Category Archives: WordPress

Blogging Wars - Wordpress Vs Blogger Part 1

November 29, 2008 – 11:17 am

There’s a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible blogging platforms. The average newbie now has “too many” options to choose from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I’m always asked the question “Is Wordpress better than Blogger?”. The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need.

You also need to understand that there are different versions of Wordpress, the earliest now termed as “Wordpress” at Wordpress.org, and the hosted version similar to Blogger now termed “Wordpress.com” which is of course available Wordpress.com. Only the latter comes with free hosting on a sub-domain account. We’ll discuss this in Part 2.

For Part 1 of this article, we look only at the self-hosted version of Wordpress. Here’s the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your Wordpress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With Wordpress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your Wordpress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can extremely furstrating. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With Wordpress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating.

With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend Wordpress to far beyond just a blogging platform.

The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS. Unlike complicated predecessors like PHPPostNuke, B2, Mambo or even Joomla, Wordpress is user friendly. Plus, the availability of source codes in this open-source system coupled with a strong community makes it possible to use Wordpress as an article management system, classifieds system, direct-selling site and even a paid membership site.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though – when you go Wordpress, you don’t go back.

By admin No Comments

What You Need To Know About WordPress Podcasts

November 29, 2008 – 11:12 am

WordPress is a blogging platform that has podcasting support. A podcast is a pre-recorded audio program, very much like a radio program that is listened to on the computer. Podcasting is distributing audio or video content via RSS 2.0 or atom as WordPress creates all the necessary links for the site.

Using WordPress for Podcasting

WordPress works for podcasting. It starts with the creation of a video or audio that is intended to be shared. The file is uploaded to a server and the line to the file is posted in the weblog. WordPress automatically includes a link to the file in the RSS/Atom feed. Listeners will then subscribe to the feed where new files are downloaded automatically.

Podcasting is supported by WordPress 1.5. Linking to an audio file in one of the posts will result to WordPress automatically adding the enclosure tag to the RSS2 feed to make it usable as a podcast. It is important to use a complete and absolute URL when linking to an audio file or WordPress will not be able to make an enclosure for it.

The RSS2 feed should be made available by putting a linking somewhere on the page. As of WordPress 1.5, the RSS 2.0/Atom links are located at the bottom of the page by default. This only works for posts and not for static pages. When a linked file is inaccessible upon publishing of the post, WordPress will not be able to collect the information it needs from the linked files.

A change in the linked file would require refurbishing of the posts so that WordPress can update its file size information about the file. In order for WordPress to recognize m4a and m4b files as podcast, the web server has to be configured to serve the right content type. An XML at the end of the RSS/Atom URL may occasionally be needed for it to work properly.

Dedicated podcast feeds can be made by creating a category in the Admin>Manage>Categories panel for the audio files, and a post containing an audio link must be assigned to every category. If audio file are being hosted on http://archive.org, a custom field called “enclosure” should be added and the full URL is posted for the MP3 file in the value field.

Podcasting allows anyone to create his/her own audio programming and deliver it via the web. The usual way of distributing podcasts are through RSS enclosures as it allows the reference of binary data from within the RSS feed. Podcast readers subscribe to the RSS feed and download the audio files contained in the enclosures. The downloaded audio files are then moved to a portable audio player for later consumption.

Of WordPress Plugins

There are resources that will help in getting to know the WordPress blog platform better. The WordPress podcast features easy and understandable commentaries about WordPress plus a couple of plugins. It is a great learning resource for any skill or experience level. The Diagnosis plugin presents the detailed information about the server, operating system and the database. It is presented in a way that could be understood by the least technically-inclined person using it. Most will be able to appreciate its rich tech content.

The PodPress plugin is designed to make podcasting with WordPress as easy as possible. It has several features that will make its use fruitful to the user. It has full featured and automatic feed generation as well as auto generation of enclosure tag. It provides a preview of what the podcast would look like on iTunes. The podcast is able to download stats and there is support provided for premium content for pay accounts. This plugin makes adding a podcast to a post very simple and makes possible the viewing of MP3 files’ ID3 tag information. The contents of the ID3 tags can even be copied into the post.

It likewise provides control where the player will display within the posts. Support for various formats including video podcasting is given while it facilitates support for unlimited number of media files. It has automatic media player for MP3, MP4, MOV, FLV, ASF, WMV, AVI and others. It also includes in-line and Pop-up Windows support and provides preview image for videos.

The Mechanics of Podcasting

Podcasting’s publish/subscribe model makes use of the push technology wherein the information provider chooses which files to offer in a feed and the subscriber chooses among available feed channels. As a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program which is made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player, podcasting makes use of an automatic mechanism that transfers multi-media computer files from a server to a client. Podcasts are generally analogous to a recorded television or radio server.

The content provider starts by making a file available on the Internet usually by posting the file on a publicly-available web server. However, it is not technically necessary that the file be publicly accessible but it is required that it be accessible through some known URL or a general-purpose Internet address. He then acknowledges the existence of the file by referencing it in another file known as the feed.

The feed is a machine-readable list of the URLs by which episodes of the show may be accessed. One episode refers to the originally made file while the list provides other information such as publish dates, titles and accompanying text description of the series, and each of its episodes. This list can either be published in RSS format and less frequently in atom format.

Feeds may contain entries for all episodes in the series but are usually limited to a short list of the most recent episodes. A feed from one author is commonly used for standard podcasts but the practice of having multiple authors contribute episodes to a single podcast feed is fast becoming popular. The location known as the feed URI or feed URL at which the feed is posted by the content provider is expected to be permanent. This is to be made known to the intended audience.

The user enters the feed URI into a software called a podcatcher or aggregator which retrieves and processes data from the said feed. A podcatcher is a program which starts when the computer is started and runs in the background. A set of feed URIs is managed by it which is added by the user and downloaded at a specified interval. Any substantive change in the feed data from the time it was previously checked will trigger automatic downloading of the location of the most recent item to the user’s computer. Some podcatchers make the newly downloaded episodes available to a user’s portable media player. Downloaded episodes can be played, replayed, or archived like any other computer file.

By admin No Comments

Making Money With Adsense Is Easy Thanks To Wordpress

November 29, 2008 – 11:12 am

Have you been contemplatingabout how to make money on the internet. I am going to give you a powerful one, two, combination that involves Google and Wordpress. Making money with Adsense and Wordpress is a quick and easy way for you to get started making money today. If you can type you can build web pages in a matter of minutes.

Wordpress is a blogging system that is very easy to use for building web pages and managing all of your content. You simply do this by logging into your account and posting your thoughts. If you can talk you can build web pages with Word Press. Just write like you talk. With a little research on what people are searching for online you can write articles that provide excellent information people are looking for.

By adding Google Adsense to your Word Press blog you can have advertising on every page that can make you a commission when someone clicks on a Google ad. Google Adsense is so smart that they match the advertisers to what you are writing about so it is relevant to your reader. It is only natural for someone reading your article to click on an ad that catches their attention. I have found no easier way in making money on the internet than with Google Adsense, but there are a couple of tricks involved.

By correctly posting keywords in your title and in your article search engines will spider your site and give you credit for writing valuable content. Give the search engines what they want by optimizing your posts and you will rewarded with search engine traffic back to the page that WordPress just created for you.

Wordpress also ‘pings’ many services for you through pingomatic each time you create a new post. This alerts the search engines to the fact that you have created new content and tells them to send the search engine spiders out to index your site. RSS feeds and sitemaps can also be generated automatically.

WordPress comes with many different plugins that allow you to customize your blog the way you want. The key is to write new articles often and create a lot of content.By doing this making money with Adsense is easily done and you can spend more time writing quality articles for new web pages to be built by WordPress.

There is no simpler way to get started than blogging with Wordpress and adding in Google Adsense. Over time you are building up web pages and content that bring you in a steady income for years to come. The key is to invest the time now and get started using this powerful team.

By admin No Comments

Moving Your WordPress Blog

November 29, 2008 – 11:12 am

Moving a blog can make it unreachable for 24 - 72 hours, unless the new domain name has fully propagated around the Internet. It is just the way it is and WordPress doesn’t have anything to do with such limitation. Moving is best done when you have the time or have planned ahead.

Moving Towards a New Domain Name

The first thing to do is create a database back-up. The entire WordPress installation needs to be downloaded with no exceptions. This is not the time to tidy up your install or to upgrade/change anything. That would have to wait after the blog has been moved and is shown to be working. Your computer should now have these items: one or more database backups plus all your wpfiles, folders and images directories. The backups should be copied again to somewhere safe on your machine so that the next stage can be done on a copy.

Alterations are needed to be made. The details of your new mysql connection have to be changed by opening the file “wp-config.php” on your WordPress install. The file: SCR 1.0.002 Freeware Edition (13KB) should be downloaded to search and replace your website URL with your Xampp url. This is because your blog address inside the database has to be changed. Database files can be very large, thus opening them can be excruciatingly slow. It could even crash your machine. By replacing the old address with your new address, the URLs within your site will still work.

Moving hosts will mean changes in your passwords. You can double check your new passwords for your mysql connection as well as other passwords that you have in use. After which, it is now time to upload all your files to your new web space and restore your database. From the website cpanel, select the database you are using. You should still need to look inside the “wp - options” table to check that the values in “site - url” and “home” are correct. Clear your cache and cookies before checking your new site.

It is possible that you will get a blank page when looking at your blog right after moving. In this case, the themes should be checked. A faulty theme file causes a blank page. You can try changing themes or uploading a new theme then changing to it. Should this step not help, you should check whether all the WordPress files are present and are of the correct size. You can use your ftp client to download a new set of WordPress files, if needed.

There may be instances where you would need to move WordPress around within your server. WordPress is flexible enough to handle this situation. Moving WordPress from one server to another is also possible.

Moving Within

WordPress files can be moved from one location on your server to another. Start by creating the new location using any of these methods: create the new directory when you will be moving your WordPress core files to a new directory, or move the WordPress to your root directory by making sure all index, php, .htaccess and other files that might be copied over are backed-up and/or moved. This will then make the root directory ready for the new WordPress files. It is crucial that you set the URL locations before you move the file.

When done, test your site to confirm that it works right. Make sure that you let people know the new address when the change involves a new address to your blog. Consider adding some redirection instructions in your .htaccess file to serve as a guide to visitors towards the new location.

Handling Redirects after Moving a WordPress Blog

Concerns should not be limited to the moving of the actual WordPress program files but also on finding a way to redirect visitors that may be following outdated links to an old content. It is possible that redirects can mess up RSS feeds and search engine results thus an ideal redirect option that preserves both past and current search results is the key. After moving your WordPress blog, look into how 301 redirects can be properly handled.

A suggested way goes like this: open your .htaccess file in the directory that houses your newly moved WordPress file and edit in either your host’s file manager interface or by downloading to your local machine. Insert a line at the top that reads: redirect301/blog/http://www.yoursite.com/. You have to make sure to insert the opening and trailing / at the end of the destination path. Save your .htaccess file. Reupload it if you’re editing on your local machine rather than on the server. Load your old WordPress URL to make this work.

Moving Several Posts from One Blog to Another

When you decide to move over all your WordPress related posts from another blog, the task is basically to extract a few posts and their comments and to insert them into the database of the new blog. This can be accomplished by following these steps: click on the wp-posts table name in the left panel when you are in the proper database. It should be noticed that other tables might have a different prefix. Click browse on the top in the next panel. Select the checkbox at the beginning of the rows that you want to extract or export. Select “Export” at the bottom of the rows where it says “with selected”. Deselect structure on the next panel, leave selected Data, check Save As file, then Go. You will then get a prefix - posts.sqlfile.

Open the file in your chosen text editor such as Notepad. Change the wp-part everywhere to target_ -, depending on the prefix of the tables where you want to move the post using Search/Research. You are ready to go if you move the post to a new, empty database. However, if the target blog has posts in the database, there is some more work to do. You have to check in the database what the ID number of your last post is in the target blog. You should also go back to the .sqlfile and take a look at the first line below Dumping data for table…

Moving a WordPress Blog to Your Own WordPress Installation

WordPress is a platform you install on your own/hosted server and maintain the installation yourself. However, attempting to make the move should only be done if you’re comfortable with ftp, basic work in the UNIX shell, basic SQL and a little bit of general hacking. Expertise is not really required but possessing the basic skills and the willingness to give it a go are.

The first thing to do is to install WordPress and get a hosting service. Choose one that does an automatic install of WordPress to do away with fiddling. Of course, you would need http://mysql.php, some form of ftp access and a shell account. The challenge lies on setting up your blog on a new place while finding the theme and the plugins you want. The themes on http://WordPress.com normally have links to places you can download them from.

By admin 2 Comments

Profitng And Benefiting From Wordpress Ella

November 29, 2008 – 11:12 am

The “Wordpress” developer team has successfully launched their latest version of Wordpress, called “Wordpress Ella”. Numerically, the version number is called version 2.1

To the uninitiated, news like this seems like a normal announcement from software developers and are often passed on by. However, from the eyes of a trained mind and savvy businessman, the news of “Wordpress Ella” contain many benefits that online business owners can immediately tap into and profit from.

“Wordpress Ella” comes with the following enhancements which are a great resource for online business owners.

1. First on the list of enhancements from Wordpress Ella is an ‘autosave’ function that ensures you will never lose a post again. This is an invaluable tool especially at times when you have spent a lot of time in front of your computer screen, brainstorming on what to write to promote your business.

Imagine the horror or frustration especially in instances where the battery of your notebook died and you forgot to save. Or perhaps there was a blackout or you accidentally closed the browser window without saving your work.

“Wordpress Ella” autosave function is a real time saver and is an abosolute must for any online businesses.

2. Next in line on “Wordpress Ella” is the “Import” and “Export” functions. Let’s talk about the import function first.

The latest release of “Wordpress Ella” has an import function that allows you to import your blog created from other popular blogging platforms such as ‘Movable Type’, ‘Typepad’, ‘Livejournal’, ‘Blogger’ and so on, into Wordpress itself.

This way, you don’t have to lose any important data such as your blog posts and comments. This flexibility is another reason why Wordpress itself is so successful and continues to gain a huge following and user base.

Why would anyone want to transfer their blog from another platform to Wordpress? Well, one reason is because with most of these other blogging platforms, the user has to pay a monthly fee. Wordpress, as almost everyone knows is free, and you can easily install with a few clicks using Fantastico from within your hosting account’s Cpanel.

Another reason to migrate or transfer the entire blog to Wordpress could be due to the limitation of some blogging platforms. Blogger, for example does not support the use of categories, which are critical when it comes to optimizing the blog to rank high for specific keywords related to the business.

Now, let’s discuss about the “Export” function.

“Export” as the name implies, will export all the Wordpress posts and comments into a file (called XML). This file can then be imported into other Wordpress blogs. It’s like a cross transferring of data between similar or related “Wordpress Blogs”.

This is useful when one is starting a new blog and perhaps need to populate the blog with useful content instead of just displaying news feed. For example, if you have a blog on muscle building, and you started a new blog on weight loss, you can import the content (which are the posts and comments) from the muscle blog into the weight loss blog.

This way, when you drive traffic to your new weight loss blog, you can at least provide the reader with some useful content while you build up the content around weight loss. Naturally there is some correlation between these two topics. After all, if you want to build muscle, naturally you need to burn off the excess fats and turn them into muscles!

3. Another enhancement of “Wordpress Ella” is the new search engine privacy. What this means is that you can indicate whether you’d like your blog to be indexed or ping by search engines, especially Google, Yahoo or MSN, which are the three top search engines online.

Most experienced marketers know about the pinging power of blogs. Everytime when a post is published, Wordpress will ping or notify specific blog directories about updates to your blog, causing them to index or visit your blog, brining you that additional and much needed targeted traffic.

As crazy as it sounds, considering that most business owners would like to get their site listed in the search engines, there are also times when you might want to hide or mask your blog from the radar screen of search engines. This is true especially in cases where it’s only meant for paid customers only. For example, you might be providing some sensitive information meant for paid customers and you don’t want anyone doing a search on the search engines to stumble upon your blog and have access to the information.

4. Another powerful upgrade that “Wordpress Ella” brings is the ability to specify a static page as the front page for your site or blog.

Most savvy marketers employ the use of a mini site or a one page only sales letter when marketing their products or services. Normally such one page sites will also contain an opt-in box, where visitors and readers are enticed to provide their email address in exchange for a free gift, software, e-course etc.

When they do so, they will normally be enrolled in an autoresponder course that automatically does the follow-up with the said subscriber which either results in a sale or no sale.

With a blog, however, the main page or the front page will always a display of the latest chronological posts. You can create pages for a blog, however, in the past it was not that easy for the layman to do so.

With “Wordpress Ella”, all you need to do if you want a static front page is to select this option in the Wordpress control panel. It can’t get any easier than this.

These are just some of the enhancements that you can immediately benefit from “Wordpress Ella”.

This article assumes you already have some basic knowledge about the marketing power of blogs in terms
of its syndication power, targeted traffic and search engine optimization capability for keywords.

By admin No Comments