Archive for the ‘Plugins’ Category

Let’s say you have 50 or 100 or 1000 old blog posts on one or more sites that were sponsored articles.  You were paid up front for a short time advertorial essentially.  That was years ago and those posts haven’t brought any revenue to you since. 

Plus, the FTC has changed the landscape of online marketing and now you have to go back and consider adding some new form of disclosure to an advertorial.  Lots of work for no revenue, all cost, no profit, plus if you don’t you risk who knows what from the FTC. 

QUICK TIPS (ok not so quick) to get those old articles earning money again!

There are several things you can do in conjunction with each other to get those old deep links earning you some money.

• First, realize that what ever work went into those articles in terms of copy, research, writing etc, is long sunk.
• The risk of FTC issues is as real as your geographical address if you reside in the US (If you live in Canada, the UK, the Pacific Rim, feel free to laugh at the FTC all you like.)
• Now, go over to Skimlinks.com and sign up for an account. 
• They essentially turn old deep hyperlinks going out from your site in to current working affiliate links if there is an affiliate program through their collection of multiple networks traversing the world. 
• They aggregate affiliate links through multiple networks at commission rates that are often higher than you can get individually. 
• Get your account up and going and load the javascript onto your site. 
• If someone clicks on one of your old deep links and buys something, you get a commission.  $$$
• Pretty easy for just copy/pasting some javascript in your footer!
• Skimlinks is a good option, BUT for advertorials, it will likely only convert if you had kick ass copy on a page that draws a lot of natural search results. 
• If your copy was written for 2006 and not 2010, it might not convert so well no matter how good it was. 
• If your page hasn’t drawn a new hit in 2 years, well then its really not good for much of anything, almost.
• SO, identify your articles that you want to target.  For example, I recently went through an old blog, I filtered for all articles that still had a CountTrakula.com link in it, an old PayPerPost tracking mechanism, then I further filtered for articles from 2006.  THESE WERE OLD AND TIRED! But some of those posts still have some power,
• Some have lots of incoming links
• Some generate traffic!
• So next, you need to install the Redirection plugin into your wordpress site. 
• Don’t have your blog on WordPress?
• Move your blog over to WordPress and stop fooling around. 
• Now, start redirecting those old links to either your home page or a category that is relevant for the post.
• Essentially you are salvaging those backlinks.  yes they are over 18 months old in my example, but a backlink is a backlink.
• I had a few hundred to do myself, not a job for one sitting.  So make sure you have a good audiobook to listen to or TV show to partially pay attention to, and then start copy/pasting/clicking away
• Once your redirects are set up in full or either in a batch, go back and check your redirection logs. 
• 
• Look for old posts that are logging actual redirects to your home page or categories. 
• If you have an old advertorial bringing traffic to your blog for ‘drug rehab’ and you don’t have a better destination for that traffic on your blog,
• then log into one of your affiliate programs and search for a new affiliate program that has a high conversion rate for ‘drug rehab’. 
• Get the link for the program, then go back to your site, and replace your redirection destination link with the affiliate link! 
• Now all that traffic that was coming into your blog for an advertorial and likely bouncing away, screwing up your stats, and not doing anything for you is getting pushed to a high converting affiliate program where it might actually do that Google searcher some good and
• make you a commission!  $$$
• Pay attention to your redirect stats.  If it stops bringing people in, then change that redirect to a new 301 redirect back to your home page to salvage backlinks.  This puppy is harvested!
• If for some reason you like the traffic on that particular topic, but don’t want to send it to an affiliate landing page cold, then write up a NEW blog article that covers that topic or category. 
• Then change that redirect from over to your new article.
• If you are smart, make sure the article includes an affiliate banner to something useful, or at least some chitika or adsense ads or something.  I don’t want you to starve! 
• Sometimes a Rewrite may work too…
• You will not want to rewrite every article, but every now and then your original article may be pretty damned good and still relevant.  If so, polish that puppy up, and republish it with a current date.  Remove the old sponsored/advertorial references and OWN that new article yourself.  Find some new way to mix advertising on that page for that article, especially if it is pulling in traffic! 
• Plus, if it is pulling in traffic, do something on that new re-written post to really try and lock in those readers to subscribing with you.  You already know that it is bringing people your way, do something good for them, and try and get them to come back or stick around.
• A large percentage of your old advertorial articles from years back will not be relevant, will not have traffic and will only bring you minor backlink boosts.  That’s ok, don’t sweat it, at least you removed the liability stemming from the doubt over the FTC’s poorly conceived and executed new rules. 
• For that 10% that can do something for you, well more power and a little extra revenue to you! 

Bonus – if you do leave old deep links in any old article, make sure you put a rel=”nofollow’ tag on it if you hadn’t already.  Might as well please Google while you are at it. 

Since July, I have been experiencing CPU usages on my Virtual Dedicated Server.  In July, my host InMotion Hosting, whom I have had an excellent relationship with for over 3 years, recommended that I should move to a ‘new faster server’ and they would migrate my accounts for free.

Sounded good, I asked a few questions, hoping to make a relatively informed decision, but I know next to nothing about servers and hardware, which is the reason why I turn to them for hosting and Virtual dedicated hosting specifically.

They upgraded me and within about 2 weeks, I started having problems with my account using up too much load on the CPU of the server.  My sites and the server were crashing every couple weeks, and InMotion Hosting started telling me that I would have to upgrade to a dedicated server, a price difference of $150 per month!  (Currently paying about $50 a month, prepaid for a year, Dedicated costs about $200 per month).

Frankly, I couldn’t afford the move.

At the time this first started happening, I was traveling in NYC for Affiliate Summit, and I didn’t have the time to completely figure out what was going on.  Twice over the years, I’ve run into CPU load issues and it usually involved a plugin that was broken or not working right.

I searched through my cpanel accounts, checking the error logs on each.  I found a few little errors but nothing significant.  I fixed those, checked with my host, and that didn’t seem to phase anything.

I did some heavy lifting in robots.txt to insure that I wasn’t being indexed by bots that were driving up the CPU (there was some indication that a bot masquerading as the cuel (cool) search engine was causing a bit of a problem.  I worked to eliminate bot access to every folder that wasn’t essential.

I triple checked my largest sites to insure that my images were optimized too.  (they were already, but I wanted to double check)

I was already running WP-Super Cache on my largest 2 sites, so I started loading that up on all my other sites.  Then I added DB Cache and even Widget Cache and DB manager so that I could routinely optimize my DB.

That seemed to make a small bit of a dent but not enough.

My biggest problem was really the lack of information at a domain level.  On a VDedicated account, I have absolutely NO TOOLS to help me identify if one domain/cpanel account is causing the bulk of the problem or if all domains are.  I thinned out the herd and eliminated/suspended/moved some cpanel accounts.

Again that helped just a little bit, but not enough.

Finally towards the end of September, I spoke with a admin at Inmotion who was able to install a script or a program to monitor my account.  I couldn’t view this program, but she was able to tell me the top domains or directories that were using the most CPU at the time.  She was also able to point out a couple plugins, that were not creating errors but did seem to be consuming to much of the cpu resources.  I deactivated and deleted them.

A couple days later, I got a message from Inmotion saying that that action had fixed the problem!

I sent back a message saying terrific! I can’t believe we finally solved this.  I was very happy and relieved.

But 20 minutes later, the same person replied again and told me that actually things weren’t fixed and we’d have to continue monitoring.

Uh, OK.

Four days later, I get an email saying that things were still bad, and my account would be shut down tomorrow, the original deadline given several weeks earlier.

So I called in, got filtered through hold for 20 minutes, got a low level representative on the phone, who was nice and polite but frankly jerked me around for 14 minutes because 1) he couldn’t do anything about the issue 2) its his job to make sure that people like me no longer have direct access to the admins 3) their own internet connection was apparently down 4) when he tried to transfer me, it didn’t work a couple times, maybe internet down related.

So I finally get on the phone with the admin who had sent me the latest message.  I mentioned to him, that when I had spoke with the helpful representative that had set up the monitoring script, that she had indicated the next thing to trouble shoot would be whether my Apache configuration on the new server was not optimal for my sites as compared to the Apache configuration on the old server.

I asked the new guy if we could look at this.  I had done some quick research that had indicated:

mod_php Vs. FastCGI

How you integrate PHP into Apache has performance implications. The two most popular options are:

mod_php

The PHP interpreter and all it’s linked in libraries are compiled into a loadable Apache Module (mod_php) and this module is loaded into every running Apache process at startup time. This is generally the simplest way to run PHP and is supported by most hosting environments. It also introduces memory overhead because of the monolithic Apache processes which you have running, and because the PHP interpreter is included in the web server binary which services non PHP files.

FastCGI

An alternative method of using PHP is to have the PHP interpreter running external to the Apache process and to use the FastCGI API to interface between the web server (mod_fastcgi) and the PHP interpreter. The advantages of this method is that you don’t load the full PHP stack into Apache, you can call upon PHP only when your web server needs to run a PHP script (not images, or HTML/CSS etc) and you also get security benefits of running PHP as a user other than the web server user. This setup is slightly more advanced, and usually requires custom compilation of PHP. One other possible advantage here is that you may be able to run the threaded Apache worker MPM when using FastCGI, since technically any non threadsafe PHP libraries are not being run inside Apache, but inside an external process.

I also found this useful description in a forum post that broke down a few additional settings from someone with the username ‘till’:

2nd April 2009, 10:42

The php option depends on traffic that you expect for the site and if the site e.g. uploads or creates images or files on the server.
mod_php:
- fast
- runs not under admin user of the site
- well suited for low and high traffic sites, but not for cms systems like joomla.
suphp:
- not so fast
- script runs under web admin
- secure
- well suited for low traffic sites
fastcgi
- fast
- script runs under web admin
- secure
- well suited for high traffic sites
so basicalley the decision is, if a site is low traffic, use suphp. suphp spawns a new cgi process for every page request, but it does not use resources when no pages are requested. On the opposite fastcgi, the php processes are running permanently even if no page is requested, this is faster and fine for a high traffic site but for a small homepage with 100 pageviews per hour you would waste resources.

So he agreed to try an alternative, and later sent me this message after it had been set up:

Just to follow up with you I have made two major changes to your VPS platform. The first being php was upgraded to the latest (from 5.2.10 to 5.2.11) and no longer uses suPHP. Also I have recompiled apache to use the MPM Worker instead of MPM Prefork which may help to
reduce load used by apache.

So now I’m in a new holding pattern, hoping that this change might be the magic bullet that gives me back my happily functioning websites and vdedicated account.  I’m heading to BlogWorld next week, so I expect that my account will likely take a crap on me while I’m traveling, not a traffic spike or anything, just a Murphy’s Law issue.

I received an email today from a member of our local WordPress meetup group asking the following question:

Got a minute to clue me in on how my WordPress site got hacked?
My service provider said it was easier to do because my WP
version wasn’t updated to the recent version. What can I do to
help prevent this in the future?

As I write this, WordPress 2.8.4 is the current release of WordPress.  I mention that because 2.8.4 was released to address a serious security flaw in 2.8.3.    I learned about this simply by logging into WordPress and reading the updates in the Admin Dashboard of WordPress.

While this should be your only source for information about practicing good security on your WordPress powered site, but it is a good starting point. 

Here’s the email reply I provided below

Its definitely important to review the new wordpress updates as they come out. They often address security concerns. Hackers are always looking for new ways to break into sites, computers, operating systems etc, so the groups and companies that maintain the software behind sites, computers, operating systems etc have to continually evolve and update their systems.

This is one of the advantages to using WordPress. It is supported by an extensive open source network of programmers around the world. They provide continued development and improvements not only in functionality but in security. All you have to do is keep up with their updates and apply them to your site and plugins.

Part of your role as a web designer or webmaster may include keeping up to date on these changes, and making the updates to your own or your clients sites. As you develop more and more sites, it can take a significant amount of your time to continually review the updates needed, test them out to make sure they work on any given site and do not conflict with plugins that may or may not need to be updated as well (or may or may not be compatible with updates) and then execute the upgrade.

In general, you need to practice at insuring that you and your clients use good usernames and good strong passwords. This is typically the area that is easiest for hackers to target because too many people use default or simple user names and passwords that are ‘easy to remember’ which both mean, easy to crack and hack.

In years past on my personal sites, I used to use simple passwords that I could remember.  I never do that now.  I use passwords that are ridiculously long, they include both caps and lower case letters, they include numbers and many symbols.

This definitely can help ward of crackers.  But you can also use stronger passwords, don’t use the default ‘admin’ password if you are setting up a site with Fantastico for example.

Also there are a large number of detailed tips and resources, plus some plugins that can help you evaluate the security level of your site today and improve it in the future.

I found this cool looking plugin recently that helps you optimize keywords within a WordPress Post or Page.  It doesn’t help you find keywords, but once you know the keywords that you want to emphasize with a <strong> tag for example, you can type in the word into the admin panel and the plugin will automatically place the keywords in bold for you, helping to emphasize to search engines that a give post is more about the keywords highlighted, which is more effective than using keywords in a meta tag list.

Highlights

Author: spunkyjones.com

The keyword optimizer SEO plugin was developed so that important blog post keywords on a website could be optimized using the HTML <strong>, <em> and <u> tags. It allows the webmaster to select the keywords he/she wants to optimize from the administration panel and let’s them assign a limit to the number of times a chosen effect is applied to those keywords.

To demonstrate an example of this SEO plugin, if "articles" is an important keyword on a website than the webmaster can choose to surround this keyword around the tag. Using this plugin, the webmaster would need to enter this keyword into the <strong> set under the administration panel and all references to the word "articles" in a given post will be automatically placed inside the <strong> tag. The limit feature provided by the plugin lets the webmaster control the number of times this effect would be applied to that keyword. If suppose the limit is set to 2, then only the first two references to the word "articles" will be effected.

This weekend I had to do an ugly install of the GooseGrade plugin.  The service was very impressive at Blogworld last year, and I think it had a lot of promise.  Unfortunately, it seems to have faltered somewhere, the web management tools were difficult to manage accounts, even though the WP plugin seemed much tighter.

But then It started slowing down my site, crashing my other plugin functionality and giving me nasty errors when I tried to deactivate it like

Warning: fsockopen() [function.fsockopen]: unable to connect to www.goosegrade.com:80 (Connection timed out) in /home/somethin/public_html/wp-includes/class-snoopy.php on line 1142

So I had to go into ftp and delete the plugin files from the server.  That’s an ugly way to kill a plugin, but I couldn’t have it crashing my site.

When the automatic (push button) upgrade of plugins within WordPress first became available, it was the best thing since sliced bread or maybe even WordPress itself.

But over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that first one then several, then almost all of my plugin upgrade attempts were failing.  It started with the xml sitemap generator plugin.  For some reason, it just couldn’t update itself anymore, when I clicked on the option to update it from within WordPress.

Soon after that, several other plugins on several different servers on several different WP installs started having some difficulties updating too.  Now, I’m just about at the point where every single plugin on every single WordPress install doesn’t seem to work.

I get a failure that looks something like this:

Downloading update from http://downloads.wordpress.org/ plugin/all-in-one-seo-pack.zip

Unpacking the update

Could not copy file: /home/Yoursite/public_html/wp- content/upgrade/all_in_one_seo_pack/all-in-one-seo-pack/all_in_one_seo_pack-pt_BR.mo

Installation Failed

After doing a little research, I came across a few people struggling with similar, if not the same problems.  After catching up on the threads and the support tickets, there appears to be 3 different solutions, which I’ll list in reverse order of how they are presented (thus saving you some time).

1. Upgrade to WordPress 2.8 as this is a bug cemented in my 2.7.1
1. But EVEN THIS won’t work for everyone
2. If it doesn’t work for you, then you will need to download this replacement file for http.php which resides in your wp_includes folder of WP
3. UPDATE – This step did work for me!
2. add "72.233.56.139 downloads.wordpress.org" to the "/etc/hosts" file. 
   1. I have no idea what that means
3. Disable cURL using the "Core Control" plugin ( http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/core-control/ ) after activating the "HTTP Access Module 0.6" within Core Control.
   1. Note this plugin probably should not be used by people not terribly experienced at programming in a WP environment (not talking html, I mean real programming)

So that all points to step number 1 for your average user.  This may be the MAIN reason to go upgrade to WordPress 2.8 if you are the type that typically sits on the fence for 3-4 weeks (like I usually do). 

Resources

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/9998

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/core-control/

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/231500

For quite sometime I have been using a great plugin that helps me to create automatic xml plugins for Google bot and other search engines, but it was only a short time ago that I discovered a very handy plugin that generates a sitemap for my visitors. 

Its called PS Auto Sitemap and it rocks!  It generates a sitemap that automatically updates as people visit your site or new content is created.  It can also build a cache so that your server and database do not get called to failure.  You have several configuration options with this plugin, including the ability to display Pages, Posts, Posts by Category and more.

Hats off to the designer of this great plugin!

If you would like to see this baby in action, you can view a few sitemaps that I have installed for the following sites

• Belize Business
• Maven Mapper’s Information
• Softduit Media
• Advanced Environmental Management
• Kensington Solutions
• Gordos Cheese Dip

Description

PS Auto Sitemap is a plug-in that automatically generates a site map page from your WordPress site.

It is easy to install for beginners and easy to customize for experts.
It can change the settings of the display of the lists from administration page, several neat CSS skins for the site map tree are prepared.

When you use WordPress as CMS of the Web site, you can expect the effect of SEO, improvement of the usability, and so on.

Functions

• Display/hide of particular home.
• Display/hide of particular categories and posts.
• Display/hide of pages.
• Limitation of the depth of the list.
• Set the display order of the page list and the post list.
• Combine/Divide category & post
• Set the excluded category from the list.
• Set the excluded posts and pages from the list.
• Select the display style of the site map from 12 prepared designs (or no style).
• Use or not caching sitemap content.

I have been expending a great deal of effort testing plugins that offer some form of management over nofollow links on a WordPress site.  I’m looking for something that will enable me to specifically select a page or Post by the Post ID and mark that page or post to always receive a nofollow tag whenever I link to it within my blog.

There are several plugins that help to provide nofollow tags for things like Categories, Tags, Archives etc. 

The only one that seemed to do this reliably was the tool that came with Headspace( author homepage), although it missed a few from time to time as well.  Anyway, I can’t recommend any of these because they did not do what I was looking for, but I can help you take a look at what I have searched through and experimented with myself.  If you find something better, let me know and I will happily cover you or your site in a future article with a link (absent the nofollow tag).

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nofollow-case-by-case/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nofollow-reciprocity/ I even tried to add permalink/deep links to the code on this plugin, but it seems to only work at a domain level.  (I think it strips out the / character which is used in deep links)

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nofollow-links/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nofollow-links-in-posts/ I liked the concept of this plugin, but it wasn’t what I was looking for

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/noindex-archives/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nofollow-archives/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-noindex-nofollow-tool/ This one seemed promising according to its description and admin page, but it didn’t seem to work at all when I tested it out.

http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/identify-external-links/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sem-external-links/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-automatic-links/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/platinum-seo-pack/ Seemed like a good plugin, but the nofollow capability didn’t quite cut it.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/replace/

I just wanted to share a great plugin with everyone.  I’ve been testing it for the last couple days within a Picasa photo album and this plugin rocks.

You can learn more or download it from WordPress here.

• Embed a gallery of your Picasa albums, and all the photos and videos in each album.
• Show your photos and videos in Highslide slideshows.
• Pick individual photos or videos to display, in any size supported by Picasa.
• Pick photos and videos from any combination of albums to display in groups of thumbnails.
• Show thumbnails of your newest photos and videos, from one or more albums.
• Display album thumbnails for albums you choose, or all your albums, sorted however you like. Includes links to Google Maps.
• Display any number of random photos and videos, from one or more albums. You can also choose to exclude certain photos or albums from random display.
• Use widgets for all of the above!
• Customize the Shashin and Highslide stylesheets to suit the theme of your site.
• Internationalization: Shashin supports translations into other languages (please contribute a translation if you’re bilingual!)
• Schedule daily automatic synchronization of Shashin with your Picasa albums.

Here is the author’s, Mike Toppa’s, home page Shashin 2.3 Now Available.  Hat’s off to you Mike!  Great Plugin! 

I’m sitting at a WordCamp in Las Vegas today listening to the keynote address by Matt Mullenberg, the founder of WordPress (the software that powers this and all of my sites).  He provided some glimpses of where we will all go in the future as we use WordPress.  Two things that really stand out for me as very important is a new WordPress Handbook, coming out this week.

WordPress Handbook

This WordPress handbook will be generated in an open source driven style.  That means that users will be able to contribute, and submit bugs reports or requests.  The book form will help to document this fantastic open source software, plus it will create a way for plugins to be documented.  It will also formalize this information which will make it possible for international (non-English) versions of the book to be created and edited as well.

This will also help to setup more tutorials and screencasts for the future of WordPress.tv.

User Response Plugin Compatibility

WordPress will also add a user feedback capability (yet to be defined) but the goal of this feature set will be to gather information from users about wordpress configuration.  Ergo it will help identify if the plugin is failing, and if so whether it is failing with wordpress version 1.5 or 2.0 or 2.5 or 2.6.3 or 2.71.  Plus, it might also help to gather feedback about plugin cross compatibility so that users might understand if plugin A works with 2.7 but doesn’t work with plugin B, C, & D.