Sat, 19 Jul 2008
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I was surprised how quickly WordPress 2.6 was released. I still have an unresolved bug about the WordPress 2.5 wp_list_pages function. Unfortunately, they did not fix this bug or maybe they don’t plan to.
Back to WordPress 2.6. I am kind of confused by all the features WordPress has to offer. This video from WordPress will show you some of the new features in WordPress 2.6.
Upgrading from WordPress 2.5.1 to WordPress 2.6 was a snap for my blog. If you have not started with WordPress 2.6, now is a great time to start.
Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging | No Comments »
Last year, I posted a list of my favourite WordPress plugins. Today, I use a slightly different lineup of WordPress plugins because I have found better plugins to replace some of the older plugins I used and the latest WordPress has made certain plugins obsolete.
The 2007 WordPress Plugin List
The 2008 WordPress Plugin List
Tagged As: All in One SEO Pack, FeedBurner FeedSmith, ShareThis, wordpress, wordpress plugins, WP-reCAPTCHA, Zemanta
Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging | No Comments »
I just upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5. I really like the new admin interface but I found a few bugs with WordPress 2.5.
1. wp_list_pages function does not excluded sub pages from the exclude list. I posted this WordPress 2.5 wp_list_pages error at the WordPress support forum. I simply copy and pasted the wp_list_pages function code from WordPress 2.3.3 to replace the buggy WordPress 2.5 function.
2. Selecting a page for the home page works fine but it seems to mess up if I try to get the blog posts to show up in a non root folder like “/blog/”. I fixed this by installing the Filosofo home page control plugin, setting the “Front page displays” option to “your latest posts” at “Settings -> Reading”.
Overall, I really like this new WordPress. I feel it is great step forward for WordPress.
Tagged As: WordPress 2.3.3, WordPress 2.5, wp_list_pages
Categories: Blog Updates | No Comments »
I have never really understood how to use nofollow links until last night. I guess I must have been very slow to pick up this technique of preserving your Google Pagerank.
On Wikipedia’s entry on nofollow links:
Search engine optimization professionals started using the nofollow attribute to control the flow of PageRank within a website. This is an entirely different use than it was intended originally. Nofollow was designed to control the flow of PageRank from one website to another. However, SEOs realized that a nofollow used for an internal link should just work as well as nofollow used for external links. It makes sense, for example, to use nofollow for internal links to pages that are not relevant for search engines and only for visitors who are already on the website. This includes pages, such as “About Us”, “Contact Us”, “Terms of Use” or “Privacy Policy”. Matt Cutts, one of the initial designers of the nofollow attribute, encouraged this use of the attribute.
At the bottom of this snippet, there is a reference to an interview with Matt Cutts, in which he endorses the use of the nofollow link. Evisibility has a great blog post about nofollow tags with nice illustrations to explain the “Google Juice” theory.
Dan Thies has a free SEO book that explains the basics and advanced uses of the nofollow tag.
What I did for my own blog was to add the nofollow tag on these links:
I also made some minor changes to my blog by removing the “month chunks” plugin, which had a lot of links to my older blog archives. It would be interesting to see the effects of this minor change on the traffic of my blog and other sites.
Categories: Blog Updates, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »
Ever since I decided to really move out of Singapore, my dominating thoughts have been all about how to get all the migration paperwork done as soon as possible and all the good things I can expect in the near future.
Therefore, I will be blogging a lot about my life in Singapore and the local news that affects my life in general. I predict this will be one of my last long stays in this country and I would like to keep a record on the reasons why I want to emigrate and how I did it so that others may learn from my experience.
I love to read alternative Singapore news from blogs such as:
My blog is primarily about internet marketing and not a Singapore political blog. If it were one, I would have to register my blog with the Singapore government and have my every post used as evidence against me if I wrote anything they deem as slanderous. Gotta get out of this FEAR based country ASAP!
Tagged As: Singapore News
Categories: Blog Updates, Singapore News | No Comments »
I used to use Keywords Analyzer and Domain Dashboard but I don’t need them any more. Today, I only use NicheBot and Niche Inspector for all my keyword research needs. Therefore, I do not recommend anything else at the moment. In fact, I think my previous recommendations of Keyword Topia is obsolete with the current version of NicheBot.
If you are interested in getting your hands on Keywords Analyzer and Domain Dashboard, please drop me a line and we can work something out.
Tagged As: Keyword-Topia, keywords-analyzer, Niche Inspector, NicheBot, SEO Software
Categories: Blog Updates | No Comments »
Some time between the last week of January to the first 2 weeks of February, my ex web server was hacked. Somehow, a hacker got into my server and decided to use my server to attack another server. My ex web host, ServInt, could not find out who did it or how they did it. Neither could I do anything about it… Lucky for me, the hacker did not seem interested in what I had on my web server as my files were left intact.
It took an extraordinarily long time for ServInt to revive my web server. I believe they were too sloppy dealing with this issue and I got very fed up when they did not answer my technical support queries over one of the weekends. Their sales director later admitted their technical support should have done more to help my situation after I decided to move out of their servers. It was a very sad end to my 1.5 years at ServInt.
I don’t really want to reveal more information about this unfortunate incident because I still believe ServInt is one of the best VPS web hosting companies out there. The problem with them and with a lot of companies in the world is their inflexible company policies. Their support staff were trained to do exactly the way they were told to do and sometimes it can be a problem. Once in a while, something bad will happen to your web server. I had a hard disk crash once and they waived one month from my hosting fees so that was compensated. No complaints about that. For other errors, they seem to take their own sweet time to fix them.
For example, I used to get frequent mail server errors and it prevented me from receiving and sending emails from all of my email accounts. I would email the technical support help desk informing them of this problem and ask them to maybe restart the mail service or find a way to fix it. What usually happens is one of their support staff will reply to me asking for one of my email address’ username and password to test if the mail server is really down. I hate it when this happens because I already told them ALL of them do not work so why do they have to ask me to reveal one of my email account information? Another common situation I received was when my MySQL database service goes down. I used to email them to tell them that the database on XYZ.com is down. What do they do? They reply to me asking for the exact database name. They have access to the web servers and if you look at XYZ.com, you should be able to see that there is only one database. Why do they have to waste their time and mine by emailing me to ask for the database name? I am not sure if I am the only person on this planet that feels irritated. Situations like these really tick me off but they keep doing because it’s their company’s policy.
Their company policy wants them to confirm their customer’s queries at the expense of common sense and a pleasant experience for the customer. Simple tasks that can be solved in one step have now been complicated to two or more steps.
Frankly, my new web host seems to have similar problems with their customer service. If you know of a good web host that does not have irritating customer service, please let me know. I believe it is worth paying more to get that extra piece of mind and save some precious time emailing back and forth dealing with inflexible robotic people like that.
The positive thing that came out of this experience is I know do not take security for granted. You never know when someone might hack into your system. Just recently, WordPress.org was hacked they had to release an emergency update because WordPress 2.1.1 was hacked by a hacker. If it can happen to WordPress.org, it can happen to me and you.
Tagged As: good-web-host, hack, servint, web-host, web-hosting
Categories: Blog Updates | No Comments »
According to Google AdSense’s Blog Opimization tips, this is how you should layout your blog for best results with Google AdSense…
I followed the second example and moved the link unit up to the top of the page above all the blog entries and just below my menu. I tried the link unit on the just like the first example and it did not work very well for me so i removed them. Through my Google AdSense AdLogger logs. I highly recommend AdLogger for your Google AdSense tracking needs. It is free and open source. I bet some of the paid Google AdSense trackers are modified versions of AdLogger.
I might try the 120 x 600 pixel skyscraper ad on the right hand side of this blog. Google allows a maximum of 3 ads on your web sites. I do have 1 more ad to place on my site if I choose to. Some people recommend putting 3 Google AdSense ads on your web site while others do not. Whatever you have read about optmizing your sites for Google AdSense still requires testing to verify if it works positively or negatively on your web site.
Tagged As: google+adsense, google+adsense+optimization, google+adsense+tracker
Categories: Blog Updates, Google AdSense | 2 Comments »
I have been using Site5.com for over 1 year. I used to have nothing but good things to say about them but in the past 3-4 days my opinion of their service changed dramatically. I have removed the Site5 link in my footer because I no longer endorse them.
They quietly shutdown my web sites without telling me in advance because they were taking up too much resources. I am using a mid-range plan at their web site that allows me to host an unlimited number of domains. I use Site Uptime to check if Site5’s servers down and they were not down in the past 3-4 days. In fact their servers rarely go down. Therefore I don’t think I can claim anything for the “downtime guarantee” even though my web sites appear “blank” in my browser.
If I did not check my web sites manually by entering the URL into my browser, I would have missed this problem and they would continue to treat me as a fool. Their support took over 12 hours to reply to my query and they told me my scripts are using too many “httpd” request and they want me to fix it. I told them I can fix it but not in a day because I need to upload and run them in the browser and since I cannot even access my web sites, I cannot do update my scripts.
This experience has taught me a good lesson in hosting content sites. Get a VPS web hosting plan! That is the minimum plan you need to get to host a hundreds of domains. It will cost about $45 - $50 per month to get a decent VPS web host. I actually have 3 VPS accounts right now and I was planning to move my web sites from Site5 to my new VPS accounts slowly. I need to move out right now to prevent myself from losing more money from Google AdSense.
Here’s some common sense tips before you get your next web host…
When I started my first community site, I used a shared hosting plan till my site got too big for them. I switched a couple of web hosts and added a few web hosts to my personal black list because of the way they handle sites that use up too much of their server resources. They are Lunar Pages, HostRocket, HostGator, Site5, and ResellerZoom. You may be using one or more of these services above. If so, you have been warned because they do not seem to have the decency to tell you that your site is using too much resources BEFORE they shut you down. They only tell you that AFTER they shut you down. That to me is plain rude and lousy customer service.
My personal “gold list” of web hosts are ServInt and MadRooster. These people are different, they’ve got class. They will tell you your sites are growing too big for them politely. Their customer support is fast and helpful unlike the others.
Tagged As: madrooster, servint, site5, vps, web+host, web+hosting
Categories: Blog Updates, Google AdSense, Internet Marketing | 9 Comments »
The blogging universe changes at break-neck speed. I started this blog with Blogger.com till my needs outgrew the limited Blogger engine so I moved it to a WordPress blogging platform.
In the beginning of my WordPress blogging days, I wanted to try out all the different plugins to enhance my blog. I was tempted to add all these cute little buttons to “add my feed to Yahoo, MSN, Google” etc but I didn’t understand how it could help me increase my web site traffic. During my blogger.com days, I even put up a lot of “badges” of the blog directories I belonged to.
As you can see in my blog, there isn’t any “Add feed” or “blog directory badges” anymore. What I have right now is simply 2 links at the footer to my blog rss feed and my forum rss feed. I removed all of them because they are rather ugly, confusing, take up a lot of space, and because I now have FeedBurner to replace them.
Introducing FeedBurner…
FeedBurner isn’t new at all. I ignored it for a long time because I didn’t quite understand how it could benefit me. I used to think “Why do I need FeedBurner when my blog generates an RSS feed for me automatically?”.
Now I know better.
FeedBurner adds a lot of useful bells and whistles to my blog’s RSS feed that WordPress simply cannot do. Now I am able to track the number of people subscribing to my feed, limit the number of characters per feed item, and have my own FeedBurner feed page.
Take a look at some of my RSS feeds. Click on them and you will see a nice FeedBurner page with all those “add feed” buttons and a list of compatible RSS readers. The old feed was simply a XML file and if you clicked on it with your browser, you would see a bunch of meaningless text.
All my RSS feeds are now processed through FeedBurner. I think of FeedBurner as clothes for my “naked” RSS feeds. FeedBurner makes my RSS feeds look good. I highly recommend you to use FeedBurner if you have a blog. Take an hour or so to configure it at your blog. It’s well worth the effort.
Introducing Tagging…
Before I learnt about Technorati tags, the only tag I knew about in the internet world were HTML tags. Technorati tags are similar to HTML tags but they serve a unique purpose.
See those links at the bottom of this post after the words “Tagged As”? Those are my Technorati tags. I am very new at this and I think they are supposed to add this blog post’s link to a Technorati tag page.
WordPress has a built-in pinging tool that activates after you create a blog entry. Technorati.com is one of my ping URLs and after I ping them, they should visit this blog post and see my Technorati tags.
I actually hid my tags in my source code. Simply view the source and you will see some tags at the end of this blog post’s content. I am not sure if this will work with Technorati because I hid them from human eyes but I am sure a machine will be able to read it. The tags are still part of my RSS feed so I don’t think it will be an issue. I’ll have to wait and see.
Introducing Social Bookmarking…
I personally haven’t used these sites. You can bookmark this blog post at some of these social bookmarking sites by clicking on the square icons at the end of this post. I am not sure how these bookmarks will help my blog, I suppose they will help me get some incoming links to my blog when you bookmark this post.
Tagged As: Blogging, feedburner, internet+marketing, rss, tag+and+ping, tagging, vincent+rich
Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging | 3 Comments »