It’s the end of the year and a lot of blogs are now putting out their top posts of the year posts. But how does one find out which are the top posts on their blog?
Here are a few ways you can find out which posts are tops on your blog.
- Number of Comments - One easy way to see if a post is popular or not is to look at the number of comments. The more comments, the more engaged people were with the post. The downside here is that a lot of people may read the post, but only a few may actually comment.
- Number of Trackbacks - How many other blogs are referencing your blog post? If you have a lot of trackbacks, that means your post could have a far reaching impact across the blogosphere. However, the quality of those trackbacks is an important thing to check too.
- Social Traffic - How many Diggs did your post get? Does it have a lot of stumbles? How well is the post doing in social media sites could be another great indicator if the post is popular or not. Again, it all depends on the quality of traffic. StumbleUpon can send a quick 200+ people, but what if they all gave it a thumbs down?
This is an excellent way to showcase all the new WordPress 2.7 features. The admin side of things has been updated and you are now in control of what you see and where you see it. Plus WordPress updates are now much easier.
Enjoy!
If you talk to companies that do blog optimization or promotion, you’ll soon learn that there are rules, or best practices, for blogging. Things like have a good deal of post content, have a well designed site, internal linking is important, and categorize posts to name a few. However, some blogs break the rules and still succeed.
Have you been to I Can Has Cheezburger? Millions of people have. It’s one of the most popular blogs on the web, yet it’s not following best practices.
Here are a few of the item they’re not doing.
- Design - The design is lacking. They have a great logo, but there is so much going on that it’s hard to know what to focus on. It’s also hard to distinguish the post title from the rest of the page.
- Content - The blog has one picture and a line of text. Nothing that a search engine will really pick up on and not much for the visitor to go on.
- Categories - No categorization is in use that I can tell.
- Linking - There is no internal linking structure in the posts.
It wasn’t long ago when WordPress 2.5 came along and the admin side of the blog was completely re-designed. It was a welcome upgrade, but it seems it was met with mixed emotions and so WordPress decided to do some usability testing.
What they found out was that the redesign was still frustrating some users. WordPress worked to move some things around and tested prototypes against the test panel. Before they knew it, they came up with a new layout that tested far above the current admin interface. People were able to get things done much faster and were overall very happy with the prototypes; even though the prototype design was ugly. So this is why WordPress 2.7 comes with another administration redesign.
New Post - WordPress 2.7
The new screenshots are very nice. The menu goes down the left side and that brings the more important information up on the page. This is a welcome update as the menus take up a lot of room and there is generally a lot of scrolling in the 2.5 and 2.6 versions of WordPress.
All the same menu options and features are still there, it’s just re-learning where they are. Hopefully it’ll be easy to adapt to.
Some web hosts do not allow for plugins such as Akismet to function properly. This is because they turn off the PHP function fsockopen for security reasons. When they do this, any plugin that connects to an outside source doesn’t function correctly. The biggest issue then is the inflow of spam.
I’ve found two plugins that seem to help take control of spam comments and trackbacks when Akismet isn’t available. Neither are perfect, but together they make a world of difference in the fight against spam.
The first is Cookies for Comments. This plugin places a cookie into the visitors browser when they arrive at your site. Once they leave a comment, the plugin checks to see if that cookie exists. If there is no cookie, then it’s marked as spam. From my testing, it works quite well.
The second is Simple Trackback Validation. This plugin checks the site that is supposedly leaving the trackback and ensures that the IP is good and that the site is actually linking to yours.
The downside to both plugins is that they either pull all questionable comments & trackbacks into moderation or they delete them. This means that you’ll continue to get flooded with moderation requests or they’ll just be deleted and, if something is marked spam accidentally, you’ll never know.
It seems that WordPress updates come down the line quite often. So often, that if you manage quite a few WordPress blogs, you seem to always be updating them. Is there to much of a good thing here?
So far there have been seven WordPress updates in 2008 with at least one more major update, and an unknown number of minor updates, due later this year.
- v2.6.2 Released: 9/8/08
- v2.6.1 Released: 8/15/08
- v2.6 Released: 7/15/08
- v2.5.1 Released: 4/25/08
- v2.5 Released: 3/29/08
- v2.3.3 Released: 2/5/08
Updating blog or two isn’t an issue, it’s when you have 15+ blogs to update each time. Not only do you need to update the software, but also keep in mind backups, plugin compatibility research and plug-in updates. It can keep a person quite busy.
The good news here is that WordPress is working on an auto updating feature called WordPress Upgrader. It sounds like it’ll work much like the auto-updating of plug-ins does currently where you can choose to have WordPress update your software. I for one am excited about this feature!
I didn’t know Wordpress could cause such a headache, but it did today. I got the white screen of death and was left with lots of admin side issues.
What happens is you can’t login, or, if you were previously logged in, you can’t mange plugins. All you can do is get a blank white screen. Even the WYSIWYG editor would not load.
I think what it had to do with automatically updating pugins in Wordpress 2.6 I don’t know why, but it made Wordpress very unhappy.
Lucky for me, I had all the plugins backed up and was able to delete all my plugin files and re-upload the old ones. Yes they are all begging to be upgraded again, but the blog is working and that’s much more important.
Thanks to Get Found Now for writing about the issue. Their article lead me to my own conclusion that worked.
Wordpress 2.6 comes with a feature that adds captions to images. It looks really nice in the Wordpress editor, but if you don’t have the code, it won’t look as nice when you publish your post.
The good news is, all you have to do is add the following lines of code to your theme’s CSS file.
/* Captions */
.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}
.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}
.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}
/* End captions */
Now your images and captions will look just as good live as they do in the editor.
Every day hackers sit out there an pray on good sites for no good reason. Some days they are even successful. In the past few months I’ve worked with a few blogs to detect and remove hidden code that was causing various unwanted issues. It happens to the best of blogs, and knowing how to find and remove it is just as important as trying to prevent it.
Blog #1 - The iFrame - The first indicator that something was wrong here was the time it took the blog to load. It seemed abnormally long. I popped open Safari’s activity window and noticed it was connecting out to an IP address that I didn’t recognize.
When the did finally load, it then asked me if I wanted to run a Java applet. Huge red flag there. It took some digging but I found a lot of files contained some iFrame code that was loading badware from an external site.
To fix, I deleted and re-uploaded all the files I could, and walked though each theme and plugin file to find any traces of code that should not be there. Once cleaned out, the site ran much smoother.
Blogging is fun and rewarding. There are so many good things about it, but comment and trackback spam can tarnish the process. I know that going in and removing 15 different ‘prescription’ comments is not a good use of a bloggers time as they could use it towards creating new posts. But how does one control it?
You can protect comments with a captcha plugin, Spam Karma or Askimet, but what about trackbacks?
Lately I’ve been testing out the Simple Trackback Validation plugin. It checks two items to ensure that the trackback is legit.
- It checks the page that claims to be linking to your post to ensure it does.
- Checks the IP address of the blog the tracback is coming from and the IP of the trackback. They should be the same. In order for these to be different, a spam bot must be auto generating the trackbacks.
It also has a feature to toss any questionable trackbacks into moderation.
So far in my testing I can’t already say if it’s working or not. No trackbacks have gone into moderation, yet trackback spam seems to be more under control, but not gone.
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