On Wednesday, while I was cleaning up some WordPress 282 details I took a little bit of time and also upgraded the Random posts plugin and Scheduled posts plugin for WordPress.
These new upgrades allow me to make the most of a common admin interface for all my plugins as well as checking for news related to the plugins straight from the admin panel of the WordPress plugin.
I’ve just updated a minor update to the Popular Posts plugin for WordPress, the changes are mostly cosmetic to help work with WP 282 but there’s a few new features are well, most dramatic I’ve begun the process of converting all my plugins to a new shared administration file structure which should allow me to rapidly release updates
As with many of my other plugins for WordPress, the update to WordPress 2.8 through a monkey wrench in the formating of the plugin information page. This fix is just a reformatting the administration pages.
While there have been a lot of great fixes in the newest version of WordPress 2.8, the upgrade did some major damage to plugin formating. As a result I’ll be putting in an hour every day for the next couple weeks fixing the formating errors on a variety of plugins.
The No More Frames plugin for WordPress is an awesome plugin that helps websites avoid spam and content theft by breaking the frame when other websites attempt to load content into a frame based web browser.
This week was a pretty productive week for updating and editing my WordPress related content here on the website, I updated most of the plugins and a few of the themes to modernize them. In a few cases minor bug fixes but mostly just ensuring they are ready for the new WordPress 2.8 release.
You can always find links to all my themes in the theme directory, but here’s a run down of some of the changes:
Great Chefs Great Restaurant Web Theme
New! This is a completely new theme for my website and hopefully will be my first contribution to the WordPress directory. It’s designed for restaurant owners and chefs who are looking for a perfect theme for their restaurant but could easily be used for any variety of websites.
One Night in Paris
I recently updated the One Night in Paris theme and redid a significant amount of the front end including a redesign of the index.php file.
Community Friendly Theme
Minor changes to the code designed to make the theme more compatible with 2.8
Get Image from Post, a Free WordPress Plugin
New! This is a simple plugin which allows users to return an image from the related post.
Get Better Excerpt Plugin for WordPress
New! The Get Better Excerpt plugin works almost identical to the built in get_the_excerpt() and the_excerpt() functions except it returns whole words.
You can of course see all my plugins in my plugin directory on thisismyurl.com or by visiting the official WordPress website at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/profile/christopherross where I sincerely hope you’ll download and vote for my plugins.
For a bit of shameless self promotion today, I’d love to remind everybody that I’m available to develop custom WordPress themes and plugins for your organizations. Sponsoring a free theme giveaway is an easy way to dramatically increase links to your website and give back to the community.
The plugin allows you to select the number of links to show, control how they are shown and include a link to the third party websites (with or without nofollow links) as a thank you for linking to your articles.
I wrote the plugin for my new theme and use it here on thisismyurl as part of the new magazine style format.
Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.
With the new plugins now available for download, I’ve installed bbPress, the open source forum tool from WordPress to help answer questions about plugins and offer more streamed support than standard comments will allow.
The forums can be found online at http://forums.thisismyurl.com, I still have a lot of work to do on them but for now if you have any questions about my plugins please feel free to visit.
Chris
There are a few other Technorati Tags generators for WordPress out there but I found most of them overly complicated and fairly difficult to use, often requiring custom fields or complex processes. What this plugin does is takes the native tags from WordPress and generates a list of Technorati tags for your blog.
Usage
To use the Easy Technorati Tags for WordPress plugin, simply download and install onto your WordPress website. You can then add it to your theme by inserting the code <?php echo timu_technorati_tags() ;?> to your blog theme files or to a sidebar widget.
Output
The tag generates a comma separated list of tags complete with Technorati links. I choose to return it as a value rather than write it directly so that if you’d like to make changes or process the results, you can do it easy.
You can download the plugin directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Don’t forget to rate the plugin if you’ve enjoyed it.
How You Can Help
I love developing plugins for WordPress and do my best to always keep them free but of course it take a lot of time and effort to build these plugins so if you’d like to say thanks, the best way is to take a few moments and write about the plugin on your own website, include a link to my website from your posts or download and rate the plugin on the official plugin directory.
Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.
On many of my websites (which I almost always power with WordPress) I like to give people incentives to signup for my RSS feeds. This let’s me keep in touch with them and helps keep people connected to my website but it also offers me a great advantage in that I know that my audience is building.
One of the things that I do is offer content for those users in the form of a contest or promotion which only appears in my RSS feeds or often appears in my RSS feed days (or weeks) before it appears on the main site. This allow allows me to test content, get feedback from regulars etc. before it’s live.
Now there are a few plugins and tutorials on how to do this (Creating Posts That Appear Only In RSS) but I prefer to do it in a much easier way.
That’s it .. very simple really.
For example, on my archives.php page I simply add the code ‘exclude=X’ (where X is my category ID) from the results, which ensures that any article found exclusively in my RSS feed is not published anywhere else.
The only problem is … this method forces me to add and remove items from the list in a method similar to how we used to have to place sticky posts in WordPress.
What do you guys think? Is there an easier way for me to do it?
When I started thisismyurl.com I didn’t have a loyal base of visitors, in fact I barely had a trickle of traffic. For the first month, I only received a couple visitors each day but now, five months after launching my website I receive a few hundred unique visitors everyday. Still not huge numbers but it’s a start right?
I follow five simple rules that I believe helped me build a successful website, five rules that everybody can follow.
What I’ve learnt over the past five months is that people love free stuff. My post popular page by far is Fundraising Thermometer Plugin for Wordpress a free plugin for WordPress designed to help charities display their current fundraising level. My second most popular post is another WordPress plugin called WordPress Plugin to automatically update the copyright notice., a simple post to allow the display of copyright details on a post. Other popular posts on my blog have been:
As a website owner, the best way for you to increase your website traffic is to understand what people want and give it to them. This might sound like common sense logic but often times we as business owners (because my website really is a business) forget that serving content is about the reader, not the writer.
Happy five months of reading my website, I look forward to another great month writing.
a circular movement of water, counter to a main current, causing a small whirlpool.
By definition the web is a fluid medium, it ebbs and flows like a river. In fact, when I formed my first web development company I pondered a wide variety of names and first settled on Eddy as my company name. Eddy is both a persons name (informal for Edward) and also a circular movement of water, counter to a main current, causing a small whirlpool. Exactly what I wanted my company to do. To be honest, the company was ready to be launched, we had brochures designed, logos ready and then one night at dinner I was speaking to my wife about the launch when my five year old son asked “Do I know Eddy?”.
That stopped me dead in my tracks and made me take a step back. I stayed up late that night looking at the company and realized that I had been too close to the problem, I’d become blind to the obvious and my attention was so focussed on the details that I’d not looked at the larger picture. The old expression “you can’t see the forest for the trees” came to mind but in this case, it wasn’t just about some vague concept it was about money. Eddy died that night but Rodonic was born.
Rodonic web design services, Ottawa
Rodonic was a funny company name, it was intentionally designed to mean nothing. In fact, when Rodonic was launched there was no other uses of the word in the Google database. That was great for branding and helped ensure the company was a success.
Where with Eddy I focussed only on my desires for branding, Rodonic was all about others. The name, selected in part for its vagueness was a perfect software company name. We tested the name to ensure it could work with various titles such as Rodonic WordPress, Rodonic DRAW, etc. and it stacked up as well as Corel, Microsoft or Adobe (I was young and had big dreams). What it lacked however was a passionate team behind it and eventually the business closed.
Just like Eddy, I was so close to the old design that I’d forgotten to check if the visiting public could find things easily on the website and just like Rodonic sometimes you have to take a deep breath and accept that changes are needed. The top navigation of the old design had bugged me for some time but more importantly, I had to ask myself what the purpose of my website is (remember, that’s one of the ways to make a successful website). This is what I came up with:
Oddly, my website structure of the old site was too cluttered and confusing for most people to find my most popular WordPress plugins easily. So I took a bit of time and redesigned the layout. Some of the new features of the site are just to show off but others are designed to make using the website much easier to use.
Key posts are now highlighted
One of the big improvements to the website is for navigation and highlighting of critical posts. Throughout the website downloads are now automatically highlighted in the listings with icons to represent the categories they belong to. So far, I’ve highlighted:
To further assist users to find key content such as downloads, I’ve added an automated piece of text at the bottom of key articles, designed to help users find other related downloads much faster.
These new additions to each page are found on all pages that share a common category. For example, if a post is included in the Free downloads category, a paragraph and link to free downloads is included on the bottom of each post. The text is automatically applied from a central repository and increased the displayed count as I add downloads to the specific category.
By far the biggest addition to the website is a new, cleaner header. The new header is designed to show the key navigation and highlight sub navigation quickly.
I’ve used standard CSS layers to highlight the active page as well as to focus attention on mouseover states. The key advantage over previous designs is that I can now help surfers find downloads and blog posts much faster.
There’s a lot more to come over the next few weeks, and as always I would love to hear back from you so if you’re having a problem finding content on my site, confused by navigation or just want to say hi, I’d love to hear from you. – Chris
Everybody wants to be successful on the Internet right? Of course we do, nobody want’s to be sitting at home on prom night especially when there’s money involved so how do we do it? Well, here’s a list of 25 things you can do right now to increase your website traffic …
Use the SEO Checker I built to see what Google can see. This tool will also help you understand what visually impaired people in your community can see … they make up almost 10% of the population, so can you really afford to only appeal to 90% of the market?
xHTML is the language web pages should be built in. If you write your page in sloppy code, it’ll be harder for web browsers to display it properly so just like a Word document, you have to save it in the right format for your audience to read it.
thisismyurl.com is available in 20 languages, 40% of my traffic comes from outside the US and Canada and is viewed in a language other than English using a free online translation service, I know it’s flawed but it’s the best I can offer and people learn from my postings.
Keywords are the heart and soul of the Internet, they’re like fresh pasta in Italian cooking or eye shadow to drag queens … if you don’t understand the value and application of keywords, get off the Internet.
Almost half my traffic comes from Google, the other half? Came from other websites and referrals from great people that I taught something to and in turn taught me a lot.
Google want’s nothing more than to know about you, it’s the companies only goal in the universe, so help them to help you.
Speaking of helping, help people. When you see a website with an error or run into a problem on a site, let them know. If you can fix a glitch, tell them how … I’ve picked up countless readers and sources of inspiration by simply being supportive.
Back to Google for a second, they have a tool called Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s powerful and it’ll help you understand your audience.
Websites like LinkedIn and Facebook are powerful tools to help people. Helping people leads to trust, trust leads to prospects and prospects lead to clients.
Ask yourself, why do people come back to your boring old stale content? They don’t. If you ran a restaurant you’d have daily specials right? Well I think running a restaurant is easier than running a website, so make sure you have fresh content served daily.
There are a lot of web sites out there that are better than me:
Know who’s better than you and read them every day. The best way to learn is to know you need to learn. (btw, if you didn’t make the list don’t be sad I have hundreds of sites I read every week, these are just the first ones I though of)
There’s a lot of things that I write on my blog that are not as well researched as they could be, and when I’m corrected I love it. You’ll notice if you pan through my comments that I don’t remove the negative … in fact I relish them. If people take the time to point out your flaws, thank them and you’ll grow.
The best way to build traffic to your website? Make people want to come back. It’s harder to get new visitors than to keep your old ones.
Write about things that you know will be timely but don’t chase trends, it’s not relevant what others are writing about … only what your readers are reading about.
The past five months of blogging have taught me a lot about myself, I look back at some of the early pieces I wrote and know that I’ve changed. That’s part of what blogging is, it’s about growing not only as a business but also as a person and learning new things.
Your title tag is a critical piece of the organic marketing puzzle, if you don’t understand how or why to use it properly … excuse my french but vous êtes vissé.
I don’t care what type of business you are … if you can add an RSS feed to your web site do it! Let people know what you’re up to if they want to know. Same goes for Twitter, use it to exploit your interests.
I love giving things away for free. I have website templates, plugins and artwork people can download for free as well as over 600 pages of advice here on my website. Guess what? It cost me nothing and it put me on Alexa’s radar without having to do anything complicated.
There’s only one thing more important then you on your website, your audience. Take time to get to know them and help them.
Why do you own a website? You’d be surprised how many people have no idea why they want to run a website … it’s a little sad really.
Websites that are build on a content management system (I use WordPress) make it easier for people to update their websites. Websites that are updated more often get more traffic.
Matt Cutts is Google. Actually he’s not but he’s the face of Google, the man who talks to all of us and tells us what Google is thinking, explains what they’re up to and helps lowly web masters to interact better. His job … to help the public make the most of Google, so why don’t you read his blog?
Forums are a great place to generate free traffic to your blog. They help you build relationships with other bloggers, build respect in the community and get into endless conversations about topics that interest you.
One of the most overlooked methods for building traffic to your website is to simply comment on other peoples websites. Remember my point about helping others? Point out flaws or add to the conversation and you’ll be generating great traffic back to your website.
Finally … the most important point … look at your analytics often and improve your website to help your audience make the most of your content.
Running a WordPress website is one of the easiest ways to run a high quality, free web site content management engine but since there are millions of other websites running the same software, there are lots of bad guys out there who would like nothing more than to break into your website. So how do you stop them? In this article I’ll examine some processes your blog should implement to ensure it’s more secure than the ‘out of the box’ version of WordPress.
Step One of any WordPress security installation is to hide the contents of the plugin directory. By default, WordPress ships with the directory exposed (it can be found by typing http://[yourwebsite]/wp-content/plugins/) but this allows the bad guys to see what plugins you’re running and possibly take advantage of them. To solve this, simply upload an empty file named index.html or index.php into the base plugin directory. Another very easy way to do this for your entire WordPress site is to simply add Options -indexes to your .htaccess file. This tells your web server to never list directory contents.
Quick Note: .htaccess files are funny things, they don’t have a filename in the traditional sense so when you download them, all you download is the extension (filename.extension). This can make working with them tough. What I like to do is rename the file -.htaccess or something similar before downloading it, which allows Windows computers to properly interact with the file.
Step Two of the basic plan of attack is to limit access to your administration tool. An .htaccess file is a server level control file, meaning that it interacts with the web server before it interacts with a web browser, what we want to do is limit the IP addresses of computers to your wp-admin directory. Need a more basic explanation? Each computer on the internet has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address made up of four numbers ranging from 0 to 256 for example, 123.456.123.456 this number reflects your unique signature on the Internet. What we want to do is control which computers can access your account.
To do this, first we need to know what your IP address is. Luckily there’s a website for that at http://whatismyipaddress.com/ which will tell you what your current IP address is. After you have that, create a new file called .htaccess on your desktop and add the following code to it:
AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “Access Control”
AuthType Basic
order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from [paste your IP address here]
Once you upload that code to your wp-admin directory only computers from the IP address you specified will be able to access your WordPress admin directory. You can add multiple allow from lines to ensure you can access your site from work or home. If you ever need to access your admin panel from outside the IP range, simply comment (place a # symbol) before the deny from all line and you’ll be able to access it normally.
One final note here, since many people have dynamic IP addresses (they change whenever you reboot your internet connection) you might want to check with your Internet Service Provider to determine their IP range. For example, once you know that your IP address is always 142.167.66.[0- 255] you can use the allow from address of 142.167.66.* so anybody in your local subnet group (the last octal) can access your admin directory. A little less secure but still better than allowing the whole world to access it.
Just like the .htaccess file can be used to limit access from specific IP addresses it can also be used to force a server level username and password check before prompting you to input your WordPress username and password. You can do this fairly easily if you’re hosting with BlueHost or if you’re using another hosting company you can create a secure login using an .htaccess file and .htpasswd files or the AskApache Password Protect plugin. This process is a little more complex but a great extra layer of security.
By default the most powerful account on your WordPress website is called admin, since everybody in the world knows this they only need to guess your password but if you change the admin account name, you make guessing both your username and password infinitely harder. One other point here, since your password is case sensitive (A and a are different letters) you should always use long, complex passwords that mix uppercase and lowercase letters, at least one number and if possible a symbol such as an ampersand (&) or dollar sign. The more complex you make your password, the less chance somebody will guess it.
Some WordPress themes include a line such as <meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” /> in the header.php file. While this is great for WordPress it’s a security blunder since you’re announcing to the world which version of WordPress your using and if it’s not the most recent … which security holes your website is vulnerable to. Simply remove this line from your header and you’ll be more secure.
WordPress displaying security issues
The next step when it comes to security with regards to versions is to always upgrade to the most recent version promptly. I recommend upgrading your website (and your plugins) as quickly as possible after a new release has been updated. You’ll see from the graphic to the right that my hotel web design company Getaway Graphics hasn’t had some of it’s plugins or base code upgraded in weeks, this is a major security flaw which could lead to hackers gaining access to my files. Luckily, I did this to demonstrate the potential flaws and the site is actually perfectly safe.
Always upgrade your website and your plugins to the most recent version after you have done a backup of your site files and data. As a bit of shameless self promotion, let me pipe in here that for a fairly reasonable fee, I can do this for you on a monthly schedule or train you how to maintain and monitor your website.
I think we’re now all aware how powerful the .htaccess file is correct? Great, so let’s secure it simply by adding the following code to the very bottom of the file:
<Files wp-config.php>
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from All
</Files>
This simple piece of code makes it impossible for people to see all the security customizations you’ve done to your blog.
WordPress is, at it’s heart a community project. If there’s something wrong and you discover it, send a bug report immediately so the team can fix security holes. This will make the software more secure both for you and the rest of the WordPress users.
Beyond the common sense security steps outlined above, there are several plugins related to security which every WordPress website should be running:
While I was putting together this article, I had help from some other sources on the net including:
The steps I’ve outlined in the above article are all fairly straight forward and necessary to ensure a strong, safe WordPress blog but I appreciate some people simply lack the technical confidence to perform the steps effectively. I’m available as a WordPress consultant and can generally perform all the necessary upgrades to your WordPress website quickly, effectively and easily so why not give me a call?
May
2009
10 simple ways to say thanks to a blogger you enjoy reading
When I was working at Yorkville University I met a fellow IT manager named Glen who shared a theory about technology people. If I remember this correctly, his former manager once told him that IT people needed money, toys or interesting projects to keep them motivated. Most of the time people assumed it was money but to people in the technology field, money wasn’t the most important thing.
I feel that way about making money online here at thisismyurl.com, which is why I don’t believe asking for donations is the right way to go when it comes from receiving support from people who read my blog. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think most bloggers feel that way. So how can you say thanks to somebody for a blog post you’ve really enjoyed? Here’s a few ways that I can think of off the top of my head:
Support their sponsors
One of the easiest ways to say thanks for a job well done is to simply take a couple seconds and look at who’s buying ads on your favorite blogs and if there’s something being marketing which interests you, click through to check it out. The act of clicking an affiliate link doesn’t put money in your bloggers pocket but it does reinforce with the affiliate company that the blog has pushed traffic to their website and this act alone is valuable to both the blogger and the advertiser.
Support their commenters
One of my favorite ways to support a blog is to read their comments and click through to supportive, helpful commentators. Again, this doesn’t make the blog owner any money but what it does do is prove to the person who left the comment that the time they spent leaving a comment was well received. I get to learn a lot from a lot of great bloggers this way but it also helps encourage people to leave helpful comments which is the best way to support a blog.
Tweet about them
People blog for a number of reasons but regardless of why a blogger takes the time to write posts on the web, telling your followers on Twitter is a great way to help encourage them to continue writing great comments. You can also Digg them or list them on Stumble Upon if you’ve really enjoyed their content.
By ads on their website
A lot of bloggers sell ads on the side of their sites, why not help them out by promoting your own products and services?
Post a link to their story on another website
If you enjoy reading something on one blog and think it could help support and article on another, why not take a few minutes and share the link there? I often post supportive, helpful links in the comments of a blog to help the owner know about other great blogs. It helps both blogs become stronger, better and more co-operative!
Send money
If there’s no other way for you to say thanks, sending the blogger a couple dollars to help keep them infused with coffee is always nice.
Support their plugins and themes
If your favorite blogger writes plugins or themes for something like WordPress, take a few minutes and download it, comment on it or rate it on the public directories. A lot of bloggers get significant portions of their traffic directly from these directories and your supporting their plugins helps build visitors to their websites.
Leave comments
I can never stress enough how much a great comment encourages a blog owner. If you’ve taken the time to read a blog post and found it helpful, spending just a couple seconds to leave a thank you note and encourage the blogger to continue writing is a great way to say thanks. If you can add to the conversation, correct a glitch or improve the bloggers understanding of the subject matter … all the better!
Post a link to their blog
The holy grail of compliments to a blogger? Posting a link to their content! If you run a website of your own and find something a blogger has written to be helpful, post a link and tell your visitors why you liked what you read. It’s amazing how much this helps a blogger build a bigger audience and how easy it is to do.
Tags: Act, Advertiser, Affiliate Company, affiliate link, Asking For Donations, blog, blogger, blogs, Commentators, Couple Seconds, Fellow, few minutes, job, making money online, Marketing Advice, Marketing Advice, Met, People, Plugins, Technology Field, Top Of My Head, Toys, traffic, Traffic Website, Tweet
Posted in Blogging, Web Site Advice