Archive for the 'Getting Started' Category

Your blogging environment

Published
by
Chalupa
on August 13, 2008
in Getting Started
. 1 Comment

Blogging and writing can be just like work and other academic endeavors in that you need to have a good working environment.  It’s hard to be creative and get your thoughts out if you’re being distracted, are uncomfortable, or can’t concentrate.  If you’ve been having problems getting your thoughts transposed to the keyboard lately, maybe try some of the following:

  • Get comfortable - go curl up on the couch or in the easy chair.  Take your laptop outside, or maybe find a quieter, more private place to try and type.
  • Set the mood - personally, I usually enjoy a little music while I’m working and am in the zone.  If you don’t have any mp3s or CDs on you, there are definitely some good places to stream music on the net.  If you have a decent internet connection check out last.fm, pandora, or any of the other streaming radio stations out there.
  • Acquire a beverage - sometimes a tall glass of your favorite beverage or a snack can help get you going.
  • Take a break - sometimes now just isn’t a good time to accomplish your goals.  If you have some ideas, jot down a few notes, save as draft and come back later.

These are just a few ideas.  Let us know if you have any more.

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
. 3 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!

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.

So you want more than one blog? Part II

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

One of the things you will want to do once you get your WordPress Mu installed is to offer up your users a variety of templates to choose from.

WordPress Mu boasts as being able to support all themes that work on a normal install of WordPress. That works in theory, but doesn’t work in real life.

Tip: Use one of the more popular themes, it is more likely to work with WordPress Mu.

There are several big names using various versions of WordPress Mu. I try to use themes that they use, I figure that they have invested sometime to determine which themes work well and don’t work well. Below is a list of themes that I’ve compiled that I would consider using in my WordPress Mu installs.

Themes

  • 72 Class
  • Almost Spring
  • Ambiru
  • anarchy
  • Andreas04
  • Andreas09
  • Anubis
  • Banana Smoothie
  • Batavia 1.5
  • Benevolence
  • Black-LetterHead
  • Blix
  • Bluebird
  • Blue Green
  • Blue Moon
  • Blue Zinfandel Enhanced
  • Borderline Chaos
  • ChaosTheory
  • ChaoticSoul
  • Citris IslandWP
  • CleanTidy
  • CommentPress
  • Connections
  • Contempt
  • Copyblogger
  • Cordobo Green Park
  • Crop Circles
  • Cutline
  • Daisy Rae Gemini
  • DayDream
  • Deep Blue
  • Deichnetz
  • Digg 3 Column
  • Dignity
  • Dixie Belle
  • Dusk
  • Emire
  • Fadtastic
  • Falling Dreams
  • Fauna
  • Fjords04
  • Fleur De Lys
  • Flex
  • Flower Power
  • Framefake Theme
  • Fresh Bananas
  • Freshy
  • Garland
  • GenkiTheme
  • Gentle Calm
  • Girl in Green
  • GloriousDay
  • GlossyBlue
  • Greenday
  • Greenery
  • Green Marinee
  • Gridlock
  • Hemingway
  • Iceburgg
  • Jakarta
  • Jentri
  • K2
  • K2-lite
  • Kubrick
  • LetoPrime
  • LetterHead
  • Light
  • Mandigo
  • man~ja
  • MistyLook
  • Neat!
  • Neo-Sapien
  • Newsportal
  • Nikynik BlueMU
  • Northern-Web-Coders
  • Ocadia
  • Ocean Mist
  • OceanWide
  • Pinky-Kupy
  • Primitivo
  • Pool
  • PressRow
  • Quadruple Blue
  • Quentin
  • RadMod
  • Reaching Darkness
  • Redoable
  • Redoable Lite
  • Regulus
  • Rounded
  • RoundedFlow
  • Rubric
  • Sandbox
  • Sandbox-10
  • Sapphire
  • SeaShore
  • Shocking Blue Green
  • Silver is the New Black
  • Simpla
  • Simplr
  • Solipus
  • Sunburn
  • Supposedly Clean
  • Suhsweet
  • sumenep
  • Stean
  • StrippedPlus
  • Sweet Blossoms
  • Tarski
  • TerraFirma
  • Trevilian Way
  • The Journalist
  • Thirteen
  • Thoughts
  • Toni
  • Treba
  • Twenty-eight Thirteen
  • Twilight
  • Unsleepable
  • Vermilion Christmas
  • veryplaintext
  • Vertigo
  • Vistered Little
  • WaterWilly
  • White as Milk
  • WordPress Classic
  • WordPress II Silver

There are many places to download themes on the internet, usually each theme can be found in a couple of places. I would suggest Googling the theme name plus “WordPress”. You could also use one of the many theme viewers and cross reference your findings with this list to see if it is one of the themes known to work with the Mu version. Lastly, I would suggest downloading the lastest release directly from the developers website. This might take a little extra work, but you would be guaranteed to find the most up to date version.

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.

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.

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.