Creating tags is not a magical task, but tag creation is critical if you’re doing any content publishing or blogging.  Search engines, plugins, and even crawlers look for instances of the reuse of key terms and index your page/post accordingly.  Getting ‘tagged’ can be the difference of your site coming up in search results, and leaving you in the dust.  Using some generic logic can help you discern which words to latch on to, which words can help you to get closer to the top of the search results.

One method that is common is to search for the words and phrases that you want to use [inside your search engine of choice].  Place yourself amongst those who you want to be compared against.  If you want to be a fine dining result, then find like-minded sites, and study their keyword source – see if it’s pertinent to what you can, factually, offer as a word to ‘be known by’.

Anyone who wants to come up on a page of results needs to tag their site. If you’re using templates, use the meta keywords tags in the head, if you’re using a blogging structure, then take advantage of the seo/keywords/tag features that come default on almost any blog framework.  CMS (content management systems) have even incorporated  a tagging logic, allowing each page of the system to be able to be crawled, index, and make it a contender for a pertinent search query.

Example of the Meta Keywords tag:

<META NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”oranges, lemons, limes”>

Blogging systems like WordPress, have input boxes on the side, where you can enter keywords, one at a time, called “Post Tags”.  The use and common advice is to repeat features that may ‘best describe the point you want to get across’.  For this post we chose, “metatag”, “keyword”, “seo”, “example”, “how to”, “html” and “blog”.   Just by even stating what my keywords are will increase the ranking of the post (the frequency).

There are different guidelines for each crawler, but as a general rule, you can usually use 10 keywords safely, and up to 25 – each separated by a comma. With this in mind, place (what you feel are) the most critical keywords up in the first 10.  Likewise, make your site description short and sweet – usually one sentence.  If possible, include your region – even your address if possible.

references: Seomoz | webmarketingnow.com |

Need a “Pick-Me-Up?”

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Google Sitemap Generator
This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. If you have any intention of using the webmaster tools – you should get this plugin so you can keep your sitemaps current & prevent any hold ups from your site not being current with current tags/etc…

Digg-Digg
This is another program that gives your blog visitor’s the opportunity to make it accessible to share a post in a network that can potentially drive more traffic to your site. The integrate “Digg Button” , “Reddit Me Button” , “Dzone Button” and “Yahoo Buzz Button” Into WordPress Content. Setup screen provided to let user choose where user want to display Digg , Reddit , Dzone and Yahoo Buzz buttons.

Awesomepixgallery
Let’s face it… there isn’t a perfect gallery out there. If it looks good, it’s slow – if it’s ugly is fast and no one wants it anyway. APG is a good compromise between all the features out there. APG does have a superior intergration interface (after you upload pics you have quite a bit of control immediately to place/shape the image).

Email-Users
A plugin for wordpress which allows you to send an email to the registered blog users. Users can send personal emails to each other. Power users can email groups of users and even notify group of users of posts. The best part about this plugin is that you can specify mailing by group, so you only hit the publishers, subscribers/etc…

All in One SEO Pack

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

http://semperfiwebdesign.com/ I keep going back between this and the headspace2 plugin, both have their advantages. Even though I’m currently on headspace, this is still worth checking out.

Simpler-Contact-Page
Are you tired of all the “bells and whistles” of most WordPress contact forms? Are you exhausted from modifying CSS for hours just to get a contact plugin to display with your theme?
WP-Cache

WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database. WP-Cache allows to serve hundred of times more pages per second, and to reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to, supposedly, less than a millisecond.
Google Analytic Plugin

• Google Analyticator supports the following features:
• Standard Google Analytics tracking support
• Provides a widget that can be used to display visitor stat information on the front-end
• External link tracking of all links on the page, including links not managed by WordPress
• Download link tracking
• Support for hiding Administrator visits without effecting Google Analytics’ site overlay feature
• Support for any advanced tracking code Google provides
• Easily installable only requiring the user knows their UID
• Allows code to be placed in the footer to ensure faster load times
• Complete control over options; disable any feature if needed

Socialble Bookmarking Plugin
Social bookmarking sites allow your blog visitors to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find on your website. The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts – making each post as accessible as possible. I’m currently using Digg Digg, but it doesn’t hurt to stay familiar with updates to the social networking sites. Sometimes what one plugin misses – the other will catch.

*Edited on 01October 2010:

A must see plugin for WordPress:

After the Deadline, you will wonder how you’ve lived without it (seriously)… it’s not just a real-time spell checker, it checks language specific usage, grammer and language syntax (comparative dynamics).

Don’t believe me? Give it a try now!

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The very first thing that you should always do is keep your WordPress blog upgraded to the latest version. Some people say don’t do this because plugins won’t work, etc. But my advice is this: plugins are a dime a dozen. It is far more important that you have the most recent tweaks to WordPress. A lot of time, WordPress upgrades are to fix security vulnerabilities.

Another thing you should do is install this WordPress plugin: Secure WordPress. What this does is hide the WordPress version number in your blog’s header, installs a blank index.html file in your plugins directory so people can’t snoop, and various other tweaks to prevent hackers from getting in easily.

It goes without saying that your password is another part of the equation when it comes to security. Create a good password that’s at least a 6 in password strength, and don’t write it down anywhere-memorize it! It’s a good idea to change your passwords on a regular basis, as well.

A lot of people make money from their WordPress blogs. Offline you would have security cameras, excellent locks, etc, installed in your business location, wouldn’t you? So it makes sense that you need to take the same precautions online.

The great thing about security online is that a lot of the time you don’t need to spend very much money. There is enough freely-available information and lots and lots of good people who create open source software. A lot of the time the software is superb. Wouldn’t you say WordPress itself is superb? You bet!

So just make sure you are vigilant. Implement the above procedures quickly and then you can spend the rest of your time building your blog with quality content and making money from it without worrying about security issues.

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I have found an easy way to get around this (my site is hosted on an IIS server) and thought it would only be fair to share it with the world.

Before you begin you need to be able to choose a custom 404 error message as all URL requests are routed through this page as the file does not actually exist.

Download this file by right clicking and choosing “save target as” then filing it somewhere safe. Rename the file to a .php extension, put it in the root of your wordpress site and set your custom 404 error page to that file.

You can now set the permalink structure on your site e.g. “/%category%/%postname%/” – the custom file you have downloaded looks up the content and displays it!

If you need help implementing this contact me and I will do my best to help.

Original article.

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First I touched on the topic in my first impressions of WordPress 2.5. Then I whined a little about the tickets relating to them, and eventually I released my Google Maps Plugin that uses them. In the end, WordPress’s new shortcodes are really nice.

What are they?

First of all, a shortcode called “mycode” can look like any of these:
[mycode]
[mycode foo="bar" id="123" color="red" something="data"]
[mycode]Some Content[/mycode]
[mycode]<p><a href="http://example.com/">HTML Content</a></p>[/mycode]
[mycode]Content [another-shotcode] more content[/mycode]
[mycode foo="bar" id="123"]Some Content[/mycode]

As you can see, shortcodes allow a user to put a code into a post or page, and a plugin can then easily handle those codes. They can be nested, contain content (including HTML), attributes, etc.

How can I use them?

First of all, you need to add your shortcode:
add_shortcode('mycode', 'yourFunction');
Your function should take two arguments and return the content that you want to replace the shortcode with. The first argument will be an associative array of attributes (keys will be the attribute names, and the value will be the corresponding attribute value), and the second will be the content between the tags.

To handle default attributes, you can use shortcode_atts($defaultsArray, $attributesArray):

function yourFunction ($attr, $content) {
    $attr = shortcode_atts(array('foo' => 'bar', 'id' => '','color' => 'blue'), $attr);
    return '<h2>Attributes</h2><pre>' . print_r($attr, true) . '</pre><h2>content</h2>' . $content;
}

That’s it! That’s why they are so great, it takes next to nothing to handle! However, maybe you’re thinking about a relatively complex way to use these, and you want to take it to the next level.

The Next Level

Maybe you’re worried that you’re users won’t grasp the intricacies of your shortcodes, or will be plagued by typos. It’s a valid concern. For example, I don’t want to assume that my users will be able to create a Google map by flawlessly entering:
[googleMap width="100%" height="400" name="Aero Rental - Phoenix" directions_to="true" directions_from="true"]3432 W. Clarendon, 85017[/googleMap]

The solution is to create a way for your users to generate the shortcodes and have them sent to the editor, but where to start? First, you need to add a meta box to the writing/editing pages (these are the dropdown boxes below the editor, such as Tags, Categories, etc). To do this, create a function that you will use to display the form used to generate your shortcode. Then you need to hook into the admin_menu action, and use it to create the metaboxes.

View the complete solution to complex shortcodes in WordPress 2.5.

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Writing Posts

The first thing that stuck out to me (and that I had been waiting for) was the tag suggest feature. Simply start typing a tag, and an auto-suggest feature will give you a dropdown of existing tags to choose from. Before, it was too easy to end up with tags like “web development” and “webdevelopment” since you had to remember them (no one actually looks them up).

This brings me to the new way media is managed/added. I haven’t had the need to add videos or sounds to my site, so I’ll stick to the images. In the end, I like the new way it works. The Flash uploader is nice, and the addition of a medium option for each image (thumbnail, medium, full size) is a welcome change.

However, nice as it is, there is one thing about it that is REALLY annoying. Full size isn’t actually full size. It’s 500px wide! What’s the point of calling it “full size” and then not making it “full size!” If they want small, medium, and large, they should call it that (although I still think there should be a full size option). There is however a simple solution. You can set $content_width inside your theme’s functions.php file, and it will use that instead of 500 for the max width. I set mine to 1024:

$content_width = 1024;
Unfortunately, this isn’t a standard that was in place, so themes do not have this. It’s a hack, and it’s shouldn’t be needed.

The last thing I wanted to mention, which is very minor, but annoyed me, is that you can’t resize the editor window when in HTML mode. I almost always use HTML mode, and I thought they had removed the ability to resize the text area. as it turns out, you need to switch to the visual editor, resize it, and switch back.

Admin Layout

I don’t like static width layouts. Have dual screens that both run at 1680×1050, and I run my browser full-screen because that’s the way I like it. My laptop runs at 1920×1200, and I even run full-screen on that. Instead of having more room to work, I am rewarded with more than 40% of my screen wasted as blank white space. Having said this, I’ve seen far worse layouts, and it’s fairly intuitive. You can expect plenty of plugins to fix this. Right now (as I’m typing this), what I have done is use firebug to inspect the HTML, found div#wrap, and altered the style by removing max-width:980px;. This seems to work fine for me.

Plugin API

For me, this is the most exciting change. I love the new shortCodes. They are a little rough around the edges, but they are extremely handy. As a matter of fact, I just finished a Google Maps Plugin that uses the shortCodes. It generates a shortCode based on the settings a user chooses, and inserts it into the editor. It later handles those shortCodes by changing them out for a Google Map. Unfortunately it relies on the ticket referenced above, so I’ll release it once that gets figured out.

Summary

WordPress 2.5 is definitely a big step forward. It has some small inconsistencies, which I expect to be easily fixed in upcoming minor releases, but nothing that should keep you from upgrading. Go try it and tell me what you think.

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After all, I had the hosting in place, web hosts offer so much nowadays that you can’t use more than a small percent of it. Not to mention he had a chance to make some real money off his own hard work.

It sounded rather simple in my mind:

1. Buy domain
2. Setup said domain on my web host
3. Install WordPress on the new site
4. Configure settings
5. Themes, plug ins, etc
6. Export WordPress XML from WordPress.com blog
7. Import into the new setup

Looking back, that was a rather nice fantasy. If only it was that easy, I’d not be posting this right now.

What happened in summary was this:

1. Bought domain
2. Setup said domain on my web host
3. Installed WordPress on the new site
4. Configured settings
5. Themes, plug ins, etc
6. Exported WordPress XML from WordPress.com blog

And then the fun nightmare started.

Let’s see what all issues cropped up as I intended to simply Import the XML file into the fresh install of WordPress on my host, keeping in mind, this is an XML generated by WordPress.com in their own special layout and destined for import into their own WordPress product, the only difference being its not hosted by them.

• Opened Import page within new WordPress Dashboard, Manage–>Import–>WordPress (there are a nice selection of Import choices)
• My host seems to have configured the php.ini file on their end to max the upload file size to 2MB, whereas WordPress had generated a 4.7MB file for me to upload. Normally this file wouldn’t be so big, but the blog had many, many images that were uploaded to WordPress.com
• That started my search on how to change the limit in PHP. I ended up contacting my host and starting a thread on WordPress.org’s support forum. After much back and forth and a lot of reading on my own, I had worked out I needed a script to fetch the web hosts php.ini file, make changes to it via that script and write it to my /home/ directory. In my case I’d need to only do this once as all I wanted was a temporary increase in the upload limit, whereas those wanting that limit to remain would need to create a cron job running the script daily, so as to keep abreast of any changes made to the web hosts php.ini file pre-adding their own changes.
• With that done, I was finally able to upload the XML file into the new WordPress installation…yay! NOT.
• This is where it got really bad, because the file was so large, after uploading the file it would import all the posts, comments, pages, etc into the new setup, and this was done in real time displaying the details on the web page, coincidentally if a php process takes more than 30seconds, my web hosts php.ini file says that it should kill the process, ding…Houtson we have a problem!
• So I go back, remake my new php.ini file to make sure the time limit is raised to a decent 300seconds and re-do the upload/import process. By now I have 5% of the posts and pages in the blog and it’s looking a right mess. That’s ok really, because after about half a dozen tries, and the import process not stopping half-way it finally reached the end. Breathe.
• What WordPress decides to do is tag every image that was ever uploaded into the WordPress.com blog (Note: The images would have to be moved over manually…more work, eh) was tagged with an ID and placed in the Manage–>Upload section (pic). It also decides to link to the now non-existent image files all on its own (pic).
• Not content having to re-upload every image from the WordPress.com blog over to the new host, editing every page and post for image links, we now had a huge amount of ‘dead’ files under the Upload section, which as I said, didn’t exist. I also think this is why the exported XML file was so big to begin with.

After much debate, we’ve decided to either ask the kind people at WordPress.com to delete all the images off the original blog and thus save us the hassle of exporting it incorrectly.

Either that or follow a very good idea by muhtar on WordPress.org’s support forum, where his suggestion is simple, yet ingenious.
Run a php/db server on your home machine, easy and free.

1. Import the XML file into a fresh WordPress install (again on the home machine acting like a server, running Windows XP if you like), this is way better than to a hosted server, because at home its all instant and no lag to a far off server.
2. Export it to a common format, i.e. SQL and import it into your self-hosted WordPress install (the new domain).

OK, so it’s not easy…but way less error-prone and hair-pulling this way. I guess many have had no issues, the moral here is, don’t assume it’s gonna be so easy to move over.

Better yet, make a good choice to begin with

Originally posted at techzonline.net

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It has been my experience and that of several of my clients who use WordPress that this visual editor can really mess your post up.

It can screw up your perfectly valid code and there is a better way to view your posts prior to publishing.

First, you will want to disable the visual editor. Log into your WordPress admin area. Click on Users.

Next, click on Your Profile. Under Personal Options, make sure the box in front of “Use the visual editor when writing” is un-checked.

Now, when you write a post you will see an editor with just a minimum of tags to use. You can add any XHTML code manually.

After writing your post click “Save and Continue Editing“. Now you will see a “Preview” link to the right of the allowable tags.

That’s right, even though you haven’t clicked “Publish” yet, WordPress creates a draft of your post, but it won’t be saved completely until you actually click “Save“.

You can click “Save” when you want to save your draft permanently to work on it later, and then click “Publish” when you are satisfied with your post.

Happy posting!

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Yes… yes it does.

For me at least, I particularly have a negative reaction to seeing a blogger using Blogger/etc. What do I not like about them?

• Interface:
  for the Blogger: It’s a bit of a mess, I didn’t like the ‘new’ Blogger control panel (admin interface) and the old one was just terrible. There are just too many things to fiddle around with in this interface and it feels very unlike Google products, which is a big negative.
  for the Reader: Moving around in other blogging platforms isn’t as comfortable as it should be, I often am not able to follow the layouts that these other platforms adopt. It has much to do with the fact that WP has hit upon the best way to do it…and now nothing can compare…tsk!

• Commenting: My biggest issue with platforms other than for WP, commenting….why oh why is it so complicated and cumbersome to make a comment. Why on earth would you allow only a Blogger user to comment on your Blog? How narrow-minded an option is that? The captcha option, why aren’t we past that now! Some WP users have the easy question option like “2+4 = ?”I love commenting, it makes blogs so interactive, but non-WP blogs give me a headache to comment. This entire post is basically because of the horrid comment system in other blogging platforms.

• Looks: The common problem, they all tend to be MySpace’d blogs, too many shiny objects and glittering doo-dah’s. WP blogs look so darn professional, they are vivid, colorful, easy on the eyes.

These are my personal views, so enjoy whatever platform you use, even if it’s any of those horrible non-WP ones, but be sure to check out WordPress.org (self-hosted) & WordPress.com (freely hosted). After trying Blogger (and the new one) and having my own self-hosted WordPress blog, I can say I’m biased towards WP

Originally posted at techzonline.net

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Per a few user requests, the plugin is now completely localized using language files created with poEdit.

Current available language packs:

• English (default – built into plugin)
• French – Français
• German – Deutsch

If you’d like to help by contributing additional language translations, let me know. This would be a great help.

To find out more about this release, take a look at the following article.

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