Archives For WordPress

Working toward A Brighter Web

January 24, 2012 — 3 Comments

A Brighter WebOver the years I’ve posted quite a few video tutorials on here and on other sites.  The problem is that they were scattered all over — many on here, quite a few on Google Earth Blog, various ones on my Google+ account, etc.  Recently I set out to get all of those organized, and the result seems to be pretty good.

With the help of Ali Green, we’ve put together a new site called A Brighter Web.  On the site we have over 60 video tutorials on topics such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and WordPress.  We’re adding a few new videos every day, and we’ll be expanding our range of topics over time.

With that in mind, what would you like to see on a site like that?  More social platforms, like FourSquare and LinkedIn?  Or perhaps software tutorials, like Photoshop?  Leave a comment and let us know what you’d like to see, and we’ll certainly take your ideas into consideration moving foward.

Thanks!

In Facebook, Social Media, Technology, Twitter, Videos, WordPress , , , , , ,
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My favorite WordPress plug-ins

May 1, 2011 — 4 Comments

Three years ago I wrote up a list of my favorite plug-ins, and decided that it was well past time to give the list a fresh look.  While many of them have stayed the same, I’ve got a few additions and a few deletions.

The ones that stayed the same

These plug-ins have certainly been updated in the past few years, but remain part of every blog I manage:

Akismet – Amazingly awesome spam fighting plugin.

FeedBurner Feedsmith – I still run all of my blog RSS feeds through FeedBurner, and this is a great plug-in to quietly redirect visitors over there.

Google XML Sitemaps – A simple way to generate an XML sitemap and automatically notify search engines of your new posts.

Highlight Author Comments – Make your replies stand out when you reply to comments on a post of yours.

Subscribe to Comments – Allow users to get email notifications of new posts after they leave one.  I love when blogs have this, so I can be notified if someone replies to my comment and then we can continue the conversation.

The ones that I’ve moved away from

Here are the plug-ins that I no longer use regularly, for one reason or another:

All in One SEO Pack -Most of the themes that I use (typically from StudioPress) have great SEO baked right in and this is less important.

Enhanced WP Contact Form – I’ve switched to Wufoo for virtually all of my forms.

Fancy Zoom – I still use it from time to time, but most themes have better image management.

Top Commentators – This isn’t really a bad plug-in, I simply don’t use it any more.

Sociable – I’ve removed this in favor of Twitter and Facebook-specific plug-ins, shown below.

Twitter Tools – I now use dlvr.it to handle this instead, but I use it rather sparingly; be fresh on Twitter, not automated!

WordPress.com Stats – Still a great plugin, and I use it on a few blogs, but I primarily rely on Google Analytics.

The new additions!

I’ve dropped some plug-ins, but also added some new ones over the past few years such as:

Canonical URL’s – A very simple plug-in to add the canonical tag to your pages.  Not overly helpful in many cases, but can be excellent for your SEO sometimes.  (What is the canonical tag?)

PuSHPress – This enabled PuSubHubbub support for your blog. In short, it makes sure that RSS readers and others will get your posts instantly, rather than the next time they check in a few hours.  (more about the PuSHPress plugin)

RSS Footer – This adds a line of text (with a few links) the bottom of each post in your RSS feed.  The basic idea is that if someone is scraping your site and posting it as their own, you’ll at least still get some free links back to your site!

Twitter Button for WordPress – A simple way to add a “tweet” button to your posts.

WP FB Like Button – A simple way to add a Facebook “like” button to your posts.

WPtouch – A great plug-in that creates a mobile version of your site and automatically serves it to mobile phones when they connect.

You?

What about you?  Any other killer plugins that I’m missing from the list?

In Analytics, Facebook, Mobile, SEO, Technology, Twitter, WordPress , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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I’ve installed WordPress — now what?

April 18, 2011 — 1 Comment

A lot of you have been watching my “How to install WordPress in less than 10 minutes” video, but I’ve been asked the same question a few times: “After I install it, then what?”

This short video will show you some of the next steps I take after I’ve installed WordPress to help make the site ready for prime time — setting up comment features, permalinks, etc.

If you need additional help with your blog, I’m continuing to add more videos to my “Simple WordPress Tutorials” post, so check it out.  If you’re trying to do something that isn’t listed on that page, let me know and I’ll create a screencast for you.

Update: This video can now also be found at A Brighter Web.

In Videos, WordPress ,
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Some simple WordPress tutorials

April 12, 2011 — 4 Comments

If you’re just getting started with WordPress and you’re stuck on how to use some of the features, I hope that the videos below will be helpful.  You’ll find four short videos in this post, to show you how to create links, add images, add PDFs and embed videos.  Enjoy!

These videos have been moved to the WordPress section of A Brighter Web, along with many others to help you with your WordPress site!

In Videos, WordPress , , , , , ,
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How to install WordPress in less than 10 minutes

October 12, 2010 — 3 Comments

I talk about WordPress quite a lot on this blog.  It’s an excellent blogging platform, and it’s a great addition to almost any site — as long as you have time to write on it.

However, some people get intimidated by the idea of installing it and end up using Blogger or something else instead.  Long-term, having the software installed on your own server offers a lot of advantages, so here’s how it’s done.

Before we get started you’ll need to do a few things:

  • Get hosting established. For this tutorial I’m using a cPanel-based host (like ClickHost), though most hosts will be similar.
  • Get your FTP software installed and configured. The FTP software I use is completely free and is called FileZilla.  Your hosting company will provide your username and password, which you put into the software.
  • Find the location of your hosting “control panel”.  Again, this will be provided by your hosting provider.

During the install, I’ll be going out to wordpress.org to download the software.  Note that wordpress.com is something different — be sure you’re going to the .org site.

Ready? Here we go.

After you’ve finished installing WordPress, check out “I’ve Installed WordPress — now what?” for some suggested next steps to take.

Update: This video is also now available over on A Brighter Web

In Videos, WordPress , , , ,
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More clicks = better rankings in Google?

September 19, 2010 — Leave a comment

I was talking to @jasonbhuffman on Twitter about search engine optimization on his church site, and he told me this:

I was informed that on Google, more clicks on a particular site would cause it to be listed higher in certain searches.

Google won’t confirm or deny whether or not clicks can help, so know one knows for sure, but most experts agree with the following:

  • Clicks from Google search result pages possibly help. If you come up fourth for a particular phrase, yet more people click your result than the third listing, it seems there’s a chance you could move up.
  • Clicks from other pages (like Twitter) to your site are unlikely to help. While Google can often see clicks from other sites via the Google toolbar or Google Analytics installed on your site, it doesn’t appear to have an effect on your rankings at this point.

Of course, clicks from sites like Twitter are still certainly excellent, since they’re visitors!  Even if it doesn’t have a secondary benefit, you’re still getting someone on your site, which is the entire goal.

So what can be done?

Jason’s site is First UMC Palestine, so I thought I’d offer a few other on-site SEO tips that might help.  There are really two things that we need to focus on:

  1. Make sure that Google is aware that the church is located in Palestine, TX, so they can rank well when people refine their search to that area (like “churches in palestine tx”).
  2. Make sure pages focus on their primary content, so Google will know when to show those pages.  As a result, we want to rank well when people search for specific things in the area, like “palestine preschool” or “vbs in palestine”.

So, here’s a few things that should help:

  • First, clean up the page titles.  The title on the home page is incredibly long, and titles on the internal pages are missing some nice keywords.
  • Add more internal links. For example, the list of worship services on the left side of the home page should link to details about those searches.  Use the main text on each page to link to other relevant pages, but do it naturally.  If you mention the preschool, link to that page, but don’t try to force extra links in there.
  • Build separate pages for each staff member, with the full list of them on the main “staff” page.
  • Avoid saying “click here”, which I noticed in a few places.  Link the relevant text every time.
  • Keep posting great blog entries.  Each of those have the potential to pull in some visitors from Google, especially if we can get the page titles cleaned up so that each one has more of a “palestine” pull to it.
  • Remove the link to the “Arras Theme” in the footer.  They allow you to remove it, but I agree that you should give them a small donation in exchange for it ($10?). Here’s why that will help.
  • Get more links pointed to your site.  Our link at the top of this article will help, but now you need a bunch more as well.  Get church members to add a link from their personal blogs, see if any Palestine-centric sites (Chamber of Commerce, etc) will link to you.  Any inbound link will help.

Over time, those should help you rank better.  You don’t appear to have Google Analytics installed, so I hope you have some way of accurately tracking your traffic to see how things change and improve.

In Analytics, Church, SEO , , , , , ,
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WordPress plugins; less clutter, more Facebook and Twitter

August 12, 2010 — 1 Comment

Right now I’m in the process of changing up some of the social icons on my various sites.  For a few years now, I’ve been a fan of the Sociable plugin for WordPress.  It’s an excellent plugin that makes it easy to add quick links to various social site (Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc) for users to click on.

It looks something like this:

It’s a great plugin, but I was wanting more.  A few months ago, Facebook released a pretty slick “Like” button that could be added to sites, and just recently Twitter added a similar “Tweet” button.  Rather than being simple links like the buttons above, these buttons are much more interactive.  You can see who else has tweeted/linked the post, and users can tweet/like without having to leave the page.

The problem then became clutter. If I added both of the new buttons and still kept sociable, I’d be making things rather messy.  So, Sociable had to go.

You can install the buttons manually if you want, but I found a few simple plug-ins to do the job for me instead.  There are many to choose from (and all of them are quite similar), but I’m using:

So far, I like them!  While it’s kind of a shame to lose the other icons, these are the two that people use overwhelmingly, and I really like how much cleaner things look.

You can see the new buttons just below this post.

What do you think?  Have you installed either of these on your site yet?

In Facebook, Social Media, Twitter, WordPress , , , ,
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Being productive on the road

August 5, 2010 — 3 Comments

I’ve worked hard for the last few years to be productive while away from the office, but a recent trip to Michigan showed me what I was lacking.

I have three primary computers; a beefy desktop, a solid laptop, and a netbook.  My goal is to be able to pick up any of the three machines at any time and have virtually all of my tools available to me.  Using web-based services such as Gmail and Nozbe are easy, but the challenge has been with desktop-based software like code-authoring and FTP tools.  I’ve just about got it worked out, so here’s what my arsenal looks like today.

The tools I’ve used for a while

Gmail – Love it. Being web-based it’s available on any computer I’m using and has a great interface on my Droid X

Google Reader, Calendar, Analytics, etc – All are web-based.

Nozbe – For task management. I have dozens of projects in there and it works great. Despite searching for something better, I haven’t found it.  Nozbe is still doing a great job.  No Android app yet, but their mobile version is good enough.

Evernote – I have it loaded on all three computers (along with their weak Android app), so they’re always in sync with my 500+ notes.

Dropbox – Aside from personal photos and videos, ALL of my files are in there; more than 15,000 of them, taking over 13GB of space.  Every file is accessible from any of the three computers and from their Android app.

Tweetdeck / Sobees – I use Sobees on my main computer (more screen real estate to play with) and Tweetdeck on the laptops.  On Android I’m currently using Seesmic and I’m quite pleased with it. Since they all pull directly from my Twitter account, they’re automatically in sync.

The new tools

Now, none of that stuff is particularly new to me.  I’ve been doing that for a while and it’s worked great.  My problem is when a client needs something fixed and I’m on the “wrong” computer.  I’ve used Dreamweaver for years (love the way it handles FTP and code coloring) and a variety of FTP clients.  The problem is that I’d add FTP info on one machine, but I’d need to add it on the others as well.  This wasn’t a big problem since I keep that information handy (mostly in Evernote), but it was a pain.

The problem became worse because WordPress 3.0.1 was released while I was up north this time.  I’m responsible for nearly 80 WordPress installations (some are mine, some are friends, some are clients, etc), and the quickest way to update them is to find the “changed files” each time and push them up via FTP.  I had all of those sites saved in my FTP software at home, but only a handful on the laptop.  Finding and loading the credentials for the others would have taken quite a while.  Even then, I still wouldn’t have them on the netbook or in Dreamweaver on either machine.

My solution was a few portable applications. “Portable” applications are designed to run off of a thumbdrive.  It’s quite cool; pop the thumbdrive into a computer, and run the application directly from there — no installation necessary.  For an IT person that needs to carry around various anti-virus and other tools, it’s gold.

For me, the great part about these apps is that they can be installed within Dropbox and run from there.  I loaded FileZilla Portable to handle FTP and I purchased phpDesigner7 Portable to handle code writing/edits.  I spent a few hours and loaded the credentials for all of my sites into both programs, and now I’m rolling!  Any edits to either program get automatically saved to Dropbox and synced to the other machines.

So far it’s working out great.  Not only am I looking forward to my next trip, but it’ll make purchasing a new computer much easier; I simply install/sync Dropbox and Evernote and I’m nearly done!

How do you manage software/data across multiple computers?

In Productivity, Technology, Twitter, WordPress , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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If you have a WordPress blog, install the PuSHPress plugin right now

March 19, 2010 — Leave a comment

A nifty new plugin has just been released for WordPress.  It’s tiny, requires no configuration, and does it’s work behind the scenes.  The plugin is called PuSHPress, and it helps get your content out there much more quickly.

The past, Google would check your site periodically and then post your new content to Google Reader (and other places) after it was discovered.  Last year, a new protocol called PubSubHubbub was introduced, as a way to speed up that process.  In short, it gave you an easy way to tell Google (and others) when you had new posts ready for them, rather than waiting for them to find you.  Here’s how it works:

This new WordPress plugin is a simple way to enable PubSubHubbub on your blog.  No tweaking, no setup.  Just install and activate the plugin and you’re done!

For more, check out the full article on 10e20.

In SEO, WordPress , , , , , ,
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Organize Your Digital Life 6 – Streamline your lifestream

December 14, 2009 — 14 Comments

This is the sixth in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

Whether you realize it or not, most of you are creating a “lifestream” of some sort.  Your Twitter updates, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and other assorted items are out there on the web in a haphazard fashion.  Getting that organized can be beneficial in a lot of ways.

For most people, there are two aspects of this that need to be tweaked:

  • Posting updates to a wide variety of services, rather than having to update each service individually.
  • Getting all of your various updates (status, pics, vids) to show up in one place.

:: Posting updates to a wide variety of services

I wrote a fairly comprehensive post on this a few weeks ago, which pretty much tells you what you need to know.  In a nutshell, I recommend that you use ping.fm to handle the bulk of your updates.  It takes some time to configure for the first time, but once you have it set up it’s a huge time-saver.  You can post one status update on there and it’ll post to all of your networks — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and about 50 others.  It’s superb.

For photos and videos, I’ve started using Posterous.  It’s a very popular micro-blogging tool that allows you to post new items via email, from their site, or using a mobile app.  It can be configured to post to a variety of services, to the point where it duplicates much of what Ping.fm does.  However, Ping can post to a lot more, so I confine my Posterous posting to simply images and video.

It may look a bit confusing a first, but check out the image below.  Depending on what kind of item I want to push out (on the left), you can see the path that it takes.  All of that really only requires setting up accounts on two sites (Ping and Posterous), assuming you already have accounts on the destination sites.

outgoing-lifestreamThe only real downside to this setup is that pictures and videos don’t get pushed out to the “various other microblogging sites”.  It’s a small price to pay, since Twitter/Facebook are the main ones for me right now anyhow.

:: Getting all of your various updates to show up in one place.

This one isn’t as important to most people, but I’ve just spent some time figuring out the best way to handle this so I thought I’d share my findings.

My goal was to create a single page that would always pull in my latest “stuff”; blog entries, twitter posts, flickr photos, youtube videos, etc.  Here’s what I considered:

  • storytlr: From what I can tell, this site did exactly what I wanted.  Unfortunately, they’re shutting down at the end of 2009.  Quite a shame…
  • posterous: If I chose to push my status updates through Posterous, it would essentially contain my lifestream.  Some people do it this way and it works well.  However, I have a lot of other sites configured in Ping.fm that I don’t want to leave out.  Posterous is adding new features constantly, and it might fit the bill in a year or two.
  • Sweetcron: This is a nifty script that you can load on your server.  It’s very customizable and you can do a lot with it.  I ran it as my lifestream for a while, but it seemed to have some issues (duplicate posts, broken videos, etc).  When I went to get a newer version of the code, I found that it hadn’t been updated in over a year.  It’s never good to hitch your site to an abandoned tool.
  • Lifestream.fm: This had it all in theory, but the site seemed quite buggy to me.  I sometimes couldn’t add new feeds, things wouldn’t appear, etc.  Also, ideally, I’d like the lifestream to show up on my domain, not theirs.
  • wp-Lifestream: A lifestreaming plug-in for WordPress.  It supports a large number of sources and integrates nicely into WordPress.

I tried all of them to some degree, and ended up going with wp-Lifestream.  Not only does it support the usual suspects, but it has a few neat ties to other sites (like Gowalla).

The result is my lifestream page. It pulls in:

  • My latest posts on this blog
  • My latest images posted to Flickr
  • My latest videos posted to YouTube
  • My latest Tweets
  • My latest check-ins using Gowalla
  • My latest posts on a few other blogs I write for

It’s certainly not perfect, but it works well.

What do you use for your lifestream?

This is the sixth in a series of posts in the Organize Your Digital Life series.

In Facebook, Social Media, Technology, Twitter , , , , , , , , , , ,
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