Mike's Quarter - the internet blog » Blogging on Wordpress

Backup your projects on a monthly basis – just a reminder

Mike — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 10:20:16 +0000

This is just a reminder for you (and for me) that you should make a habit of backing up your blog (and all your projects actually) monthly. Also, try to keep all the backups at least 1 year old. Storage drives are so cheap right now that you can easily do that, unless you have gigantic projects. But if you do, that means you earn enough to afford multiple backup methods, right?

Anyway, you should do that in order to protect your work. Because nowadays the number of attacks on sites is increasing exponentially. Especially if your project becomes big, there will be many trying to hurt it. And there’s a big chance they will succeed eventually, no matter how secure your server/code is. Thus, backup as often as you can. By doing a full backup, whenever something happens, you can just put the backup up and restore everything in just minutes.

I’m writing this because this site got hacked and injected with a JS in May. I used the .snapshot facility from my hosting (details about .snapshot) and restored everything. Unfortunately, i didn’t notice at the time that not all of my pictures we’re backed up. But I just found out today that most of the pictures from 2008 and part of 2007 are missing. And, since i have the very bad habit of forgetting to backup everything (i backup the files, but not the pictures), i might have lost them for good. Hopefully i do have something on my other computer. Hopefully. Still, stupid stupid me.

That’s why be careful and backup everything, or else… you might end up like me. Epic fail

Photo source

Indexing tag pages or not?

Mike — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:06:55 +0000

I’ve been playing with the subject of indexing tag pages in WordPress for quite a while now. I have sites were i keep these pages in the indexes and pages where i don’t . The result vary from case to case though, so stating a rule for this subject is kind of difficult.

You might ask why am I even bothering with this problem. Well, let’s see why Tag pages are not worthwhile of being indexed:

they are just another navigation method on your site, meant to help visitors find posts on the subject they’re interested of.
they won’t rank. Unless you’re an authority, they won’t. I believe SE have some kind of trigger to distinguish and declassify tag pages, and this is especially true foo Google.com . On regional though, clever done tag pages might rank well.
they create duplicate content: a tag page is usually similar to the category page so you have the same content as in categories, just displayed in a somewhat different order
they create almost empty pages, unless you have a very tight tagging system. And this will happen every time you’ll use a new tag that hasn’t been used before on your site.
sometimes, they create useless pages

And we could continue with that. But that doesn’t mean tag pages can’t be useful for ranking, if done correctly. First of all, you should have a standardized tagging system. You should only use nouns on singular form, without any articles, etc.

ex: use only "mobile phone" to tag all the articles about mobile phones, and don’t use others like: mobile phones, mobile, phone, telephone, etc .

You should also try using complex tags made from groups of words instead of singular words. And you should use tags that have a potential to help your visitors and be searched on SE.

ex: a tag like "pictures of Britney Spears" used on all the articles with Britney Spears will do better and be more useful than just "Britney Spears"

Also, try not to have singular tags (tags only attached to one or two posts on your site), cause these will generate almost empty pages.

Lots of other tiny advices could be given here… So, as you can see, tagging is not that simple in you want to get traffic from search engines on these tag pages. Actually, it’s quite difficult. And even if done right, most of the time you will only rank on long tail searches with almost no competition. Or you won’t rank at all…

That’s why i choose to not index tag pages on my .com blogs. I can’t say this vastly improves my ranking positions (although slight increases were spoted 2-3 months after no-indexing these pages), but at least i keep a tight control on the pages indexed. Anyway, if you have a site with 1000 posts and 5000 tags, no-indexing these tag pages will surely help your posts rank better. Like in this guys case: traffic increase by 300% after no-indexing tag pages .

In the end, i can’t draw a clear conclusion, but I’ll have to say no-indexing Tag pages is the good thing to do in most cases. Oh, and if you don’t know how, the easiest way is to add the following line to your robots.txt file :

Disallow: /tag/

This should work on any default WordPress blog. If your tag pages have a different indicator (like /tags or something), just use that one instead.

5 Free WordPress Themes You Could Pay For

Mike — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 07:34:28 +0000

The most obvious difference between premium and free WordPress themes has for long been the quality in addition to price. But more and more professional web designers are designing free WordPress themes as a proven online marketing strategy. A well crafted wp theme offered for free will not only generate many backlinks, but may also increase awareness of the theme designer.

After some research I can list five designers, freelancers and agencies that have created exceptionally beautiful free WordPress themes. Here we go:

1. WeFunction Design Agency – Magazeen theme

Magazeen is the second in a line of free WordPress themes created by WeFunction.com. Implementing a jQuery based Latest Image Showcase on a clean and communicative web design, Magazeen is an outstanding freebie from WeFunction. Costing only two links in the footer, Magazeen is a great example of professional free WordPress theme of today.

2. WELLMEDICATED – Zinepress theme

WELLMEDICATED.com is the creation of the talented Vancouver native, Andrew Lindstrom. Just recently taking the step to designing websites full time, Lindstrom wasn’t late to create the beautiful magazine/news theme Zinepress. With all the elements of a classic theme, Lindstrom has made the theme user-friendly with thumbnails and post listings on frontpage and a customizable ad space on the sidebar.

3. ProductiveDreams – Imprezz theme

Trying to access ProductiveDreams.com to retrieve some juicy information, I was greeted by an error page. But based on the design of Imprezz theme, these designers seem to know what they are doing.

4. Paulicio.us – Viewport theme

Paul Bennett released Viewport November 5th 2008 and offers his services as a freelancing developer at Paulicio.us. Viewport is an exceptional wp theme as it is obtained by a featured content image slider on front page. The large images makes for quite an impressive first impression of the site and a true pioneer contribution the to free WordPress themes category.

5. Woothemes – Irresistible theme

Woothemes.com produces mostly premium WordPress themes but throw in a free theme now and again. Irresistible is a personal blog theme with My-sections for posts, photos, feeds and video. A perfect and well-designed option for a portfolio or blog site.

Additional tips for your WordPress users

In addition to web design, I have taken the liberty in listing some more useful information regarding WordPress, to paint a full picture. You have free themes for download above. Let me also recommend proper blog web hosting options here, where you can find best host for wordpress and for more information concerning WP installations, plugins and misc documentations just go over to WordPress.org.

How to protect your content from scrapers

Mike — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 10:51:33 +0000

I noticed quite a lot of my sites have been heavily scrapped latelly by lots and lots of automated bots… That’s why i decided to investigate and find out how could i stop them.

After doing a little bit of research and reading a couple of good materials (like this one and this one), i decided i should use the following two plugins:

Simple Feed Copyright WordPress Plugin – a very simple plugin that adds a link signature at the end of your feed. Thus, even though bots still scrap your content, you’ll get a Link in the scrapped post.
Owen Winkler’s AntiLeech WordPress Plugin – this one is a little more advanced… It does not prevent bots from scrapping content, but it produces fake content especially for them, with links towards the original site. You can add "flagged sites" by IP and lots of other functions. Not sure exactly how it works, but i’m testing it right now.

That’s about it for now. I’ll keep them online for a couple of days and get back with the results.

Oh, and do you guys have any better suggestions to fight with content stealing? Some kind of plugin where you just put the stealing site and it automatically bans the IP of that site would be nice i guess. Any suggestion and advice is appreciated here .

Once you go no-follow… you’re doomed

Mike — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:57:38 +0000

I know lots of people talk on and on about spreading link love in the blogosphere and removing no-follow from your comments so you can appreciate your readers and reward them with a good quality link.

This sounds very nice, but… In the early days of this blog i used a do-follow plugin in order to attract more comments. After a couple of months, manual spam comments reached such a level that i came back to the all so good "nofollow". But… the damage was already done.

As i found out later, my link was included on a couple of do-follow blogs lists. And this sucked. As these lists spread like plague and spammers use them for "link building". Thus, every day for the last year i received at least a couple of such spam comment. How can i tell? Well… because these comments don’t have a real person’s name in the Name field, but a Keyword.

Now, what happens to these comments? 95% of them get deleted instantly, but i still approve some of those that really make sense. They still remain a pain in the but though.

So, as a bottom line, i advice you not to use do-follow on your blogs. It’s not like it would get you so many thanks from your readers if you do, but it will definitely get you a lot of spam. So, better not

Starting a new blog: the beginning

Mike — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:48:28 +0000

A couple of years ago I’ve heard a friend telling me about blogs. I didn’t quite understand what they were, i just consider them some kind of online journal where you can write publicly whatever you want. And others find your lines, read them and then comment. And then you go reading other blogs too, make a couple of friends, write some more and become a member of the big blogosphere family. And so on.

But then i found out blogging can be a business too.

I never blogged about my earnings with all my blogs, i don’t like it, it looks like bragging to me. But, i would want to share with you what I’ve managed to learn during my last 2 years of blogging, when i grew from blogging as a hobby to blogging as a business. And I’ll do that in a couple of episodes where I’ll carry you from the early beginning to mastering a couple of the techniques i use in order to achieve success.

So stay tuned here for the episodes to come and don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed.

When do you know it’s time to give up?

Mike — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:47:05 +0000

I believe i have a problem. I am a very bad looser. Actually, i don’t to like to loose at all, at nothing. I don’t even get the idea of "playing just for fun". No, i play to be the best . But that’s not exactly the subject of this post, is just a preamble to the next lines…

During the last two years I’ve started a couple of online projects. Some of them worked better than the others, some didn’t work at all.

But I always found it very hard to give up the projects that were not working as expected, due to various causes (mostly because they started from wrong assumptions). And even when i gave them up, from time to time i would still come back and do a little research to see if there’s a way i could revive those projects and make them work. The answer is always the same… but i guess my subconsciuous refuses to think i failed.

So, i wrote this post to ask you people the following two questions.

Q1: How many of your projects did succeed in reaching the goals you picked for them and eventually become self sustained and profitable?

Q2: And when do you decide it’s time to give up a project?

In my case, the answers would be: around half of the the projects i started are still alive and around 30% are profitable. And for the second question, i tend to give up a project after a couple of months, if i see that it’s not growing as expected or is growing to slow to worth the time and money invested in it.

How about you? I would really appreciate you answers here.

25 styles of blogging

Mike — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:31:15 +0000

Blogging can be easy if you like it. But, blogging is nowadays more of a business than a hobby, so besides liking the subject you write about, you must also consider if your posts will interes other people. And, in order to keep that interest, how many hours will you have to dedicate to your blog each week.

The following presentation shows you 25 styles of blogging, what each of it means, how hard will it be to make a successful blog with that style, how much effort will you have to put in and what are the results you can potentially reach (the Buzz effect). Enjoy it.

If you’re reading this via RSS, there’s a presentation below. Unfortunately you have to visit the site to see it, it’s not visible in the RSS readers.

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: tips marketing)

Remember, if you have any questions or comments, just leave a message via the form bellow.

Hmmm, strange

Mike — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 10:31:35 +0000

I was just doing a basic checkup of my blog this morning and i found something that bothered me: My site was last cached by Google bot on ~~March 8th~~ March 4th. That means none of my latest posts are indexed yet. This is kind of disturbing, as the bot used to come by everyday a couple of weeks ago.

Anyway, i went checking the last bot visit on my other sites, and i can’t say I’m happy with my results. All the blogs i have hosted on Dreamhost haven’t been indexed since March 5th. Some other sites have been visited by Google later on, but none of these. So that makes me wonder if we’re talking about coincidence or something else?

For now, there’s no impact on my traffic, but the fact that Google bot does not come by as often as it did bothers me. So, if you have sites hosted on Dreamhost, could you please check out the last time the bot indexed you? I’m looking for answers, as I’m not worried yet about this problem, but soon i might begin to be…

How to write a good tutorial

Mike — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:05:30 +0000

Lots of people write how to’s and tutorials, but I’m not so sure most of their readers understand the things they are trying to explain there. Why? Because most of these tutorials lack a couple of common sense basic rules that every tutorial writer should know.

If you were to synthesize those rules in a short list, it would look somehow like this:

make your tutorials specific and detailed
write in steps
use short sentences and repetition to reinforce the main ideas
use text formatting options (Strong, Italic, etc) to emphasize the main parts in your tutorials
use as many visual aids as possible
the readers of your tutorial are complete newbies, so don’t assume they know things from their previous experience, things you could skip in your tutorial. No! Make sure you don’t skip ANY step and make your tutorial as explicit as possible
make sure your tutorial is readable and understandable by your targeted traffic. Thus, don’t use terms and abbreviations your readers might not know without explaining them
link to other articles treating the same subject
try to offer some concrete examples and explain how you solved them
leave room for ~~interpretation~~ comments and feedback

Mike's Quarter - the internet blog » Blogging on Wordpress

Backup your projects on a monthly basis – just a reminder

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