From tthe tweet, I surmised that this person either thinks that updating Wordpress is a pain, or perhaps they have some highly customized Wordpres installation. Although it’s not a 1 click installation, upgrading is a fairly straight forward process.
Here’s a video explaining the process:
If you have any questions or if something is nor clear, just leave your question in the comments section and I’ll do my best to help you out. Thanks!
This is a really good presentation by Tim Ferris about blogging and about how he blogs. If you don’t know who Tim Ferris is, he’s the guy that wrote the book “4 Hour Work Week” among other things.
There are some really good nuggets in here which I’ll share with you here courtesy of Alex:
POSTING TIMES: Tim’s ideal posting times: 7am PST and 6pm EST
BEST DAYS TO POST: Best days to post to engage discussion and get trackbacks: Tues, Thur & Saturday.
WORDING: Changing your “Categories” section to “Topics” encourages more browsing.
SIDEBAR BOX & TABS: If you have “All-time most popular” as your first sidebar tab, then it becomes a fulfilling prophecy. Better to follow Tim’s model and put “all-tim” and your 2nd tab (see Tim’s site for the layout).
Add a “Reasons to Subscribe” page near the top.
POST DATES: Because of bias toward newer content, make sure your post date is at the footer.
TIME ESTIMATE: For very long posts, give the reader an estimate (in bold) of how long the post might take to read (e.g. 3 min, 15 min, etc).
RESOURCES: Consider using Evernote for your post research. (I love Evernote, it synchs between multiple computers, your iPhone, and the web)
WRITERS BLOCK: If you’re ever blocked, write about what makes you angry (but never attack other people).
WRITING THE POST: For long blog posts, print out first draft and edit by hand. Don’t be concerned with SEO on 1st draft
SEO: if your keyword is “steak” go to Google analytics, search for synonyms and sort by average monthly value to find your choices. Make sure your post can only be described one way. Do not have 2 topics in one post. You end up splitting your anchor text.
VIDEO & PHOTOS: “Short” is good when it comes to video. Very rarely does he do standalone video posts – he generally has some value-add in the post. Nothing travels faster than text, text stays around and gets indexed. So have at least a “this is what I talk about in this video” text.
CONTENT: Do evergreen content – dont chase the news.
PHOTOS: To find cools photos, go to flickr, advanced search, creative commons, and sort by most interesting.
COMMENTS: He uses askimet, and quickly scans thru comments to see if there’s any spam that’s been missed. Deletes abusive comments. Tries to save good comments because of hidden gems for use in future posts. Saves them to Evernote. Add a “comment rules” section.
PLUGINS: Uses very few. One is the Redirection plugin.
USABILITY: Also, embeds crazy egg to track where people are clicking. It’s a free service.
Other things to notice about the presentation:
He spent $1200 to setup his current blog, but his first blog was free.
He doesn’t use very many fillers like “uh” and “ums.”
I don’t think he’s a very engaging speaker. Despite that, I’m interested in the topic he was talking about so he held my attention, but I don’t think I’d want to hear him talking about anything else.
He’s done a lot of testing.
I’ll probably start implementing some of his suggestions on this and on my other blogs.
In this video I go over how to add a page to your wordpress blog. This is a preview from the complete video series that I have for sale on the order page.
One of the most time intensive tasks on a wordpress site is dealing with comments. If you’re not careful enough to enable some kind of anti spam tool like the Akismet plugin, you will spend a large percentage of your day dealing with and deleting spam comments.
I think that you have better things to do with your time than deleting spam comments.
What are some plugins that you can use to help you deal with comments more effectively? How about these:
This plugin lets you add an image captcha to your comments box. The captcha is a little image that requires human intervention before the comment can even be submitted for posting. Most spam comments are auto-submitted and therefore cannot get past a captcha. This one plugin alone can save you a lot of time.
The one thing that I see that could be a problem, is that depending on your audience, the captcha may create a barrier for people to submit comments. Some legitimate commenters may not understand the concept of a captcha and/ or may not be able to read the captcha and just not leave a comment.
I’ll go on record, again, and say that I hate automatic replies. Having said that, I think that this tool has the potential to change that opinion. What I like about it, is that you can customize the time between the event occurrence (someone leaves a comment) and the time that they get an email reply.
The utility of this, is that someone can come to the site, leave a comment, and “x” number of hours/ days later they get an email from you thanking them. At your discretion, you can then invite them back to the site for a follow up comment, or invite them back to check out something else on your site.
The potential pitfalls are that the commenter may not be expecting an email from you at all, and they may flag your email as spam.
This little plugin allows your commenter to tweet their comment and a link back to your post. This could help you raise your site’s profile to the twittershpere so it has a lot of potential.
The problem that I see with this, is that it depends on your commenter caring enough about your post and their comment to send it out to their followers. So, you really have to have some very compelling content on your site to make someone tweet it.
I’ll have one more post in this series, and it deals with the image headers, “stay tuned”
3 Comment Plugins for Wordpress
One of the most time intensive tasks on a wordpress site is dealing with comments. If you’re not careful enough to enable some kind of anti spam tool like the Akismet plugin, you will spend a large percentage of your day dealing with and deleting spam comments.
I think that you have better things to do with your time than deleting spam comments.
What are some plugins that you can use to help you deal with comments more effectively? How about these:
SI CAPTCHA for Wordpress
This plugin lets you add an image captcha to your comments box. The captcha is a little image that requires human intervention before the comment can even be submitted for posting. Most spam comments are auto-submitted and therefore cannot get past a captcha. This one plugin alone can save you a lot of time.
The one thing that I see that could be a problem, is that depending on your audience, the captcha may create a barrier for people to submit comments. Some legitimate commenters may not understand the concept of a captcha and/ or may not be able to read the captcha and just not leave a comment.
Thank Me Later
I’ll go on record, again, and say that I hate automatic replies. Having said that, I think that this tool has the potential to change that opinion. What I like about it, is that you can customize the time between the event occurrence (someone leaves a comment) and the time that they get an email reply.
The utility of this, is that someone can come to the site, leave a comment, and “x” number of hours/ days later they get an email from you thanking them. At your discretion, you can then invite them back to the site for a follow up comment, or invite them back to check out something else on your site.
The potential pitfalls are that the commenter may not be expecting an email from you at all, and they may flag your email as spam.
Comment Twitter
This little plugin allows your commenter to tweet their comment and a link back to your post. This could help you raise your site’s profile to the twittershpere so it has a lot of potential.
The problem that I see with this, is that it depends on your commenter caring enough about your post and their comment to send it out to their followers. So, you really have to have some very compelling content on your site to make someone tweet it.
I’ll have one more post in this series, and it deals with the image headers, “stay tuned”