Archive for the 'Administration and Organization' Category

RSS feed problems

Published
by
Chalupa
on June 3, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins and Administration and Organization
. 0 Comments

This post isn’t so much a tip, trick, or idea, but a call for help. I was using PodPress for a short while on my personal movie blog and it did some funny things to the RSS feed. The one thing I was most unhappy with was it changed the author on every post to something default and not of my choosing. After uninstalling the plugin and upgrading Wordpress to 2.5.1, my feed still looks like it did when PodPress was installed. Does anybody have any ideas on how to fix this? I thought upgrading Wordpress would have fixed that, but maybe it’s something in the database.

The reason I want the author field fixed in the feed is because it’s a multi-author blog and people deserve credit for their stuff. Also, I don’t like what it automatically put in there on its own.

blog - http://branfeld.com/movies

forum post on wordpress.org

My Wordpress review

Published
by
Chalupa
on May 22, 2008
in Administration and Organization and Blogging Platforms
. 0 Comments

Since Nathan wrote up a review for us in Wordpress 2.5 brings some fresh air, we have since then upgraded this site and have been using 2.5 ourselves. I have to say I’m really enjoying it. I was a little skeptical at first, and even had a bad experience updating a personal blog, but I’m still really enjoying it.

With the interface being totally re-worked, it might take some time getting used to where things are. The good part is that this will be much easier to figure out than Office 2007. More pertinent information is shown with a lot less clutter. I think this has to be much more easier for non-technical people to use.

Updates are one thing that have always been a hassle, but there is now a built-in feature to upgrade your plugins. All you have to know is your FTP information to allow Wordpress to upload the files for you. Another big improvement are the media features. You can now easily insert images, video, and audio to a post. I haven’t used it yet, but I’m imagining this will make podcasting much easier.

On more awesome thing I wanted to point out is the fact that nothing has visibly changed from the reader’s perspective. Usually an upgrade of these proportions would render themes and plugins obsolete. Maybe we just picked a good template to use, but I really appreciated how we didn’t have to re-work our blogs just to be functional with the version upgrade.

If you’re a current Wordpress user I’d highly suggest upgrading if you haven’t already. If you need any help, feel free to ask and we’ll try to point you in the right direction.

Automatic Updaters

Published
by
Chalupa
on May 12, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins and Administration and Organization
. 2 Comments

Personal Saviors or Angels of Death?

I’ll let you be the judge of that.

Automated things are just so easy and great to use, right? Well, sometimes. If they truly are all they’re cracked up to be, they’ve usually gone through some heavy testing, usage, and many revisions. This past week I decided I was finally going to upgrade to the new version of Wordpress on my personal blogs. I also decided to try out this nifty updater plugin they were promoting.

I first tried it out on my personal blog, ran into a lot of permission issues, and gave up. Then I played around with it some more, and gave up again. Fast-forward a few days and I decided to give it a third try, cause that’s the one that’s always supposed to work. This time I decided to try it out on my movie blog. Same problems, yet this iteration I did a little homework and tried changing some permissions around. I eventually got to the very end of the installation, but had pages and pages of errors and my blog didn’t work…at all. Part of the updating process was to create a backup. I tried to open these files and could not because Microsoft Windows had deemed them to be unsafe.

By this time I’m sure you can image my frustration and annoyance at my self-perceived stupidity at 1)trusting an auto-updater to fix my blog, 2)not doing my own backup, and 3)not trying this out on something I don’t care about. I think it’s fair to say I’m above-average when it comes to technical things, but I don’t have that much experience troubleshooting web issues. I’m going to have to recommend most of you bloggers out there avoid this upgrader unless you’re very comfortable with file permissions, and tracking down errors within specific lines of PHP code. Even if you are comfortable doing that kind of stuff, is it really worth the risk of having to spend the time on it?

Maintain Blogger Permalinks

Published
by
Chalupa
on May 5, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins, Administration and Organization and Content and Editing
. 0 Comments

I’m sure some of your are like me and have moved, or attempted to move, from one blogging tool to another.  I started off with good ol Blogger before it was bought out by Google.  I wasn’t too hip on Blogger Beta when they were making the changes so I decided to bite the bullet and figure out Wordpress.  Migrating from Blogger to Wordpress is a mostly smooth transition, however, one thing I immediately noticed was my permalinks weren’t quite the same.  Then I found a plugin to help me fix that.

Justinsomnia.org has created a plugin called wp-maintain-blogger-permalinks.  Pretty self explanatory, right?  Just download, install, and click a button in your settings.  Not much else you have to do.

Categories and Tags

Published
by
Tara
on May 3, 2008
in Administration and Organization and Getting Started
. 2 Comments

Chalupa and I spent some time last night talking about how best to organize this site for users. We have very different category/tag setups on our individual blogs, and with so many authors here, we needed to figure something out quickly.

Note to you folks just getting started - think about organization BEFORE you get going. It’ll save you time and headaches down the road.

You can organize your blog any way you want to. You can use pages instead of categories, categories instead of tags, any of those alone, or all of them together. Usually a combination of categories and tags does the trick.

What’s going to be the most useful organization of content for your readers? My thoughts on the matter:

  • Most users will look for some kind of heirarchy.
  • People browse content most easily when it’s organized in general groups.
  • Folks aren’t going to spend a lot of time looking for something. If they can’t find it right away, they’ll move on to someone else’s site. There are a LOT of people blogging out there - chances are you’re not the only one writing what you’re writing.

There has been a lot of research suggesting that people can retain more information (and, relevant here, can FIND information in less time) when it’s “chunked” - divided - into intuitive groupings. An intuitive grouping for most humans is a hierarchy.

Think, also, about the way categories and tags display on your platform. In Wordpress, for example, unless you seriously tweak things, your categories and subcategories will display in a list. You don’t want a list that makes your page scroll for miles, so it makes sense to limit the number of categories and subcategories you use. Tags, on the other hand, display in a cloud - meaning you can have a LOT of tags and still won’t take up tons of vertical space on the page. So, WP users might use tags for more specific labeling/grouping.

Another note: Don’t categorize or tag so specifically that only one post/article is going to use the category/tag. Make sure that you’re general enough, even in your specific labels, that you can reuse them - remember that you’re grouping (or “chunking”) things.

I decided to use this hierarchy for our category/tag structure: categories to group posts by general topic, and tags to label them by specific topic/content. Example: this post deals with, on a high level, organizing your blog content, and specifically working with tags and categories. So this post goes in Category: Administration and Organization and is tagged with “tags” and “categories”.

So… two things to take away:

  • Organize content so it’s easy and quick for your READERS to get around (even if it’s not the way you think).
  • Think through the organization of your content before you go any further - it’ll save you some serious time.

Cross Posting and Self Promotion

Published
by
Kacey
on April 25, 2008
in Administration and Organization and Getting Started
. 4 Comments

Having only recently started up my WordPress blog, one of my first concerns (beyond the normal woes of “What am I going to write about?” and “Why am I even keeping a blog?”) was how to make sure all the people in my other social networking circles were kept up to date with my newest blog. Having been on LiveJournal for the last seven years, I didn’t want to abandon all the contacts I had made there, but I didn’t want to go through all the work of duplicating every post from my WordPress blog over to LiveJournal. Similarly, I’ve been on Twitter since shortly after its inception, and wanted to make sure that my new blog posts were broadcast to my Twitter audience as well.

—

LiveJournal, being my larger audience, was my first priority. After some Googling and searching on the WordPress Plugin Directory, I finally came across the plainly named LiveJournal Crossposter. As a rule, I am wary of any plugin or application that hasn’t been updated in over a year. Status such as that rarely indicates that the plugin is “perfect just the way it is” and more often means its “abandoned, because I just don’t care to work on it anymore.” Never the less, it was the only option I could find short of setting up a bulky RSS feed that I would then have to force my LiveJournal friends to subscribe to, so I downloaded it and started setting it up. LiveJournal Crossposter appears under the Settings menu and has a nice feature set with a user friendly interface. Connecting it to your LiveJournal account is as easy as simply putting in your username and password. No confusing codes or authentication links. Additionally, you can set the plugin to post to a community if that is your preference. You can customize a marquee of sorts (as a header or footer) that will refer your LiveJournal readers back to your WordPress blog. There are a series of custom options that the plugin will configure for you, or alternately, you can create your own full custom marquee using a series of context tags and so forth.

Other options you can set are default privacy settings; how comments are handled (readers can either comment on the LiveJournal cross post or be forced back to your WordPress); tag transferral, how extended text is handled (either with an LJ cut, a link back to WordPress, or simply ignoring it and posting the whole entry); and filtering by WordPress Categories. All of these settings are simply to configure the default options and can be changed on the Create New Post dialogue within the WordPress dashboard.

The plugin is extraordinarily efficient and throws the new blog entry up to LiveJournal almost as fast as your WordPress updates. Even when you edit a post after publishing it, the LiveJournal mirror is immediately resubmitted. It is in the editing of entries, however, that I found the only issue. When you edit an entry, it physically removes the post from LiveJournal and uploads a new version. This will lose any comments you may have already received at the LiveJournal end. This can be avoided, however, by simply forcing your LiveJournal friends to post all their comments on your actual WordPress blog. Easy peasy.

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A reliable Twitter publisher was actually more difficult to find. Not because it was hard to find a plugin, but because there were so many it was hard to find a good one. I ran through two other Twitter plugins that either did nothing, or made a rampant mess of my twitters, before discovering the final, successful plugin. While some of the earlier options had more configuration settings and lots of variables, they weren’t worth the effort and usually failed to work anyway. I actually gave up on it for a couple of weeks and just used TwitterFeed, portaling an RSS feed from my blog to Twitter. It worked, but it was slow. It scrapes every 30 minutes and when it pushes your post, can often reinterpret the title or cut off text. I still use it for LiveJournal and Flickr, but if I could get away from it completely, I would. Which, in the end, is why I was so excited to finally come across Twitpress. Twitpress loads under the Manage tab and is about as simple a plugin as you’ll ever see. You simply put in your Twitter username and password to initiate the service. You can also customize the message format with a few defined variables listed on the page for you. Really, it doesn’t have to do much; but what it does do, it does well. There are no filters, limited options, and basic configuration. Its a straightforward service and it works perfectly, and quickly!

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The final plugin that I wanted to briefly mention, is one that’s actually in use here on BloggingAmigos, but isn’t featured in any of the previous entries. When I was reading the latest greatest from Chalupa, I noticed the ShareThis link and icon at the bottom of the post and was curious. I’ve seen a lot of different mechanics for Digging, Stumbling, or Del.Icious.ing content on the internet, but I hadn’t had the pleasure of the ShareThis experience. Feel free to scroll to the bottom of this entry and click on it to see what I’m talking about. What I like about ShareThis is that its compact, because I’ll admit, I love collapsible spaces in web pages. It takes up very little room on a page, and yet expands out to be very functional. From one plugin, users can share your content with several other social bookmarking sites; and with minimal effort.The system is very customizable as well. Starting at the ShareThis home page, you first create an account which will inevitably provide some nice tracking stats for your click-throughs. Once your account is created, you simply build your button in the ShareThis for Publishers section. The WordPress section has the download link for the plugin and the button configuration options, which allow you to choose what all social linking is included on your pop-out window. You also have limited ability to change the menu colors to better match your WordPress layout.

All of this customization generates a code that is then reciprocally inserted into the plugin management page, which is loaded under the Settings menu on your WordPress dashboard. Also, default adding options are managed in the settings page as well.

Once everything is set up and running, you will want to go back to the ShareThis site and log in to your My Account page and register your domain. It takes about 24 hours for your domain to be validated, but once it is, you can visit a reports page that shows how the ShareThis button has been used on your blog. Some nice, additional, usage tracking for your blog.

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I hope you find some of these plugins useful and use them to try and drive a little extra traffic to your blog. So enjoy, and be sure to let me know how they work out for you!

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.

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 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.