I know everybody is waiting for it. I opened their official website this morning and I saw some good news and some bad news. Good news is they’re working on it and there isn’t much to wait, bad news is that the original release date was 10th of November and they’re currently testing the beta 2.
To be honest, I didn’t see many improvements, I was expecting something really ‘wow’. When I installed the beta 1, the first thing that I noticed was the new admin area. So far so good. Now it’s easier to navigate in the admin panel and it has a better dashboard as well.
If you’re interested in the new features, you can go here. I enjoyed the XMLRPC comments posting and the core updating. Good job with these!
Anyway, go and test it and let me know your thoughts.
It’s obvious that the tell a friend scripts become more and more popular each day. So why not giving it a change?
First, what is tell a friend?
The whole idea behind this is very simple: your visitors can email their friends telling them to come and check what you got, no matter if your website is a dating one, or a social network, or a blog. Yes, tell a friend scripts can be applied to blogs as well.
Why is tell a friend important for you?
Simply because this way your website can go viral (self promoting). Imagine if someone lands on your website and uses the tell a friend script to get 10 people on your website. That’s 10 more free visitors for you. Now, what if those 10 emailed by the first visitor will email 10 friends each, this way? You’ll get 100 visitors. And it could go on and on and on.
Where do I get a tell a friend script from?
Hmm … I’ll let you do the research and testing. I installed few of them on some of my clients websites and they were pretty happy. However, recently, I ended up building a little free tool that places a tweetme button on every single post of yours. You can get it from here: tweet-me button for wordpress. If you don’t own a wordpress blog, but still want to have that button on, there is an equivalent for the other platforms, free as well and you can get it from here: tweet-me button for other platforms. Feel free to use both of them and let me know if you encounter any problems.
How do I install a tell a friend script once I got it?
Well… Most of them come with an install guide at least, or even free installation. If you need more info on how to integrate it into your blog once you got it, just reply to this post or contact me.
I won’t stay on this subject too much, I just mentioned it as it can bring you some extra traffic and extra cheese if used properly.
As I was promissing few days ago here, I’ll name few tools that you can use to fight agains WordPress Spam.
Here we go:
Akismet – a very popular plugin which comes by default with wordpress. To use it, you need to signup for a wordpress acount and get an API key for your website.
Defensio – A wordpress plugin that helps you filter your comments and also provides rss feed for both accepted and ‘spammed’ comments.
Simple CAPTCHA – Adds turing text to your comment area to eliminate automated comments
Challenge – Adds a challenge to your comments area, the regular stuff being additions and multiplications
Referrer Bouncer – You don’t need to do anything to use it. Just activate it.
Email Immunizer – Simply converts all your emails on your website to numeric references to prevent email colecting
WPBayes – Implements the spam filtering with the Naive Bayesian technique, which means it marks the comments as spam or not based on your previous decisions. To be honest, I didn’t use this one
Spam Karma 2 – This one assigns a karma score based on multiple factors like the age of the post, the email, if there’s a link inside, etc, etc.
WP Spam Hitman – It fights agains wordpress spam using a series of patterns. That’s all I know about it, please test it and let me know if it’s a good one.
Spam is a huge problem these days, and not only for email accounts. It’s done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to public services. Blogs can be spammed too. In fact, everything that requires posting and user action/comments can be spammed (forums, boards, blogs, guestbooks, wikis, etc). Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks can be a target for spammers. WordPress spam is done using the commenting feature of wordpress, therefore the term “comments spam”. By posting links, spammers help increasing the pagerank of a website and the traffic coming from refering websites as well.
A variety of anchors are used by spammers: images, regular link text and even whole paragraphs.
The smiley WordPress spam techinique
WordPress spam usually comes in this format: “nice post, thanks” and a link at the end of the post with a smiley ( :) ) as the anchor. Many wordpress owners won’t notice the comment has a link because it’s hidden by that smiley, as wordpress parses the smiley text into an image. The html looks like this:
"Nice post, thanks <a href="http://spamdomain.com"> : ) </a>
It’s quite easy to spot it. Everytime someone posts a comment on my blog I’m getting an email with a notice (I don’t remember if that’s default, but there’s an option for it in the settings menu, just look for it and you’ll find it). Since my email is powered by yahoo, I see the html because yahoo transforms it into regular text (for the same purposes, html is not allowed if not properly set) and I can see it’s spam.
Another clue would be the comments admin area of WordPress. Depending on your blogs css version and settings, links are underlined (I assume this is happening for most WordPress versions). Therefore, you can check for smileys in the comment before you approve it and see if they point to some external link.
How to block WordPress Spam
Fortunately, protection against wordpress spam is available. There are many ways to fight against it and, depending on your imagination, you can come up with more.
Disallowing multiple consecutive submissions – You won’t see too often users to reply to their own posts. Well … spammers will do it. So a possible solution would be to check if the current user IP is not the same with the last one and if a specific time period has passed. However, this can block multiple users behind the same proxy and using the same public IP. It’s up to you if you use this or not
Keyword blocking – this can be one of the most effective ways to block wordpress spam. You will eliminate spam simply by banning names of popular pharmaceuticals or casino games etc. for instance, “viagra”.
Nofollow – it’s added by default in the newer WordPress distributions. When a search engine finds the nofollow tag applied to a hyperlink, it breaks the process, so even if you link to some external URLs, they won’t be considered as links by the search engines. Google announced in 2005 that hyperlinks with rel=”nofollow” attribute would not influence the link’s target ranking in the search engines index. Yahoo and MSN also respect this tag.
Validation (CAPTCHA) – a method used to detect robots. Before a form is validated, a random text verification is required to the end-user.
Disallowing links in posts – simply, would cut any link posted in a comment by the user or simply transform it into regular text.
Redirects – instead of displaying the direct link to the actual target, it would display a link to a script on the same server that redirects to the correct URL.
These are few ways to protect your blog against WordPress Spam. In case I missed something, you can post a comment and tell me (make sure you don’t include any link, lol =) ). In a future post I’ll name few plugins that would help you fight against WordPress spam.
One cool thing you can do with WordPress these days is let your visitors choose the theme they want to see on your website (of course, if you have many of them installed).
What is a Theme Chooser For WordPress?
It’s an addon for WordPress that makes it possible for your visitors to change the layout they want to see with just a click of a mouse. Yep, that’s possible and very easy to implement. First, you need to have multiple themes installed on your WordPress blog. Where to find them? It’s simple: google will give you all the answers you need. Just do a search for “free wordpress theme” or other related terms, and you’ll find a dozen of free themes to add to your blog. The next step is to upload them. Once you have them on your computer, unzip and use your ftp client to upload them and last, activate them from your admin area.
The next step is to ‘install a WordPress theme chooser add-on‘. By default, WordPress offers you the possibility to upload as many themes as you want, but use only one at a time. However, you can change that. How? With an addon. You have two options for this task.
The first one is “theme preview“. This one will allow your visitors to choose from a list of themes and preview them in the browser. Although there is a single theme activated as the main one and all the visitors will see it when they land on your blog for the first time, they will be able to switch to another one very easy. You don’t even need to install the themes. To install this plugin, just download it from the wordpress plugins website, unzip, upload to your server and activate it from the “plugins” menu in the admin area, then access your blog with an URL in this format: www.yourblogdomainname.com/index.php?preview_theme=some_theme (of course, change “some_theme” with your theme name). That’s it, test it and let me know if it works … or not :)
The second option is “Theme switcher“. This plugin does the same as the first one. To install it, just upload it to your plugins folder and then activate it from your admin area then add your themes as they say on the instructions page (you can find it in the settings menu). They offer 2 formats: full list or dropdown.
To conclude, if you want to let your visitors view your blog the way they want, you have at least 2 possibilities to do that, so you can’t say it’s impossible, even if your tech skills keep you far away from beeing an expert in this area. The theme chooser for WordPress makes it possible.
The default permalink structure for wordpress is something like his: http://blogname.com/?p=123, where “123″ is the internal ID of the post. I totally disagree with that structure and I’m not the only one in this world who thinks meaningless and useless for SEO purposes. It doesn’t help in any ways your rankings or your placing in the SERPs. This is obvious because one of the most important rules for SEO is having the keywords in your URL/titles. Honestly, I don’t understand why they choose that as default, but that’s not so important.
The pretty structure is something like this: http://blogname.com/2008/10/27/some-post-name. Now, the big question is: which permalinks structure is the best one? I’ll let you decide that, but, for me, one thing is for sure: the post name has to be in the URL. WordPress comes with few options for the permalinks structure:
Day and name, which is actually ‘year, month, day and name’. This helps the reader too as it’s like searching through the blog archive. You have the year, the month, the day, so you can easily find the post.
Month and name, which is almost the same with the first option just that the day is missing
Category and post name, for instance http://blogname.com/some-category/some-post-name. This format is used on a lot of new blogs lately. Some say that the category name is relevant to the post name, and hence improve SEO.
Post name, meaning just blogname.com/some-post-name. This 4th one is used on a lot of blogs as well.
WordPress offers you the possibility to go even further with your imagination, using the structure tags in your permalinks to create a custom permalinks structure. According to ‘codex’, these are the structure tags you can use in your permalinks settings page:
%year% – The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004
%monthnum% – Month of the year, for example 05
%day% – Day of the month, for example 28
%hour% – Hour of the day, for example 15
%minute% – Minute of the hour, for example 43
%second% – Second of the minute, for example 33
%postname% - A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URI (see Using only %postname%)
%post_id% – The unique ID # of the post, for example 423
%category% – A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.
%author% – A sanitized version of the author name.
You can use ‘-’ or ‘/’ to separate them, eg: /%category%/%postname%-%post_id%/
This isn’t a SEO blog so I’ll let you decide which one is the best permalinks structure for your blog. I personally support having post name and id and nothing else. Why? It’s because your post name will contain your keywords. Therefore, if the URL is short, the keyword density will be high(the concept is called relative weight of keywords). I don’t encourage having only the post name in the title, and here’s why: if you do that, the rewrite rules may make it impossible to access pages such as your stylesheet or the /wp-admin folder. That’s why it’s best to include some numeric data in the post, for instance the post ID. This will prevent you from having 2 posts with the same URL (I know you wouldn’t name 2 posts the same, but you might have 2 posts with the same name in different categories, etc … you never know).
One thing I forgot to mention is that if you already made some posts and published them with the faulty structure, there is a plugin that will help you redirect the old URLs to new ones. Here’s the link.
Google Analytics is still the most used traffic analysis tool on the planet, although it seems a little bit old and slow for these times (it loads at a slow speed and shows the actual data few hours after any events occur on your website … ). WordPress & Google Analytics can work well together if you do it right.
Right now I’m using a plugin to add google analytics to my website, but there are few other ways to do that, depending on your imagination :).
Next, upload it to your “wp-content/plugins” folder and activate it from your plugins page in wp-admin. Once this plugin is active, you will have a new button in your settings sub-menu. Click on it and you’ll see this screen:
Here you can paste your google analytics code. Please note that this plugin works with the old version of GA as I marked with red in the screenshot (I hope in the near future we’ll have a version that will support the latest script from google). Hit update options and you’re done.
Another thing, if you’re logged in, this plugin won’t show the code in your page, so if you want to check it’s there, you need to logout first.
A second option would be to edit the theme files. This is good and bad at the same time. Good because you don’t have to get stuck with uploading plugins and so on, and it’s bad because it won’t work once you update your theme (or switch to another one). So it’s up to you if you use this method or not.
Here’s how to do this: first, you have to know what files from a WordPress theme are used always. These files are the header and the footer (the others might be used or not while user navigates on your website). Therefore, you may put the google analytics code inside one of those 2 files. I recommend editing the footer.php file because google instructions say that you have to place their code before the </body> tag. We’ll do so.
To edit your footer.php file, go to “Design” \ “Theme editor” and select “footer.php” from the right column. Once it’s loaded in the textarea, paste your code before the </body> tag, just like in the image below and hit the “Update file” button.
That’s it. You have installed Google Analytics on your WordPress Blog.
Few days ago I wrote a short tutorial on ‘how to make your title appear in your links’, but I guess I missed something from it because one friend of mine couldn’t make it.
The problem is that, by default, hosts don’t set folder permissions to allow writing for apache and WordPress needs to write the .htaccess file on your server in order for the permalinks to work. If you go to your permalinks settings and try to change their format and see the image below at the bottom of the page, this means you have a problem with your permissions.
Here’s how to deal with this.
If you have the ‘x’ theme on your cpanel admin area, read below. If you have ‘x3′ scroll down a little.
Once you’re logged into your cpanel, hit the ‘File Manager’ button:
Once it’s open, start browsing until you reach your blog root folder. To enter a folder, use the yellow icon near the folder name. If you click on the folder name you will get a list of options on the right upper corner.
Also, please note that your blog root folder might be on your cpanel account root folder or it might be in a subfolder. For instance, if your domain is called wordpress.org and you can reach your blog by typing that address, then you have to navigate to /public_html. If your blog is located at www.wordpress.org/somefolder/blog/, then you have to navigate to /public_html/somefolder/blog. If you encounter any problems with this step, please mail me or post a reply on this post.
Now you are in your blog root folder. You have to put there a .htaccess file. If you cannot see it in the listing, then it means you don’t have it and you have to create it. If you can see it, you only have to set writing permissions for it.
Here’s how to add the .htaccess file: click on “Create new file” and you’ll see a small box in the upper right corner of your browser. Put “.htaccess” inside and hit “Create”.
Now you have to set permissions for it. To do that, click on the file name in the listing
The contextual menu will appear in the upper right corner. There, click “Change permissions” and make sure the ‘user’ and ‘world’ writing permissions checkboxes are checked. When ready, hit “Change” and you’re good to go. Now you may go to your WordPress admin area and change the structure of your permalinks.
I’ll come back later with the screenshots for the ‘x3′ theme on cpanel as it’s a little different.
Ok … now you know what a blog is and you’ve been thinking of starting your own. You also heard of the term ‘wordpress’ but you don’t know exactly what is it all about. In just few words, wordpress is the most used blogging platform on the planet. It is a free open source platform that lets you create and publish your blog. You just install it on your website and you’re good to go.
There is really no difference between a blog and a regular website. It’s just that the blog means a specific type of website: a web log or a personal diary. That’s it.
WordPress will basically build your website. You can choose from various skins to make it personal. You can have widgets, banners and so on. You can organize your posts in categories, timeframes and the most recent ones appear by default on your home page. If you wish, you can change that setting to display a static page. WordPress also has a complete, well designed administration area where you can manage everything on your website: you can add new categories, create posts, add pictures, embed videos, music, add links and many, many more things, all in one single online administration area.
Installing it is really easy if you are familiar with uploading files through FTP to your website. If you don’t know what that is, then read this guide and you’ll find out. If it’s still too complicated, there are hosted versions also, which are free and don’t need to have a website. I recommend having your own name on the internet though …
I wrote a guide on how to install wordpress which you may download and read.
You can download it using the form in the upper right corner.
Writing a post is a very important feature for wordpress … actually I consider it the most important feature. I’ll make it really short now and explain in just few words ‘how you can make a post on your blog using wordpress’.
It’s very easy. Basically there are 3 main ways that you can use to post on your blog. I’ll start with the most used, which is the one in the administration area. I assume this post will be read only by people new with wordpress, if you already made a post you know how to do it, so what I’m doing now it’s kinda` useless. Ok, so, here we go: let’s say you installed your blog or someone else did it for you and you want to make a post. You must have the admin info (user and password) to do that, so if you don’t have them you must ask for them. Having those ready, you need to go to ‘yourblogurl.com/wp-login.php’. After you’re logged in, you will see your dashboard. That’s not important for now. You just need to click on the button named “Write” (you can find it in the upper left corner if you’re using newer versions). Once you click on that button, you’re automatically taken to the post writing area (using the same write button, you can go and write a static page or a link, but ‘post’ is the default option).
Now, you’re in the writing area. Enter the title, then start writing your post. Make sure your title is search engine optimized (eg. contains a keyword you want to target, etc). When you’re done, scoll down and you will see the “tags” area. There you must enter your tags(or keywords). That’s not a must, but it’s important for SEO purposes. If you scroll down even more, you’ll see the categories area where you can include your post in one or more categories. That’s about it. When you’re done, just hit “save” to save it or “publish” if you want other people to be able to see it. Please note that if you don’t publish it, it will still be saved, but it won’t be available for others.
That’s it, you wrote your first post using wordpress.
Earlier in this post I was saying about 3 ways to write a post on wordpress. The one above was the first one. The other two aren’t so much used, but they’re very useful. Another way to post to your wordpress blog is using the XML-RPC protocol. XML-RPC enables a background communication channel for to manage your blog. Don’t worry, it’s quite secure so you can use that too without being afraid of something.
It works like this. First, you have to enable it. You can do that by accessing the writing settings page (“Settings” > “Writing”). If you go to that page, you’ll see this:
To have XMLRPC enabled, just check that checkbox and hit “Save changes”.
If you have this setting enabled, you can use external posting services to post remote, schedule posts, post multiple articles at once, buy content from PLR websites, etc (a lot of tasks, really). I’ll come back with more info related to XML-RPC in a later post.
The third way is ‘email publishing’. To be honest, I didn’t use that, but I assume it logs in to your email account, it grabs your email messages and posts them on your blog (based on some user/password of course as you could get a lot of spam emails going online as posts) – I strongly recommend being carefully with this one :)
Hope it helps and hope you enjoyed this post. If you did, please share it with your friends.
