Posts Tagged ‘Wordpress’
Since it’s been almost a year since I set up my last blog, it’s been a somewhat nostalgic experience looking at how the platform has changed since I started using it in 2006 with it’s 1.x incarnation.
Having played with a WP 2.7.1 install, it seems to chug along slower compared to it’s 2.5.1 predecessor, and hopefully this doesn’t signal a path down the bloatware route, even if it comes with lots of shiny bells and whistles, compared to before.
WordPress has become much easier to use now for the most part, with several functions accessible behind the browse-based point-and-click interface. In the past you had to FTP files down, edit them with a text editor and upload them, or use the clunky “theme editor” function and edit the text from there.
I started out in 1997 writing HTML on a text editor and created tables writing raw table, tr,td,/td,/tr, /table tags. I later progressed on to using WYSIWYG text editors and software like XSite Pro. These days I do almost everything exclusively with WordPress only or in tandem with other software like vBulletin forum software, Aweber email autoresponder software, Joomla or some of the new CMSes I’ve been working with recently.
HTML editors have gone to the scrapheap for me. That’s not to say that WordPress is the final word in creating new niche affiliate sites though.
Here is my wishlist:
Here are a couple of things that WordPress has done well:
- Spam control: Akismet works hard to keep trackback spam, comment spam out of the woodwork. I use a couple more for good measure so very little spam is sitting in the moderation basket each day.
- Tagging: Keywords and tags help readers find relevant content, especially with the millions of blogs floating in the blogosphere. They’re one step further towards relevant and have made older plugins like Tag Warrior float into lesser prominence.
- Native embedding of video and other embed code: While you had to jump through hoops to place a YouTube video in a blog post, the process is a pretty seamless copy-and-paste job now.
Here are a couple of things that would help WordPress become (more…)
Brian Garnder is known as the creator of the popular WordPress theme, Revolution.
In a recent blog post, he mentioned that Revolution arose out of a site design which had been rejected by a real estate client.
Good thing too, because it’s gone on to be one of the most popular magazine-style WordPress templates.
I invited Brian on to the Friday Podcast and we talked about:
- How he got started in online marketing 2 years ago
- Balancing blog design and blog usability to build user stickiness
- How you can test out new templates on your blog before you go live with them
- Tips on becoming more efficient with your blog
- Shifting his business model from a paid premium blog template now to an open source business model in November
Check out the podcast below:
Be sure to check out:
Important note: The Revolution themes will only be available till Oct 31st, so you should get them before they’re taken off the market.
If you’ve been following the developments on the WordPress blog, you’d know that the new official release of WordPress 2.5 is out.
Besides better image handling – the new version has a pretty comprehensive built-in gallery (WordPress head developer honcho Matt Mullenweg did a preview screencast of the new gallery), it also has features like an enhanced in-built tagging feature, integrated analytics (so you get a better idea of your traffic picture without having to go to Google Analytics), a redesign of the user interface that should allow for more intuitive posting.
What’s uncertain is if embedding videos and other code requires having to muck around with the blog settings, because WordPress hasn’t really “played nice” with PHP, javascript and flash files in it’s previous incarnations.
Also, there’s a big question mark about the compatibility with WordPress plugins (generally developed by third party and independent developers) designed for earlier versions of WordPress.
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So the $64,000 question (or perhaps in today’s context, the $1million question…) is (more…)
If you tried to access this blog over the weekend, you might’ve noticed that it was up and it went down at times. I’m glad to say that we’ve moved the blog from a shared hosting account to a dedicated server and for the most part the bugs have been ironed out. (barring some file permissions and folder permissions).
[Note: the “broken database” comments you see are part of some inherent bugs in the WordPress 2.3.X series, but the comments are still going through]
In addition, we’ve ported over a couple hundred megs of content and if there’re broken graphics or missing MP3s or videos, drop us a line at the contact form.
Here’s one blogging tip:
If I had to do it all over again, I would’ve put the blog in a /blog/ directory and have the index.html be a “directory” page.
Yes, you can do it with one of the WP plugins to have your “landing page” be a “page”, but it’s not the same thing…
Back on the blogging front…
There could be a number of major enhancements in store, though we’ll likely start at the end of tax season (it’s a scramble filing tax statements from multiple companies and checking for regulatory compliance).
But while our tech team doing planning for the year ahead…
- Are there any “wishlist” items you might like to see on this blog?
- What’ve you enjoyed reading?
- What’s the single post or page you’ve found the most useful OR enjoyed OR both?
List them in the post comments below.
Pound-for-pound, WordPress is my preferred blogging platform of choice, in terms of flexbility, customization and ability to optimize for SEO and traffic generation.
The current version, 2.3, still has a number of issues yet to be resolved, but the great thing is that the Automattic and third-party plugin developers are constantly chugging away at the hardest working blogging platform in my eyes.
Ryan Boren, part of the WordPress development team, just put up his “s/2.4/s.5/g” post that the WordPress development team will be skipping WordPress 2.4 and releasing WordPress 2.5 in March, together with the promise of “some big new features”.
What’re the “big new features”?
No secret really, if you check out the WordPress roadmap.
If you drill down to the specific WordPress 2.5 milestone level, you will find details of some of the features being worked on.
For example, WP 2.5 will have the ability to search through static “pages”, in addition to the “posts”.
Tweaks for WP plugins and cache (which should give better blog performance, as a cache file would require lower resource overhead compared to a .PHP script), uploading of flash and 3gpp files.
And a host of other features designed to make WordPress an easy platform for new bloggers.
For the comprehensive and somewhat gory list of WP 2.5 milestones, you can look here.
WordPress bloggers can rest easy knowing that the development team is on it…
Here goes:
“I’m a new affiliate and I’m wondering what’s the best website platform I should use?
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about using Microsoft Front Page to create a HTML site. While others have mentioned blogs.
What do you suggest?”
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My Answer:
There’s no right or wrong answer when it comes to choosing your marketing platform, and there’s no “best” platform.
It’s very situational in nature.
If you’re starting out, creating a HTML site might be easier.
I started out using Microsoft Front Page (which has since been replaced by Microsoft Web Expressions). It is alright for single page affiliate sites.
However, with Google’s stricter implementation of Quality Score and having to insert secondary pages like an about us, privacy policy, contact us page, sitemap, etc, using Front Page can be quite cumbersome.
I’ve been using XSitePro quite a bit recently. It’s a pretty intelligent website builder and lets you create sections and sub-sections pretty easily. Best of all, it (more…)
