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WordPress
For Best Results, Visit Your Website Every Day
How’s your website doing? Mine is good today, thanks for asking, but it’s not good every day.
If you own your own website, you should visit it every day to ensure its working properly. Better yet, a few time a day.
If you visit your website at least once a day, you can see how it’s doing. Think of it as a quick health checkup.
Once and a while I’ll find some strange issue that just appears out of nowhere. Like when it was giving all visitors a 403, access denied, error the other day. That killed my StumbleUpon traffic.
Using Posterous To Post Photos To My WordPress Blog
I may have found a use for Posterous!
I’m currently testing out using Posterous as a gateway between my phone and my blog.
By tying the two together I can take cool photos with my phone, attach them to an email with some text, send that off to Posterous, they’ll format it, post it and then send it over here to post.
All of this without leaving my phone.
It’s not perfect though. I will have duplicate content on my Posterous site and here, plus adding categories will have to be done later, but it’s a really easy way of creating content without sitting in front of my computer.
Geeking out at the first WordCamp MSP
The first ever WordCamp Minneapolis – St. Paul was a full day of nothing but WordPress and it was great.
First off, the BestBuy campus was a fantastic location. For those that have never been there, it’s easy to get to, easy to get around, and very cool on the inside. This was the perfect setting and sure beats trying to get around downtown.
Then there was the conference itself. It was nothing but WordPress and there was something for everyone.
There were beginner tracks for those that were newer to WordPress and needed help getting off the ground, and then there were more advanced tracks that really dug into the code.
Are you a Posterous fan? What about Tumblr?
I keep looking at microblogging sites, like Posterous and Tumbler, and think they look cool, but I never get around to doing much with them.
To be honest, I love my WordPress and I don’t know why I’d want to create more content elsewhere.
I can see the advantage from ease of use, but the lack of features and the lack of owning/controlling the software that runs my site concerns me.
Are you a Posterous or Tumblr fan? What makes you love them so much?
Just trying to find out if I’m missing something here. 
Bad Behavior WordPress Plugin Killed My Google Traffic
I’ve been looking into the Bad Behavior WordPress plugin to help stop some of the spam comments that I’ve been getting. Turns out, it made things horribly worse.
I’m not sure why, but the plugin decided to block Google bot. By the time I noticed, the damage had been done and my visitor stats are falling at a rapid rate. I’m getting 1/3rd of the traffic I was last week and it continues to go down.
I’ve removed the plugin and am now eagerly awaiting Google bot to come back and index my content. I don’t know how long it’ll take to recover, but I’m hoping not to long.
What happens when you change WordPress’ URL structure? Will it kill SEO?
Earlier this year I switched all my WordPress URLs (aka permalinks) from date based to ID and post names. Since then I haven’t seen any negative effects from search engines when it comes to the amount of referral traffic.
The Background
Now, when a blog is set up, the URL structure is defined. If you don’t really know what you’re doing, then you probably don’t think twice about the URL structure. I sure didn’t when I setup my blog in 2004. However, years later, I realized that I hated having the month and day in the URL and I wanted to change it to be shorter and cleaner.
What makes a good web host?
I’ll admit it, I have A.D.D when it comes to technology. There’s always something new, someone cheaper, or something shiny that grabs my attention. But new isn’t always better.
As I’m writing this post, I’m having conversations with my web host, A Small Orange, over high CPU performance. It seems that something on my WordPress site is causing the server to work extra hard. We’ve found out it’s either related to index.php and/or wp-cron.
Me & WordPress vs Google Page Speed & YSlow
If it’s not one thing, it’s another. It seems that I can’t stop tweaking my WordPress install & settings.
I’ve done some major re-working of things on the back-end and I’m hoping I didn’t break anything. If I did, please tell me!
The bulk of my changes are to help with my site speed addiction. Ever since Google announced tools to help webmasters find ways of speeding up their sites, I’ve been hooked. I check the graph in Google Webmaster Central all the time in hopes of seeing sharp declines.
Google's Site Performance Analysis
WordPress 3 Login Error Animation – No No No
It’s a small new feature in WordPress 3 but a fun one.
On the login screen, if you enter your username or password incorrectly, it shakes the screen at you in a disapproving manor. “No no no, that’s just not right” is what WordPress is telling you.
I wonder how many other small, but fun, little updates were made.
Speeding Up WordPress Starts With Plugin Developers
I’ve recently been looking at Google’s speed test tool and working to increase the speed of some of the sites I interact with daily. Where as there are things that we, as blog owners, can control, a lot of speeding up WordPress falls in the hands of plugin developers.
Here is what WordPress plugins developers can do to help us all out:
1. Set the Height and Width of Images
I know this is an easy one not to do, and it’s one of the most common issues that Google reported, but it’s so easy. Please set the height and width of all images in your plugin.
