Shaun Low

I gave my mom my old weight loss blog a few years back. In spite of publishing it on its own domain (smart) I was still using Blogger (dumb) when I gave it to her. It is not that Blogger is bad, but that Wordpress offers so many customization options that allow you to effectively rank for a wider array of keywords, and thus earn more per word.

These are the steps I did to help move her blog over from Blogger to Wordpress.

Step 1: Download and install Wordpress (also requires setting up a MySQL database).

Step 2: Make Wordpress URL configurations.

Step 3: Cloned my mom’s old blogger theme design using Themepress (cost $10), and then had to hack the CSS by hand for about 10 minutes.

After verifying the layout was fairly decent I deleted the blogroll links and the opening post.

Step 4: publish my mom’s old blog onto blogspot.com so I could import it to Wordpress using the one click import located at domainname.com/wp-admin/import.php

After importing it I used Blogger to republish the blog back to her domain instead of leaving a copy on Blogspot, such that she does not have a stray cloned version of her site floating around.

Once import was complete I looked it over and verified it generally looked good. If you still have your old site up you can view the Wordpress blog version by going to yoursite.com/index.php (presuming you installed Wordpress in the root of your site).

Step 5: rewrite the .htaccess file to include both the Wordpress specific functions and rewrite rules needed to lose the dates from the URLs. The exact .htaccess file you need to write depends on your old URL structure and file extensions (the below one redirects html and shtml files). Our .htaccess file looked like this (note there were a few dozen lines like the first line, but I limited it to one in this example for brevity)

Please note that when Wordpress imports your blog some of the stop words are removed from the URLs, which can end up creating some mean 404 errors until you line up the new URLs with the old ones (which we deal with in step 7). Also, if you used Blogger tag pages then you might need to make your .htaccess file a bit more complex than the above one, adding entries to redirect the tag pages.

Step 6: Delete my mom’s old static file archives.

If you are afraid that something might get hosed up with the move you can rename the old archive files and folders. For example:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reading Blogging Heroes by Michael Banks and I’ve noticed that throughout the 30 interviews (I’ve read 28 of them so far.) that there are a couple of common themes that all of these professional bloggers tend to come back to. Some of the folks that are interviewed include Mary Jo Foley, Gina Trapani, Chris Anderson, Philipp Lenssen, Frank Warren, Steve Rubel, Gary Lee, Robert Scoble, Peter Rojas, Rebecca Lieb, John Neff and Brad Hill.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like most bloggers, I struggle with true metrics for my blog. The problem isn’t so much about technology as it is about understanding what is useful to know about my blog to make it better and attract more of an audience. I’ve got lots of metrics that I can look at today, from my Technorati ranking to where my blog is on the Power150 list. I can check the number of comments I get, or look at the number of daily or monthly impressions. There are several big problems with any of these approaches, though:

1. RSS skews most metrics - When readers are consuming your posts through RSS, most of the time they don’t need to visit your site. While this may reduce your page views and monthly visitors, it can often lead to a greater engagement and wider distribution. 
2. Inbound links aren’t all equal - Perhaps the greatest injustice of many metrics systems today is that they reward “linkbait listing” (the activity of listing a large number of blogs and links in the hopes those sites will also link back to you). As a result being part of some of these lists, some blogs can be propelled to higher numbers of links and authority without producing any quality content to earn it.
3. Content expires though it may still be relevant - One of the most frustrating things about Technorati as a tool is that it expires older content. There is lots of good content that is getting ignored simply because it was written over six months ago.
4. There are multiple ways to measure engagement - Looking only at links to a post or comments are incomplete measures. People use different sites and different ways to engage with content, from commenting to saving it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every day hackers sit out there an pray on good sites for no good reason. Some days they are even successful. In the past few months I’ve worked with a few blogs to detect and remove hidden code that was causing various unwanted issues. It happens to the best of blogs, and knowing how to find and remove it is just as important as trying to prevent it.

Blog #1 - The iFrame - The first indicator that something was wrong here was the time it took the blog to load. It seemed abnormally long. I popped open Safari’s activity window and noticed it was connecting out to an IP address that I didn’t recognize.
Read the rest of this entry »

Embedded comments, and star ratings

Google’s Blogger has a couple of new features available at the special Blogger Draft site. Among these changes are:

• Star ratings: Let your visitors vote from one to five stars. You will then be able to see the average rating for a particular post. You can find this feature at your Layouts page; click Edit at your Blog Posts element, and check the Show Star Ratings box.
• The ability to put the comments form embedded below the post. Blogger’s old comments functionality had very low usability for a couple of reasons; one of them was that it took you to a separate layout when you wanted to comment. To enable this change bringing better integration, switch to Settings -> Comments, and in the Comment Form Placement segment check the “Embedded below post” box. Click Save Settings to approve. Who would’ve thought the day would come…
• Integration into Google Webmaster tools. You can now follow a dashboard link reading Webmaster Tools. Automatically, all your Blogspot blogs will be added to the tools suite, though they still remain to be verified. With Google webmaster tools, you can utilize statistic information and diagnostics, for instance.
• Exporting and importing your blog. Google announced you can now export all of your blog posts into a single (Atom-formatted) XML file to allow for a backup… or perhaps, to allow to move to another blogging system, or do something else with the data. Reversely, you can also import that file back into your system. To give this a try switch to the Settings page for your blog; you’ll find the links “Import blog” and “Export blog” on top. Exporting will trigger a download named e.g. “blog-06-27-2008.xml” (this might fare better with the ISO date format yyyy-mm-dd).
• A new post editor. The new post editor has a different image handling. Google says, “When you upload an image to the new post editor it will appear as a thumbnail in the image dialog box. That way, you can upload several images at once, and then add them into your post at your convenience.” Also, the HTML editing mode saw a couple of improvements; <br>eaks won’t be added automatically, and there will be a clearer formatting with new lines for generated HTML.

These features are also further detailed in the Blogger in Draft blog. If you don’t want to always visit the special draft.blogger.com URL, you can now also make the Draft mode your default mode; look for the checkbox reading “Make Blogger in Draft my default dashboard” at the top of your dashboard.

[Thanks DPic and Mrrix32!]

Comments

About the author:
Philipp Lenssen from Germany, author of 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, shares his views & news on the search industry in the daily Google Blogoscoped.

Question: I’m running a weblog for my company and we have some people from the business community who are adding comments after our blog entries, which is great. Other people who we don’t know put in incorrect or off topic remarks and I want to just delete them, but I’m not sure whether that’s okay or not. Specifically, isn’t it censorship if I delete the remarks people leave on our site?

Dave’s Answer:

Let’s start by defining our terms. Here’s a simple definition of censorship for us to work with: “The practice of suppressing a text or part of a text that is considered objectionable according to certain standards.”

If you host a party at your office and someone comes in off the street, spouting obscenities and saying comments that are patently offensive to the rest of the participants, should you ask that person to leave? Of course you should. That’s because they’re violating the standards of behavior expected of people at a business party or other social event. Of course, those standards are going to vary based on the group too, so a clique of rough and tumble bikers or street gang members is going to have a very different set of behavioral standards than the symphony society tea, but in both cases, there is a definite expectation of acceptable behavior.

When we turn to the written word, be it online or physical documents, there are similar standards, similar expectations of behavior and discorse, and if those standards are violated, there’s no reason that those comments or letters should be published or retained.

Ah, but what about freedom of speech, which is defined as “the concept of the inherent human right to voice one’s opinion publicly without fear of censorship or punishment.” That’s critically important too, but there’s a contextual element to this freedom that is often forgotten. The Constitution actually says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” It’s about laws restricting this freedom, the amendment to the Constitution isn’t about the freedom to say anything at any time or place. That’s actually restricted by libel and slander laws, among other things.

Your weblog is a private publication, as is the Boulder Daily Camera, my hometown newspaper, and while it may serve the public good, there’s no law, no legal nor moral obligation that every terrible, crude, rude, offensive or hostile comment left need be retained.

It’s okay to delete comments that are in violation of your site’s standards of conduct, whether stated explicitly or not.

The Daily Camera has just such a standard of conduct defined too, summarized as “You agree not to post comments that are off topic, defamatory, obscene, abusive, threatening or an invasion of privacy.” Post something like that and odds are very good that it’ll be promptly deleted.

To learn more about how the paper applies this guideline, I asked online editor Jennifer Falor how they determine whether a given comment is over the line or not. Here’s what she said: “We don’t actively monitor the comments. Users flag comments they believe break the User Agreement and that sends an e-mail to city editor Matt Sebastian and I. We quickly look at the comment and then have to make a decision whether to delete it or not. Usually it’s cut and dry.”

That’s for the easy stuff. What about the less obvious comments that one person might find offensive but others might think is an important voice or perspective to hold in the debate? Jennifer: “Some comments are more difficult. Users post things that I personally believe are inappropriate, insensitive or disgusting. However, as long as they’re not explicitly breaking one of the rules, we really can’t justify deleting the comment.”

Finally, she’ll get opinions from other members of the Camera staff, and “if we both come to the same decision, it’s an easy call. If we don’t agree, we usually err on leaving the comment up.”

Is it censorship? Is the Daily Camera violating the constitutional freedoms of the online community by managing the comments left on the site and deleting those that are considered inappropriate or in violation of the user agreement? Jennifer explains “I do not believe that it’s censorship when we delete comments. We are a private business and can make decisions about what kinds of content we want displayed on our Web site.”

So there you have it. I manage the content on my weblogs closely to ensure that the discourse remains high quality, and with a different mechanism and are more careful approach, the Daily Camera does exactly the same thing. I suggest to you that it’s not only acceptable but critical that you do the same with the comments left on your company’s weblog too.

Comments

About the author:
Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is
internationally known as an expert on both business and technology issues.
Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four
startups, he also runs a strategic marketing company and consults with firms
seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave
is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast
programs.

AskDaveTaylor.com
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/

I think the hardest thing for a blogger is the moment that the initial newness and excitement wears off. You are faced with what is perhaps one of the hardest realizations: and that is, “I have to keep this going”.

As I have completed my first 100 blog posts on the Ignite blog, it is apparent that I’ve had ups and downs in blogging. There were some weeks where I would be on a roll and write a blog post daily, and yet other weeks when I breathed a sigh of relief that Jim or another Igniter posted something.

Surely, having a large of amount of client work has been one culprit to these inconsistencies, but quite often these were due to the difficulties of blogging itself. Many times I had come to a place where I thought, “I can’t think of anything to write about”, and felt the pain of scraping to find something else to write.

Last week, I finally read a blog post that put this feeling into writing, and if you are a blogger I highly suggest reading it. It was an article entitled, “Leaning into the Blogging Dip“, written by Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger, and was partly a review of Seth Godins book “The Dip“, combined with his own experiences as a blogger and his commitments to overcoming his struggles. In short, this article put a finger on exactly what I have felt as a blogger - while giving perhaps the best advice I’ve heard in how to deal with it.

His advice? You’ve got to lean into it. Don’t try to convince yourself you need a “blogging vacation”, or that you need to wait until you are “inspired”. Instead, he has shared the following promises he is going to use to push through his “blogging dips”:

* I need to write when I don’t think I’ve got anything new to say
* I’ve got to write when I’ve got too much to say.
* I’ve got to write when I learn something new so I can share it with my readers.
* I’ve got to write when I find something “old” that’s valuable and convince my readers that it’s worth examining.
* I’ve got to write when I feel confident and relaxed.
* I’ve got to write when every word that comes out seems like crap.
* And I’ve got to write during all of the times in between.

After reading these, I’ve decided to commit to this same philosophy, and will probably pick up a copy of Seth’s book to get even more inspired.

So here’s to 100 more posts, and pushing through the dips along the way!

Comments

About the author:
As a Social Media Strategist for Ignite Social Media, Lisa McNeill outlines social media tactics and develops social media campaigns to help companies reach customers and build brand advocates. Her expertise in project management and marketing additionally guides the execution of these campaigns.

I got several emails when I had published my new site design about how to style only the first post of the blog in Wordpress. This tactic can be handy to call out the very first post so that the readers attention is on the most recent topic for your blog. It is actually very easy, and may not be the best PHP in the world but it works perfectly.

Now the only problem with using this method is that you will have every first post on every index page styled this way. I haven’t played around with how to avoid that because that is the way I intended to design it. Perhaps someone has an idea on avoiding that if it is needed.

In your index.php file for your Wordpress theme you want to find your post container div (or whatever markup wraps your entire post). In the class area of this post you want to add a space after the first class (assuming you have a first class) and use the following PHP:

What this PHP will do is check to see if the variable $post is set with the string “set” and if it is not set with that string then it will echo out the class “firstPost” and then set the variable. Once the variable has been set each post afterwards will not echo out that class. Thereby creating a unique class for your first post that you can style however you want.

May be a little sloppy for the PHP gurus reading this— but it works.

Comments

About the author:
Dustin Brewer is a web designer located in Oklahoma City, OK specializing in aesthetics in design, web standards, accessibility and usability. He also enjoys helping others to discover CSS and web design best practices through his web site, dustin brewer, a web design news site.

What a difference 24 hours make.

A few days ago I was honestly prepared to rip a product to shreds. It wasn’t that it was a bad product, but it wasn’t as well prepared as it should have been, and from what I can tell it was due to an honest communication error between a well respected online marketer and his programming team.

But before I talk about the product itself, I am going to give you a little history lesson.

Wordpress Elite

A few years ago I purchased a script called WordPress Elite. It was pretty useful, and allowed you to point the software at a server, and create WordPress blogs based on a default configuration plus you could select various parameters.

I even sold a couple of copies as an affiliate.

It didn’t do everything, you still had to log into the WordPress blog and activate the plugins, configure them etc, and at the time I was an SEO newbie… some would say I still am

The marketer however sold the business, and the new owner didn’t do anything with it. He got some new subscribers. He asked the list once for new features, then nothing was released, and the script never really supported 2.x very well.

Wordpress Super Installer

I managed to pick this up really cheap when it was first released, and I soon forgot that WordPress Elite was going through some teething problems.
Unfortunately development pretty much stopped at the beginning of 2007.

The last update I received from Randy Rhodes (not Randi from Air America) was at the end of July 2007.

WordPress 2.0.x is still maintained because it needs to be for Debian inclusion, thus if you don’t need all the fancy features of WordPress 2.1 or above, it is still a good choice, especially if you are fed up of things breaking all the time, or have tons of WordPress blogs to maintain.

Other Scripts

There are other scripts out there, plus various services that promise to install WordPress on your behalf. I must admit I am not that keen on forking out more money, changing business processes, and then for another script development to grind to a halt.

I would never trust an automated service to install WordPress packages for me. There are a few cropping up again, there have been a few in the past, but why reveal all your niche sites to a 3rd party hiding behind a website, even if you trusted them to do the installation, and have access to your server.

WordPress Packages

If you are not too reliant on 10s of plugins, you can get by just creating WordPress packages. Include a set of standard plugins and themes that you have tweaked, upload, switch on the plugins, and configure them to your liking.
Or you can create a process, and pay someone else to do it for you.

SEO Optimized WordPress Package

Jeff Johnson has just released a special package for WordPress SEO

The installation is painless

Setup your database as always
Edit your config as always
Upload
Enter your blog name and email address
Log in
Select a theme

So what is done for you?

Permalinks

Plugin Activation
Plugin settings (though I am not sure how much they differ from default)
Ping list

Shall we coin a new phrase… the “4 Ps”

The themes are also relatively well optimized, so you have H1s where they should be

Pretty useful?

WordPress SEO Plugins Installed

All In One SEO Pack
Google XML SiteMaps

Sociable (the new official version with nofollow)

also Akismet and Simple Captcha

Why Was I Going To Slam It?

This problem was exasperated by many of the themes Jeff Johnson decided to include in the package, some optimized themes from MyType.com who basically take fairly average WordPress themes, optimized them a little, and then stick 5 spammy links in the footer to various pages on their domain, many seem to be paid client blogs.

(disclaimer: MyType.com currently rank first for WordPress SEO and I have a post blocked by robots.txt ranking on the same page - it is not exactly a competitive search term, doesn’t bring much traffic, but it probably takes 100s of spammy theme links to rank for it now)

In addition Jeff had included a few links on the default blogroll, and a badge in the sidebar.

When you added up the total number of external links per page, and it came to 14 without the WordPress default links etc, it couldn’t really be looked at as a good recommendation for SEO, especially if people download it who are less experienced.

So I emailed Jeff, and within a few hours I had a reply that it was going to be fixed. I think I may have been the only one who was concerned.

It Is Not Perfect

I don’t like some of the sites on the pinglist they use - lots of .jp sites - my personal pinglist for “quality” blogs consists of just one site, Feedburner, and I let them handle the pings to other places.

sidenote: I keep seeing Pingoat listed on ping lists - last time I checked Pingoat hadn’t been accepting pings for 18 months, maybe that is now closer to 2 years. Web pings only. Maybe John Reese when he purchased the site switched that function back on and didn’t tell anyone (such as update the Pingoat blog) - looking at recently updated blogs on Pingoat, it seems like the Poles might be using a script to spam the hell out of it.

I would use a different plugin selection, though I am sure the version of WordPress Jeff provides to his clients has a more comprehensive feature set. That being said, you really want to minimise plugin use if you are hosting a lot of blogs on a single server.

The themes are better than the originals, though you might want to look for replacements.

As they stand, if lots of people use this WordPress version for blog farms and datafeed sites, they have a bit of a heavy footprint. They still have a lot of nofollow links in the footer, plus 2 blogroll links and a banner

It Is A Time Saver

Even as it stands, for an experienced WordPress users it represents a time saver, and for someone less experienced who has problems with the basic steps of setting up plugins, permalinks etc it is a good resource, especially if the package gets improved over time.

Jeff is providing lots of instructional videos on how to install the package, though effectively it is the same as any WP installation. He does recommend using this only for new blogs, though there is a procedure that can be used for existing sites.

It Is Free

Whilst I started off with some real concerns, what concerns remain can be cured with very simple hacking. I expect this to be well maintained.

Thanks Jeff, great value for money - download it here.

p.s. I am not sure how long Jeff will have this available. It is just one of many things he is providing free of charge as part of a product launch, and these bonuses tend to disappear from public display once a launch has completed.
My advise would be to download it and test it on a few spare domains, tweak it for your own use and feed the blogs you create with some content.

Comments

About the author:
Andy Beard - Niche Marketing - Blog search engine perfomance, Wordpress and general niche and affiliate marketing tips

I’m a regular reader of Fred Wilson’s blog. Fred posted an article today that he is planning to clean house on his blog. He will remove many (if not most) of the widgets that adorn his site.

There was much rejoicing!

I can understand why Fred installed all these widgets in the first place. He’s got a natural curiosity and he’s a venture capitalist by trade — and invests in this stuff. There’s no better way to get to understand a technology or trend than to actually use it.

But, I’d argue that very few of his blog readers appreciate the widgets (except, perhaps the people that developed them).

Benefits Of Widget Removal And A Cleaner Blog

1. It focuses readers on the core content, which is (hopefully) why they’re there.

2. It makes pages load faster. Think of the bandwidth saved across the web!

3. Search engines like Google appreciate fast-loading sites (and possibly reward them with higher rankings).

4. It makes things simpler and more likely to load across a variety of browsers. (Yes, yes, I know things are supposed to work — but they often don’t)

So, if you’re a blogger, follow Fred’s lead and clean things up a bit. Your readership will thank you.

Comments

About the author:
Dharmesh Shah is a serial software entrepreneur. He is the author of the
widely read startup blog OnStartups.com which focuses on advice and ideas
for startup founders and management teams. Dharmesh is also the co-founder
of HubSpot.com, a software company building applications that help small
businesses transform their website into a marketing machine.