It is my belief that for anyone who is passionate about writing and not so keen on developing websites, WordPress is the best content management system (bit of website software) to build and manage a website. WordPress is great because it is fully open source (so no cash needs to be handed over to use it) and there is a very active community which supports the software. Although some SEOs and webmasters believe that WordPress works “out of the box” perfectly well, I do like to use a few plugins to give it a boost and enhance the CMS. Here is a list of the main plugins that I use. I do not use them all on all websites, but do use them all somewhere or other. Some are handy to have, some are vital, some simply save time and others can improve your website in ways you just could not imagine (OK, I am getting over excited, they are just all OK really). Here are my recommended plugins for enhancing and WordPress blog. Broken Link Checker http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/broken-link-checker/ – Checks for broken links, also for redirects (and fixes them, careful of aff links!). Broken link checker really is an amazing [...]

When I first saw mention of Jetpack for WordPress I thought that it was a game plugin (why aren’t there more?) for WordPress. But no, it is a plugin that brings some features from WordPress.com onto your site. I installed it only for the nice social buttons. They just seemed a be more functional and better laid out that other plugins, they look very neat. Also with Jetpack is a URL shortener and WordPress Stats too. The stats were not required, although at times useful. I had been running Jetpack for about a week and then yesterday and today I started running some new page speed tests on www.webpagetest.org as I had been having some problems with CSS caching. I think that I have fixed those problems but in the last tests had page timed out errors which were due to something called edge.quantserve.com/quant.js  loading slow (or not loading at all). This had me scratching my head (really must shower of this blog). The Schroedinger’s cat of on-page SEO After a bit of Googling I found this thread wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wordpresscom-stats-httpedgequantservecomquantjs-after-uninstall which indicated that the problem was caused by the WordPress Stats program. The obvious solution was to disable WordPress Stats and keep all the good stuff. But [...]

Another video of Google’s search expert Matt Cutts. In this one he provides tips to “make a great site” but speaks mostly about simple SEO. Once again he supports WordPress, and basically says that if you use WordPress you do not need to do anything else, as it is great for SEO. At the end he actually says that you are better off using a simple WordPress layout and having a blog than getting a website custom designed at great cost, especially when starting out. Many people place a WordPress blog in a subdirectory (often as /blog ) which is really rarely the best idea. If you have an eCommerce site then this may be the best solution so that the homepage remains the store front, but for most business websites it is better for the whole site to be WordPress (just like Webologist is). Homepages can be customized in WordPress now, so design is no longer an issue. This video is from 2007 and the ValleyWag website that he mentions is no longer around, looks like it got taken over by Gawker. But this is not important, he just mentioned that as an example of how to drum up [...]

Last night I received a Google Alert for one of my websites. For those that do not know what this means, Google Alerts is a service that Google provide for free which will send you an email whenever a word or phrase appears to them for the first time. Google Alerts is handy for research and to keep an eye on your digital media products, including yourself. Set up a Google Alert for your name and you will get an email whenever someone mentions you online. Set one up for your website and you get notified when your URL appears on someone else’s website, this could indicate a link (good) or clumsy content theft (bad). Or it could be a warning that some reputation management is required. So, what happened to me? Last night I received a Google Alert for my main website brand, e.g. Webologist (but not Webologist). So I merrily opened to link to see what people were saying about my brand. That is when I caught the spyware.iemonster virus, the zlob.trojan and rogue.securitytool. The last one seemed to do the most damage, closing down my Anti-virus software and changing a bunch of settings on the computer, and [...]

WordPress Trademark Changes Hands Sep 10, 2010 The WordPress community took a big step forward today when Matt announced that Automattic has donated the WordPress trademark to the non-profit WordPress Foundation. Moving forward, the Foundation will be responsible for safeguarding the trademarked name and logo from misuse toward the end of protecting WordPress and preventing confusion among people trying to figure out if a resource is “official” or not. Good news for WordPress and Matt Mullenweg. Matt is now one of the top 30 people on the Internet. Pretty impressive for someone that built an open source platform. WordPresss 3 is Here – A Message from Matt Mullenweg Jun 17, 2010 WordPress 3.0 is a highly anticipated upgrade for the popular blogging and content management system. WordPress merges the WPMU (WordPress multi user) system with the standard WordPress, so that any WordPress site can now offer multiple blogs. An exciting upgrade indeed. You’ve probably already seen the notice in your dashboards, so I’ll keep this one short and sweet: http://wordpress.org/development/2010/06/thelonious/ 3.0 is faster, stabler, and more secure, so you can focus on what matters (your audience) and let the rest fade to the background. Custom post types, MU merge, menu [...]

Do any other WordPress users think that the All in One SEO Pack is updated too often? It is an excellent plugin that enhances the CMS really well, but I seem to be forever installing a new version. Why? Maybe I should ask the chaps over at Semper Fi Web Design. Suggested Reading:The Best Magazine Theme For WordPressWordPress Jetpack On Hosted Domain – FailRuby Gems, Textiles, Redclothes and other new toysAdding Author Authority (rel=”author”) To WordPress – Plugin Required?Joomla Installation Using Putty / SSh to Linux Server

Just found this fantastic tutorial on adding widget areas to any WordPress theme. I successfully set up a new widget area below the content of my posts on another blog I write for in about 5 minutes. Addwidget Area to Theme: Step 1. In the index.php file in your theme directory, add the following code to an area where you would like a new widget area. Directly below the content is a good idea if you wish to place adverts, or further reading there. Note we have had to wrap this line of code so it displays. Careful of too many spaces. <div> <?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('Post Widget') ) : ?> <?php endif; ?> </div> Step 2. Then in the functions.php file add the following line, directly below the current widget code: register_sidebar(array('name'=>'Post Widget',)); Step 3. Finally, to style the wdiget, add this code to the style.css file: .widget_post { background: #FFFFFF; margin: 0px; padding: 10px; width: 600px; } It really is as simple as that. When you next go to the widgets area in your WordPress control panel, you will see an option for “Post Widget”. There is a more detailed explanation on StudioGrasshopper’s website. Source: Studiograsshopper.ch [...]

Yesterday I managed to successfully transfer a Google Blogger generated blog over to a WordPress platform. The blog (actually 3 blogs) are hosted on my own domain (like this) and not on Blogspot / WordPress.com. But you can transfer from Blogger blogspot to WordPress.com if you desire too. With WordPress it was actually very easy to do a transfer of all blog posts, comments and labels over to WordPress, as there is a built in import script that allows imports from several blog platforms as well as RSS feeds, Technorati tags and other social bookmarking sites. The only problem that I had was that I wanted to keep my Blogger generated URLs in tact, so that all links and search engine listings would continue to work OK. This was actually very easily done, with a small piece of code to modify the import file. So, how is it done? Firstly, I downloaded my entire Blogger blog using FTP to my pc, so that if anything went wrong I had a back up at hand. I then downloaded the latest version of WordPress (2.5.1) and uploaded it into my blog directory. I set up a new database in phpmyadmin, and then [...]