Archive for February, 2008

Statistics: Getting what you want

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 26, 2008
in Getting Started
. 0 Comments

Burger King knew what it was doing when it came up with the ad campaign, “Have it your way.” That’s all people really want; a burger that fits their needs, well, I guess with the exception of those who don’t eat hamburgers. Anyway, statistics plugins and packages are the same way. They won’t necessarily customize themselves for you, but there’s a wide enough variety of options that should allow you to have it your way.

Before you just grab something and install it, which is OK if you’re willing to do a lot of experimenting, you might want to do a little research first. What exactly do you want? Here are a few thing I would consider:

  • Cost - This seems like a no-brainer to me, but I always look for the free tools. Depending on your application though, you might want to find something “extra” professional.
  • Longevity - How long will your stats be available? Are only the last X hits available? Does your data accumulate for as long as you use it? In this case most people would prefer to see trends over time. Yes, it is nice to see what’s happened in the last 100 hits, but what if you receive 125 hits/day? You’ll never be able to compare your numbers to yesterday or last week or last month unless you manually keep track of your data. That would be a lot of work
  • Data Types - What kind of information are you getting? You should be able to track hits, time, browser, and referring links. Some packages will give you more information like pages visited, language, ISP, location of visitor, search engines, keywords, entrance pages, and exit pages. Do you really need all of that? Are you interested in some of that? Something to think about if you have to choose between a few.
  • Tying Data Together - It’s nice knowing where your hits came from, what referring links were clicked, and what pages were visited. It can also be nice to be able to track all of that information by a single visit.
  • Readability - Like everything else, how easy you can use a product can affect how often you use it and how happy you are. If your stats application has a lot of data but you can’t decipher any of it, you might want to find something else.

I know I don’t need to sing the praises of the great and powerful Oz, I mean Google. That just happens to be what I’m currently using for all of my Wordpress blogs. Google Analytics is free, it’s easy to setup, it lasts forever and I get a wide variety of data. I wouldn’t even begin to say that I understand all the ins and outs of it, but I’m learning. All you need is a Google/GMail account and you’re good to go. You can also share these stats with any other Google account. This can be handy if you personally have several accounts and want to see your stats from all logins, or if you have a joint blog with several friends/colleagues.

There is also a quick and easy Wordpress plugin called Google Analytics for Wordpress. After downloading and installing, you just need to tell it your account number. If you’d like to read more about this plugin I have a more extensive review here.

Google Analytics for Wordpress plugin

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 26, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins and Other Software for Bloggers
. 1 Comment

If you have already setup a Google Analytics account and now need to add your tracking code to your Wordpress site, I highly recommend using a plugin. A plugin for this task eliminates the hassle of having to copy and paste that code into your template. Plus, you will not have to repeat this task every time you switch templates.

Google Analytics for Wordpress is very easy to install and setup. After you download and upload the folder to your plugins folder, you’ll need to activate it from the Plugins menu in Wordpress. Your next step will be to copy/paste your account number from Google Analytics into your plugin’s configuration page. Your account number can be found by logging into Google Analytics, clicking on the edit link for your account and then clicking on the Check Status link. From here you’ll be able to pick two types of code to paste onto your site or blog. The account number is within the code in both pieces of code.

You’ll then paste this account number into the appropriate box in your Google Analytics configuration page located in a sub-menu of Plugins. Some other options you can check are Track outbound clicks & downloads, Track AdSense clicks, Track extra Search Engines, Track the administrator and integration with Urchin.

To check your stats, you’ll need to login to the Google Analytics page to do so. This is normal. This plugin doesn’t import any stats to your Wordpress Dashboard.

Content Tips, Part 1: The Personal Blog

Published
by
Liz
on February 26, 2008
in Content and Editing
. 0 Comments

The pitfalls of personal blogging are well known and well publicized: self-centered and boring content, a scope either too broad or too limited, and poor writing. If you actually want people to read your blog, you’re going to have to avoid those mistakes. Here are some things to keep in mind.

  1. Pick your audience. This is a general rule for all writing, whether it’s a novel, an essay, or a blog. When you write for a specific person or group, your writing immediately becomes more focused and clear. It’s okay if you don’t appeal to everyone. No one says you have to. Are you writing an update blog for family and friends? Keep them in mind as you blog. While going through your day, be aware of those times you think, “Mom would think this is hilarious,” and then blog about it! Are you detailing your journey to a specific goal — say, running a marathon or adopting a baby or losing weight? Write for others who are in the same situation, or write for people who would be interested in your journey. Are you a minister, a pilgrim, or a seeker? Choose whether you are writing to your peers or those who are somewhere else on your spiritual journey. You’re going to have a hard time writing for both.
  2. Know the big names in your blog genre. This is actually important to all bloggers, not just those of you who are writing your personal story. No one would start a new political blog without being aware of Daily Kos, right? Would a celebrity gossip writer totally ignore sites like TMZ and Perez Hilton? Find out who are the premiere bloggers in your area. Make sure you’re not stealing their quirks or gimmicks. Knowing about them will enrich your writing, it will trigger your own creativity, and it will keep you up to date on the latest trends in your area.
  3. Publish often. No one expects you to post five times a day, but if you want readers, you’re going to have to be a pretty frequent writer. You can’t just post once a week or a couple of times a month and expect people to remember that your blog exists. That said, don’t just publish to get a post out there — make sure your writing is good before you throw it all out there. Which brings us to the next point.
  4. CONSIDER GRAMMAR. One thing you don’t want to be is the equivalent of a 14-year-old on MySpace. Even if you are a 14-year-old on MySpace, you don’t have to write like one. Use spell check. Use grammar check. Write out full words instead of abbreviating them. Use capital letters where necessary. Your blog is not a chat log. Good grammar and punctuation exists to help the reader along. If your readers can’t make it through your content, they’re not going to stick around.
  5. Consider reader appeal. This goes along with using good grammar and punctuation. If your readers aren’t just your closest friends and family, you’re going to need to keep their attention. Posting photos, creating themed lists, using tags, and posting videos is going to do that. Your job is to make them want to come back to your blog to read whatever you post next, so be sure you’re always posting interesting, relevant content. Not your lunch details. (Unless, of course, your lunch details are really funny or interesting.)

Happy blogging.

So you want more than one blog? Part I

Published
by
Smitty
on February 25, 2008
in Administration and Organization and Blogging Platforms
. 3 Comments

I happen to work for a school district, where we get frequent request for blog installs. With a normal Wordpress installation, only one blog can be hosted per install. This is great if you only want one blog, or possibly two. But if you need to maintain 10, 100 or even a 1000 blogs, it is time to start looking at different solution. You will find it very time consuming to keep Wordpress, plugins, and themes all up to date across multiple installs.

I use a modified version of Wordpress called WordpressMU, which allows you to have one install of Wordpres and about as many blogs as you want (space permitting). Some big names use it like Wordpress.com, EduBlogs, and Harvard.

There are many benefits of WordpressMU. One install will provide you with as many blogs as you have hardware resources for. All the blogs install into one database as well, making backups up very easy. Lastly, with just one install updates are a breeze. It is just as easy up dating one blog as it is a 1000 blogs.

Steps.

Step 1) Download WordpressMU.
Step 2) Setup a blank MySQL database, user, and password. Note the hostname of the server as well.
Step 3) Run the install. This is almost identical to the normal Wordpress install.

Tip. For large installs, run your MySQL on a separate box. I run a centralized MySQL server for all my web servers. It allows me to allocate a ton of ram to MySQL and allows for easy maintenance of my many databases. I will talk more about this in a later post.

Tip. There will be a point during the installation where it will prompt you to have your blogs be sub-domains or using a single domain. A single domain is far easier to get setup, especially if you are new to DNS editing or Wordpress.

Tweak. Because I work for a school district, I like to be control freak and control who has blogs. The normal WordpressMU install allows any user to register and create a blog all willy-nilly. To fix this I remove or rename the wp-signup.php file from the main folder of WordpressMU. I also remove the links that point to the setup process. These links are located within the home.php file located in the ‘Home Theme’.

In Part II of “So you want more than one blog?” I will discuss which themes I use and how to tweak them all to use Feedburner without any user setup.

FeedBurner Part 1: Setup and Analyze your feed

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 18, 2008
in Getting Started
. 0 Comments

In my first post, I installed Wordpress, now what?, I mentioned FeedBurner as a good tool for RSS feeds. I haven’t used other RSS tools for Wordpress so let us know if you have any other suggestions. Besides being able to see statistics on your feed, FeedBurner also has some other nice features that are broken up into four categories: Analyze, Optimize, Monetize, and Publicize. As you can see by the post title, I’m going to be talking about the Analyze tab today.

For starters, setting up your feed is easy. First you’ll need to know the address for your auto-generated feed. Wordpress creates two: one for your posts and another for your comments. If I were you, I’d setup both because it’s not that hard and this way everything will be consistent. On your blog there should be links to your feeds. You can click on them to get the address or right-click and copy the address. Now that you have the address you can setup the feed at FeedBurner.com. On the homepage there’s an area to paste/type in the address for your feed. From here you hit the Next button and you’ll have a few more options. I’m not going to write about those because FeedBurner has excellent help for that kind of stuff. After you have things setup for your post feed you can then repeat for your comment feed.

Next time you’ll login to FeedBurner you’ll have a dashboard, called My Feeds, with your two new feeds showing up. Click on one of them and you’ll be under the Analyze tab. This is where you can view all of your statistics. You can view stats on your Feed, Site and Headline Animators. For your feed you can track item views, item link clicks, and item enclosure downloads. The last one is mostly for podcast episodes, which we’ll eventually get to. The feed stats are already setup, but it’ll take a little extra work for site stats, and headline animators can be configured under the Publicize tab.

Your feed stats will track subscribers, hits, item uses, and uncommon uses. A subscriber is defined as somebody checking your feed through a feed reader on a given day. If you have 20 subscribers on Monday and 15 on Tuesday, this doesn’t mean you have 35 total. This just means 20 people checked it on Monday and on Tuesday some of them had their computers off, didn’t open their reader, etc. You can look at your stats by yesterday, past 7 days, past 30 days and all time. You do get to see trends over time, but you’re not able to look at specific day more than a month back. This is a drawback, but hey, you’re using a free service.

If you already have a statistics tool setup or are going to set one up, you might not want to use FeedBurner’s service. You almost always get conflicting numbers for hits, unique hits, etc. This has to do with time zones and the different algorithms and criteria the software is programed to use. It can get confusing trying to work off of two different statistics tools.

After you look through some of the initial options and make your choices, you should start seeing some stats in the next day or two, if people are subscribed. One last thing you need to do to make sure people are using your FeedBurner feed and not your old feed. You could go to all the trouble of tracking down those links in your template, or you could use the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin.

FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 18, 2008
in Administration and Organization and Other Software for Bloggers
. 1 Comment

If you’re using FeedBurner for your feeds, and I highly recommend you do, you can easily re-direct your feed links from your self-hosted Wordpress blog to Feedburner using the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin. Yeah, so that’s a mouthful. After you download, upload, and activate this plugin there are just a few things left to do.

1.) You’ll need to already have your FeedBurner account setup. You could do this afterwards, but you’ll need this information for configuration.

2.) If you’d like FeedBurner to handle the feeds for both your posts/entries and your comments, you’ll need to setup two feeds - one for each.

3.) Go to your Options menu in Wordpress and there should be a submenu called FeedBurner. This is where you’ll enter your feed new FeedBurner feed URLs you just created.

4.) Last step is to test this out. Most templates/themes have links on them somewhere for your built-in RSS feeds. Test them out. If they don’t work I’d suggest trying them in ten minutes. If they still don’t work go back and check your spelling. That’s usually my most common mistake.

Well that pretty much covers setting up this plugin. There will be more posts in the near future describing some of the features you’ll find useful, or may want to check out, in FeedBurner.

Template edits vs plugins

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 18, 2008
in Getting Started and Templates, Themes, and Design
. 0 Comments

Every once in a while you might find something really cool you’d like to put on your blog or site. Usually these things require a little coding, or the pasting of code. For example, creating a Google Analytics account requires you to paste a bit of tracking code onto your blog or website.

Now this may not seem like a big deal, just pasting some code into your template, but where do you put the code? How do you know it’s in the right place? Would you be able to find it later? How would you modify it? Would you remember to re-paste this code every time you switched to a different template? These are several questions some people never think about or contemplate. One way to help the situation would be to use good commenting practices. You could clearly block off an area marking the beginning and end of your added code. You could also write a few lines describing what the code is, what the code is doing and where the code was obtained. This still doesn’t take care of the problem of switching templates. You would still lose all of the custom edits you made and the valuable time you spent.

You might have guessed this already from the title, but I would suggest a plugin if possible. Plugins can be easily turned on and off and they don’t get tossed in the trash when you uninstall or change a template. They can also be customized and configured with appropriate settings. Going back to our Google Analytics example, there are several Wordpress plugins designed just for this task. All you have to do is go to the Wordpress Plugin Directory and search for “google analytics.” It’s just that easy.

The next step is choosing one that will work best for you. This can be easier said than done. Sometimes you’ll need to try a few out and see which you like best. There are many factors that can affect the selection process. These could include how and where you want to use it, the version of your blogging tool, how much you want to customize the plugin and even the fact if it works or not. It’s usually not a bad idea to check out user reviews if they’re available - and don’t just read the first one you see. Like most things in life there are people that both hate and love every plugin out there. Try to read at least a few reviews to get a general idea of how people feel about it. From there, it’s just trial and error, but hopefully you won’t have to deal with all of that hassle. We’re planning on testing a lot of these plugins to give you the rundown of when, where and why you might want to use it.

Templates and Themes: Getting Started

Published
by
Tara
on February 17, 2008
in Getting Started and Templates, Themes, and Design
. 0 Comments

After you’ve got the “essentials” out of the way, it’s time to style your blog. Without knowing a thing about HTML and CSS, you can personalize your site’s look-n-feel.

There are a lot of pre-made themes out there for you to use. The best site out there for browsing these themes is themes.wordpress.net. It’s a slick site that lets you search for themes based on the features you’d like to see.

So, with all those choices out there, how do you choose the right theme? Here are a couple of things to think about:

  • How many columns do you want? These will contain both your content and your extras (widgets).
  • Do you want your site to stretch when people resize their browsers (fluid width), or do you want it to look the same no matter who sees it (fixed width)?
  • You’ll definitely want to get a widget-ready theme. This will allow you to add… stuff… to your blog in the future. We’ll post, at some point, about widgets.

For different kinds of blogs, you’ll want different kinds of features - different types of themes. My suggestions on getting started:

Journal-Style Blogs

Start by looking for something with at least two columns. You’ll have your posts, of course, but you also have complete control over the rest of the space. And there are some pretty great plugins and widgets out there. At the very least, you’ll want to have a sidebar that displays things like your blogroll (list of links to other blogs you find interesting), a list of the latest posts and/or comments on your posts, and a list (or cloud) of your post categories/tags.

From your selection of multi-column themes, choose something that matches your content.  If your blog is a personal journal blog, choose something that reflects on your personality and have fun.  If you’ll be posting on a theme (news, politics, religion, movies) that might interest a broad audience, make sure that the theme you choose is simple enough you’ll be taken seriously.

Video/Photo Blogs

If you’ll be posting only videos or photos, you’ll want a theme that really makes your work stand out.  Try to find a theme that doesn’t have multiple columns/sidebars - rather, look for something that’s laid out with horizontal bands (like Hemingway or Squible).  Getting rid of the distractions in the sidebars puts the focus on your photography.

That’s it for now - stay tuned for more posts on templates and themes.  I’ll be writing about how to tweak and customize the look of your new theme.

I installed Wordpress, now what?

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 12, 2008
in Getting Started
. 2 Comments

So you’ve bought a domain name, installed your Wordpress blog, and now you’re wondering what to do. Well, look no further because I’m about to tell you the things you should be thinking about.

Whenever I play around with technology I usually do a little research, play around with it, and then jump in headfirst. Over the past few years of blogging, there are a few things I’ve learned that would have been better being setup from the very beginning.

#1 Statistics
“What’s that?” you say. “Stats? I hated that class!” Well, you won’t have to get out your calculator or calculate any r values. What we’re talking about here is finding out if people are coming to your blog, what posts are popular, what are people searching for to find your blog, what links were clicked to get to your blog, etc, etc.

Feeling a little bit better about this topic? I thought you would. I have tried out about 5-10 different stats packages, that are free, for blogging. They have all been a little bit different and offer some different types of information. One thing to point out is if you have multiple stats packages installed, you’re probably going to get different numbers for the amount of hits (both total and unique), referring links, time on site, etc. The reason for this is because it depends on how long it waits before counting a hit from the same IP as another unique hit. It also depends on the timezone it’s working off of, and many other technicalities. This is why I would suggest only using only one to avoid confusion.

One reason to set up your statistics immediately is that every day that goes by without a tool installed is another day you have no idea what kind of traffic your blog is seeing. I’m currently using Google Analytics and am really enjoying it. The biggest advantage to using this free tool is that you’re not limited to only seeing the most X recent hits. Most of the other free tools I’ve used have only allowed me to see the last 100 or 200 hits. This is great, but it cripples you from seeing any trends over time. The only thing I miss about Google Analytics is that even though I’m able to see a lot of different types of information, they aren’t sorted by specific hits. I can’t see that a particular person came to my site from a referring link, went to 8 pages, spent 3min on my site and then left. So you might want to consider what types of information you’re wanting to receive and how they’re sorted before picking a certain stats tool.

#2 RSS Feed
If you’re not familiar with what an RSS feed is, then you should look it up on Wikipedia or something. These aren’t so much the wave of the future, but the wave of the now. Almost every blog and website you go to will offer some type or types of RSS feeds to their users. These are then setup on RSS readers so somebody can see if new content has been posted without having to go visit their favorite site(s). This may not sound like a big deal if you check one or two sites a day, however, if 35 of your friends are infrequent bloggers and you’d like to keep up with all their blogs…that’s when an RSS reader starts to sound like a good idea.

Wordpress has automatic RSS generation features built right into it. The only drawback is you don’t get to choose how it looks or what’s included, you can’t see stats on who’s subscribed, etc. A good, free tool I’ve been using for all of my feeds is FeedBurner. FeedBurner was recently bought by Google so I don’t think there’s any danger of it disappearing any time soon. With this service you can add bells and whistles to your feed, customize it for podcasts, modify description and title, see how many people are subscribed, etc. There’s a lot of cool functionality which I will be discussing in a later post. There are also some very handy plugins that allow you to redirect your built-in Wordpress feed to use FeedBurner, which I will also be talking about in a later post.

#3 Ads
Advertisements are something I just started using and wish I had setup a long time ago. Some of my friends stay away from them because they see it as “whoring themselves out” or something that will “clutter up their site.’”This can very easily happen and is something to consider if and when choosing an ad service. I’ve been using Google Adsense for a few months now and highly recommend it. You’re able to choose the type, style and size of your ads. You’re able to blacklist specific ads from showing up. Most importantly, you’re also able to maybe make some money which could cover your domain name costs and maybe even your hosting costs.

#4 Spam
Spam is something I’m sure you seen in your mailbox. If you’re new to blogging, then you may not know that you can also get spam comments. Just like there are spam filters for mail, there are also spam filters for blog comments. Wordpress has some settings to help prevent this under Options…Discussion. You can prevent comments from showing immediately, blacklist people and even hold comments if they have too many links in them. This doesn’t always catch everything though.

One built-in plugin you’ll find is called Akismet. This is a pretty decent service that will try to catch some spam. The only catch is you have to have an API key to use it. You can easily get one of these free by creating an account at Wordpress.com. The only thing I don’t like about Akismet, and this might just be ignorance on my part, is that I’m not notified in any way if some suspected comments are being held for my approval. I have to login to my blog and check my Comments tab.

There are also many other free spam plugins you can check out and try. Always check out some of the specifications before you pick one. You’ll want to make sure you can manually “ok” a comment if it’s suspected of spam and that you’re able to manage the spam blocker/catcher in some way.

#5 Organization
I’m sure all of you have gotten tired of somebody telling you to clean up your room at some point in time. This is one of those things that may seem pointless to you and important to someone else at the exact same time. In the case of your blog, it’s good to consider your readers on this one because they’re the ones reading. If you’re creating a personal blog and don’t want anyone to read it, then maybe you can skip some organization. I would still recommend some categorizing or tagging of your posts regardless of what kind of readership you’re expecting.

There are two ways to organize your posts: categories and tags. The general rule of thumb is to use categorize for big and broad things and tags for more specific things. Both categories and tags make posts easier to find for you and your readers. It allows people to find more posts on similar topics or maybe continue reading the saga of a long and drawn-out story. The hard part is always deciding on your organization scheme. If you can figure this out beforehand, it’s usually less work. If you need to change things up later on, the amount of work really depends on how many posts you have to edit.

Another step in this organization process is to setup a plugin and/or widget to display your categories/tags for people to go directly to them. There are some built-in widgets to display categories and tags, but you might want to look for something specific once you start having a large amount of posts of varying types.

Wrapping it up
This pretty much covers what I consider to be the essentials. There are many, many other plugins and add-ons out there just begging you to play with them. Your template/theme is an aspect I didn’t mention. One reason is you can easily use one of the provided themes to get started. Another reason is this isn’t my area of expertise. Tara will be giving some advice and tips about these in the near future. If you have any questions or comments let us know.

Welcome to BloggingAmigos.net

Published
by
Smitty
on February 12, 2008
in BloggingAmigos
. 0 Comments

Welcome to BloggingAmigos.net. The editorial team that started this blog is comprised of several college friends that have one thing in common, we all are bloggers.

Personal blogs, enterprise blogs, entertainment blogs, audio blogs, video blogs, photo blogs, we’ve done them all at one time or another. We’ve learned many tips, tricks, and things not to do along the way, and this will be our mechanism to share our experiences.

We will do our best to stray away from making this blog personal or political in any way. Our end goal is to share all the blogging goodness that we have to offer to our internet friends. We invite you share your thoughts, ideas and comments by sending us an email.

Our goal is to make this a high quality blog, so you won’t necessarily see a post every day. You can expect to see a new posting weekly and we’ll troll through the comments and reply on a regular basis.

Cheers,

~Smitty