Few days ago we launched our first plugin to help wordpress users add google analytics to their blog to track their blog traffic.

It got over 200 downloads within the first 2 days, so we decided it should have its own website.

You can find it at www.googleanalyticsplugin.com.

The download page on this site will be also moved there soon.

Cheers

As I was saying in a earlier post, we released our plugin called “wordpress google analytics“. Its purpose is to help people integrate google analytics with wordpress in just few seconds.

The plugin is very easy to use, it has only few options, you just need to copy it to your website plugins folder, activate it and paste the GA code inside.

That’s it.

You can find here the wordpress google analytics plugin.

I thought it might be useful to list 7 of my best posts here so you don’t get lost while browsing my blog by jumping from a post to another.

Let’s start with the start:

1. How to install wordpress – Here I wrote a whole guide on how to install wordpress. To be honest, I didn’t like the famous “5 minutes installation guide” on wordpress.org so I wrote my own. The tutorial posted on this page explains how you can create a new blog from scratch using cpanel, ftp, etc. Of course, there are other ways, some of them even easier (maybe) like Fantastico. But your hosting company has to upgrade their software right after the release, so you depend on many factors. Anyway, it’s one of the many solutions, test it and rate it.
2. How To Display A Static Page On Your Home Page – by default, wordpress shows the latest 10 posts on your main page. This can be good or bad, depending on your preferences. The good news is that you can change this setting from the admin. To find out more about this, just click on the link in the title of this paragraph.
3. Top recommended WordPress Plugins – A small personal wordpress plugins collection. I think you must have them (or at least some of them) installed on your blog to make your life easier. The post includes: All in one SEO pack, google xml sitemaps, social bookmarks and few more. Check them out.
4. How to recover your admin password (if the password recovery feature doesn’t work) – you may think this will never happen. But it does … it did happen few times for me so I thought it would be great to let others know how I did it before they quit trying and get a new fresh wordpress installation losing all their data.
5. Top 10 WordPress anti spam plugins – Another collection of mine, this time to help me get rid of spammers. Yep, they attack blogs too (and attacked mine as well). The best seems to be akismet but there are few other options from which you can chose your destiny, so read the whole post before you make a decision (and maybe test them one by one).
6. How to integrate Google Analytics with your blog – A common problem for bloggers is to have their google analytics code installed on their blog so they can track traffic. This post explains exactly what you need to do to have it working.
   
7. The best permalinks structure – If you don’t know what permalinks are, then search this blog and you will find a post explaining that for sure. In the 7th post listed here I explained what’s the best way to have your URLs listed and why is that.
   

Enjoy reading,

Peter

Many people are saying that videoblogging is the next generation of posting products and ideas on the internet. When you watch a video, you don’t need to stay near your pc to read all the post, but instead you can do your daily work and simply listen to it, or just stay relaxed and watch the video if it contains useful images (not just a person speaking in front of you).

The bad part is that videoblogs require a lot more disk space on your server and better bandwidth (and a streaming software as well) so it’s not that easy to move to it.

People like to see what they’re going to buy. Therefore, if you look at this from a business perspective, you get a lot of benefits because puting a presentation video on the internet is like having video advertising for free where you can display your products and services. Some people would like to see the proof that they’re getting their money’s worth before spending them.

On the web things are pretty much static right now unlike in television in which all are moving. If you something that’s moving you’ll get attention for sure, and if the video is good enough, people might buy your product even if they don’t need it. If you’re just starting a business, you don’t need to invest too much, you can just start at home. All you need is a camera (I’d say a good one, not just a webcam) a microphone, a video software, some lights and you’re good to go.  You need to invest in a good camera because the better the resolution is, the better the output is and you want to present your goods in an optimum way…

Light is very important so make sure you illuminate the whole area when capturing images. The brighter the area, the crisper the images will be.

Another very important aspect is your voice. You need sounds, especially your voice during the video.  The software can be any as long as it does the job. You simply need to be able to cut bad angles, tune the video for its best quality and export it in a format for the web.

As for the downsides, I already named few of them: diskspace and bandwidth for the server. On the client side, I’d say it might slow down a little the visitor’s computer but not that much but they can experience high load times if they’re on dial up or any kind of slow connection. Their connection speed must allow them to view a video real time for the best experience, so be careful with that.

Well, that’s about it. I’ll let you decide if you’re going to use videoblogging or not. Oh.. and by the way, you can merge text blogging with video blogging, meaning you can integrate videos in your current blog. That’s good news :)

Take care,

Peter

Anyone who has writing abilities (or simply they just think they have it) has a blog on the internet these days. There are lots of blogging softwares that are easy to use and don’t require technical abilities so everybody can aquire a blog online.

For some of us, blogs are their projects for their daily living, as they talk about their life or bring tribute to friends and family. Furthermore, blogs assume a profound meaning to endorse a product, supply information on a topic, post tutorials, and the list could go on. Simply pick a subject and you can find a blog for it on the internet.

Blogs can be written by politicians, sports people, musicians or even kids. The fact that anyone can compose and regarding any subject matter under the sun, complaints about certain write-ups are an issue. A lot of blogs are mentioning names. So, please bare in mind that you have to be very careful and take a lot of responsibility when posting to a blog and avoid saying things that can become controversial.

Why having a blog?

1. Simply as a hobby or daily dairy – You can write about your daily activity, friends, what’s going on with your life or how you feel in a given moment.

2. Topic blogs – these blogs are focused on a single topics, like sports, politics, computer hardware, etc. They are frequently read just like magazines.

3. Marketing blogs – corporations are into blogs as well. A blog can be a very powerful instrument for business communication forming eagerness and anticipation regarding their products and services offered, or used as tool within the company, keeping employees well informed about company issues and news.

Build your own vs. others software

Maybe a lot of software developers will tell you that using ready made sofware packages is pointless. Well, they’re right somehow, because we all have our own needs and requirements and you cannot find a solution ready to meet all of our requirements. On the other hand, the existing sofwares were built after years of research and many of their features aren’t just random picked. Besides, building your own, even if you’re a developer can take a lot of time and resources to build one from scratch and since the blog is the place you need to write, you better focus more on writing posts rather than code.

Where to host my blog?

It’s simple. You have 2 choices: one would be to pick an existing platform that provides a hosted service (like blogger, typepad, live journal etc). You can have it setup really fast and in only few minutes you can start writing. A second option would be to have a self-hosted solution. Of course, there are few advantages and disadvantages. It is better because you don’t rely on anyone and you don’t risk to have your blog shut down for no reason (which can happen on hosted platforms) but at the same time, you’ll be needing some techie skills to be ready to start. The most used platform for self-hosted blogs is wordpress, but there are few more like Movable Type or Textpattern.

Few weeks ago I wrote a post on this subject. If you didn’t read it you can find it here.

In that post, I was talking about 2 different ways of integrating google analytics with your wordpress blog. One was by editing your theme files and the other one by using a plugin (actually in reversed order). Well, the problem is now that those guys that wrote the plugin are not giving it away anymore to the public, but integrated it in a bigger software package and are selling it for $295 (I’d say it’s a little too high for many people’s budget).

I noticed that few days ago when a reader of this blog told me I was pointing to an expensive software as being free so I had to tweak the post a little.

Anyway, the point is I’ll write my own plugin very soon (I plan to release it at the end of this week) so if you want to grab it when it’s up, just leave your email in the box you can see in the upper right corner and I’ll shoot you a message when it’s the time.

Take care