Digitalquill

Just one hour ago I posted a blog post about work I have done today on the shed. My post talked about the product I have used for this which is Coroline corrugated bitumen roofing.

I use the Google Bot Bling plugin for WordPress which tells you when Google has visited your site and emails you a log of what was indexed. I noticed this email and saw that my latest post had been indexed so I tried a search in google for ‘Coroline corrugated bitumen’ and this site came 5th in the search engine results page (SERPS)

Following my recent post about the ‘3 must have Media Centre Plugins‘ I thought that I would post about the three WordPress plugins that I consider a must have for all WordPress installs no matter what you use WordPress for, be that a Blog or a CMS.

I of course would promote my plugins at this point, however they are targeted at a specific niche on the WordPress users and as such do not fit into the must have for all WordPress installs category.

I also could go on about SPAM filter this, and SPAM filter that, but in all honesty that has been done so many times before and in my opinion most of the big SPAM plugins for WordPress out there work well so pick one and go with it.

My List is one that give practice benefit to you the blogger. They are all available for free on the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Search Meter

WordPress has a great inbuilt search facility, most if not all themes integrate with this to allow users of your WordPress site to search your content. This information is very valuable, especially if you are using WordPress as a CMS or as an ecommerce site, but also if you are a blogger.

To be able to have an insight into what your users are searching fo on your WordPress site gives you an insight into what they are interested in and as such you can tailor your future content to suit that, providing more content based on the search trends on your site.

Combine this with information coming from Google Analytics which will show you what keywords people used to find your site on search engines and you start to have a very powerful body of data at your disposal.

The Search Meter WordPress plugin records the searches made on your WordPress site and provides you with that information along with how many results those searches had on your site.

This allows you to start writing the content that your users want on your WordPress site.

All in one SEO

You can not have a list of WordPress plugins without the ‘All in one SEO plugin. By rights it should always be the number one plugin that you install every time you setup WordPress. In all honesty what should happen is that this plugin is taken on into the main code of WordPress and maintained by the WordPress developers.

The plugin improves the Search engine optimization of WordPress and allows you to control the meta tags created. Meta tags are things like the title of the page, hidden keywords and descriptions that can be picked up by the search engine spiders.

It is a must for all WordPress installs.

Keyword Density

Ok, so I said that I would not promote my WordPress plugins, what i really meant was I would only promote one of them! Seriously though, I do believe that this little tool is essential for everyone.

If you have done any research into getting search engine ranking, you will know that content is king. It does not matter what your site is, the most essential aspect is the content, its quality and its uniqueness.

The keyword density plugin aids you in writing this content to ensure that you get the balance of your chosen keywords in your text. It is a very simple plugin, you tell it to monitor keywords of your choice. If for example you have a blog about Cooking you may want to make sure that your content is rich with keywords such as ‘Cooking, cook, chef, recipe, kitchen, food, meal, baking’

This plugin tells you how you are doing with the balance of those keywords as you type your content. It also makes sure that you do not include your keywords too often as that would bee seen by Google as spamming the search engine.

I have been asked by many people how I managed to post a blog post on Friday when I was at a Wedding of a friend (Congratulations to Lian and Bobby!) Well the fact of the matter is that although the post was published on Friday it could have been written at any time.I generally use the Scheduled posts facility in WordPress to publish the posts when I want them to be published which is not necessarily when I write them.

Why would I not want to publish when I write them? Well for various reasons, generally I will write a whole bunch of posts in one go and then schedule them to be published over the coming days to ensure that there is a constant feed of content to the live site, rather than a big chunk and then nothing for weeks followed by a big chunk again.

Having a constant stream of regularly posted content is better for Search Engines (SEO) especially for Google. There is a chance that Google would see a mass of published content as being SPAM rather than being genuine content if it did not fit within the pattern of posting for that site.

I have blogged before about WordPress 3.0 and all the new features packed into it. One that slipped past my overview and indeed slipped past almost all who have talked so much about this new version of wordpress is a nasty little bit of code hidden away and apparently surreptitiously included by the original developer of WordPress Matt Mullenweg in what some say is a personal mission.

The coe in question is fairly simple, and what it does is search all your posted content for the string ‘wordpress’ and ensures that it is in the ‘correct’ format with a capital W and capital P.

This code was applied by change set 14996 which includes the new function as seen below:

 /** 
* Forever eliminate “WordPress” from the planet (or at least the little bit we can influence). 
* 
* Violating our coding standards for a good function name. 
* 
* @since 3.0.0 
*/ 
function capital_P_dangit( $text ) { 
return str_replace( ‘WordPress’, ‘WordPress’, $text ); 
}
The comments added to that function speaks volumes. It is rather ironic that from someone who preaches open source and allowing users to freely do what ever they wish with software and although it it a very minor point I do not see why they should insist that wordpress is written in the ‘correct’ format.

Matt Mullenweg claims that this small piece of code will not have any impact on users what-so-ever, however, it is clear that he is wrong. I have had the situation today where an apparent bug with a link cloaking script in my WordPress Datafeed Import Plugin was indeed this silly little function messing up the URLS. I have a test area on my server where I install many versions of WordPress so that I can test my scripts and plugins. These are all within a folder called WordPress all in lowercase. When the masked urls are created wordpress finds the wordpress string and changes the case. This in turn breaks the link as Linux platforms are case sensative.

Since I found this and doing a little more digging, I have found that there are reports of people having problems with images named WordPress and indeed others who have their wordpress install in a wordpress folder, find that any internal links in their site will no-longer work.

I really do not understand this position, yes if this is the way that Matt Mullenweg origionally intended WordPress to be written it must be frustrating to see it written otherwise.  However, it does not make any different for SEO, Google is not case sennsative. I agree that they should control the image and the wordpress logo, however, when it is text in a blog post like this, and you subscribe to the full ethos of open source software then this sort of tinkering and forcing the hand of the blogger is simply out of order.

Install the Remove WordPress to WordPress filter which will disable this silly little function…

Following the last release of both of my WordPress plugins I have released a discount code for both meaning that you can get them for £20 each rather than the normal £25. This discount code will be valid until the end of July.

Go to the plugin websites:

Amazon Import Plugin for WordPress Website

or

Datafeed Import Plugin for WordPress Website

and enter the discount code ‘july10′ to get this great offer.

I have the ‘TD Word Count plugin installed I install it on all the wordpress installs that I am using for blogging rather than CMS. The three posts from last night took the word count to over 30,000 words on this blog! Not bad at all! I have three blog posts that are over 1500 words and several more over 1000 and an average of over 300 words per blog post.

I have recently released a new version of the Amazon Import Plugin For WordPress. This release sees a major re-write of the plugin adding functionality, features for usability and some changes to comply with the Amazon API Terms of use.

The Amazon import plugin started off life as a very simple copy of the datafeed import plugin for WordPress, it allowed you to create a search on amazon and import amazon products that match that search and create WordPress blog posts from them. The plugin had limitations that meant you could only import 500 products from each search and only have one template.

With Version 2.0 of the Amazon Import Plugin for WordPress you can now have many search imports and templates for each search term and the plugin will import all the matching products for your search term no matter how many there are.

The plugin now gives you a progress indicator in the WordPress admin area showing you how the import is going, it will make one request per second for the data required to complete your import, it will also print a time stamp against all prices obtained from the Amazon API, this is to comply with the Amazon API TOS.

This release is a significant step forward for the Amazon import plugin and brings it in line with the datafeed import plugin for WordPress in terms of its functionality.

Take a look at the website for the Amazon Import Plugin for WordPress

I have released a new version of the datafeed import plugin for WordPress, also known as the Multifeed import plugin for WordPress.

This is a major release, with significant work gone into methods of posting the datafeeds on slower servers which suffered from timeouts under certain circumstances. The plugin now employs a slow posting system with user feedback on its progress through the datafeed file.

I have also re-written the XML support for the plugin, and it now can import XML and RSS into WordPress using the same methods as it did for the CSV files.

This is a significant step forward for the WordPress plugin and increases what the plugin can be used for, as it can now be used as an RSS aggregator plugin for WordPress as well as a datafeed import.

I have also fixed some bugs introduced with the URL masking system which caused problems for special characters in the URLs and in some cases a character encoding issue with some datafeeds and the WordPress post body.

I also have the next version of the plugin nearly ready, this includes support for the ‘All in one SEO’ plugin for WordPress. I have some testing to do on that version and also I have a request that the URL masking be made optional which I am looking into doing.

All versions of the plugin since version 2.0 have been WordPress 3.0 compatible.

I hope to have the next version ready within the next week.

You can view more details about the plugin at the WordPress Datafeed Import Plugins Website

Please keep tuned for an update about the Amazon Import Plugin for WordPress.

Since the release of WordPress 3.0 earlier this month I have been upgrading all my WordPress installs. These upgrades are progressing well, although, I have not dedicated any time to actually doing this, I have been doing them on an ad-hoc basis, if I visit a site to do some maintenance or work on that site I will upgrade it while I am doing it.

Using this approach I have probably done around 30-40% of my WordPress sites. Not a great percentage, but if you knew the numbers I am talking about then you would realize why I am pleased with this progress.

Some of the WordPress sites that have not been upgraded probably will not be for some time, but this doe not worry me too much as long as no security flaws are found and exploited, at which point this becomes a whole different ball game and I will have to dedicate time to the upgrade process.

I have considered using the WordPress multi-site functionality, however, using it across domains is not as clear and easy as it could be, you have to do some trickery with the htaccess and virtual hosts with the rewrite mod. Not something that is out of the question but something that will take time to setup and work out, on my test WordPress server.

I have read somewhere (sorry to the author I can’t now remember where) that they are so pleased that for once they can do a WordPress upgrade at their leisure rather than being forced into it due to WordPress security problems. I agree with this, especially with the 100′s of WordPress sites that I run, upgrades take a great deal of time.

A very simple and clean process, simply clicked the upgrade now button and away it went, no problems whats so ever. I need to run through the plugins I use, although I try to keep the number of plugins in use to a minimum as they can prove to be a security risk.

At first glance all seems normal and working. I have been using the Candidate releases for some time now so the features and new look of WordPress are not a surprise to me, but it will be good to see how I get one with it in real life.

Time to go to work…!