPress Themes-

Ever wish you could use more widgets without your blog looking overcrowded?  Well check out last week’s Thursday Themeday review of the Quadruple Blue four column WordPress theme!  Considering many people (myself included much of the time) feel that three column themes are, by their very nature, cluttered, the concept of a four column theme may seem preposterous.  But, somehow, this one pulls it off.

Anthony Delgado’s Free WordPress Themes may not be what you expect.  Instead of listing more free themes he actually discusses how to make a theme “your own” with only minor modifications.

Want to use WordPress as a CMS?  Then you absolutely have to check out the WordPress ReMix Theme I reviewed last week!

—–

That’s wraps up this week’s WordPress Roundup!  Look for next week’s edition over at Gilroy Review on Monday, January 26th!  Submit your WordPress-related article (or someone else’s that you find worthwhile!) to the next edition of Weekly WordPress Roundup using our carnival submission form or by emailing it to philaahzophy@gmail.com.  Future hosts can be found on the Weekly WordPress Roundup homepage.  If you’d like to be added to the list, just drop an email!

As always, comments, links and social bookmarks are very much appreciated!

Post from: Philaahzophy

Weekly WordPress Roundup – Jan 19, 2009

• Victory Over The Comment Spammers - January 14, 2009 - 7 common tags
• Can Your WordPress Blog See The Future? Mine Can! - September 17, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Polite Comment Spammers? - December 1, 2007 - 4 common tags
• Philaahzophy Now In Top 100,000 - November 13, 2007 - 4 common tags
• Introducing The Get Paid To Read / Click / Surf Carnival - August 27, 2007 - 4 common tags

Welcome to the twelfth installment of my Wonderful WordPress Wednesday series.

With more than 20 blogs to watch over, comment spam has become quite the annoying time killer of late.  With more than 200 Akismet entries to sort through each day it became clear that something else had to be done, so I headed into the ether to find a solution.

My first stop was, of course, the WordPress plugin directory.  Unfortunately, searching on “spam” returns 117 of the 3,870 plugins currently listed there.  Not exactly a bullseye solution to the problem.  So I headed into the WordPress Codex ehere I found their Combating Comment Spam page with the following suggestions-

• Akismet – Akismet was already keeping the majority o fthe spam off my blog, but I was still forced to sort through it in search of false positive.
• Settings > Discussion -
  • Here there are multiple options to automatically detect spam: number of links, spam keywords, blacklist.  Alas, when detected, it was just dumped into the Akismet area for me to sort through later.
  • Moderate All Comments – This would create even more work for me, essentially labeling everything as spam.  Not exactly a timesaver and not really user friendly, either, IMO.
  • Pre-approve only “old” commenters- Since I don’t have many ‘regular’ commenters this would still require far too much moderation time.
  • Restrict Comments To Registered Users – not only user-unfriendly, but I really have no desire to have dozens or even hundreds of people with user accounts on my blog(s).
• Delete wp-comments-post.php and/or wp-trackback.php -Again, not exactly user friendly.  I’m trying to encourage more comments, not remove them all.  Besides isn’t this just giving in to the spammers?  I’d rather let them run rampant than shut out my actual readers.
• Use rel=”nofollow” – this has never actually been effective in stopping comment spam.  The bots simply don’t care.
• Deny access with .htaccess – Now that seems interesting!
  • Deny Access to Spammer IPs/Referrer Spammers – Again, too labor intensive what with the need to collate and enter individual IP addresses and referrers.
  • Deny Access to No Referrer Requests – I think we have a winner!

Here’s the relevant section of The Codex-

When your readers comment, the wp-comments-post.php file is accessed, does its thing, and creates the post. The user’s browser will send a “referral” line about this.

When a spam-bot comes in, it hits the file directly and usually does not leave a referrer. This allows for some nifty detection and action direct from the server. If you are not familiar with Apache directives, then write the following in your root directory .htaccess file::

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*yourdomain.com.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/$ [R=301,L]

This will:
1. Detect when a POST is being made
2. Check to see if the post is on wp-comments-post.php
3. Check if the referrer is in your domain or if no referrer
4. Send the spam-bot BACK to its originating server’s IP address.

After reading that over it seemed to make perfect sense to me.  A simple but elegant solution t ospambots.  Five minutes later I had added the relevant code to my .htaccess file and expected to never hear from comment spammers again.

However, the next morning, my Akismet spam queue was full of over 100 messages again.  The only thing different was that not a single one of them was a false positive or even questionable.  Every single one of them had been left by a spambot.  Clearly this simple but elegant solution wasn’t working.  So I headed off to find another solution.  The worst part, however, was something I didn’t realize until a full two days later: the .htaccess changes were blocking regular comments!  I think this was because I don’t use the normal comments.php, instead using a custom one from a comment plugin, but regardless, it wasn’t helping block the spambots anyway, so I just wiped it clean out and immediately was able to receive comments again.

My next “great find” was Yet Another WordPress Anti Spam Plugin (YAWASP).  Unlike the vast majority of anti-spam plugins out there, YAWASP did not require Javascript or cookies (which many of my visitors have disabled) or a CAPTCHA (which I and many of my visitors hate), but instead, was entirely transparent to the regular user.  Its primary means of spam detecting is to add a “hidden” field that the bots will see (and complete) but is invisible to the human eye on the rendered page.  I use this same type of anti-apam system to keep spammers from registering on the various forums I’ve over the years and it works great.  So I was exited to see it available for WordPress as well. Unfortunately, i couldn’t get it to work.  No matter what I did it kept insisting that every comment was spam because it’s author had somehow entered data into the “hidden” field.  Exceedingly frustrated at this point I removed it and took a nice long break.

Finally I decided to see what other long term bloggers were doing and with a little poking aruond in Google Blog Search I finally came across several positive article about the Bad Behavior WordPress Plugin.  Like Akismet and YAWASP, Bad Behavior is transparent to my actual readers.  However, unlike them it was as simple as install and activate.  I haven’t received a spambot comment since!  Regular comments still seem to be getting through and spam that is manually left still shows up (though it tends to get caught by Akismet).  Best of all, in the last 24 hours I’ve only had to clear less than a dozen comments from my various Akismet queues.  Now that is protection.

Yeah, I know that was a long way to go for what could have been a simple single paragraph post.  But I wanted y’all to understand that I share your frustrations.  Now, hopefully, you can avoid all of my pitfalls and wasted time and simply install Bad behavior to begin with.  The only question remaining is why is Akismet distributed with WordPress when Bad Behavior is not?

Post from: Philaahzophy

Victory Over The Comment Spammers

• Weekly WordPress Roundup – Jan 19, 2009 - January 19, 2009 - 7 common tags
• Can Your WordPress Blog See The Future? Mine Can! - September 17, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Starting A Blog? Install These 5 WordPress Plugins First! - September 3, 2008 - 5 common tags
• Using A Default Rating With WP-PostRatings Plugin - January 7, 2009 - 4 common tags
• Popularity Protection For Your WordPress Blog - September 10, 2008 - 4 common tags

Welcome to the eleventh installment of my Wonderful WordPress Wednesday series. Today’s lesson is a quick little hack for one of my favorite plugins: WP-PostRatings (by the irrepressible Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan) which adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s posts.  I don’t use it here on Philaahzophy, but it’s a vital part of several other blogs that I manage.

My problem occurred on my amusement park and roller coaster video blog where I also use a plugin (that I previously wrote about) to schedule posts for future dates.  You see, I’ve noticed that people are far more likely to actually rate a post if others have already done so.  Therefore I was visiting each post after it was published and rating it myself.  This can become bothersome since I schedule posts on that blog days or even weeks in advance.  What I needed was for the WP-PostRatings plugin to add a default rating score to every post as it was published.  Luckily, with a little poking around and some help from more PHP-knowledgeable friends I was able to come up with a solution.

Simply navigate to Plugins > Editor > WP-PostRatings in your WordPress admin area and scroll down to lines 763-766 which read as follows:

add_post_meta($post_ID, 'ratings_users', 0, true);
add_post_meta($post_ID, 'ratings_score', 0, true);
add_post_meta($post_ID, 'ratings_average', 0, true);

Now, change the values in each variable to reflect your default ratings. For example, to have each post be published with a single rating and a score of 4 you would change the code to appear as follows-

add_post_meta($post_ID, 'ratings_users', 1, true);
add_post_meta($post_ID, 'ratings_score', 4, true);
add_post_meta($post_ID, 'ratings_average', 4, true);

You can set whatever default ratings you like, but make sure that your math works out or you’re likely to get some type of error.

• ratings_users refers to the number of different people that have entered their rating
• ratings_score is the total value of all the ratings thus far added together
• ratings_average is the current score of the post

So you’ll want to make sure that ratings_score divided by ratings_users is equal to ratings_average.  If you’re worried about the math, just use the values in the example above and all of your posts will publish with a rating of 4 granted by a single user (you do think all of your posts are worthy of at least 4 out of 5 stars, don’t you?).

As always, if you have any difficulty with this tip, questions about using WordPress more effectively, suggestions for future articles in this series, or just want to say ‘Hi’ or ‘Thanks’, comments are always very much appreciated!  And if you found this post useful or informative, please consider adding it to your choice  social bookmarking sites (StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, etc).

Post from: Philaahzophy

Using A Default Rating With WP-PostRatings Plugin

• Starting A Blog? Install These 5 WordPress Plugins First! - September 3, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Popularity Protection For Your WordPress Blog - September 10, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Lighten The Load Of Your WordPress Blog – Part Two - August 27, 2008 - 5 common tags
• Can Your WordPress Blog See The Future? Mine Can! - September 17, 2008 - 5 common tags
• Victory Over The Comment Spammers - January 14, 2009 - 4 common tags

Welcome to the eighth installment of my Wonderful WordPress Wednesday series.

I first started blogging about six years ago, discovered WordPress in 2006, fell in love with it in 2007, and started sharing that love with y’all (through this series) a few months ago.  However, I must confess, I hated the changes that WordPress 2.5 brought to the WordPress admin panel and flat out refused to update beyond 2.3.3

That all changed when I gave WordPress 2.7 Beta a try on a new blog.  Today Release Candidate Two (RC2) of 2.7 was released and I spent the day upgrading all of my blogs.  While this only took 15-45 minutes (based on which plugins were installed) handling so many blogs still took me many, many hours.  All well spent!  So what is it that’s got me falling in love with WordPress again?  Let me count the ways…

1. Collapsible, click & drag boxes in the admin panel.  These allow me to set up my admin pages (particluarly the Dashboard and Add New/Edit pages) with only the features I want and in th elocations I want.
2. Simple, internal upgrades.  Now when I get that annoying little “A new version of WordPress is available! Please update now.” at the top of my admin pages I can simply click on the link and the update is handled automatically!  Plugins are updated in the same way.
3. Simple, internal way to add plugins!  The ability (or desire) to use an FTP program is no longer necessary to install the latest WordPress plugins.  Now when I find a nifty new plugin I want to try I can simply search for it from my admin panel’s Plugins page and click “Install”.  All of the background “tech” stuff is then taken care of automatically.  Why this hasn’t been implemented for themes as well is beyond me.

WordPress 2.7 isn’t without its problems, however.

For example, I have a grand total of zero interest in my “Akismet Stats” but since the folx at Automattic seem to think these are somehow vital I’m stuck with that link taking up space in my menu bar.  Of course, I can close the Dashboard box to return that space to me, but whenever I click over to my dashboard it just pops back up.  I could also move the Dashboard box further down the menu, but I frequently use the Dashboard link so this isn’t really an option either.

Okay, that’s a pretty minor quibble.  So how about the fact that all of my drafts are now included in the ‘Edit Posts’ page, in date order, like regular posts.  I use drafts to keep notes for future posts and most certainly do not need them cluttering up my previously clean Manage Posts page.  Still minor?  Hmmm…

How about all the plugins that have conflicts with 2.7?  What?  That list keeps getting shorter as the plugin makers update their work?  Hmmm…  I guess there aren’t that many problems after all.  No wonder I’m in love!

So, what’s keeping you from upgrading to Wordpress 2.7?

Post from: Philaahzophy

Falling In Love All Over Again – WordPress 2.7

• Can Your WordPress Blog See The Future? Mine Can! - September 17, 2008 - 5 common tags
• Weekly WordPress Roundup – Jan 19, 2009 - January 19, 2009 - 4 common tags
• Victory Over The Comment Spammers - January 14, 2009 - 4 common tags
• Starting A Blog? Install These 5 WordPress Plugins First! - September 3, 2008 - 4 common tags
• Popularity Protection For Your WordPress Blog - September 10, 2008 - 4 common tags

Welcome to the fifth installment of my Wonderful WordPress Wednesday series.

This week we’re going to take take our WordPress blogs into the future! Okay, not literally, but figuratively. Well, maybe not figuratively either, but. Well, just read on…

I’ve been kind of obsessed with the idea of “one-a-day” blogs of late. My original idea was “MyDailyTs” which would present a different t-shirt each day, highlighting its merits and offering direct links for its purchase. These links would, of course, be affiliate links in order to compensate me for my time and effort. Despite two false starts this concept still has not gotten off the ground. Several other ‘MyDailyWhatevers’ have followed, in concept at least.  The latest being Confirmed Celebrity Addresses (which isn’t living up to expectations) and On-Ride Videos (which isn’t even ‘officially‘ open until October 1st).

My biggest problem with these projects was that in order to make them real-world feasible I would have to write somewhere between a week’s worth and a month’s worth of posts in advance, publish them, and let WordPress actually post them to the site as their time stamp rolled around. With Z not having computer access at home and her blogging job requiring a minimum of four posts per week, spread out over that week, she’s needed to write in to the future as well.  However, when doing these we ‘future posts’ we kept running into the problem of remembering just how far into the future we had posted and what days (if any) we were missing between now and then.

I did a lot of Google searches for “increment WordPress posting date” and similar queries trying to find a WordPress plugin or hack that would automatically incremement the date of a post to the first day without an existing post on the Write > Post page, but all came to naught.  Then, entirely by accident (or was it serendipity?) yesterday I came across Aaron Harun’s Future Posts Calendar Plugin which accomplishes my goal even beter than I had imagined!  In fact, I’m using it while writing this very post as can be seen in the screenshot (above).

You see that box on the right labeled “Future Post Dates” with the calendar?  Under the “Post Timestamp”?  Well, that’s what this plugin provides.  Okay, it’s not very impressive there, but that’s because I just started using it.  What happens is that when you want to set your Timestamp to a future date you just click on the date you want your post to appear and it enters it into the Timestamp box. Not very impressive, I know.  You could just as easily type in the date yourself.  However, that’s just a simple little functionality bonus.  The REAL power comes in to play when you already have a bunch of future posts entered.

Check out this screenshot from my Amusement Park Ride Photos blog.  See those green boxes on some of the dates?  Those indicate when I already have posts scheduled for future publication.  So now, when I want to schedule the next post “in line” for my “Daily” blogs, I just have to click on the first non-green number and don’t even need to particularly worry about the date itself!  WooHoo!!

When this plugin was first released, one of the foremost authorities on WordPress, Lorelle, commented-

I’ve been looking for something like this for YEARS. This has been a feature of WordPress that has annoyed me since the beginning, forcing me to check the Manage Posts panel before hitting the Write Post panel all the time. HATE IT!

So thank you muches and I’m eager to give this a try.

Can’t ask for a much higher recommendation than that!

But Aaron wasn’t satisfied just letting the bloggers themselves peer into the future (and neither am I). No, he went on to develop the Sneak Peeks Widget which allows a blogger to promote their upcoming posts in the sidebar of their blog!  You can see this one in action by checking out my Roller Coaster Videos site and looking in the right sidebar.  While I’m not sure that I’ll be integrating that widget here at Philaahzophy, where I tend to write things off the top of my head,  it’s perfect for many of my more niche blogs where I am more prone to schedule content.  I may, however start using it here to promote the next installment in each of my weekly series.

Not only will the Sneak Peek plugin encourage readers to revisit your blog in the near future and/or increase RSS subscription numbers, but it can also help with SEO.  This is because the keyowrds in the title of the future posts will be read by the Googlebot and other search engine spiders even before the posts themselves go live, thus having them associated with your site that much earlier!

One final look into the future before closing this installment of Wonderful Wordpress Wednesday. Next week’s installment will cover making your category and tag pages both more attractive and more functional for both you and your guests.  Assuming that is, that time-constraints and web hosting problems don’t, once again, get in the way.  See you in the future!

Post from: Philaahzophy

Can Your WordPress Blog See The Future? Mine Can!

• Weekly WordPress Roundup – Jan 19, 2009 - January 19, 2009 - 6 common tags
• Victory Over The Comment Spammers - January 14, 2009 - 6 common tags
• Starting A Blog? Install These 5 WordPress Plugins First! - September 3, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Popularity Protection For Your WordPress Blog - September 10, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Lighten The Load Of Your WordPress Blog – Part One - August 20, 2008 - 6 common tags

This fourth installment of my Wonderful WordPress Wednesday series was inspired by an event that occured right here at Philaahzophy earlier this week. One of my stories, Still Think Google’s PageRank Means Something, became so popular on StumbleUpon that not only did my blog go offline, but the web hosting server that holds it crashed in its entirety!  Obviously this was not good for anyone – my readers (because they couldn’t find the information they sought, me (because no one could read my pearls of wisdom ), my web hosting company (since they had to deal with it on their end), and even the other webmasters whose websites are hosted on the same server (and their readers).

I just happening to be watching the traffic influx live with my stats tool, Clicky and saw more than 100 visitors StumbleUpon my post in less than 60 seconds.  Then a complete and instant lack of activity.  Obviously this wasn’t natural, so I headed for my WordPress admin panel to see what the problem was and received an error stating that “a database connection could not be made.”  Of course, my next step was to contact my web host (Top Hosting Center), who were unaware of the problem.  Luckily, everything was back up and running within 10 minutes.  Unfortunately, the site was down too long to maintain the momentum that had been building.

Still, I was left pondering what I could do to avoid such a situation in the future.  Afterall, the goal of most bloggers is to have as many readers as possible.  How is that going to happen when the site crashes when too many people visit?  Obviously it’s not.  However, my love of WordPress letf me assured that someone out there had come up with a solution for me.  I was not disappointed.

Late last year Donncha O Caoimh, developed a WordPress plugin called WP Super Cache, which branched off from Ricardo Galli Granada’s WP-Cache 2.  According to Donncha-

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

[...]

WP-Cache 2 caches the pages of your WordPress blog and delivers them without accessing the database. Unfortunately it still means loading the PHP engine to serve the cached files.

WP Super Cache gets around that. When it is installed, html files are generated and they are served without ever invoking a single line of PHP. How fast can your site serve graphic files? That’s (almost) as fast it will be able to serve these cached files.

Since the problem with my server was accessing the database, it seems that either caching plugin would be a solution.  However, I went with Super Cache because my host is obviously on the weak side so the less stress I can put on it the better for all involved.  If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you’ve probably heard of The Squid List, from Laughing Squid.  If you haven’t, it’s a hugely popular event listing and social site.  Well, returning to the official plugin page we find-

Scott Beale uses WP Super Cache on Laughing Squid. He posted about his experiences using the cache during a traffic spike when a posts made it onto the Digg frontpage twice, on to Slashdot, and received major media exposure. Here is his traffic graph for that time. Over 200,000 page views in one day. Could your server handle that?

I can’t imagine a spike much larger than that, so if WP Super Cache kept Laughing Squid online, don’t you think it can handle your blog?  WP Super Cache does come with a few caveats though-

• You should have mod mime, mod rewrite and fancy permalinks enabled.
• Some sites have problems serving compressed html files and need extra configuration.
• Some of the more dynamic aspects of your site’s template won’t refresh quite as quickly.
• Don’t expect a cheap hosting plan to survive a major traffic spike, even if it is cached!

WP Super Cache is also more difficult to install than many plugins.  But, please, don’t let that keep you away from it!  We’re all hunting for that flood of traffic, spend the time now to ensure you’re ready for it when it comes.  The included readme file is extensive, there’s a support forum available, and if you have any problems with installation feel free to post them here in the comments section.  I’m certainly no guru myself, so if I can get this bad boy installed than so can you.  After all, the whole purpose of this series is to help people show their WordPress blogs a little love.

I had intended to share with y’all a step-by-step walk thru of how I installed WP Super Cache and dealt with the few sticking points that occured, but (as usual) this post is already getting long. If there is interest, or I get a lot of requests for installation assistance I may still do so in the future. Until then, what are you waiting for? Head over to the WP Super Cache site right now and get this baby installed before the hordes come acrashin’ at your front gate.  Then come on back and share with others how much better you feel about your blog becoming an overnight sensation by leaving a comment.  Already have it installed?  Then please drop a comment below to encourage thosewho may be put off by the techie aspects of the install.

Post from: Philaahzophy

Popularity Protection For Your WordPress Blog

• Starting A Blog? Install These 5 WordPress Plugins First! - September 3, 2008 - 10 common tags
• Using A Default Rating With WP-PostRatings Plugin - January 7, 2009 - 6 common tags
• Lighten The Load Of Your WordPress Blog – Part Two - August 27, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Lighten The Load Of Your WordPress Blog – Part One - August 20, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Can Your WordPress Blog See The Future? Mine Can! - September 17, 2008 - 6 common tags

Welcome to the third installment of my Wonderful WordPress Wednesday series!

Over the last two weeks we looked at simple steps you could take to improve the efficiency of your WordPress blog. This week we’re going to back up a little bit and look at how to set up a blog, or, more specifically, the very first plugins you should install on your WordPress blog. Yes, even before your very first post. With all of the great “Top 10 plugins for {whatever}” posts I’ve read, the one I really needed was never found. So, I’ve now written that post for the benefit of all the new bloggers out there. More experienced bloggers are welcome to follow along, of course, and if you think I’ve made a bad choice, or left something out, please comment to let me (and the other readers) know!

Exec-PHP

What it does- Exec-PHP is short for “execute PHP code” and the plugin executes code in your posts, pages and text widgets.

Why Install Before Blogging- Exec-PHP should, without a doubt, be the very first plugin you install and activate. While it is an “activate and forget” plugin, it’s absolutely essential to so many things a WordPress blogger does that it really should be part of the WordPress core. Even if you don’t know the first thing about PHP this plugin will still regularly aid you in your blogging journey. Aside from that, many, many plugins require that Exec-PHP be installed on the blog. In fact, so many require it, that it has become simply assumed that you’ll already have it installed and few mention the requirement, leading to no end of heaaches for the uninitiated. Save yourself stress – install and activate Exec-PHP before doing anything else on your new WordPress blog.

Google XML Sitemaps

What it does- An XML sitemap is like the directory at a large shopping mall. It includes the link to every page on your site (both posts and pages) with special meta data about each page in order to help webcrawlers (like GoogleBot) more easily track down all the bits and pieces of your blog. XML is the standard for sitemaps and is used by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search, and YAHOO!

With this plugin you don’t need to ever worry about your sitemap. Not only does it create one for you automatically, but it constantly updates it (and notifies Google!) with every change you make to any page.

Why Install Before Blogging- I assume that if you’re publishing a blog you want “the public” (aka complete strangers) to find and read it. In this day and age that means being indexed by Google. By installing this plugin before writing even your first post you ensure that Google will be with you every step of the way, reporting it to any websurfer interested in your topic(s).

All In One SEO Pack

What it does- The All In One SEO Pack WordPress Plugin does exactly what its name implies. This one plugin will automatically improve the search engine optimization of your WordPress blog. Specifically, here’s the highlights-

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• - Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
• For Wordpress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.

Best of all, this is all 100% customizable for those who have an understanding of SEO techniques.

Why Install Before Blogging- It’s never too early to start worrying about search engine optimization. With the All In One SEO Pack you can just install it, activate it, and ignore it while still receiving maximum SEO benefits while you concentrate on the quality content that will keep readers coming back. The last plugin I recommended will make sure Google (and other search engines) knows about your website. This one will make sure you show up near the top of relevant searches.

I’ve been running my primary blog for about three years now and only started worrying about SEO in the last few months. When I went to research and test how effective my current SEO tactics have been I found they were considered near perfect by most online tools! At first I credited this directly to the WordPress platform itself, but after checking a few of my other blogs one was ranked down around 70% instead of the 95%-98% of the majority. While investigating what was different about that site I realized that I had never activated this plugin. After doing so that site as well jumped into the 90th percentile!

WP-PostViews

What it does- WP-PostViews tracks the number of times each post or page on your blog is viewed. This information is stored in your WordPress databse so can be easily accessed and posted just about anywhere on your blog.

Why Install Before Blogging- You may or may not be interested in sharing a list of your 10 (or 23 or 147) most popular posts on you rblog right now. Especially as you have zero posts at the moment. However, once your first post goes public views will start coming in. And if you wait to install (or activate) this plugin you’ll never have accurate data again. Install and activate it now, then the data will be ready for you whenever you’re interested.

CommentLuv

What it does- CommentLuv is designed to encourage fellow bloggers to comment on your blog by rewarding them with a link back to their latest post. It accomplishes this by accessing their blog’s RSS feed.

Why Install Before Blogging- Much like WP-PostViews, this plugin is unable to “go back in time” and add the links after the fact. Since it gathers the data as the comment is posted there is no way to append the commentor’s latest blog post to a comment that has been left in the past. Additionally, there is a growing CommentLuv community of bloggers that you will be plugged into as soon as you start your blog should you enable this plugin before writing your first post.

There you have it. Five more things to do before you even write your first post. Obviously, after installing the WordPress software you’ll be anxious to get those first few posts out the door, but taking the time to add these five plugins will get you started ion the right foot. All together it shouldn’t take you more than a half hour to install and activate these plugins, and down the line you’ll surely consider it time well spent.

That’s it for this third installment of the Wonderful WordPress Wednesday series. Next week I’ll have some more great tips for using WordPress to achieve all of your hopes and dreams!

Post from: Philaahzophy

Starting A Blog? Install These 5 WordPress Plugins First!

• Popularity Protection For Your WordPress Blog - September 10, 2008 - 10 common tags
• Lighten The Load Of Your WordPress Blog – Part Two - August 27, 2008 - 7 common tags
• Lighten The Load Of Your WordPress Blog – Part One - August 20, 2008 - 7 common tags
• Using A Default Rating With WP-PostRatings Plugin - January 7, 2009 - 6 common tags
• Can Your WordPress Blog See The Future? Mine Can! - September 17, 2008 - 6 common tags

Welcome to the second installment of my Wonderful WordPress Wednesday series!

Last week we looked at two simple steps you could take to improve the efficiency of your WordPress blog.  It’s already working hard to present your priceless thoughts and opinions to your readers, so we might as well do what we can to make its job a little bit easier.  This week we’re going to continue on that same train of thought.

If you’re like me, you don’t think about your CSS stylesheet very often.  You probably downloaded a free WordPress theme from somewhere, added it to your blog, and then never really thought about it.  Perhaps you’ve added a few things to it or modified a color selection or two.  Overall, however, it’s not really a part of your blog that receives much attention from you, the blog author.  But did you realize that the stylesheet is loaded with every single page?  Although I was aware of this, I never really gave it much thought.  Until, that is, I came across a post on gHacks.net titled Optimize Wordpress loading times.  Martin used the Free Website Performance Tool and Web Page Speed Analysis over at WebSiteOptimization.com to run his tests and I recommend y’all do the same.

Martin shares the results of his actual experiments in reducing the load time for his blog and found that simply compressing his CSS style sheet with Jeff Minard’s css-compress plugin not only reduced the file size, but also sped up his page downloads.  According to the plugin’s homepage-

Automatically removes comments, new lines, tabs, and gzip compresses (GZIP) any CSS file called with “<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_url’); ?>” Just activating the plugin with the default Kubrick theme will reduce the CSS file from 8k to 1.7k.

The css-compress plug-in is a simple install it, activate and forget it tool (my favorite type!) and seems to have zero visible effect on the appearance of any of my blogs, while still increasing their load times and saving me a bit of bandwidth.  In other words it’s a win-win.  There is one caveat, however, (again, according to the plug-in’s page)-

It has been noted though, relatively referenced urls inside the style sheet may be problematic. If nedd be, the plugin will attempt to re-write all of the url() paths to a fully qualified path – this may not work right. If things break, please file a bug with the address of the blog and contact me via AIM chuyskywlk so that I can fix this.

Note: In addition to compressing and optimizing your CSS style sheet, you should do the same thing to the PHP code that powers most of your WordPress blog.  Unfortunately, I have yet to find a simple and safe way to do so automatically.  If you know of one, please let me know via a comment!

Speaking of compressing and optimizing… When is the last time you optimized your WordPress database?  If that phrase means nothing to you, don’t feel bad.  It didn’t mean anything to me either when I came across it over at J.T. Pratt’s Blogging Mistakes (currently my favorite blog about blogging).  You can follow the link to his excellent explanatory article on why you should optimize your WordPress database, so I’ll just cut to the chase. Your database “reuses” old space in the same way that your hard drive does.  Sometimes this leads to a sort of “fragmentation” of data and empty, unusable space.  Optimizing your database is just like defragmenting your hard drive – you won’t know how much better your performance will be until you try it.

Luckily, Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan (one of the most prolific authors of must have WordPress plugins) has created the ultimate WordPress Database Manager plugin which (according to his site)-

Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

In other words, it’s an all-around health maintenance supplier for your WordPress database.  Although not quite an “activate and forget” plugin, it’s pretty darn close, providing one-click optimization of your database as well as the ability to schedule any and all optimization and backup functions.  An optimized database means WordPress doesn’t have to work as hard to serve your site to visitors.

That’s it for this second installment of the Wonderful WordPress Wednesday series.  Next week we’ll look at the first plugins you should install in your blog even before you write your first post!

Post from: Philaahzophy

Lighten The Load Of Your WordPress Blog – Part Two

• Lighten The Load Of Your WordPress Blog – Part One - August 20, 2008 - 9 common tags
• Starting A Blog? Install These 5 WordPress Plugins First! - September 3, 2008 - 7 common tags
• Popularity Protection For Your WordPress Blog - September 10, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Using A Default Rating With WP-PostRatings Plugin - January 7, 2009 - 5 common tags
• Can Your WordPress Blog See The Future? Mine Can! - September 17, 2008 - 5 common tags

Welcome to the first official installment of my Wonderful WordPress Wednesday series!

I love WordPress and I assume if you’re reading this that you’re at least flirting with it as a blogging platform yourself. Today let’s take a look at something nice we can do for our WordPress blog that will help us (and our readers!) out at the same time.  Today’s topic is optimizing your WordPress installation.  Don’t worry, we’re going to take things easy here…

One of the most powerful aspects of WordPress as a blogging platform is that its open source nature allows people with far more programming skill than I to easily create plugins or add-ons.  If WordPress doesn’t do what you want out of the box, odds are someone else wanted the same functionality and a plugin has already been developed to modify WordPress to do that very thing.  In fact, the Official WordPress Plugins Repository holds more than 2,700 various plugins!  That’s a lot of add-ons to experiment with and, odds are, you’ve tried a few over time that you’ve chosen to no longer use for one reason or another.  Which means, of course, that you’ve probably got a lot of unused plug-ins sitting around in your wp-content/plugins folder as well.  Some of these may even still be activated, despite the fact that you’re no longer using them.

Did you know that WordPress loads the vast majority of plugins on every page whether they’re needed or not? For example, up until yesterday I had Alex King’s excellent WP-Grins plugin installed.  It allows users to click on smileys to place them in their comments.  Frankly, I think I’m the only one who ever used it, but it was cute, so I kept it around.  I had no idea it was loading with every page, regardless of whether there was a comment box available or not. So now it’s gone.  In fact, I deactivated a half-dozen plugins while researching this article and my blog loads noticeably quicker over my DSL line.

Sometimes deactivating a plugin can cause errors on your blog because the template is still calling the plugin.  If this happens to you, check out John Lamansky’s aptly named What To Do If Plugin Deactivation Breaks Your Blog.  But deactivating unused plug-ins is just the first step.  After deactivating a plugin you also want to make sure to go the extra step and completely delete it from your plugins directory.  While you’re deleting things, make sure to get rid of any themese you’re notusing as well.  Not only will this clear up a little server space and make the plugins and presentation pages of your WordPress Admin that much cleaner, but it’s essential to our next step of automatically deleting orphan database entries.

If those last three words got you a bit nervous, just stick with me.  I promise this is easy, thanks to Allan Hutchinson (aka Mittineague) and his WordPress Clean Options Plugin.  Essentially orphaned options are lines that have been inserted into your Wordpress database in order to allow various plugins to do thier job.  Most plug-ins don’t delete these options when the plugin is deactivated (for various reasons).  What the Clean options plugin does is scour your database and blog directory, then lists any database options that are not called upon by any of your WordPress files.  You then have the option of selecting which of these orphaned options to delete.

Why would you want to delete these poor little orphaned database options?  Well, simply put, because they’re useless and still taking up space which bloats your database and makes WordPress work harder while actually running slower.  By deleting all of your deactivated plugins before running this plugin you ensure that it cleans out the maximum number of orphaned entries.  That, in turn, makes WordPress work both smoother and more quickly, which means a happier blog, a happier blogger, and happier readers as well.

This installment is running longer than I expected, so I’m actually going to split it into two separate posts.  Check back next week for Lighten The Load Of Your WordPress Blog – Part Two when I’ll show you an easy way to further optimize your WordPress database as well as a simple plug-’n'-play plugin to lighten your server load, and increase page load times, in one easy step.

Post from: Philaahzophy

Lighten The Load Of Your WordPress Blog – Part One

• Lighten The Load Of Your WordPress Blog – Part Two - August 27, 2008 - 9 common tags
• Starting A Blog? Install These 5 WordPress Plugins First! - September 3, 2008 - 7 common tags
• Popularity Protection For Your WordPress Blog - September 10, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Can Your WordPress Blog See The Future? Mine Can! - September 17, 2008 - 6 common tags
• Victory Over The Comment Spammers - January 14, 2009 - 4 common tags

FiddyP created an amazing WordPress Plugin last year called CommentLuv and it’s been steadily working its way around the blogosphere. Essentially, CommentLuv uses fellow blogger’s RSS feeds to automatically append a link to their latest blog post to any comments they leave on a CommentLuv enabled blog. I installed it here at Philaahzophy about 6 months ago and it’s quickly became my favorite WordPress plug-in.

However, a few months back word slowly started spreading that people who use FeedBurner’s excellent RSS service to serve their feeds may be losing out on the advantages of commenting on CommentLuv enabled blogs. The best post I’ve seen on the topic is Stephen Cronin’s Don’t Let Your CommentLuv Be Stolen Away-

Some people are not taking full advantage of the benefit provided by CommentLuv on DoFollow blogs. They could be improving their PageRank and their position in the SERPs, but instead this is being stolen away.

How? The link for their latest post points to a FeedBurner redirect URL, not to the original post on their site.

This doesn’t stop people getting to the post, as FeedBurner will redirect them to the site. However, it means that the PageRank / SERPs benefits are going to FeedBurner, instead of the commentator’s site. Some of this may be passed on by FeedBurner, or it may not be. It’s not worth the risk.

Fortunately, there’s a simple step one can take to ensure FeedBurner isn’t “stealing” away one of the advantages of the CommentLuv Plugin – simply uncheck the ‘Item Link Clicks’ option within the FeedBurner Stats PRO section of your feed’s control panel at FeedBurner.

Not only will this ensure that you receive link credit in the search engines from CommentLuv’d comments, but it will also make it easier for other people to find the direct link to your post should they so desire. And an awful lot of the ‘promotion’ we tend to do as bloggers is about getting readers back to our site, so why send them to FeedBurner instead?

If you’re not sure if your links are pointing to your blog or your FeedBurner feed, feel free to leave a comment on this post. CommentLuv is enabled so when you reload the page you should see a link to your latest post. Hover over it to see where the link leads.

Post from: Philaahzophy

CommentLuv and FeedBurner Don’t Mix (Or Do They?)

• Can Your WordPress Blog See The Future? Mine Can! - September 17, 2008 - 5 common tags
• Weekly WordPress Roundup – Jan 19, 2009 - January 19, 2009 - 4 common tags
• Victory Over The Comment Spammers - January 14, 2009 - 4 common tags
• Starting A Blog? Install These 5 WordPress Plugins First! - September 3, 2008 - 4 common tags
• What Is Applied Anarchy? - December 11, 2007 - 3 common tags