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

The next few weeks we’ll be releasing a series of tutorials on how to design and code a WordPress Theme. If you missed our first tutorial, it’s located here.

We’ll cover topics like:

• how to design/draw a WordPress theme
• how to slice the final image and export it to html
• how to create the css stylesheet ready for use with WordPress
• how to ‘code’ the theme
• the wordpress header
• the wordpress footer
• how to create the index page
• how to create posts pages
• comments pages
• and so on

The tutorials may include videos(or pdfs) or not, it depends on you. If you feel you’re interested in this tutorial series, then get our RSS to be notified when a new post is made or bookmark this page. Here we’ll post the links to each topic and updates.

Also, feel free to ask any questions or make any suggestions.

I’ll be providing a demo premium wordpress theme with options in the admin area ( this will be for advanced users only though : )  ).

Keep in touch,

- Peter

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.

1. 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
2. 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”.
3. 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.
4. Validation (CAPTCHA) – a method used to detect robots. Before a form is validated, a random text verification is required to the end-user.
5. Disallowing links in posts – simply, would cut any link posted in a comment by the user or simply transform it into regular text.
6. 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.

- Peter

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.

Hope this helps,

- Peter

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.

Hope this helps,

Peter

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 :).

First, let’s talk a little about this plugin. You can download it for free right here: Download Google Analytics for WordPress

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.

- Peter

(You can find an update for this post here)

Here’s the post in case you want to read it:

How to Make Your Title Appear In Your Links

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.

Take care,

Peter

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.

Get it now and start blogging :P

Peter

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.

Thanks,

- Peter

And guess what? I went to that page where you enter your email or username and receive a link on your email.

Pretty easy, right?

…

NO!

Unfortunately, when you install wordpress, it generates a key for you that will be used to recover your password. Therefore, in the email, you get a link like:
domain.com/blog/wp-recover.php?key=somestringhere.

Here comes the problem: wp includes the “&” when generating these keys (and for some reason it seems to include it everytime I install a blog, lol), but the “&” char is used to separate the request variables sent by GET. That’s why, when you click on that link, you get a “wrong key” error, because if the key is 1234567&9, wordpress will get only 1234567, which is wrong (duuh).

Solution? I have one that I use. I just open phpmyadmin on my server, go to wordpress database in the wp_users table and change that key to something else (of course, “1234″ won’t do as you might get up one day with all your posts deleted ). After I’m finished with that, I do the process again and I’m able to set a new password.

… Pfew