Updates

One of the biggest problems owning multiple WordPress blogs is upgrading. To make it even more challenging, WordPress releases upgrades at a pace like no other software. It’s not a bad thing. I for one, appreciate the fixes and security patches. Doesn’t make it any easier.

I’ve tried many things and methods to make this process easier. I even paid a good chunk of money for a software that while good, I just could never get it working. Worked fine for blogs installed on the same server but always problematic for blogs on other servers. I’ve resigned myself to countless hours of manual upgrade when it hit me.

I’ll use SyncBackSE. SyncBackSE is really, a backup software. One of the features is the ability to save your files to an FTP destination. I know, I’m not really backing up here but the process is the same - copying files from one computer to another. So, I made a special folder where I’ll unzip all new WordPress versions, tell SyncBackSE where to copy them to - Save each process. One for every blog and now I just hit one button and it’ll copy the files to every blog automatically. There is one other step though. The Upgrade process. So what I did was bookmark the upgrade page for every blog then just load them after copying the files. Easy, peasy and I get lot’s of bang for the $30 spent on it.

Learn more about SyncBackSE.

Here’s a tool that will make beautiful WordPress Themes simply by clicking a few buttons. Before I get to that, introducing a free theme I released lately. Not custom but definitely free. I really enjoy making themes - it’s relaxing for me and takes my mind off work and other pressures. Weird huh? Click here to test run and download.

Now to this wonder theme generating tool. I’ve seen a few ‘Theme Generators’ out there, even paid for one, but this is one different because it really does create nice themes. The best thing I like about it is, you can have 2 or 3 column themes, change the size and even sidebar size. You can even have tabs on the top and cool gradient backgrounds. Plus, every change you make is reflected in the preview. Try it for yourself.

Veteran WordPress bloggers would know this immediately but I thought I’d point this out anyhow. The next time you write a post on your WordPress blog, scroll down the page and look at the boxes on the right side of the page. See one that says Post Slug? Ever wonder what it does? Funny name, not quite descriptive, but if you’re concerned about SEO, you’ll be happy to know this.

If you have pretty URLs (Custom Permalinks, Search engine friendly URLs, whatever you want to call them), post slug lets you change the post URL (more familiar to some as the page name). You see, by default, WordPress (and most other blog systems) use your blog post title to create the URL. But, sometimes, you have really long titles or you just want to write a witty, cute title and still want some SEO benefits. This is when post slugs become so helpful. Try it right now. Write a post and go to Post Slug, enter something and publish.

In fact, check out this post’s URL and the title. See how they are different?

Q: Is it necessary to make your blog design match your website?

A:Good question and one commonly asked. It really depends. Anytime a blog is tied to your business, try to go for a blog design that compliments your website or your brand.

This doesn’t mean your websites and blogs must look exactly alike. Find a color palette that would represent your brand and try keeping the basic color scheme. You can always play around with the header and actual graphics, but as much as possible, maintain a similar look and feel. Generally, it’s good for people to feel like they are in the same family of sites as they move from one place to another.

After being invited to write a guest post on a popular blog, my friend Angela, got to work quickly. She came up with an excellent article based on the most frequently asked questions in her industry. She had one concern. It was a little lenghty and wondered whether it would be appropriate for a blog.

There really isn’t any hard and fast rules for blogging. She certainly should ask the blog owner if the long post is OK with them. But in addition to that, here’s a twist I suggested. Propose a series of posts. It’s a good thing that her article can easily be broken up into 5 posts, making it great as a week (even month) long series. Why a series and how does it benefit both parties?

• Sell the idea to the blog owner - It’s good because they can now have more regular, fresh content. Even if it’s for a week. Most blog owners are looking for content every day or every week to keep their blogs updated, the spiders coming back and the content looking fresh. If you can help relief some of that pressure, they’ll welcome it.
• It’s good for you the guest blogger because instead of a one shot deal, you stretch your presence, get the chance for a few more exposures since different people may visit the blog on different days.
• Get more bang from your hard work. Breaking it up means the article is spread over different pages. So, if you ever re-compile it all into a full article for your own website or for distribution, it’s like a whole new article.

Not a guest blogger? No problem. You can absolutely do this for your own blog too.

A client couldn’t figure out why her RSS feeds were loading into the browser nicely but all the directories and FeedBurner kept rejecting her feed. When you’re up against an RSS feed error, the best thing to do is to see if it validates. Basically, you run your RSS feed through a service that tells you if it’s properly formatted or not. 99% of the time, feeds don’t work properly because they don’t validate.

But what does it all mean? Usually, it just means you have some invalid characters. This happens a lot if you type your post up in a word processor like Microsoft Word and then paste it into your blog. Generally, typing anything into a word processor and pasting it anywhere online is a bad idea because when you copy the text, you’re not only copy plain text, you copy some formatting along with it which gets pasted into your blog, website etc. This will almost always cause errors in your RSS feed.

That was what happened to my client. So, she had to go back into all her old blog posts and edit out the invalid characters and all is well now.

To validate your feed, just go to Feed Validator, type in your RSS feed URL and click Validate. If there are errors, it’ll show you where they are.

My list of ’standard install’ plugins changes over time. E.g. I used to tell BSP owners that they must absolutely have WPCron if they are doing any post dated blogging. But this is no longer required now that WordPress 2.1 and up has it’s own built in feature to take care of post dated pinging.

But these are roughly what gets installed on all my blogs.
SpamKarma2
Some kind of Adsense either Mighty Adsense or Adsense Deluxe
Optimal Title
*Sidebar Widgets - this used to be a must have but since WordPress 2.2, widgets are included in the core installation. You won’t need this if you’re running version 2.2 and up.
All-In-One SEO Pack - allows you greater control over the fine details like meta description etc.
Future Calendar - doesn’t show up on the front end. More an admin tool. Extremely invaluable if you do a lot of post dated blogging. Tells you what dates you’ve got scheduled posts.

The rest are common through my network of blogs but not all of them have it. These are often installed because I want the blog to behave a certain manner.

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A friend recently created a new WordPress blog and she couldn’t quite figure out why after editing the header.php theme file, the header image displays only on the front page and not on the other pages.

There are several reasons for that. The first thing I would check is to make sure you are using the correct path. Instead of relative paths e.g. ./images/picture.jpg, use absolute paths instead like: http://www.site.com/images/picture.jpg

But the best way to edit header images in WordPress is really to use the following code.
< ?php get_bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/picture.jpg

Let me explain the code a bit more. The php part:
< ?php get_bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>
Tells WordPress to fetch the URL for the template directory. So when you visit the blog, WordPress will work in the background to build a URL that may look like this:
http://www.blog.com/wp-content/themes/jungletheme/

The second part of the code: /images/picture.jpg
Tells WordPress where inside the theme directory your image is located. When you put those two together (be careful not to add any extra spaces after the ?>), WordPress will build a URL that might look like this that will do the trick and carry through all your blog pages:
http://www.blog.com/wp-content/themes/jungletheme/images/picture.jpg

But what if after doing all that it still fails?

Here’s the fact. Most of the time, changing the header file would work but in WordPress, you can also customize other pages to look completely different that’s the beauty of this system. Which means, I can add code to the header template that tells WordPress to load a different header depending on what page it is on. If that is the case, then you will need some understanding of PHP coding to edit the theme.

But, I think the easiest and fastest way to accomplish what you want without getting lost in code is to look for the page.php or archive.php files. Rename those files to something like page-old.php. When WordPress checks the themes and doesn’t find the page.php, it will default to the index.php and use that to display the page. And that should take care of the problem.

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If you’re using WordPress and are the only blogger, it’s a good idea to save your admin account logins in a safe place then create another account just for you, with a high level rights but not admin rights. Why?

Well… firstly, we tend to lose our logins. Sometimes, we’ve changed email addresses and can’t retrieve your password either. That is a good time to whip out the admin account info you saved to recover your account. Recovering admin accounts can be tricky on WordPress especially if you’re not familiar or comfortable with the thought of messing with the database.

Second, because we use our own logins so much, if someone else gets a hold of it, they do not have admin rights to change the more crucial parts of your blog around.