Author Archive for Chalupa

PodPress review

Published
by
Chalupa
on April 14, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins
. 3 Comments

For those of you out there podcasting, there sure are a lot of available tools. One easy and free way to get this done is with a blog. Links to audio files can be placed inside of your posts and the automatic RSS creation for the blog itself can serve as your podcast feed. This is a really simple way to do it. There are also some plugins and other tools you can use to do this - one of them being podPress.

I have one real podcast, Lebowski Podcast, and one sorta-podcast, Chalupa’s Movies. The first is being hosted on a CMS and the other is just my movie review blog with a few audio reviews popped in there. I installed podPress a few months ago to see how I liked it and this is what I found.

Pros

  • Inserts a player into your blog entry
  • Stats for the feed, streaming, and downloads
  • Settings for iTunes and other podcast directories
  • Customizable feed options
  • Customizable player options

Cons

  • Takes over your RSS feed completely
  • Makes changes to your feed that you can’t specify or change
  • Only one author on all posts (My movie blog has several contributors and they aren’t being credited in the feed now)
  • Annoying default image on your feed unless you have something to change it to
  • Inserts backslashes in front of all special characters that actually show up on the web and looks tacky

Even though there are some nice features to podPress, I don’t think it’s working out for me and my movie blog. I have plans of uninstalling it soon. Even though the player and statistics are nice, the changes being made to my RSS feed are just unacceptable. If any of you know of a good plugin for podcasting, let us know and we’ll try to check it out.

We’re legit!

Published
by
Chalupa
on April 8, 2008
in BloggingAmigos
. 0 Comments

I’m proud to announce we’re becoming legitimate.  BloggingAmigos has been getting hit with porn-spam-comments the past couple weeks..  That’s right folks.  Apparently enough people read this that it’s worth someone’s while to try and trick you guys into going to a porn site.

Emails

Published
by
Chalupa
on April 7, 2008
in Administration and Organization and Other Software for Bloggers
. 0 Comments

This isn’t earth-shattering or new, but I thought I’d share with all of you how I handle some of my email. If you’re hosting your own Wordpress blog, you have most likely bought a domain that it’s being hosted on. You probably also have an email address setup there like admin or your name or something. Personally, even though I’m good buddies with the guys that started the Squirrel Mail project, I find most email systems a little clunky and not fun to use. I’m a Gmail man myself and have forwarded my emails for my blogs over to a Gmail account.

This probably sounds like extra work and not a big deal, but it keeps me from having to log in somewhere else to check it. I should also add that I have 1 personal blog, 1 movie review blog, this blog, a podcast website and blog, and another blog I don’t post to very often anymore. So if you count alerts, notifications, fan/hate mail, etc….that can turn into a lot of email. So what I’ve done is setup forwarding on all of those mail accounts to one Gmail account of my choice. I’ve also used filtering and automatic labeling so I know exactly where these emails are coming from, and what they are for. I also have some of them auto-archived so they don’t clutter my inbox. Another cool feature with Gmail is I have the option to reply to these emails as the sender it was originally sent to. That means it looks like I logged into one of those accounts and replied. Add on the fact Gmail has lots of storage and great searching capabilities and what more could you want?

I know some people prefer email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird. Most of the people I know using these kinds of programs also download all their mail to one computer. I’m not a big fan of that because then I can’t check my mail from wherever I am. You also have the potential for losing all of your mail and contacts if your drive crashes. I know there are other email solutions out there and I know some of you are using them. Let us know how you like to manage multiple email accounts.

Star Rating for Reviews plugin

Published
by
Chalupa
on April 1, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins
. 0 Comments

If you’re doing some kind of reviewing on your blog and would like to attach a star rating system to posts, you might want to check this plugin out. Here is a link to the website.

Downloading and installing are very straightforward, using it is a little more difficult because the readme file is pretty vague. After you install and activate, the only thing left to do is add those stars to your review. To do this you’ll need to type this”[rating:x/y]” where x is the number of stars something received and y is the total number of stars possible.

For example, if I wanted to give a 3/5 rating I would insert, “[rating:3/5]” at the end of my post. You must include the brackets and you must have the plugin activated for this to work. Other than that, it’s a piece of cake. If you’d like to see an example of this in action, I’ve been using it on my movie blog.

Adsense Manager

Published
by
Chalupa
on March 24, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins and Getting Started
. 0 Comments

If you started using Google Adsense or already are, I hope you’re not copying and pasting the ad-code into custom text boxes for your blog. There are several plugins out there that make the job so much easier. One I finally settled on using is Adsense Manager. Other than installing, you’ll just need to copy/paste your Adsense account number under Options…Adsense Manager.

Once you do this, you can go to Manage…Ads and create new ad content for your blog. Instead of logging into Google and choosing colors, size, type, etc…you can manage it all easily from your blog. After you create something here, you can save your options and then add it as a widget under Presentation.

You might have heard some news in the past year or so about Adsense Manager being blocked by Google. I’m not sure exactly what was happening there, but whatever was happening has been cleared up. One thing to check though is under Options, where you enter your account number, there is a thing at the bottom about donating a small percentage of your ad revenue to the plugin creators. This is not required to use the plugin. If you’d like to donate some money to them, I’m sure they would appreciate it, but that’s up to you.

WP Authors plugin

Published
by
Chalupa
on March 16, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins
. 0 Comments

Does your self-hosted Wordpress blog have multiple authors? Would you like a simple plugin displaying their names with the number of posts that belong to them? Well, look no further. The WP Authors plugin should easily do the trick for you.

After downloading, uploading, and activating, the last thing you’ll need to do is place the widget on your sidebar. If you’re already using several widgets you can choose the placement so your new author plugin shows up where you want.

runPHP plugin

Published
by
Chalupa
on March 16, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins
. 0 Comments

If you’re wanting to use some PHP code on your blog, you’re going to need a plugin. If you didn’t know, your text editor can accept plain text and HTML, but not much of anything else. I haven’t used any plugins for PHP except runPHP, but I haven’t really had a need to look for anything different. As far as I know, Blogger, Xanga, and MySpace don’t have the option to add in a plugin for PHP. Wordpress and Typepad do, though.

In Wordpress installation is pretty simple. 1.) Download the plugin. 2.) Upload the folder to your plugins folder 3.) Activate the plugin from your Plugins menu. Now you can paste PHP code into a post or page and something should show up. Other plugins you setup may require runPHP because they utilize some PHP code. I found an archives plugin a while back that required runPHP to also be installed.

Akismet is my anti-spam

Published
by
Chalupa
on March 12, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins and Getting Started
. 1 Comment

I was trying to think of something clever to title this post. I wanted to somehow tie in SPAM, the meat product, but couldn’t think of anything that would work.  So this is what you have - a play on a TV anti-drug campaign.  I’m sure somebody will hate me for it.

If you’ve looked at your Wordpress plugins, you’ve probably seen Akismet.  It’s one of those default things that gets installed just because.  It isn’t setup to go though.  You’ll have to activate it and input a code.  No worries though because that code is free.  All you need is an account at Wordpress.com and you get a free code you can use on all of your Wordpress blogs.

After you’ve done the setup work, all you have to do is wait for pretend-people to start posting comments.  If Akismet catches some suspected comments you’ll find them when you login to your blog and check your Comments tab.  There will be a new sub-tab called Akismet Spam (0).  If something accidentally goes in there, the number won’t be zero anymore and you can mark it as not-spam and rescue it.  On the same hand if something goes in there that should, you can delete it.  This is very similar to the spam catchers for your email inboxes.

I’ve been using Akismet for a while now.  On my personal blog it catches all of those annoying gambling/casino, wonder drug, and pornography comments that seemingly come from nowhere.  Another thing to check in the way of comments are your moderation settings.  Under Options…Discussion you’ll find some boxes to check or uncheck.  I usually have everything selected except requiring an administrator to approve every comment.  As long as somebody has already made a comment and I trust them, I’ll allow them to do so again without being moderated.  Also, just in case anything unwanted sneaks past, you can always mark a pre-existing comment as spam and/or delete it.  If you have any questions feel free to ask.  There are other spam plugins out there and I’ll be reviewing some of those in the future.

Blog Ads: Shake your money-maker

Published
by
Chalupa
on March 4, 2008
in Getting Started
. 3 Comments

When Gmail first came out a few years ago, I remember there being a lot of talk about the ads. Friends of mine would go on tirades about how they were never going to use Google’s email service because they wanted to protect their privacy. They didn’t want these ads showing up. These ads that would find keywords in their emails and conjure up ads on the side. I also had a few other friends of mine who said they really didn’t care. The ads were just going to be text - nothing flashing nor colorful.

I’m glad I listened to my second set of friends because I’ve had Gmail accounts now since 2003 or 2004 and love them. They were right about the ads. They’re over there on the side and I rarely even realize they’re there. Google Adsense is very similar. You can insert ads on your blog, or website, that are just text on the side. Adsense is a little bit more complicated than the GMail ads though, because you can customize them to some extent, and choose where they are located.

Setting up an account is pretty easy. You just need an existing account with Google. One thing to keep in mind is that you can only create one Adsense account with your personal information. You’ll have to give them an address, SSN, etc for tax purposes and they won’t let you make multiple accounts. After you account is created you can creat five types of ads: Content, Search, Referrals, Video Units and Mobile Content.

For all ad types you can somewhat customize the size, shape, colors, etc of the ad. This is helpful when placing something on your blog/site in case you want something horizontal, vertical or have a particular color scheme. You can choose between just text, graphics and combinations. You can also restrict specific ads from showing up. I had one particular ad for some new wonder drug constantly showing up so I blocked it. If you happen to be selling some particular item or service on your blog/site you could also easily block competitor ads from showing.

Like most other services, there also happen to be plugins to easily integrate Adsense into Wordpress and other applications. I’ll be reviewing a particularly good one for Wordpress in the near future.

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.