Ron Kernahan's Test Wordpress site

Over the last few years I found the following plugins most helpful:

• Akismet (by Automattic): Comes bundled with WordPress, Akismet “blocks 99.9% of spam” from reaching your blog. (Ok, it does a decent job, but let’s not exaggerate Akismet, ok?)
• Broken Links Checker (by Janis Elsts): I only activate this occasionally to check for broken links, but it works well.
• Dagon Design Form Mailer (by Dagon): There are many Contact forms available, for some reason I stuck with Dagon’s.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator (by Dagon): This sitemap is internal and displays the way I want it. (I’ll actually be using a BuddyPress plugin for this sites Sitemap) …
• fbLikeButton (by Dean Peters): Another “Like Button” which allows Facebook users to like an article, share it and so forth, effective!
• Google XML Sitemaps (by Arne Brachhold): This plugin generates an XML sitemap to help Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index the site.
• Greg’s Comment Length Limiter (by Greg Mulhauser): Long comments are unreadable and unhelpful, but I can limit them using this plugin.
• HeadSpace2 (by John Godley) / or All in One SEO Pack (by Michael Torbert): SEO plugins so you can add keywords, etc. Not needed for many new Themes, but still helpful.
• (Move Comments) [Deactivated until it's needed. This by Apostolos Dountsis works well]: Sometimes I move posts and want to move the comments too…
• Page Menu Editor (also built into All in One SEO plugin) (by Sarah Anderson). Many themes offer a top bar navigation where the Title is the same as the link (such as Home, Members, etc). To change the title tag use this plugin or the AIOSEO (assuming you don’t want to edit your theme header.php file).
• Page Links To (by Mark Jaquith): I moved some posts and pages and found this plugin helped clean up the links.
• RefTagger (Transform Bible references into links by Logos Bible Software): RefTagger supports all of the Bible book names and their standard abbreviations.
• Related Posts by Category (by Sergej Muller): I used to rely on categories to cross-reference posts, not so important now-a-days.
• Subscribe to Comments (by Mark Jaquith): Just a nice touch for those who post comments and want to see who responds.
• What Would Seth Godin Do (by Richard K Miller): Offers new and returning visitors different greetings, a friendly plugin.
• Widget Logic (by Alan Trewartha): Brilliant, lets me put different Sidebar content (widgets) on different posts, pages, home, whatever I need and want!!
• WordPress Security – see note below.
• WP-DBManager (by Leters Chan): A must have, to optimize, backup and otherwise manage the database from within the WP-Dashboard.

Plus a few others which are site-related

WordPress Security Plugins

There are quite a few plugins to help your WordPress site and there are several things you can do manually to improve security. Most of the manual steps are outlined quite clearly on the WordPress.org site and perhaps I’ll create a post with some links to other sites talking about this. However, there are a few things to remember:

1) Some security issues rest with your hosting company. Some issues I had in the past were taken care of when I checked with my host.

2) Some vulnerabilities are based on the version of WordPress, Themes, Plugins and so on you are using. The general rule is to update and stay up-to-date. When you login to your Dashboard, you will get a list of updates available.

3) Based on both these above points, you probably need to be careful taking advise or adding plugins which were written for older version of WordPress or specific themes. As I said above, I could add links to sites which have helped me in the past when security issues came up. However, some of the issues they mention have already been fixed in the latest version of WordPress.

Having said that, here are a couple of helpful plugins I use on certain sites:

• Secure WordPress (by jremillard): Gives the option to remove versions and protect against malicious requests (Malware).
• WordPress File Monitor (by Matt Walters): handy plugin which checks for added, changed or deleted files.
• WordPress Ultimate Security Check (by Eugene Pyvovarov): this free version does a check and tells you possible problems.
• WP Security Scan (by Michael Torbert): A set of Admin tools with quite a bit of info about your site including tools to fix many problems.

Since a few of my WordPress sites got hacked, this issue is important to me. So I thought I would share this with you before you get hacked!

Read the rest of this entry →

Updated July 3, 2009:

(Scroll down for the actual article, right now I need to address some problems I had / am having with 2.8)

1) I am noticing some inconsistencies. These include

a) WWSG (What Would Seth Godin Do) plugin strangely comes up with “header already sent” errors. The Plugin worked fine for the first week … and when I deleted the error.log file, it hasn’t come back yet … Read the rest of this entry →

If you are validating your webpage but have embedded video from YouTube or most other video sites, chances are your page will not validate via the WC3 Validator.

Not to worry, whether you are adding a video to your sidebar or to a post or page, do the following:

Grab your “embed” code. It will look something like this:

< 'object width="425" height="344" '>
< 'param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/PObIJN17iNs&hl=en&fs=1">
< 'param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" '>< '/param '>
< 'param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" '>< '/param'>
< 'embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/PObIJN17iNs&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344" '>< '/embed ' >
< '/'object>

Note that the actual URL or Link to the video is here:

http://www.youtube.com/v/PObIJN17iNs

the additional stuff starting with the & is not needed, in the case above, the &hl=en&fs=1

To embed this in your sidebar or page and have it validate and be somewhat shorter, all you need is the following:

<object class="aligncenter" width="425" height="344" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/gZ9sM8Lu4ug">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/gZ9sM8Lu4ug" />
<param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
</object>

The result is video which also validates.

(The class=”aligncenter” simply puts it in the center of the page, but you need to have a “aligncenter” defined in your CSS stylesheet somewhere to have that work.)

So what is WordPress? I like to think of it in terms of a complete system to take care of my web-site needs. It is in many ways like a software programm to develop my sites, but since I don’t have to program anything nor write code nor worry about updates, it really does more than software does for me. WordPress can manage my information by creating categories or sub-areas where I can move my information around. It also manages items such as comments for me and allows me even to change the looks of a site very quickly. On one site I run I need a daily calendar for just one month per year – I can add that and remove it after the month with just the click of a button, without having any of my data lost or at the very least, no longer linked in.

The whole structure of the WordPress has been designed to be flexible. And since I don’t have time to get into PHP nor even MySQL Database, I am very thankful to have a community where there are enough experts who are willing to offer advise, insight and point me in the right direction to find answers I need. Best of all, when January 1st comes around, I don’t have to worry if I changed all of my 200x to 200x since my pages and posts are automatically dated.

Yes, I would say WordPress is a system for me, a system which is getting better and better with each new release (and there have been many new releases, also a nice touch). For sure I will not be going back to HTML. As with any system, it isn’t perfect and I would love to see a few things added which I like (including the looks of the “themes” which tend to get pretty boring) but I see potential since it is a system which is trying to grow along with the Internet community it serves.

For example, some of the areas it is growing into is:

More CMS functionality (Content Management – in other words, like a traditional website not based on dates for your posts, but more for content as you want the public to see it and find it.)

More SEO friendly (Search Engine Optimization – always changing, but simply how to help search engines find you, and thus, eventually, have people find your site.)
[SEO is a huge topic, more on this later ...]

More users (WordPress has a strong following, and it is getting much stronger. In a year or so it is predicted WordPress will have 50% of the blog market.)

More later (there is a lot to be said about WordPress, so I’ll keep coming back to this.)

Bye for now … xodigoguy

Before I came across WordPress I enjoyed creating websites for various people on a range of subjects, all using traditional HTML (hyper text markup language). I never was great at graphics nor had much of an eye for colors, but I did find the technology of the Internet fascinating. As the Internet opened up, so too did a world of users. I have become good friends with many people just through the Internet. Read the rest of this entry →

John Pozadzides mentioned at a WordPress WordCamp that he does not believe that niche blogs are the way to go. He should know, he writes about just about everything on his blog and he certainly has the traffic to prove his point.

Read the rest of this entry →