Tag Archives: wordpress

Making a blog bilingual: it can be done easily in WordPress

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I finally figured out how to make our website largely bi-lingual (English and Chinese). The pages, sidebars and footers have all been done. I’m now able to drive traffic to the different segments. And all within WordPress.

I have separated the pages into Chinese and English groups, but the bloggings themselves are still the same. However, the changes should help both audiences feel a little more comfortable with the format. The English side located at http://www.nozkidz.com/en/. We’ll be able to drive a lot more traffic that way! Be prepared if you do check it out: use Firefox (for easy language switching) or install East Asian languages in your PC (it’s on your XP disk – you do still have that, right?).

english nozkidz

I wonder if you can figure out how I did it! Clue: Theme Switcher and Sidebar editing!… Do you want to know how? The posts are still mixed so you will encounter Chinese in the blog. But that’s not a problem is it?

WosServer: Tweaking Your Blog for your Stick Part 2

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After yesterday’s little experiment, I began playing with the WosServer and found some little tricks for bloggers, would-be marketers or developers.

If you already have a blog or site that you are working with that is live, you can create a full version on Wos. It’s a little fussy but you can do the following things…

For parts 1-5, see WosServer: A Useful Tool in your Armoury.

  • Step 6: Download a copy of the database from your website (via the PHPMYSQL interface or wizard).
  • Step 7: Get and install the WP PHP Admin plugin. Activate it as usual. Head over to the new tab.
  • Step 8: Activate the plugin. Then carry out an import operation to import your downloaded file into the WosServer MYSQL database.

phpadmin plugin used

Image shows: plugin activated and accessing my database.

  • Step 9: (optional) If you encounter a problem with the size of your file, you will need to go into the PHP files in Wos Server, and edit the php.ini file to increase the permitted size from 2M to something more reasonable if you have a BIG blog, like mine.
  • Step 10: Download the complete wp-content/ folder with ALL the pictures, too.
  • Step 11: Move the wp-content/ folder to its rightful location, images, plugins, themes, etc.
  • Step 12: You will also need to change the database name in wp-config.php to your imported database name.
  • Step 13: You will need to edit the ‘options table’ in your database from http://www.yourblog.com to http://127.0.0.0/wordpress twice or you won’t be able to access your blog. It will keep taking you to the live site. You will see the first of the two entries in the wp-options table in the first row named ‘siteurl’, the second entry is on page 4 of the list, entitled ‘home’. Change both of these to your new URL. It’s difficult to change them within WordPress like this, because you will end up on your live blog.

Oh, and when you login for the first, do remember to use your original blog password, not admin/password for the WosServer. Oh, and there’s no email reminder! So don’t forget! The good news is that the plugins/wordpress core updates all seem to work fine as they do in version 2.7. Good luck.

 

Blogging Tools: Wos Server – a useful tool in your armoury

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Ages ago, I wrote about how you could put your applications on a stick. For the inveterate blogger, tinkerer, and under-the-hood kind of guy/girl, you can also put a blog on a stick with WordPress, and (almost) everything you need. The only caveat: the blog is not (nor should be) live for security reasons.

investorblogger - in a box

Look closely at the browser bar. This is InvestorBlogger on my stick! I’ve managed to import all the posts, plugins and themes. Now I can carry my blog, and work anywhere my computer and cruzer can take me!

Wos server is an installable application that you can put on your stick or anywhere. It includes a full version of apache for serving pages, PHP for parsing code, and MYSQL for your database. You can download and configure your own version of the server yourself at the website. There are a wide variety of apps that you can install, of course, bloggers can choose WordPress! But here’s a selection of other packages you could try!

  1. DBHcms
  2. Drupal
  3. Joomla
  4. MediaWiki
  5. Moodle
  6. OpenDB
  7. Textpattern
  8. WordPress

You can visit their site, or download my own customized version with themes, and plugins to get you started. The WordPress user is admin and the password is password.

Additional steps to setting up your blog on a stick or desktop.

  • Step 0: Copy your files/themes/plugins to your desktop and anything else you want to use in your install in the wp-content folder at your site…
  • Step 1: Download the file and unzip it on your desktop.
  • Step 2: Open the folder and find the file mowes.exe. Hit that and open it. Wait a few seconds.
  • Step 3: Your browser window will open. Look for the entry ‘wordpress’ and click on that link. (or type http://127.0.0.0/wordpress/ or http://localhost/wordpress/)
  • Step 4: You will see a mini-version of a blog… with themes and plugins.
  • Step 5: Customize your blog by copying the files/themes/plugins you use from your site to the same location in the wosserver (ie. wos server/www/wordpress directory).

Login details are on the folder in step 2. This is not a real blog, just a mini-blog. You can play with it all you want. Break it, too. Your real blog will be safe and carry on regardless. Some plugins may not work because they require additional features, or are not necessary at all (spam plugins, for example). If you want to import your database, you could do that, too. But you will need a plugin that allows you to import your db into the wosserver: wp-phpadmin plugin might work.

Have fun blogging, but don’t worry about borking your blog!

Update: I’ve had a weird issue with this software. If you download and expand the files to your desktop area, and run from there. It seems to work. Otherwise it won’t run properly if you put the files elsewhere. Apache seems to be  hurdle but I’m not sure about this. This is a pity: if you are like me, and you use your stick on a number of machines, the server may not run properly. Another possible workaround would be to set the drive for your USB stick to the same drive on all your machines. That might work. I’ll let you know.  The obvious solution: download the entire original file from the kind people at Wos.

WordPress 2.7 – Five Reasons You Shouldn’t Wait To Upgrade WordPress Today!

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With the recent and much anticipated release of WordPress 2.7, I was reluctant to upgrade some of my blogs because of past foibles, bugs and unexpected incompatibilities with plugins. So when I read that 2.7 was released, I was initially reluctant to upgrade ANY of my blogs. So I started with a couple of them, and updated, tested things out, and moved on. Ordinarily, I would have waited until 2.7.1 was released as a bug fix for some of the issues that area always present in a full release of WordPress.

Overall, I’ve been very impressed with WordPress 2.7, in the few days that I have used it, and I’m a little frustrated that some of the hosting companies I work with haven’t updated the software on CPanel yet. Of course, Dreamhost jumped in pretty early, and that’s why I was happy to try it out. I’d say that there are five basic reasons I like this version of WordPress more than any previous release.

1. A Simplified Dashboard: You can eliminate clutter!

The dashboard has long been a bone of contention for me, because of the tendency of WordPress to want to flaunt its gimmicks, updates and features to all and sundry. In this version, though, users get to turn off the feeds, through the screen options at the top right. Simply uncheck the things you don’t want. Voila!

wp admin area

Additional features that are helpful are the little downward arrow that occurs at the top of most boxes, in the top right corner of each box. Simply clicking on that arrow or area closes or opens the dialog box in an obvious fashion. You’ll see the downward pointing arrow next to tools (see highlighted area). It works simply in a toggle fashion. These toggle switches are all over the admin area. To find them, just hover over the task bar for each item on the right hand sided.

down arrow in wp admin

The dashboard area is divided into three areas: the sidebar on the left where each of the menu items can be opened and closed; the central column which includes the stats box, the writing box; and the right column that pretty much includes everything else. As you can see from mine, it’s easy enough to pick things up and move them around a lot. Clicking on the words “screen options” highlights an area where you can turn off things you don’t want to see.

The right sidebar includes several new designations which may be confusing to new users. First the ‘pages’ button has moved to just below ‘links’. It used to be located right next to ‘posts’. This confuses me now. I often hover between writing posts and pages, and now I have to look further afield to find the pages button. It seems illogical to place it after ‘links’.

The old ‘design’ menu has been renamed ‘appearance’ on 2.7 but functions in pretty much the same way as the its predecessor. The Tools menu, however, is a new one and features several items that were moved from the former ‘Manage’ menu, including import/export functions. The Upgrade items, though, hint at some of the new features of WordPress that make management much easier (more later).

2. Keeping Upgraded – it’s getting easier!

Plugins are getting easier to manage: You will soon no longer need to use FTP to upload stuff – plugins and core upgrades can all be done within WordPress itself. This leaves ‘themes’ as the only item that now needs FTP. I imagine that future versions of this will remedy this. Other software, such as Joomla or SMF, have long had this ability. Right now, you can upgrade a plugin in much the same way as uploading other items. Find the item ‘plugins’ on the left hand menu. Click it, and you will see it open slowly to reveal four options. To add a new plugin, click on the words ‘add new’, and you will be taken to a page where you can upload a zip file of the plugin which is uploaded and installed. After it’s done, you can activate it straight away. A nice touch. Just hit ‘install now’ to upload the plugin!

plugins management

It’s also much easier now to find new plugins. Take a look at the next screenshot: you will see what I mean! The tags below the upload button hint at the next page. These plugins are from WordPress.org’s own plugin area, and clicking on the tags reveals that they can all be downloaded and installed quickly and without any fuss.

install plugins

In fact, activating and inactivating plugins has also got easier as has removing unwanted plugins. Simply just click on the plugins area on the sidebar, usually under ‘plugins’ >>> ‘installed’ menu option. You’ll find it easy to manage plugins from there, including removing them completely!

But this plugin management hints at another feature (one that I have not needed to try yet)… upgrading WordPress can now be done entirely from WITHIN the admin panel. Take a look for yourself! Under Tools >>> Upgrade, you’ll see the following dialogue.

upgrade wordpress

Very tempting when you can choose to download and reinstall automatically. I have no idea how this works, yet. But it would be a neat variation IF you could upgrade from WITHIN the admin area. Perhaps this is just teasing us.

3. Commenting from WITHIN WordPress

Admins often had to comment in a very odd fashion before: read the comment in the comments area; find the post in the archive, read the post, and then comment in the comment box AFTER the end of the article. Now it’s much easier:

comments reply wordpress

Just hit ‘reply’ to answer the query and a simple but functional comment box will appear just below, enabling you to answer without messing around in the archives! Of course, this presumes that you remember what you wrote!

4. Quick Posting and Quick Editing

The commenting function also has another feature that hints at much more power: the quick edit button. Clicking on the Quick Edit enables you to edit the comment very quickly, without calling up the entire post or page where it is entered. But the ‘quick’ idea has been extended with in several ways: making a powerful trio of blogging tools.

QuickPress : on the admin page, when you login you’ll be taken to a dialog box that enables you to write a short post, with media and tags and publish it in a matter of minutes! While you don’t have a WYSIWYG editor, you can learn some simple codes to faciliate quick blogging (they’re all available in the Write Post area).

wp admin area

Quick Edit is also enabled in the post and page view, and allows you to quickly update a number of features (the usual suspects that a busy blogger will forget in the heat of the moment!): such as tags, categories, slug, date or more…

quick edit post

This combined with Press Links (shouldn’t it be called ‘Quick’ Links?) means that posting, editing, linking and commenting can all be carried out fairly rapidly.

5. You can now add media without creating post

This is another puzzle from the previous version that was finally finished! For years, I never thought about uploading media to WordPress. I simply created a post and added the stuff I wanted… until last month when I created a batch of videos and wanted to upload them all at once. I would have had to create a post and add each one one by tedious one! Now it seems, I can simply upload media as I need and when I’m ready I can create a post and find the media I already uploaded! It’s funny, but that’s something you don’t need, until you really need it! And now it’s here!

upload new media

Now it would be nice if I could upload a number of files at one go! Oh, wait! It does! Or at least I think it does! I’m practising uploading media now! Now I wonder how I can create a simple gallery from these files! …

Spam, Ham: What do you do with over 1000 of them in your comments queue?

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After New Year, I came back to a huge glut of spam in my database! I hadn’t configured a standard plugin because I thought the blog would go relatively unnoticed! Boy! Was I wrong or what? The queue contained over 1000 spams, that didn’t include spam in my comment plugin either.

spam I am

So how do you deal with a huge queue of spam like that? I spent ages clicking page after page when I realized that I was doing it the stupid way.

Continue reading →

30 Tweaks for Setting Up WordPress For the First Time

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This is a short checklist of items that I created when I was setting up a friend’s new blog. It’s pretty much all the tweaks, I make to a standard install of WordPress that I use.

Once you have created your admin user:

  • 1). Login and set the password to something you can remember!
  • 2). Update any pre-installed plugins that you need, remove any that you don’t.
  • 3). Set the title and Tagline in General Settings
  • 4). Check your WordPress address is correct
  • 5). Update your email address.
  • 6). Check the membership of the blog including the New User Role
  • 7). Don’t forget to check your timezone!
  • 8). Go to the writing tab, and check the size of the post box! I usually set mine to 15 lines.
  • 9). For remote publishing, I always check the XML-RPC box.
  • 10). Add any Update Services that you want to ping.

On the reading tab in Settings:

  • 11). Set your frontpage, to either blog style or have a static page.
  • 12). How many posts do you want per page? Five is a reasonable number
  • 13). Set your feed to show the ‘x’ most recent posts. I usually set that to 10 if I’m doing full feed or 25 if not.
  • 14). Set your feed to show the full text or summary. Most people recommend the full text for feeds.

On Discussion Settings:

  • 15). I always set “An administrator must always approve the comment” which is ideal for a new blog, and prevents unnecessary spam.

On the Privacy tab:

  • 16). I always set to “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” but if you’re for a small or private audience, then check the other option.

On the Permalinks tab:

  • 17). Set the options for your permalinks. I usually use the /%postname% tag with something else, for example ../archives/%postname%/

Plugins – There are two plugins that are pretty useful to get at the beginning:

  • 18.) Akismet for spam. You’ll need a WordPress.com API key for this.
  • 19.) WP-Cache Manager. You’ll need to activate it, enable the manager and set the time (in seconds).

Users Tab – On the Users tab, click to find your admin profile:

  • 20.) Set the Nickname to something you like. Hit ’save’.
  • 21.) Set your “Display name publicly as” to the Nickname in 20.)
  • 22.) Check your basic details, Website, and any Bio. Info.
  • 23.) Go to the Design Tab.

If you have a good host, you’ll have a variety of themes pre-installed.

  • 23.) Find a good one, activate it.
  • 24.) Go to the Widgets and select the ones you need.
  • 25.) Go to the Theme Editor…
  • 25.) Add your Google Analytics code in the footer!
  • 26.) Add any other code that you might need to the footer.

General Tidying Up: Let’s set the links categories

  • 27.) You will need to decide what links categories you need.
  • 28.) Remove or add any particular links you need in the blogroll.
  • 29.) Set your initial categories for posts, too.
  • 30.) Remove the Hello World post and default links in the blogroll!

This has been honed over numerous installs of WordPress, but is by no means the only possible set. If there are any errors, please read the comments and submit one!

WordPress 2.7 is coming – the preview…

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Well, WordPress 2.7 is just around the corner, yet another upgrade, yet another version that is likely to introduce all the things we love and hate about WordPress

New Features and Bugs

Take a look… I won’t be in the first wave of upgrades at all. I’ll likely hang around for version 2.7.1 before upgrading unless there’s an immediate requirement to upgrade.

I think the interface will be useful and more friendly, but I won’t really know until my customers have tried it out! For more information, check out an extended discussion at WebTools Collection.

WordPress 2.7 is coming – the preview…

Posted on by

Well, WordPress 2.7 is just around the corner, yet another upgrade, yet another version that is likely to introduce all the things we love and hate about WordPress

New Features and Bugs

Take a look… I won’t be in the first wave of upgrades at all. I’ll likely hang around for version 2.7.1 before upgrading unless there’s an immediate requirement to upgrade.

I think the interface will be useful and more friendly, but I won’t really know until my customers have tried it out! For more information, check out an extended discussion at WebTools Collection.

Blogging News: Updates on InvestorBlogger Dot Com

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My, how things change? Last November, I was railing against Google and telling people to diversity their services… Now I’m finding that things have changed again…

A Quick Recap: Switching to WordPress MU

I’ve reset some of my categories as sub-blogs (or ‘channels’) on the InvestorBlogger Domain. I found that there were basically three or four types of reader, and so I wasn’t gaining much traction with any of my target groups. Hence, each channel is now its own ‘blog’.

One blog: Many Channels

From the outside, it’s nearly impossible to tell that this is the case. I haven’t changed the theme unduly, or the plugins or the widgets. But as you click through the ‘blog’ you’ll find that each blog is beginning to take on its own ‘personality’. At the moment, I’m binding each blog together because there is strength in the shared roots: so the theme, the footer and header, and much of the sidebars are the same.

But as time goes on, more differences will start to emerge. One example: advertisements are mostly for financial products, so these will no longer be shown to users on the ‘blogging’ area. Other sidebar details will change, too. Eventually, I may break up the site into real blogs (either because they can stand on their own or they are pulling in VERY different directions). Since the switch in early August, there hasn’t been enough time to assess the impact on traffic any more than casually but early indications are showing an increase in traffic, page views, unique page views, longer times on the site, and a modestly decreased bounce rate.

The changes that I’ve made are currently difficult to make in standard WordPress installs, though there are several multi-blog plugins for WordPress that would achieve much of what I did here. I eventually decided to opt for a standard MU install, and expected a tough struggle. To tell you the truth, some things are troublesome, but I was able to solve nearly ALL my initial problems.

If you have a largeish blog, with weak traffic numbers, splitting your blog the way I have could be the way to salvage your traffic, create a new impetus and improve your own blogging. The route I chose with WordPress MU isn’t the only possible route to go: two or three WordPress installs would be perfectly manageable as well, a multi-blog with WordPress Standard could work, or choosing another multi-blog system like B2 evolution would allow the same privileges. One word of caution: don’t split your blog into too many parts, I initially thought I would have five channels, but it was just too much to administer at the beginning. But the great advantage of a multi-blog set up: you can easily expand past your initial setup!

Sidebar Changes

I’ve been experimenting with ways to make InvestorBlogger stickier for some time now, and the sidebar features a number of small changes: YouTube Video, a Featurific flash gallery that shows some recent stories, and a Tag Cloud. The tag cloud itself necessitated typing tags for each of the posts, so for new posts and posts ‘moved’ to the new blogs, I’ve taken extra steps to tag everything.

google stats august

SEO, Traffic and Google

Other changes include maximizing the impact of each article: I’m now adding SEO to each article, as well as the blog itself, through selective choices in the keywords. The plugin that I’m using is ALL-In-One SEO that allows each post to have its own post title, keywords and description in the meta details. Adding tags to the article itself is also helping. There’s no big effect on traffic yet, but it can’t but help traffic.

AdWords for Google

I’ve also been experimenting with AdWords, too, to see if I can draw extra traffic to InvestorBlogger. I do have several products that are free that I’d like to promote. It’s quite exciting, a little expensive, and frustrating to get CTR rates that are as low as mine. The best I’ve achieved so far is about 0.7%. I’m going to keep plugging away at the CTR to see if I can’t raise the bar. Steve has loaned me a wonderful book on how to use AdWords.

Adsense from Google

It seems that InvestorBlogger is no longer smart priced… How? Well, I’ve made three significant changes to the way Adsense is displayed on my blogs… I’ll be posting that soon, but for observant users, you will already notice the changes! But CTR rates and earnings are showing positive growth for the first time in ages, and they seem pretty stable at the moment, too. Sometimes less is more.

Et Cetera…

There are a whole bunch of other changes, too, in the header, footer and elsewhere. At the moment, I’m sticking with this theme, and tweaking as much as possible. I decided in the meantime to create some essential pages, like a privacy policy, comment policy, rewrite my disclaimer and add a few other important pages. If my plans really come to fruition, much of this work will be the solid foundation from which I will expand InvestorBlogger.

izearanks placement

And finally, it seems the changes are beginning to pay off, even though my posting rate is now less than before. InvestorBlogger is now #9 on the top 10 finance sites on IzeaRanks! Wow! That’s incredible. It’s a minor honor! I’d like to be number 1, but I don’t see how that’s possible just yet. I would need to increase my pages by nearly 5 times! It could be done… but things are not ready yet!

WordPress MU vs. WordPress Vanilla

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It’s been about a week and a half of using WPMU, since I switched full time. And it’s been a real trial but I am slowly bringing the blogs back to full speed. Obviously, blogging is going slowly and each stream will be less frequent than the full blog, at least until I’m more able to handle the beast called MU.

It’s not for newbies!

WordPress is a great application for bloggers, and it’s a great way for relative newbies to cut their teeth on managing, installing and updating a PHP based system. It’s fairly robust on the installation front, quite stable once running. However, WordPress MU shares many of the features, it’s a little more tricky to set up; but the limitations (mostly for security) really drive me nuts at times!

Stubborn and spiteful

There are quite a few issues with plugins, themes and general wordpress functionality in the MU environment. In general, Javascript and other scripts DO NOT work out of the box. Additionally, some common and important plugins just don’t play nice with MU at all. I’ve had problems with the sitemap plugin, and several that share the database. Any themes that require any plugin with javascripts or popular database reliant plugins will likely encounter severe problems. And you can forget YouTube Videos out of the box, though there are solutions.

Forums and Advice

If you are considering switching to MU, then consider this: many of the plugins that I have tried, (for example, to install Adsense or YouTube) simply don’t work, though you’ll find the odd one that is worth it’s weight in Gold. Similarly, advice that is posted on forums, blogs and the Codex may or may not be relevant to your install, and there’s little to tell either way.

So, if you are considering switching, I’d suggest a trial install of MU on another domain so that you can figure out if you will be happy with the switch. I’m still finding the problems annoying, but I am not switching back: the power of this platform is surprising, and I’m only beginning to understand what I can do.

Have you tried the switch? Let me know how it went!