Good chuckle at the end there as well…

“Not really tricks, techniques”! We can all feel good about ourselves again, tooling your sites to help you rank better in big G isn’t dirty.

I’ll add that from experience, I find a good sprinkling of your keywords in the title, page description, heading 1, heading 2 and 3 if it makes sense, and use the alt property on the img tag. In fact, I’d say it might work out really well if you use a blogging system like WordPress. You could make the tags that you apply to each post correspond with the content for that alt property. Making the process of adding new images as simple as:

1. Log in, create new post
2. Add title, apply tags, assign category
3. Post

What you do in step 2 means everything, and any way to decrease the time spent there, the better.  So taking advantage of existing work you’ve done by thinking of the tags as an extension of your selected keywords for the post/image, you could apply a list of keywords elsewhere within the entire html, like say in the meta tags for “keywords” (which really aren’t all that important, depends on who you ask).  I always try to include meta keywords though, to be thorough.

As well, the WordPress Codex contains all the information you need to include the tags into the ALT property of the image tag as well.  You can dump those tags onto the page and use them in a variety of ways.

Applying good tags to your image posts, and even non images posts, and used in ways described in the video, and with a little tag ingenuity on the resulting html page, will help save you time, and help to increase your PageRank.

Of course, if you need any help you can always ask for my assistance. I’m more than happy to help when I’m able.

If you liked the video, thank Google, and catch more of Matt on the Google Webmaster Central Channel on YouTube.

If you have not taken the time to consider how you might recover if you lost everything, perhaps you should right now.  Not taking the time to make sure you can recover your instance of WordPress will only leave you crying the day that you need to, but can’t. Follow these items to ensure you can restore your database and/or files that comprise your WordPress blog.

The following two plugins will help make sure that you are backing up everything you need to recover should disaster strike.

Backups and Recovering from disaster

Making sure you can recover from the potential “oops” that can happen, as well as being able to quickly recover from any type of attack is perhaps the most important first step you can take, and before implementing changes that effect your blog, or anything else for that matter.  Having a backup will one day save your ass, trust me.

With that said, how can you effectively and efficiently backup your WordPress site? Pretty easily with these few plugins I’ve found.

WP Backup – The WordPress Backup plugin performs regular backups of your upload (images) current theme, and plugin directories. Backup files are available for download and optionally emailed to a specified email address. You can adjust the interval between backups and the email address to which the backups are sent.

However, if your blog is rather large and filled with years of posts, don’t expect the email portion to work unless you can send large files through.  At least, the resultant .zip file might be too large to fit through email servers. You’ll have to grab your backups off the server directly if this is the case.

You can visit the site with the link above, or simply type “WordPress Backup” in your admin panel for a plugin search.

WP Database Manager – The WordPress Database Manager provides some great functionality for working with the back-end WordPress database. Performing actions against it is a snap, and like the WP Backup plugin, it too will backup, zip and email your database to you at regular intervals.

One of the great things about the WP Database Manager is that you can also take that backup and restore it, effectively giving you the ability to recover from disaster easily, and quickly.

That’s all you need!

You have the files being backed up, you have the database being backed up?  What’s left to do?

Make sure you collect the backups off the server.

The last part of an effective backup routine is making sure that the backups are safe and that you can get to them when you need to.  If disaster strikes, you might lose a bit of data due to the timing of the backups and when disaster actually strikes, but, it won’t be as much of a heartbreak if you didn’t have those backups.

Cover your ass, make sure you do this if you’re serious about keeping your blog going.

]]> http://www.waynejohn.com/ensure-you-can-recover-from-disaster-backing-up-wordpress-files-and-databases/feed/ 7 http://www.waynejohn.com/spring-cleaning-before-summer-starts/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=spring-cleaning-before-summer-starts http://www.waynejohn.com/spring-cleaning-before-summer-starts/#comments Tue, 22 Jun 2010 04:12:07 +0000 Wayne http://www.waynejohn.com/?p=2369 Continue reading →]]> I’ve upgraded to WordPress 3.0 and so far the blog is looking good, if not completely different. I decided that I like the new default theme that comes with WordPress 3.0 so much that I’ll just use it for my own theme for the time being.  It just feels like a good time to do some spring cleaning before the summer starts.

Actually, I found problems with the Arras theme I was using previously. I didn’t bother exploring the issue much, but the layout decided to skew a bit. I didn’t need much prodding to just ditch the whole theme and start fresh. The old one wore on me a bit. Each post required an associated image. I had a stock of them sitting aside for general purpose, but for the most part, that felt like too much of a setup just to get a post out the door. I was already struggling with mental blockage and didn’t really need the additional weight of have-to-do’s like finding an image. Sometimes, you don’t need or want one.

So this is the new theme.  I’ve already added in the AdSense and such.  What little comes through I don’t necessarily want to stop, right?

I’ve also noticed things acting a little slow.  I think I’ve overloaded on plugins a bit, so had to scale back what I use.  Perhaps part of that was the theme itself, time will tell if that’s the case.

So, a new theme.  A few less plugins.

The overall theme with me these days is reducing the complexity of life’s daily chores and duties, responsibilities and focus on what matters most.

Me.

You should do the same for yourself too.  When was the last time you did something good for yourself? What was it?

Getting your own house in order allows you to help others out with their house.  There is still time to do some spring cleaning before the summer starts.

It seems that the new release includes taxonomy functionality, which essentially means that you can build lists and relate them. The demo shows a few possible menu choices like “Products” and “Employees”, but it didn’t go any further into it. That left me wondering exactly how detailed you can make each item that might go into those “buckets”.

Perhaps the most exciting feature is that you can run multiple sites off a single install. If you’ve tinkered like me, you probably became really good at installing WordPress from all the experiments you’ve done. This might save some time when tinkering, so I’m excited to hear about that.

So, what are you doing lingering around here? Go play with WordPress 3.0 and let me know what you think. I’m going to have some fun checking out the multi-site functionality.

Cheers!

So what’s the big deal, anyone can set up a blog right?

That’s right, anyone can set up a blog using one of the many free blog sites out there.  To be quite honest, it isn’t difficult, but that’s relative right?  Do you know what domain name would be the best choice for your blog?  Do you know if it’s going to garner a decent level of natural search traffic?

Search traffic is the best type of traffic to make passive income from.  Traffic coming from Google, Bing, Yahoo and others routinely click on ads and make sales for bloggers, whereas the other traffic sources don’t click ads as frequently, if at all.  If you are unclear about traffic, I wrote an article on the various types of web site traffic that you can drive to your site. It will help you understand more about the traffic that is waiting for your site.

So, what I’m proposing to you is this:

If you are ready to take the plunge and start blogging for dollars, let me help you get set up the right way.  Here’s what I’ll do for you:

• Help you choose a good domain name – The domain name is perhaps the most important aspect of driving search traffic to your site.
• Establish your blog on a self-hosting provider – When it comes to flexibility and not having constraints put upon you and your blog, a self-hosted blog is the way to go.  This simply means that you’ll have full and complete access to modify and change your blog however you see fit.  Self-hosting does cost a little money, but it is well worth it if you are serious about your new venture. If you can make about $130 in a year, the blog will pay for itself, and begin paying you.
• Configure WordPress – I use WordPress exclusively, I’ve tried the others, and found the best features and flexibility in WordPress.  I’ll configure your WordPress install, establish your theme, and set you up with the plug-ins that I use for my own blogs and web sites.
• 2 hours of training/consultation – Once your blog is set up, you’ll need to know what to do.  I’ll spend some time with you and help you get over the hurdles you’ll face so you can hit the ground running.
• Support – I prefer to build long-lasting relationships with my clients.  If there is ever an issue or problem, I’m here to help.  Please feel free to use me.  I stand behind everything I offer and feel it’s only appropriate that I do so.

I use DreamHost exclusively

DreamHost has been a dream, really.  They have proved to me that they care about the sites they host, so I use them exclusively for all of my own sites.

With DreamHost, you get:

• Free domain registration
• Unlimited disk space
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited MySql installs
• Unlimited Email accounts
• Unlimited hosted domains (Set up more than one site without paying more)
• $9.95 per month if purchased for a year.  That’s only $119.40 per year.

If you use the promocode “WAYNEJOHN”, that will get you your first year at only $75, saving you $44!

Free Hosting for Non-Profit 501(c)(3)

DreamHost offers a FREE hosting plan to non-profit, charitable organizations registered in the United States.

This discount applies to a single hosting plan per non-profit, hosted within only one account, for US-based 501(c)(3) organizations.

A determination letter is all that will be accepted for free hosting.

Where’s the catch?

There is no catch.  When you purchase hosting from Dreamhost and use my promo code, Dreamhost will pay me a few dollars for bringing you to them.  As a thank you for using my link to sign-up with Dreamhost, I’m able to offer all the above.

Ready to start blogging?

If you have already decided on a domain name,  Click here to get started with Dreamhost.  If you want to take advantage of my offer to help you decide on a good domain name before you dive in, please contact me first and let me know what you are considering for a topic or idea for your site.

I’m looking forward to helping you achieve your goals using WordPress and Dreamhost.  Contact me right away to get started!

I’ll also walk-through setting up a WordPress blog instance so that we can work with WordPress locally.  Being able to do so will bring a few benefits.

• Developing locally is much faster than over the wire, allowing us to get more done, faster
• Because development is isolated to our local system, we won’t impact site visitors, in case the site we are working on is a live site
• We can try new plugins and themes, develop plugins and themes safely
• Develop WordPress solutions without being connected to the Internet

As you might know, this year I’m going to show you how to build an image based WordPress site.  I’m going to use my local development environment to build everything, and when I’m done, I’ll deploy it out to the Internet and make it live.  Actually, there will probably be a few steps where things will be live just for demonstration.

What I’ll show you is everything I went through to establish my own WordPress development environment.  This requires that I have an Apache web server, PHP and MySQL running.  WampServer provides all three of those technologies, and it’s in the name too: Windows Apache MySQL PHP, WAMP.  Although, once WampServer is installed, we’ll need to make some changes to the configuration files.  Once WampServer is set up, we’ll then walk through establishing a working WordPress install, right on your home system.  From there the sky is the limit.  You will be able to do everything you can do on a web host, but with the convenience of a locally running application.

If that sounds appealing to you, let’s not waste any time and get to it.

Who is this for?

This article is geared towards developers and those that are looking to become developers, or teach themselves web development in the comfort of their own system.

Requirements

There are a few things you should know and be aware of before just diving on in.  WordPress requires PHP version 4.3 or greater as well as MySQL version 4.1.2 or greater to run on the date I wrote this.  You also need an Apache or Nginx web server.  WampServer gives everything we need to get ourselves up and running, and that is why we are using it. The official WordPress requirements page may express more.

I’ve been through the install process a few dozen times now as I built this article, and each time I’ve never ran into any problems.  The issues I do run into are more configuration, and I’ll explain those as they occur.

Downloading and Installing WampServer

Download WampServer

Using the link above, check out the WampServer site and grab the download from their download page.  When you do, you’ll find you’re redirected over to SourceForge.  SourceForge is an open-source code repository where many great applications are built by developers around the world.  Save the file to your desktop and run the application.

During the install process, after you accept the license agreement, you are asked to provide an installation destination.  The path you provide here will have an impact on where your root website will be placed.  For instance, I specified my path as c:\wamp to keep things simple.  It’s easy to remember and short.  We’ll be using this path later, and having a short path is going to be helpful in a few different ways.

Clicking through the rest of the installer is fine, there isn’t much else that will happen.  After the files are copied and if you have FireFox installed, you might get the following prompt:

I use FireFox for any and all web development, and I recommend you do too.  It’s easier to make accommodations for Internet Explorer after the fact, than it is the other way around.  Plus you don’t get great tools like FireBug either!

I left the default mail parameters alone for now.

Starting WampServer for the first time

If you didn’t start WampServer automatically after installing, or if you are returning to do more work WampServer, you can do so any time by finding the WampServer menu item and clicking the “start WampServer” link.

You might also see a Windows Security Alert warning you about the Apache HTTP runtime.  This particular executable is going to attach itself to port 80 and listen for any requests coming in, so I’m going to allow it to communicate with private networks, but not public networks.

You should see a new system tray icon now.  The icon will change color depending on the status of the WampServer, the yellow in mine indicates that I have an issue that I’ll have to sort out, not to mention the fact that the message reads “server offline”.

Clicking the system tray icon will display the menu, and it’s here that I’ll refer to many times through the remainder of setting things up. When I do, you’ll see it like this: Apache->Service->Test Port 80.

Go ahead and click Test Port 80 right now.  If you see a message that reads “Your port 80 is not actually used.”, you’re all set and can skip over the next few items.

If you already have another application listening to port 80, then you might want to consider who gets to use port 80.  Each web server needs their own port to listen through, and I have mine in use by Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) right now, so I’m going to disable the service.

To disable the server, right-click on My Computer and navigate to My Computer->Manage.  This will bring up the following screen.

The numbering follows my own click pattern, yours should be very similar.  Looking at the World Wide Web Publishing Service tells us that the service is “Started” and it’s set to “Automatic” start.  Right-clicking on the service and choosing Properties reveals all you need to stop the current running instance, and configure it to not automatically start every time Windows does.

Running Apache->Service->Test Port 80 again should give you the message “Your port 80 is not actually used.” now.

Testing and configuring the WampServer install

WampServer is now running and we can start playing around with it.  Open up FireFox and enter http://localhost into the address bar.  You can also do this through the WampServer menu via the Localhost link at the top of the menu.  You should see the following screen.

This is the primary WampServer Homepage for your local installation.  From here you can see the versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL that is installed, as well as the extensions that are currently in use by PHP.

Installing WordPress locally

Download WordPress

After you download the latest stable release of WordPress, extract all the files into a folder under c:\wamp\www

You should end up with the root of WordPress local website at c:\wamp\www\wordpress.  We now need to set up the MySQL database instance.

Setup MySQL for WordPress

WordPress installs the database tables it uses automatically when you first run WordPress.  However, this will fail if we don’t first provide a database to use, so we need to create a blank database in MySQL.  To do this, first open the phpMyAdmin application from the top level of the WampServer menu.

Create a new database called “wpdata” and set the collation to utf8_general_ci, unless you feel something else would be better for you.  For most of us, utf8_general_ci should do just fine.

With a new database waiting for WordPress to use, you might notice that WampServer installs MySQL without the root user having a password.  Not a terribly bad thing since everything we’re setting up is behind our own firewalls.  I don’t know what problems might come from this, so I’m going to modify the root MySQL users password to be something other than nothing.  To do this yourself, the first thing we want to do is go to the Privileges tab in the phpMyAdmin interface.

Change the root password for the host 127.0.0.1 first since we’re kinda using localhost right now.  You don’t want to shut yourself out so early.  You’ll need to do these steps again for localhost.  Once you click the icon indicated in the image, you will see an area that looks like this:

Simply fill in the password you want to use and remember it.  Click Go and then change the password on the localhost user account as well.  With both changed, we are now locked out of MySQL.  To rid us of our misfortune, we can update the MySQL configuration file at C:\wamp\apps\phpmyadmin3.2.0.1\config.inc.php and put our password on the line that reads:

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = '';
and make it
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = 'Put_A_Passw0rd_Here!';

Now when you hit refresh you should see your phpMyAdmin interface again, as well the warning should now be gone. The next thing we want to do is create a user specifically for our install of WordPress. On the Privileges tab you’ll find a link to add a new user. The values I’m using for my user are the following:

• User name = Use text field: localwpuser
• Host = Any Host:%
• Password = do0obiedoob1edooo
• I set my user for full blown access.

That’s all you need to do with MySQL.  With those steps complete we are almost ready to run WordPress for the first time.

Running WordPress for the first time

Before we can run WordPress for the first time, we need to do is tell WordPress how to access the database. Edit the WordPress configuration file located at C:\wamp\www\WordPress\wp-config-sample.php and fill in the blanks with the values you used above.

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'wpdata');
/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'localwpuser');
/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'do0obiedoob1edooo');
/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

After editing the wp-config-sample.php file, rename it to wp-config.php and access the new WordPress site by typing in “http://localhost/wordpress” in the address bar of your browser.

You should be presented with the following screen:

Fill in your information and uncheck the “Allow my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati”, as it’s pretty much unnecessary to have search engines index this test site.

One final step, enable the mod_rewrite Apache module

WordPress uses the mod_rewrite Apache module to keep control over the URL’s that WordPress will create, but WampServer doesn’t enable it by default.  To enable the mod_rewrite Apache module, on the WampServer menu, click Apache->Apache Modules->rewrite_module.

That’s it!

You can now develop solutions for WordPress right from the comfort of your own system.  You don’t need to be connected to the Internet to work with this, and if things go awry, it’s really easy to start all over again.  If you need any assistance, the WampServers forums are an excellent location to drop a question or two, or you can even ask me here in the comments.  I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to help, but I’ll try my best for you.

Enjoy your new found development freedom!

All images are copyright of their respective owners.

What the hell is DoFollow?

DoFollow refers to your links and whether or not there is a property assigned to the link that looks like this:

rel="nofollow"

If the anchor tag has this property set to “nofollow”, search engine bots will not follow the link to see where it goes or index the linked page.

Linking is, of course, the primary way we refer to (or “vote” for) other sites, so having the rel=”nofollow” property set is reducing the power of the link.

This reduction in power may or may not be real as it is really up to the spiders and bots to determine if they are going to follow the link through or not.  All we can do as link creators is provide some level of indication how we feel about a link.

Even setting rel=”nofollow” on a link isn’t a good indication of how we actually feel since many platforms automatically add nofollow to everylink, while others might sprinkle it about the site, and yet another might not use it at all.  So there is some disparity out there on it’s usage.

How do I make my site Dofollow?

I’m not going to give explicit directions on how to make your site DoFollow.  Instead, I’ll only tell you that you should consider the platform your using (WordPress, Blogger etc…) and hit Google to do a search and research this for yourself.

Since I’m writing about how to build a website this year, it’s best you become very familiar with Google.  When there is something you don’t understand or need to research, hit Google.

I’d use keywords like “WordPress dofollow” or “blogger dofollow”, including the name of the platform, and the intended sub-subject you want to find more about.

I’ll be referring to how I use Google to learn and teach myself new tricks in future posts as well.  It’s an important part of web development now, as there is no possible way anyone can know everything there is to know out there.  Especially with the rate of change occurring in the world.

Thank you ExtremeJohn!

Thanks for providing a great set of images for free.  I’ve added mine to my footer for now, and I might consider migrating that more towards the comment area when more time allows.

For now, thanks!

Get a DoFollow Image for my blog

How Google looks at nofollow links

Just a quick update that I felt was important enough to include on this post.  This is again, Matt Cutts discussing how nofollow links aren’t necessarily a bad thing in terms of traffic that the link can generate.

There are a few reasons why I made the switch, most notably:

• I wanted more flexibility with my homepage
• I wanted something a little more engaging and nice to look at
• I wanted a few more widget areas
• I wanted a nice way to promote certain posts instead of watching them rotate out to page 2 and never be seen again
• I wanted nested comments
• I wanted to provide the ability for visitors to find more of my content easily

I think I have all that and more now with the theme I installed.  The theme is titled Arras and was written by Melvin Lee.  So far I’m quite pleased with it, but I’m still tightening things up a bit around here.  So far I haven’t found any real show-stoppers with this theme.

One of the downsides, if you even want to call it that, is that I’ll want to apply some image for each and every post now.  Not necessarily a bad thing at all since it makes the homepage look nice.  But it does cut into the amount of time it takes to build a post.  I’m not terribly worried about that though, the theme makes me happy to click about.  I’m not sure if that’s just me, or if that same feeling will transfer to my visitors as well.  Time will tell I guess.

All the comments are now threaded, which means you can respond to a comment itself instead of lumping your comment into the line of comments.  It’s my belief that this will encourage more people to comment and engage others that are also commenting here.

Finally, one last thing I’ve done also, WayneJohn.com is completely DoFollow.  My goal is to make every link on here a DoFollow link, and so far the plugin I’m using seems to do the trick.

Now that I have my new toy installed, maybe I can get some work done and keep my hands to myself.  Don’t count on it.

What do you think?  Kill me with your comments people!

The end result of using  WordPress to update itself caused an error, and left a message in my admin area that stated “An automated WordPress update has failed to complete”.  After realizing that I should be using my hosts installer process instead, and performing the upgrade through my host, everything was file.  The install went off without a hitch, and I was back in action.  However, it left the message in dull yellow across the top of my administration area.

If you happen to see the same message in your admin area, and you know for sure that you’ve upgraded just fine, you can get rid of that message by deleting the .maintenance file that is located in the root of your website.

The .maintenance file seems to be an indicator file that is used by the WordPress install routine to indicate to itself that there was an issue upgrading, and the presence of that file tells WordPress to give the administrators the message stated above.  Sometimes, that file fails to be removed, and you’ll continue to get the message, even though you shouldn’t.

Simply deleting the file is all that is required to remove that message, and return your administrative interface to an error message free interface.  Assuming that was the only error of course.

Actually, the theme I’m using didn’t even come with an archive.php page, so I created a new page and added a new plug-in as well.

I decided to roll with the Clean Archives Reloaded plugin written by a Viper007Bond.

Installation was really easy, and I like the collapsing JavaScript functionality it came with.

Now that I have this in place, I can take inventory of what I’ve written before, and it will help define what I don’t need to write about, but what I should be referencing in the new project for this year.

Onwards and upwards!