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handful of internet plans

Taking my own advice to do as I say, not as I do

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It’s a common conundrum among those who develop or work on other people’s websites and web presences: we neglect our own.

I’ve spent more than 15 years working on other people’s, and most of that time I’ve had to say “do as I say, not as I do”. If not out loud, than implied by reality, where I urge people to develop a regular pattern of posting to their blogs and to social media, and generating content and revealing themselves to their audience…meanwhile, I post sporadically (that’s being generous), and most of my “revealing myself” lately conists of adding cute photos of my 4 year old to her photo album on Facebook for my friends and family only.

To be fair to me (a.k.a., this is the excuse I lean on)–in the years before I put out my freelance shingle, I had been posting like mad, and revealing myself pretty exhaustively on the web. My main blog had ~2000 blog posts by 2003. And I had been community manager of a large forum site for years, posting hundreds of times there. And before I had my own one of those, I posted hundreds more posts at a prior community site. And I had sites on Angelfire, and Tripod, and GeoCities even before all of that. (Not to mention MySpace and Friendster.)

So I’ve walked the walk. But ever since I started encouraging others to walk the walk, and spending my time focused on helping them do so, I’ve walked it a lot less. Like, a lot.

I have other excuses beyond “been there, done that”. Procrastination, prioritization, relocation, distraction–pretty much the same issues plaguing many of my clients. I am human after all, just like they are. (You probably are too!)

Perhaps my best excuse is this: Since 2005, I’ve worked almost exclusively based off of repeat business and referrals. I’ve never had to advertise or do any marketing at all and have had pretty steady business most of the time. Though I’ve had a few relocations that have thrown that formula off over time (mostly due to my own lack of follow-through to keep clients on board through and after the move).

That almost sounds like a legit reason: if I don’t need to generate business, then I don’t really need to do the steady drip-drip online marketing stuff…right?

No. Not right. I’ll address why in part 2.

Google Search Engine Ranking Factors 2015  from Moz

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Here’s a basic breakdown of the most important factors for ranking on Google, and which ones are more important than others. Happy to see that quality and keywordliness of the page content is still a top factor. (#3 on the list.) That’s the factor that site owners have the most direct control over. If you build the best page on a certain topic, you still have a good chance of ranking well, regardless of your site’s popularity or other factors. However, if Google is comparing your page to competition that’s of similar quality, then links and popularity (#’s 1 and 2 on the list) might be the deciding factor.

Here’s the main infographic behind the survey. MOZ has a lot more info at the Ranking Factors 2015 main page.

MOZ's Google Ranking Factors 2015

21 Quick Actions for Massive Blog Success

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Think Traffic has put together a really great summary of steps you can (and should) take to develop a kick-ass blog that rocks the Internet’s socks off.

It’s not that hard to achieve success in blogging, but it does take some work. Actually, quite a bit of work–but not hard work. All of these steps are pretty easy in and of themselves, and Think Traffic even includes time estimates for each task. So start working through the list, and by the time you get through the last of these tasks, you will be noticing a difference in your blogging efforts–namely, they will feel easier and be more effective. In fact, you should start feeling those effects well before you finish all 21 tasks.

Are you still reading this? Because you should probably be reading Think Traffic’s post by now, and getting to work on the first task. Get to it!

http://thinktraffic.net/21-quick-actions-for-massive-blog-success

15 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

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This is a really solid post from Joe Foley at WPMU:

15 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

I wish I was following more of the rules here. If you’re trying to get serious about blogging, bookmark that post and re-read it every day until you have internalized the tips in it. I can’t argue with a single one of Joe’s suggestions, and while I might be able to think of some to add to the list, there’s no need to even bother–follow his advice and you will have plenty to do (and all of it wise and effective).

WordPress .com vs .org Explained

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Confused about WordPress, and don’t understand what’s up with its dot-com and dot-org variants? That’s about to end!

What is WordPress?

Basically, WordPress is a piece of software made up (primarily) of many PHP files, which work together, in conjunction with a database, to serve up pages and blog posts. (The way they display is controlled mainly by a Theme, which is made up (primarily) of PHP template files.)

WordPress runs on a web server. You access and use it via the Web. If you install it, you install it on your web site/host – – not on your own computer.

What is WordPress.org?

That software described above is available for free download at WordPress.org (and via various “one-click”-style installers at many/most web hosts). To use that, you need to own a website domain that is already hosted somewhere. (Thus, this version is sometimes called “self-hosted”.)

If you install “dot org WordPress” at your own web site, you can use it for free and do whatever you want with it. But just as you have full power, you also have full responsibility for operating and maintaining that WordPress installation. You might need to do some online learning to really get underway, and while there are lots of WP support resources on the web, no one would be around to hold your hand. (Your host will almost certainly offer little to no help with WordPress, beyond maybe helping you get it installed.) A lot of business owners in this situation will look to a WP professional like myself to help them get squared away, or get their theme tweaked, etc.

WordPress.org is backed by the WordPress Foundation, and its mission basically is to spread WordPress across the globe, and to keep making it better while making sure it remains free and open source forever.

What is WordPress.com?

WordPress.com is a free blogging service as well as a for-pay WordPress host. It uses basically the same software as above, but it’s hosted by the WordPress.com people. (Which makes this the “hosted” version of WordPress, vs. the “self-hosted” dot org version.)

With the free account, you get a blog at something like yourname.wordpress.com. It’s not as pimped-out as it could be if you had it hosted on your own site, but you can definitely get off and running with it.

If you pay for their hosting, you can use your own proper domain name–basically getting you to the state that a “dot org” version user is in, except you have the creators of WordPress as your hand-holding guides and hosts. But you also get less control over your actual WordPress installation. (You can’t add plugins, for one thing…you’re stuck with their handful of widgets.) Those WordPress.com people have to manage a gazillion blogs and sites, so they have some limitations in place on their WordPress installations. And they are a for-profit enterprise, so they will definitely hit your wallet a bit, especially if you want to get more features or control.

WordPress.com is run by Automattic, a for-profit company started by WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg.

 

Which one to use

Which one you should use really depends on your situation and your priorities, as well as your access to tech help and/or your willingness to learn new things and get your hands dirty.

“Self-hosted” WordPress.org is infinitely more powerful than its commercial cousin, due to having full access to all features, plus the ability to use plugins. (And I don’t mean it’s a lot more powerful–I mean it is literally infinitely more powerful.) But it might be scary or confusing to dive into; you could end up daunted just trying to get it installed, and you will probably have lots of questions early on. Push through that, and you could end up with an awesome slick site with hundreds of pages and tons of neat features for essentially free.

“Hosted” WordPress.com is convenient and turnkey, and you get “24/7 support” from the people who know WordPress better than anyone else. Of course, since their WordPress installations are relatively limited, most support probably deals with basic issues involving their limited set of tools and features. But if you’ve seen (and been freaked out by) the full WordPress menu set, you might prefer a more scaled-down version. And your ambitions for your web presence may be such that a WordPress.com might be the perfect simple solution for you.

I’m such a huge fan of what the WordPress folks have brought into the world that I’m more than happy to see people spend money on their dot-com services, even though it’s a limited version of WP, and even though I generally make my bacon from business owners who are forging into the denser forest of dot-org WP. ;-)

If you want some advice on which way you should go, you can always tweet me at @freeWPadvice–I’d be happy to help you figure it out (and as the username suggests, I’ll do it for free). If you’re not on Twitter, hit me up some other way and I’ll talk to you there.

Cool tool for cleaning up CSS stylesheets

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Every now and then I come upon a stylesheet that someone created which is hard to read–sometimes, even hard to look at. (Like when everything is all jammed together with barely any line breaks.)

Call me spoiled, but I like to see my CSS styled like this:

.prev {
width: 225px;
padding:7px;
float: left;
}

.next {
width: 225px;
padding:7px;
float:right;
}

#headerimage {
position:absolute;
left: 425px;
top:4px;
width:270px;
}

not like this:

html,body,div,span,object,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,p,blockquote,pre,a,abbr,acronym,address,big,cite,code,del,dfn,em,img,ins,kbd,q,samp,small,strong,sub,sup,tt,var,dl,dt,dd,ol,ul,li,fieldset,form,label,legend,table,caption,tbody,tfoot,thead,tr,th,td{margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;outline:none;font-size:100%;background:transparent;border:none;text-decoration:none}b,i,hr,u,center,menu,layer,s,strike,font,xmp{margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;outline:none;font-size:100%;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;background:transparent;border:none;text-decoration:none}font{color:#333}center{text-align:left}body{line-height:24px;font-family:Georgia,Times,”Times New Roman”,serif;color:#333;background:#fff}h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;margin:0 0 21px 0}h1{font-size:1.8em}h2{font-size:1.7em}h3{font-size:1.55em}

Luckily there is a sweet-ass tool on the web that will take something like the messy block above and pretty it up, a la the pretty bit above that. This CSS Formatter/Optimizer has all sorts of settings so you can fine-tune your results, and it can go both ways…if you want to condense your pretty, spaced-out CSS into the solid-block format (for a smaller file size and quicker load time), you can do that too. There are a lot of neat specific options, so you can auto-modify your stylesheet to suit your taste.

I’ll be using this any time I run into a stylesheet that someone else created in their own wack way–which happens a fair amount. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from ~10 years of PHP/CSS template-based work, it’s that every template/theme creator does things his or her own way. This CSS Optimizer tool will go a long way toward bringing things to my standard–or yours.

It’s not 100% clear who made the web tool, but I had to guess, I’d say credit goes to Florian Schmitz, the creator of CSS Tidy (the desktop software that the web tool is based on). Thanks Florian – great tool!

Which image type to "save as" – GIF, JPG, or PNG?

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Don’t have a clue which image format you should use when some program asks you to choose?
Here’s a simple guide for when you have a choice of what to “Save as”:
  • GIF (.gif): usually “line art”, drawings, etc., and not photos (though photos often come into play in “animated gifs”)
  • JPG (.jpg): photos and complex art with effects or lots of unique colors/shades
  • PNG (.png): will handle any image style with aplomb, but this can result in larger file sizes than if you chose the applicable one of the first two.

You probably don’t need to (and therefore shouldn’t) use TIF (.tif or .tiff) unless you are making art of some sort or doing design work. Don’t use it on the web; it probably won’t work for anybody who’s trying to view it if you do. (Likewise, don’t send people a TIF unless you like gambling on whether they will see it or be frustrated and disappointed instead.)

There you have it. That wasn’t so bad, right?

One of the Plugin Authors You Should Love: Christopher Ross

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You remember my post about how I love WordPress plugin people? In it, I mentioned the very cool phenomenon where one would randomly stumble upon some humble plugin author, and discover that said author has a whole page filled with eyebrow-raising plugins of every type. Stumbling onto such people with such pages, I said, was one of the experiences that helps open your eyes to the real vastness and variety of the WP plugin universe.

Witness: Christopher Ross, and his eyebrow-raising page of plugins.

I found Christopher when I found his External Link to New Window plugin, which makes all your links to external sites automatically open in a new window, so people also stay at your site when they visit links to other sites that you post. I’m glad I clicked through from the plugin search results and ended up at his actual site, or I wouldn’t have found the other 25 plugins he has created. And they are cool plugins. Check them out on his site where they have full descriptions and download links, or on his user page at WordPress.org, where you can see how (appropriately) popular his plugins are, and go right to their pages at that site. Then, if you install the WordPress.org One-Click Install Plugin ahead of time, you could install every one of Christopher’s plugins in probably 52 or 78 clicks. That might sound like a lot of clicks, but if you consider all the neato new tools and functions you’d be getting, and the fact that the total financial outlay would be $0.00, it’s a pretty amazing deal.

In fact it’s so amazing, that you should actually give Christopher some money, if you dig his plugins and have some money to spare for appreciation of them. (You can donate via PayPal right on his plugin page.) But even if you don’t/can’t, go check ’em out, and install 1 or 2 or 26 of them. If all goes well, you should feel a cool little rush, from the realization of all the possibilities that must be available in the world when things like Christopher’s huge page of free WordPress plugins exists.

Thank you, Christopher Ross! I love you and what you do, and have ordered my readers to love you as well.

Here are a couple other great plugins from Christopher’s big page:

Auto-Copyright – adds a copyright message to your footer that (here’s the brilliant part) automatically sets the date range based the dates of your earliest and most recent posts.

WordPress Admin Quick Menu – Add your own menu cluster on the side in the WP Dashboard area, with whatever links you want, including external sites (like Google Analytics maybe, or your other WP dashboards, or help pages for your clients…you get the idea.)

How about a fundraising thermometer? A frame blocker? A login redirect plugin? Those, and 20-odd more. All from one person.

This is why I love plugin people.

Thanks again, Christopher!

 

Add horizontal line button to WordPress's editor

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WPSnipp.com has provided a little snippet of code that will add a “horizontal rule” (or <hr />) button to the default editor in WordPress.

What’s a horizontal rule? It’s one of these lines:

In my opinion, that should definitely be a default button in the WP editor, but since it isn’t, you can use WPSnipp’s little snippet and add it to your installation. Cool!

WordPress – Add horizontal rule button to editor – wpsnipp.com

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