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 a more complete solution:

• Higher SEO intelligence: Er, who in their right mind would use a permalink structure like domainname.com/?p=284 ? To have to toggle it to a date is a slightly better with your postname showing. But I think more could be done. Recommendation: the All-In-One SEO pack plugin. Another, XML sitemaps (shouldn’t this be built into WordPress?).
• Caching to HTML or static files: WordPress is a set of PHP (a programming language) scripts and these use more computing power than most HTML pages or static pages. Shouldn’t something like Super Cache be part of the standard plugins? Lowering your server overhead is a good practise, rather than wait till you encounter server slowdowns.
• More Multimedia: With audio and video content becoming more prevalent (there was only one audio blog listed in many blog directories when I started, now there are thousands), shouldn’t the functions provided by plugins like PodPress become part of the standard issue plugins?
• More Talk: This is a weird one. With spambots actively harvest email from sites, it’s weird that blogs don’t come with a contact form or email mailto: form. Are you only supposed to talk to readers in your comments?

It’ll be interesting to see what the new versions of WordPress bring (hopefully they make it run more speedily.

I doubt that Twitter will be driving blogging out of business any day soon, and with the trend towards WordPress as a landing page, or as the building block for niche sites, its popularity looks set only to increase.

Maybe someone can take a snapshot of the proportion of WordPress sites compared to total websites today and see how much it increases a year from today.

If you’re serious about using WordPress for branding yourself, or creating affiliate/niche sites, you should also check out the Thesis WP theme (see my product review) and also the Secret Blog Weapon training.

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:

• Brian’s personal blog
• Revolution blog theme website

Important note: The Revolution themes will only be available till Oct 31st, so you should get them before they’re taken off the market.

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 as an Internet Marketer – either you promote other products as an affiliate or you have your own products – should you upgrade to WordPress 2.5 now?

Here’s my personal take…

If you started out with the later versions of WordPress  2.2.x or WordPress 2.3.x and your blog works ok now, you should not have too much difficulty with the upgrade. Maybe 1 or 2 plugins might stop working, but you might be able to get along without it.

If on the other hand, you started out with WordPress 2.0.x or 2.1.x and you use more than 20 different plugins, you can expect some pain during the upgrade process.

I know specifically if you’re using SEO-optimization type plugins and affiliate marketing plugins, and one of them breaks in the process (especially since WordPress has gone from a category-based data management system to a taxonomy-based one), you might want to hang on for a moment, and wait a couple of weeks before the dust settles.

From what I’ve seen from the notes, it doesn’t look like the ability to post video on the blog is a huge priority at the moment, so podcasters, video bloggers and lifecasters might experience some difficulty during the migration.

Whatever you choose to do, be sure to backup your MySQL database, and copy and paste important settings and information into a text file for reference later in case something goes awry.

There’s nothing more “fun” than doing a one-click upgrade of your blog, only to spend the next 24-48 hours trying to undo it.

If you have the ability to, you might even want to duplicate your existing blog on another domain or a sub-directory and upgrading that instance of your blog. The major bugbears may take a couple of days to show themselves though.

Whatever you do, tread carefully, especially if your blog brings in daily income!

[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.

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…

“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?”

–

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 links your pages seamlessly, creates a site map for you and automates your HTML creation.

I’ve created content sites with about 60 pages of content within 2 hours before, mainly because you can create pages in bulk.

–

If you’re more advanced, you might like to look at using WordPress as your marketing platform. Super Affiliate Ros Gardner mentioned that WordPress is a key element in her marketing strategy and you can take a look at the Dating blog attached to her Sage-Hearts dating site.

Another Super Affiliate, Kim Rowley, who’s been featured in the September/October issue of Revenue, has mentioned that the bulk of her sites are on the WordPress platform. You can take a look at her Key Internet Marketing portfolio of sites.

–

Blogs are great because they get indexed quickly by the search engines, especially if the content is frequently updated.

One thing I don’t like about blogs is that the information is presented in a chronological manner (like a diary), rather than in a categorical manner (like how information is sorted).

So the solution is to point your blog, or direct blog traffic to a content site.

While you can use Joomla as a content management system, especially since it’s got categories down pat, do note that it’s essentially a PHP script, so if you have a heavy trafficked WordPress blog and a Joomla site (both of them use PHP) you will put a strain on your hosting resources, especially if you’re using anything less than a VPS or dedicated server.

Right now, my preference is to go with a HTML site (created and more importantly, managed with XSitePro) and WordPress as a traffic generator.

A key reason is mentioned on the WP-Testers list by Ryan Boren, one of the developers:

“The big schema change is the dropping of the categories, post2cat, and link2cat changes in favor of the new terms, term_taxonomy, and term_relationship tables. Any plugin that queries against the old table will break horribly.”

What this means is that the new WordPress has shifted its data structure from a category-basedsystem to a new taxonomy.

If you’ve extensively used category-based plugins to enhance your SEO or social marketing efforts, you’ll bang into lots of error messages, as anyone who’s posted a comment on this blog will attest to.

Given the number of social-based plugins I’ve installed, and the extent to which they interface with the old (now defunct) category-based data strcuture, you can expect to see lots of errors like “WordPress database error: [Table ‘blog_wrdp24.wp_post2cat’ doesn’t exist]”

Even better, I don’t receive email notifications of pending comments now…

So, it’s no wonder that some have called WordPress 2.3.1 the “blog plugin killer”

It does represent an evolution of the blogging platform, with the inclusion of native tagging support, although many bloggers have commented that it’s doesn’t hold a candle to mature tagging plugins like Simple Tagging and Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Still, it’s early days yet, so keep your fingers crossed that that WordPress development team will launch their own plugin enhancements or an incremental upgrade soon.

For more information, you can check out this WordPress.org thread.

I’ve performed some minor changes, which may enhance your reading experience.

I’ve revamped the “About Andrew” page, as you’ll see shortly.

The “Long Bio” page has some redudant information (already included in the “About Andrew” page). The main reason why I’m keeping it for now is that it’s built up a Google PageRank 4. So I’ll likely do a 301 redirect to better use that PR.

New on the pages tab is “Worth Reading” which I’ll continue to add to when I have time.

I’ve also moved the RSS feeds and my new Podcast RSS feed to a more prominent location, so readers can access them more easily, especially since I’ve removed the mailing list some time ago.

There’s a fairly significant change on the “about andrew” page:

I’ve included a video intro. Which should be interesting and personalizes the connection with readers.

I did some trials with embedding it on the front page, but this existing template will require some PHP tweaking and possibly cookie handling to display once and disappear (at the risk of overstaying its welcome).

Tweaking your blog can be fun, as long as you don’t get too obsessive about it…

On a conservative basis, I’d say that monetization from my blogging alone amounts to somewhere in the mid to higher 4 figure range per month.

Which is a pittance compared to some of the “Super Bloggers” out there.

There’s a lot of talk these days about how much the top bloggers make, especially in the light of Business Week’s “Bloggers Bring In The Big Bucks” story.

Although I know Darren Rowse and Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker and visit Mario Lavandeira’s PerezHilton and Pete Cashmore’s Mashable, the names on the list were alien to me.

It’s a testament that blogging is an open field and you pick your niche and can do well with it.

But if you’re clued in to the power of blogging, you’d realize that the payoff from blogging comes outside of blogging.

If you listened in to the episode of the Net Income radio show where Shoemoney had Matt Mullenweg, part of the team which developed the WordPress blogging platform, the real money comes as a result of having blogged, rather than because of blogging.

If you missed that episode of Net Income, you can check it out:

As an example, Darren Rowse is a founder of the B5Media blog network, which receive venture funding earlier this year and Shoemoney’s income also comes from promoting CPA offers and developing AuctionAds with partner-in-crime Dave Dellanave AKA Dillsmack. AuctionAds was recently acquired by Media Whiz for an undisclosed sum.

Personally, blogging is a platform to network and form joint ventures, it’s given me the opportunity to “meet up” with several influential super affiliates and information marketers and importantly, clients. Meeting up at events in a face-to-face context is just a way of cementing the relationship.

If you want to exploit blogging to its fullest potential, you need to look at it as more than just a website to pimp adsense or affiliate offers, it’s value as a branding platform is infinitely greater.

I’ve always enjoyed the impressionist paintings of Claude Monet, and his works are still enjoyed nearly a century later. It’s likely they’ll continue to be enjoyed for generations to come. All accomplished with a paintbrush and paint.

Similarly, a blog is just that, a tool, just like Monet’s humble paintbrush.

In the hands of an individual with extraordinary vision, you can do much more than what you thought was possible.

The year has been an interesting one for WordPress bloggers with the release of about 5 major and incremental upgrades since the start of the year.

It’s interesting to see WordPress grow from more a GNU General Public License hobbist project, to a comprehensive solution that corporates are increasingly embracing.

The fact that new WordPress versions currently do or will eventually include native functions like:

• Email functions like (phpMailer)
• Tagging (which helps out the information sorting and relevance process in the age of info overload)
• Widgets (to expand its functions from it’s base text/graphics-information Content Management System publishing origins)
• XML-RPC APIs for otherwise static “Pages” as distinguished from the dynamic “Post” counterparts
• Further ATOM feed and API support for increased content distribution syndication

These initiatives give WordPress a big step up from other more Web1.0 corporate-oriented blogging platforms.

And ultimately it’s about choice. If you choose to do a cotton candy blog featuring Youtube videos you can do it just as easily as disseminating information on service uptimes and kernel updates via a corporate blog.

Even if your favorite features like tags aren’t natively supported in WordPress now, you can easily add the functions by installing the appropriate plugin. The techset is figuring out the next big thing too.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed to see native support for audio and video content. We might see it sooner than we think.

Also check out:

• WordPress 2.2 features
• WordPress 2.2 milestones
• WordPress Dev team’s Dougal WordPress 2.2 post
• Lorelle on WordPress: WordPress 2.2 Delay

Matt Coddington over at NetBusinessBlog is masterful at this technique.

Observe his traffic:

One of his Dugg posts is: Building a Niche Minisite (Part 1)

One of the reason why your webhost might crash is due to the processing required in compiling the PHP code and serving up the page for each visitor.

This could literally kill the server resources during peak periods.

So Ricardo Galli’s WP Cache provides a workaround, by caching your blog posts as static pages, enabling you to serve hundreds of times more pages per second.

In fact, the plugin serves to “reduce the response time from several tenths of seconds to less than a millisecond.”

The plugin is WordPress 2.1.x compliant and pages have been whizzing during peak periods.

There’s a toggle to determine the cache expiry period, so you’ll want to adjust it, so you continue to serve up pages quickly and yet display updated content, like comments. (Else the new comments will not display till the expiry of the cached page).

To download, get it from: WP-Cache plugin.

For more information, visit Ricardo’s WP-Cache page.

With WordPress evolving fast and furiously since 2.1.x, the number of improvements to the user interface, processing, and bug rectification has made WordPress the preeminent blogging platform in my opinion.

However, with the release of WordPress 2.1 onwards, you may have noticed that the “Backup” function might’ve been missing from the “Manage” tab.

According to Austin Matzko’s blog “The lead developers decided to un-bundle it (the WordPress Database Backup Plugin) from WordPress starting with version 2.1”, which is a pity because the latest version includes the ability to schedule backups using the CRON function.

If you’re an adventurous blogger, constantly experimenting with plugins (and possibly corrupting your blog in the process), or want to provide an easy restoration in the event of “blog malfunction”, be sure to install Austin’s WordPress Database Backup plugin.

Adsense publishers should also check out Austin’s WordPress plugins page, which includes the Google Adsense Section Targeting plugin.

For the WordPress development team to label this as a “WordPress 2.1.1 Dangerous, Upgrade” hints at the severity of this.

WordPress upgrades can involve some pain, especially if your existing plugins may not be fully compatible with the new code.

As always:

• Backup your blog content (the most important step)
• Deactivate your plugins
• Do the installation
• Reactivate plugins
• Ensure that the blog is working as it should
• Do another data backup

Yes, some of the steps seems repetitive, but it could potentially take much longer recovering from a crash.

For more information, you can check out:

• Lorelle’s Emergency Update Notification for WordPress 2.1+
• Dougal Campbell’s Important: Upgrade to WordPress 2.1.2
• Donncha O Caoimh’s You didn’t hear? Upgrade now!

• A potential PHP issue that might cause a security vulnerability
• A Feedburner issue related to WordPress 2.0.6.

As always, backup before you upgrade.

For details, visit: WordPress 2.0.7

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or a SEM) to figure out that http://www.WhoIsAndrewWee.com/blogging/wordpress-optimization is going to be a heck of a lot easier both for humans and search engines, compared to http://www.WhoIsAndrewWee.com/573/wordpress-optimization.

Besides the richer keyword dense URL, your blog visitors will have an idea what category your post falls into, especially if you have a (fairly) tightly-themed blog (I’m doing my best to focus on blogging/affiliate marketing/social traffic generation).

To counter the potential loss of 300+ indexed pages in the search engines, I’d spent quite a significant amount of time on a 301 Redirect page, manually keying in cryptic redirects like:

Redirect /101/exclusive-99-internet-marketing-giveway-including-robert-allen-book/ http://www.whoisandrewwee.com/internet-marketing/exclusive-99-internet-marketing-giveway-including-robert-allen-book/
(And repeating that another 299 times).

But then again, having gone on a roll in the last couple of months, the prospect of losing traffic wasn’t a pleasant prospect.

Providence wasn’t far, however.

I’d checked out regular reader Ade Lamidi’s OnlineGist blog post Permalinks Migration Plugin for wordpress.

He’d used a WordPress plugin developed by China-based Dean Lee, who’s Chief Technical Officer for a domain registrar.

Here’s the link: Permalinks Migration Plugin for wordpress

The plugin works like a dynamic 301 Redirect page generator and it works beautifully.

I’m already feel a zen-like calm as I feel the traffic returning (especially from the URL pointers from the blogging meme I’d launched and incoming links from Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger writing projects)

A note: Be sure configure Dean’s plugin configuration before you activate it. Else it’ll generate redirects based on the default permalink setting (rather than your old permalink setting) and you’ll look like a wanker complaining that the plugin doesn’t work in Dean’s comments section.