Archive for the 'WordPress' category

Once again, WordPress progressed notably to increase stability and its feature set.

Tonight, all my blogs are moving up to version 3.01.

Easy switch:

• Automatic update of all plugins,
• Automatic upgrade of WordPress,
• Automatic update of all plugins asking for it.

And, this was fast enough.

Do you want to make your web site compatible with the iPhone (or most of the intelligent mobile phones)? This is relatively easy. I found two good solutions for you:

1. For WordPress users, why not install and use WPtouch which will build a theme compatible with the small screens of these phones out of your web site?



2. For the others, there is DoYouFeed. It will take your RSS feed to present it right. Not hard if you have an RSS thread containing full posts (rather than summaries); But you already know that this is the right thing to do…

There are many ways to follow a web site. The easiest is to regularly come and visit and, of course, you know RSS threads. But we can use Twitter too: a message per post update on the site.

That is the way I started using Twitter for my own YLovePhoto.com web site (for the English version as well as the French one). It’s simple: Any time an article is published on the site, it sends a message/twitt to http://www.twitter.com/ylovephoto_en (for the English version) in order to immediately inform the followers. This is quite the same as an RSS thread, but ultra-quick.

The principle is simple, but the implementation could have been a bit more complicated if I did not stumble upon an easy solution under the guise of a WordPress plug-in: TweetMe. It does the job neatly. You only have to install it, give it the coordinates (name and password) of the Twitter where to publish the updates and it generates a message containing the post title and a short link to jump straight to it.

Easy!

It’s time to upgrade your WordPress blog or web site, to warm up the FTP link and to shiver with consequences. The first consequence will be a set of new features, some of them quite useful:

• A new code editor with syntax coloring and some documentation. It won’t visible to most users, but it is my preferred interface to format properly the HTML code of my posts
• A class generator to handle the BODY tag
• Faster
• Easier theme installation
• Special RSS thread generation function
• Improvements to the admin interface (slicker and more options)

On my own, I started to upgrade all of my web sites. It takes quite some time, but it’s not hard:

• Security backup
• Download and install
• Database upgrade (this is offered by the software itself)

Easy!

I tend to think that image galleries are difficult to make good. It’s so hard to ensure that Google and the search engines will like them.

Le blogueur masqué has a download of 10 scripts. Not bad. And the blog also uses a great WordPress template you’d want to check.

I recently did a real world experiment about Google News Sitemap that I think would be interesting to share. You may remember about Google Sitemaps. These are XML documents that you create to describe your web site to search engines. The main advantage is that Google or Yahoo! no longer need to be spidering all the links of your web site to find all of its pages: You point at each page individually, you ease their job. This is important for web sites with very obscure and/or deep links where some pages may be missed. If your web site is not too badly written, it’s interesting but not critical. It helps things done…

Google News Sitemap is an entirely different thing. It’s a way to submit news articles to Google News. Since this is becoming an excellent source of information for many users, it may be critical to meet the expectations of Google in order to collect a significant amount of highly targetted visits from this search engine.

And, this is relatively easy. You have to publish a sitemap which is following a stricter set of rules (compared to the more usual sitemaps). Two solutions: Either you build it manually (I would not recommend this), or you use one of the good plugins available.

I recently started using Google News Sitemap Generator by Chris Jinks and David Stansbury on several of my WordPress-based web sites. They rank from obscure to relatively well visited (up to several thousands visits per day). And I wondered what the effect would be.

Google Analytics shows visits increase on www.YLoveBigCats.com

I can easily recommend using Google News Sitemaps: A few days after starting publishing it, I got a very noticeable visit increase on all of these web sites. It was fully simultaneous (on the day Google starting using them less than a week after initial publication) and was producing +10% to +40% increase. I never had a single operation of that kind, done in so small amount of work leading to so many more visits.

Adding a sitemap to your web site is a good way to achieve several important goals for your web site’s visibility:

1. Make sure that some difficult to access pages are kept visible to search engines (SEO)
2. Ease publication of your pages to major search engines not relying on their crawling from one page to the next to find everything at once

I would not dare say that this is easy, but it can be quite powerful. And some search engines essentially need sitemaps (MSN Live, Ask.com come to mind).

Google Webmaster Tools: Sitemap

Unfortunately, if the sitemap is relatively easy to read (this is XML text), it is also quite easy to misunderstand or to fail when writing it (this is XML, remember?). So, I would suggest checking the following resources before diving into it. I tried to sort them in the order of your discovery of sitemaps and your activities to build them.

• A good introduction to Google XML Sitemaps from Wikipedia: It is recommended to start and discover the issues.
• Google’s Sitemaps guideline
• A sitemap validator is absolutely needed to ensure that your sitemaps are 100% understandable by the search engines.
• Google Webmaster Tools is the right place to publish your web site’s sitemap to Google. But it also contains useful analysis tools and will confirm the quality of the sitemap submission.

Interestingly, if you are on WordPress there are very good sitemap generator plugins (this is also true of most other blog software). I would recommend XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress 3.1.2 whose wealth of options make it very adaptable and which is very fast and clean.

I had some difficulty after moving my WordPress web sites to a new host. It was impossible to have the WordPress auto-update feature working: I could not get WordPress to udpate the plugins or itself. Apparently, it failed when trying to FTP the code.

Solution was easy enough, even though I had to find the exact place where it was trying: Give write access to the root directory of the web site.

I have been amazed at the number of tutorials and how-to guides that exist on the Internet. You could drown into them… So, I decided to try and sort it out for you. Here are Photo-related How-To Guides selected for the choice they offer.

Web design (general)

• Entheos Free Website Designing Tutorials & Resources
• About.com : “How to design a web site” (introductory level)
• “How to design a website” by Gary Simon
• Net tuts+ is a treasure trove of tutorials for your web site, and it is really quality-minded
• If you blog, you need Blog Tutorials
• If you want to blog for a niche, you need Niche Blogging tutorials

WordPress

• WordPressMax is WordPress guides for the geek impaired
• WordPress.com 2.7 How-to Guides
• WordPress Customization Guide for Newbies
• WordPress Guides, Blogging Tips And Strategies from HowToSpoter
• The top 50 WordPress tutorials according to Net Tuts+

DreamWeaver

• Entheos Dreamweaver tutorials
• Free Dreamweaver CS3 video tutorials
• CBTCafé has interesting Dreamweaver Tutorials
• PSD tuts+ is a treasure trove of tutorials for Adobe Photoshop, and it is really quality-minded

There are certainly others. Feel free to mention them in the comments; Quite often, the best ones are the unkown ones.

It’s always been a bit difficult to get a good ranking at the Yahoo! search engine. One of the most difficult tasks is to ensure that your web site is even considered. Most of the times, you will find people advising you to pay the fee that Yahoo! requests. Unfortunately, this often leads to money lost (at least for the web sites which are not obviously important to their target market: Microsoft does not need to pay to be considered).

Since Yahoo! will consider the visibility of your web site first, it is usually important to start getting some visibility where Yahoo! will see you easily. One of the best and most accessibe locations for this is the My.Yahoo page. You can easily setup your own personalized home page at my.yahoo.com. It’s only a matter of going there and use your own Yahoo identifier or to create one.

My.Yahoo.com

After that, your Yahoo! home page becomes available and then you have the possibility to use one interesting feature: Adding an RSS feed to your page.

Adding an RSS feed

If you add an RSS feed of your web site, it will be read regularly by Yahoo!’s robots in order to be displayed on your page. Of course, it is important to recognize that the search engine spider is not the same software and just doing this is not enough to ensure a good ranking (if only it has some impact). But it starts getting Yahoo! some knowledge of your site and it is widely considered as one of the easiest method to initiate your communication with this important search engine.

Free Bonus: It can also serve as a way to check the validity of your RSS feed: Does a standard RSS reader recognize your feed?