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WordPress Plugins that stand the Test of Time November 18, 2008

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I’ve been engaging in a personal project recently to get all my OLD wordpress sites upgraded to 2.6 and on the latest versions of plugins and such. This has helped me notice that there are things I’d like to do with the software that it doesn’t do by itself, either because of 3rd party services or for SEO reasons.

One thing: I wouldn’t create a new WP site without the amazing K2 theme. Just get it. You’ll thank me later. No price tag, just CSS and some awesome AJAX, plus plugin integration and an alternate sidebar manager. The theme that kicks WordPress into high gear.

Here are 10 plugins I probably wouldn’t deploy wordpress without:

  1. FeedBurner FeedSmith - If you use FB, this is a no-brainer
  2. Flare Smith - Eric Marden’s excellent FeedBurner stats and FeedFlare plugin. No more copy and pasting javascript
  3. K2 Hook Up - Every site has those couple of places where you need to paste some javascript for tracking or ads, and K2 provides hooks into all of them. This plugin exposes those to blog admins. Another Xentek creation.
  4. Related Posts - I don’t think this is in active development anymore. I have no complaints, though. A great reason to have K2 and K2 Hook Up.
  5. Landing Sites - Let’s get real. Not all visitors hit your site from the home page. When people reach your site via a search engine, this plugin helps you display some helpful pointers to what they might have ACTUALLY been looking for. Useful for very old blog posts. Another great reason for K2 Hook Up.
  6. All in One SEO - This is a very recent addition to my list, but something that is sorely needed if you pay attention to your Google Webmaster reports, and you’re concerned about how your blog shows up in SERPs (when it shows up in search engines). This plugin is actually pretty brainless, but powerful at the same time.
  7. Google XML Sitemap - Again with this one, as soon as I started paying attention to Webmaster Tools, the sitemap stuff was jumping out at me, and I felt the need to address it.
  8. Secure Accessible Contact Form - Websites don’t exist without contact forms. That’s a statement. However, spam and usability can get in the way. This plugin leaves nothing to the imagination, and apparently it’s blocked 17 spam on this blog. Go team.
  9. FeedWordPress - For planet-style sites or other syndicated sites, this plugin has tons of options but works pretty well out of the box. Integrates with your built-in Blogroll and Categories, too. As I remember, installation is gummy, but this plugin is still an essential part of my toolkit.
  10. Akismet - I would have stopped blogging a long time ago if I had to put up with the thousands of spam comments I get on a weekly basis. Wordpress must be an easy target, because the spam rolls in, and it never stops. Ever. Install this plugin no matter what. Requires an API Key from Wordpress.com

This is not an exhaustive list of every plugin I use or endorse, just 10 you should know about, or some that are too essential to pass by.

Honorable mention goes to the built-in WP Widgets - without those babies, life would be hard. K2’s sidebar manager actually approaches a new level of sophistication with widgets, and I often wish I were running K2 on this site. Either way, you’re getting the chance to display lots of dynamic stuff that lives near the content, without needing to be the content itself.

Lately I’m a Drupal guy, but I still think WordPress has its place in my day-to-day, especially for a blog like this, or when you miss the days of 5-minute setups.

These plugins all (except FeedWordPress) get first priority on every WordPress site I configure for myself, clients or friends. I have donated to several of these developers’ tip jars, and I hope that by writing this post, I can do something just as good as loose change in the virtual hat.

BarCampOrlando Downtown April 5th and 6th, 10AM - 6PM April 1, 2008

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BarCamp Orlando is a weekend for all types of creative folks to come together and share with each other. The event is dubbed an “unconference”, a format which derives power from the people instead of the event organizers or the presenters. Everyone has an equal opportunity to get on stage and speak, teach or lead a discussion, playing off of the idea that at any given conference, the people in the audience have more knowledge collectively than the presenter(s) on stage.

This second installment of BarCamp will be held over 2 days, Saturday and Sunday, April 5th and 6th, in downtown Orlando at the Wall Street complex, from 10AM - 6PM each day. Registration is free, and a registration promises a shirt and lunch on the sponsors of BarCamp, businesses who are passionate about the technology and media communities of Central Florida.

Saturday is the designated “Dev Day”, playing host to everything from web programming to robot building and video game development and everything in between. iPhone hackers, guys with soldering irons, the latest technologies, and plenty that haven’t been realized yet. Every 30 minutes, both venues will have a different talk going on, so if you’re feeling lost in the jargon, apply the “rule of 2 feet” and check out what’s happening in the other room!

Sunday is dubbed “Media Day”, and is the place for storytellers, journalists, writers, designers, filmmakers, musicians, 2D and 3D artists, podcasters, bloggers and social networkers to show off their work, share their tricks or talk about the state of the industry. From 12 to 1 we will be talking about the “Past, Present and Future of Media in Central Florida”, hoping to give our community a sense of our story, and where we’re headed.

Registration is free, and the event runs from 10AM - 6PM both days with a lunch break at 1PM. The event will be housed in Slingapour’s and One-Eyed-Jack’s, with Wall St Cantina acting as our “hallway”. There will be projectors and microphones, chairs and a space to speak. All you have to do is write your name on the whiteboard and you get 20-25 minutes to share your passions with a group of energetic, engaged geeks and creatives. I would not use the words “captive audience” to describe the BarCamp crowd, because they all want to get involved.

Visit www.barcamporlando.org today and register for Dev Day, Media Day or both days. Wall Street Plaza is at 18 Wall Street Plaza, Orlando, FL 32801 - barcamporlando.org/where has a map to the venue and information about parking.

Use Yahoo Site Explorer to get Top 10 Pages for your Site November 21, 2007

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A while back I installed an excellent plugin for Firefox called SearchStatus. In addition to showing me the pagerank and compete score of any page I visit (I think it does Alexa, but I have a different plugin for that), it also gives you this handy right-click menu with lots of neat stuff in it. Most useful was a list of all the pages that Google, MSN and Yahoo! index on your site. For this blog, the list is interesting, but I’m not trying to make a living being me, so I checked out OrlandoScene.TV, my up-and-coming video podcast.

From Google, most of the top pages were wordpress archive lists - not very interesting, but it does prove that older pages get more juice in Google. Here’s Google’s top 10 OSTV category pages:

  1. coffee
  2. podcasts
  3. relayforlife
  4. maitland
  5. austinscoffee
  6. pandos
  7. michelle
  8. theatre
  9. rogers
  10. loch haven park

Here’s Yahoo’s top 10 pages for OSTV:

  1. Orlando Scene TV
  2. OSTV on B & S Daily Market at Orlando Scene TV
  3. OSTV 03: Taste Restaurant at Orlando Scene TV
  4. OSTV Still Getting Started at Orlando Scene TV
  5. OSTV 01: Relay For Life Concert at Orlando Scene TV
  6. OSTV 02: Enzian FILMSLAM at Orlando Scene TV
  7. 2007 Orlando Fringe Festival at Orlando Scene TV
  8. Orlando Video Blog Kicks it Off at Orlando Scene TV
  9. orlandoscene.tv/feed
  10. 2007 archive at Orlando Scene TV

The MSN top 15 pages for OSTV (MSN was the only one with an RSS feed) were interesting as well. Kind of neat was every so often they would publish a date that specified the last time they indexed it (I think).

  1. Orlando Scene TV
  2. orlandoscene.tv
  3. orlandoscene.tv/feed
  4. orlandoscene.tv/comments/feed
  5. OSTV on B & S Daily Market …
  6. OSTV 01: Relay For Life …
  7. OSTV 03: Taste Restaurant …
  8. OSTV 02: Enzian FILMSLAM …
  9. Orlando Video Blog Kicks …
  10. Join us at E.L.L.A Music …
  11. Subscribe at Orlando …

I didn’t make those linkable because those are mostly in the yahoo list as well. It’s interesting to see where MSN puts pages vs. Yahoo! I don’t know how their algorithms differ, but it’s worth looking in to…? Also, MSN repeated the first result… why?

I think Google’s results are the least useful here (until I start optimizing and theming my category pages). For now, I have a neat wordpress plugin called Landing Pages that helps out by showing the user something like this:

orlando video coffee

You came here from www.google.com searching for orlando video coffee. These posts might be of interest:

* OSTV on B & S Daily Market
* Join us at E.L.L.A Music Festival
* OSTV 01: Relay For Life Concert

But I think each category - like coffee, theatre, etc. should have a graphic and some related posts like this. That’s also a great place to do some contextual advertising. I think I might throw adsense on my archive pages - especially since google thinks they’re so important.

Temporary Insanity February 7, 2007

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Don’t ask me why, but I just wrote a song. I don’t write songs, but this one just kind of got stuck in my head and I didn’t know who to share it with, so i wrote it down - with chords and everything.

It’s about evil Starbuck’s Coffee and (partly) how it makes me run to the toilet.

I used my little Casio keyboard from like 20 years ago — if that doesn’t date me, what will? It still has all the stickers on the white keys with the little # and b in the corners. I tried to write a song on it last week and I realised it’s hard to write a song when you HAVE to… when that happens you should go to the PodSafe Music Network and grab a Swedish pop-punk band instead.

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There are also brand new episodes of Shrink your Ecological Footprint and You can’t spell crapface without PFA from this weekend posted. Those are two podcast talkshows I record with my friends, the first over Skype to Arizona, and the second locally in my living room with a sweet echo. (really)

On Sunday, I am getting jazzed up about having our #3 installment of Florida Creatives Happy Hour at the Copper Rocket starting after 3PM. Immediately before that is the Enzian’s #2 installment of the Indie Film Slam revival.

Tomorrow John Rife and I are getting together at Dandelion to talk about refreshing his videoblog a bit in anticipation of a major road trip (he will be phoning home every few days with a new video). We are planning on doing some Google Maps mashup stuff as well as the standard blogging/feeds thing. I am hoping to be able to get some microformats in there as well. I would like for John to be discoverable by people outside of Orlando who might happen by. I know YouTube has (some imitation of) geo-identification, but I don’t think it gets included in the search results. Tagging and research will help, and reciprocal links (as many as we can get). I hope John meets some bloggers along the way, and makes plenty of MySpace friends.

This will be a fun 3 months of online marketing blitz, especially considering that the location (not virtually, but physically) and focus of the content will be changing almost every day.

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Last but not least, the very talented Damien McKenna has been acting as my second set of hands this week, doing some work on a Drupal 5 site for a client. He just got this very spiffy and finally bug-free system going where you add an image (or several images) to your node (this one’s for a single project in a portfolio). Once you save the form, a module called imagecache auto-generates thumbnails for you. Last but not least, these images are munged into links to one of those spiffy AJAX image boxes, like lightbox or in this case thickbox.

The payoff? Instant photo gallery. Pats on the back for Damien.

If you’re still reading, thanks for enduring. I haven’t written many posts like this since my LiveJournal days. The last two I’ve done have been videos.

Passing 100 Subscribers January 12, 2007

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The Student of the Game, our pro football podcast, passed 100 subscibers today.

This may be a small milestone for most bloggers or podasters, but you have to remember, we live in Orlando, people! Nobody in this town uses RSS, subscribes to podcasts or otherwise does anything “Web 2.0″ worthy!

Notice how 40% of these subscribers are via Feedburner Email, and 5 (total) are from iTunes. Also notice that stupid Google only counts as a single hit, so we have no way of knowing if we actually passed 100 a week ago! Damn it to hell!

Still, props to Feedburner for making a kickass stats package that lets me see this kind of stuff.

How many subscribers do you have, and how many of them are using technology that was invented in the 1970’s (email)?

Florida Creatives Happy Hour - Dec 18th December 7, 2006

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Florida Creatives » Blog Archive » Florida Creatives Happy Hour - Dec 18th
The first post here on Florida Creatives will be to announce our first networking event! One of the goals of this podcast is to serve the community of entrepreneurs, filmmakers, thespians, bloggers and podcasters, artists, designers, architects - all are welcome at this event. The goal is to start a discussion amongst these groups and stir things up in Florida.

You can get directions and more details for this event over at Upcoming.org.

Monday, Dec 18th
Dexter’s Thornton Park
5:30PM - 9:00PM

How I got my mod_rewrite to play nice with Apache 2 and Drupal September 17, 2006

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I have been installing Drupal sites like crazy recently, and one thing that really helps a Drupal site thrive is the Clean URLs feature. Clean URLs and smart permalinks and all sorts of things require Apache’s wonderful mod_rewrite to be active. This isn’t very hard, but it is if you don’t know what you’re doing.

This HowTo assumes that you have control over your entire server. If you don’t, you need to contact your hosting support, or whichever geeky cousin you are getting your hosting from.

Here are three easy steps to enable search-engine-friendly URLs:

  1. Enable mod_rewrite in your /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
    Notice: Screwing up this file will break your Apache server, so before you proceed, make sure you make a copy of your .conf file:
    ? cp httpd.conf httpd.conf.bak

    Then check for this line near the top of your file. It will be just after some comments referring to DSO, and a whole bunch of LoadModule statements.
    #
    # Dynamic Shared Object (DSO) Support
    #
    ...
    LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
  2. Allow .htaccess files to override universal rules.
    This is the meat of this tutorial. Local directories need to be able to override the defaults and add their own RewriteRules. You put this in your file where you are setting up options for your root web directory. For my specific configuration, I had to put it in the first (/) one and not the next (/var/www/html) one. I tried them both.
    #
    # Each directory to which Apache has access can be configured with respect
    # to which services and features are allowed and/or disabled in that
    # directory (and its subdirectories).
    #
    # First, we configure the "default" to be a very restrictive set of
    # features.
    #
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride All
  3. Don’t forget to restart Apache!
    You need to restart Apache so it will read in the new logs and restart all the processes. Every single change you make to the .conf file means you need to restart Apache. The changes won’t apply otherwise. On my system, this was a simple matter of entering the following command:
    ? apachectl -k graceful
     This is the “nice” way of shutting down and restarting Apache.
  4. Set your RewriteBase directory in your .htaccess file (maybe)
    If you’re running multiple installs of Drupal on the same domain like me, you may also need to make a change in your .htaccess file in your base Drupal directory.If your install base is www.example.com/portal, you will need to find this line:
    #RewriteBase /drupal
     …and change it so it reads:
    RewriteBase /portal

That’s it! Once you’ve done this, navigate to your admin page, like http://www.example.com/admin/settings/clean-urls and check the radio button for “Enabled”. If you did something wrong, the page won’t load, and you’ll know something went wrong.

Hope this helps! You can get more detailed information at drupal>>node/84496

The steps in this HowTo should also help if you are installing another piece of web software like Menalto Gallery 2, Wordpress, or Mambo/Joomla.

google turbocompliance - Google Search August 30, 2006

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Who Googles for Google? My new friend from New York, that’s who!

google turbocompliance - Google Search

This guy thought it would be good to type google in to google, like the search engine won’t work without it…

Does that work for other things?

google cervosystems - Google Search

google ryanprice - Google Search

google zanzibar lounge - Google Search

This is some good SEO - maybe I should keep the secret to myself. Thanks, Christopher for revealing this strategy to me.

AdSense Makes Me Laugh June 29, 2006

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I decided to put some ads on Aleshia’s Site since she is starting to write more often now, and it appears she has readers and commenters as well!

Secret Teachings, Spartan World Cup

I am still going with AdSense until I hear more good things about BlogAds or one of the other competing services. There are probably better ways to get more pennies out of someone else. I am also thinking of expaning the Indie Karma coverage to all the Liberatr sites to see if we get any takers.

Did I mention Channel Guides? Podcasts | Blogs | Comics & More

I am really disliking this crappy WordPress Theme. K2 is pretty darn nice, but I don’t see it as the right theme for this. I have a bunch of them in the store back in the admin pages, maybe I will do some switcherooing now.

Google AdSense for RSS and Atom Feeds September 18, 2005

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I read this news just a few days ago, and it seems like old news, but it is a viable topic for discussion. Google is obviously big daddy here, but other companies have been putting ads in feeds for quite some time now. Should feeds contain advertising? Is it profitable? Viable? Who benfits?

Posted from eWeek.com (May 17, 2005):

By moving its sponsored listings into feeds, Google wants to remove a common fear among some publishers that they will lose advertising revenue as readers subscribe to feeds rather than reading content on Web sites, said Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for AdSense.

Over the past few years, everyone has come to expect seeing Google text ads hovering at the top or sides of almost every web page. The idea of contextual advertising is certainly not old, but new form of content delivery are now appearing, and new advertising models are needed as the Web evolves.

Scott Johnson of Feedster mentioned in a July 4th interview with InfoTalk that his RSS search engine would be incorporating ads into feeds. One of the best parts is that their brand of feed-vertising will scrape content from the entire archive of a feed, as opposed to just what is being displayed (i.e. tha last 10 posts). This allows them to give you truly targeted advertising, instead of just grabbing keywords.

The Feedster interview took place at the Gnomedex conference, shortly after Microsoft announced IE7 would have support for RSS, additionaly announcing RSS support would be built in to the Vista kernel and each user’s profile. For advertisers, that is a fairly large announcement, considering Windows users will have such integral support to viewing feeds, and therefore being exposed to feed-based advertising at every turn.

The place I see this sort of advertising having the greatest effect is in a vertical search or regional search type application, such as my brother’s Cable Ridge, where he wants to promote events specifically in South Florida. Placing ads in his RSS feeds for local businesses and services would really target the specific customer base that business is chasing after, therefore maximizing the effectiveness of their ads. On the other hand, of the millions of people subscribed to Slashdot or del.icio.us may be getting ads they don’t neccesarily care about. I guess it is better than plain old contextual AdWords, though.

Keep watching your favorite feeds over the next few months. We’ll talk about this more after it becomes common practice.