Tag Archive for 'Wordpress'

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.

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.

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.

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.