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Category Archives: Website Administration
Little Tips: Who loves you?
One of the better things to pay attention to other than visitor traffic is who is linking to your site. If you are getting a large amount of linkage odds are you’re doing a good job on developing your site (unless of course every site that links you has “sucks” at the end of it’s URL name). The easiest way to check who’s linking to you (besides looking at your pingbacks and trackbacks) is to google yourself. The more specific version to look at though is Google Blog Search. While regular links on websites are good to know about, it’s what people are saying in their personal blogs and forums that gets you the real meaty information about how you’re doing. I definitely recommend doing this at least once a month to see how far out your site has reached into the Internet.
There’s also the possibility that you might find someone using your content illegally, so that’s good to know also.
The Importance of Traffic Metrics, Not
I’m sure many of you are aware of the website Alexa.org. It was created as an attempt to make a way of tracking traffic to websites independently of the sites, so that advertisers or webmasters had an idea of the amount of visitors they were getting to their sites in an unbiased fashion. In many ways the idea was good, but the implementation isn’t perfect. Essentially what Alexa tracks mostly is how popular your site is with Windows Internet Explorer users who would bother to install an Alexa plugin.
The reason I mention the above is that it is very easy for a new or even established web site owner to become upset and disheartened when they compare what they think other people’s traffic numbers are to their own. Don’t fall prey to this trap. While Microsoft.com gets a billion visitors a day, they are mostly there to figure out why their computer isn’t working :) . Not all traffic is equal. And not all traffic you see listed is real. You ever wonder how many bots or automated spam networks are hitting the big sites? Probably a huge part of their traffic numbers.
The most important metric of your success is how you feel about doing your site. If you love doing it, keep going. If you have a small but dedicated crowd of visitors, that’s a success that a large site with visitors that are fickle and leave quickly doesn’t have. Think back to just a few years ago and the sites that were huge, are they still popular? Apple computers are the example to shoot for with your mindset–way smaller than Microsoft, but with a strong audience that would do anything to keep them going. Focus on your audience and you’ll get there eventually, and probably stay there.
WordPress Administration On The Run: Wphone Plugin
Has there ever been a time when you’ve been out someplace and really wanted to write about something to your blog you just saw, but couldn’t because it’s hard to use WordPress from a phone or mobile device? Well, now it’s much easier. Wphone is a new WordPress plugin that adds a new phone oriented admin interface to your WordPress install that makes it easy to do basic administration and posts.
I know I’ve been away from a computer when I discovered spam comments or other things on my site, now it’s no longer a big hassle to get rid of that stuff anytime. And really, who doesn’t use their phone to look at the internet? Now you can update your blog or webcomic anytime you want.
Little Tips: When Upgrade Issues Happen, Don’t Panic
As I expected, the WordPress forums are clogged up with issues related to the upgrade to version 2.3. Many of you were either caught unaware (though I did predict it and posted about it here), or you were blindsided by the fact that parts of your theme or plugins you thought were safe were using the older now unsupported database calls. If you have been affected by the upgrade effect–either you get a totally whitescreen with nothing showing, or parts of your site don’t appear–DON’T PANIC! There are some things you can do to at least get your site running until you can fix everything back to how you want it.
1) First thing, if possible go to your Admin Plugins interface and deactivate all of your plugins. If you can’t log in to your site, the last resort way of deactivating your plugins is to go to your servers file system (either FTP or through a web admin interface) and delete all of the plugins from the plugins folder in the wp-content folder. Of course make copies of them to your local system first.
2) Second thing, if your site still looks crazy or won’t load, go to the Admin interface Themes area and select either the “Classic” or “Default” theme that comes with WordPress. Unless your database is totally hosed this will at least allow your site to load. It probably won’t look like how you had it before, but at least you won’t be down. In an extreme case where you can’t load your admin area go to the wp-content folder and delete your theme folder (of course, like above, make a copy first to your local system if you don’t already have a copy). Then rename either the “Default” or “Classic” theme to have the same folder name as your non-operating theme. This should get you back to being able to log in and see your site.
3) If it appears your database is hosed and deactivating all of your plugins and using either the classic or default themes still won’t allow your site to load….well, you DID create a backup database didn’t you? It’s not a fun process but you will need to reload your old database. I can’t give you a quick rundown on that, but there are plenty of Google findable sites that have PhpMyAdmin tutorials or Cpanel or whatever you use for setting up databases on your server. Once you have that in place you can copy your older WordPress files (you DID back up your original files didn’t you?) back to the server and do research on how to upgrade in a way that will work for how your WordPress is set up.
4) Go to the WordPress.org website and post on their forum for help. There are many people there already, maybe they have already posted about your issue and received a response that might help you.
5) Go to the developers sites for your theme and plugins and see if there are updates available. If the software is still being maintained it will hopefully have an update soon, if it’s older and no longer maintained….you’ll have to find a replacement that fulfills it’s function. The good thing is anything that is normally a good idea for a plugin or theme will have someone making it or redoing it for compatibility with the newest versions of WordPress.
6) In worst case scenarios you can hire someone like me to fix things for you. If you have some cash there are plenty of people that are willing to work for you to fix things up. WordPress.org forums always have people posting to have someone help them for a fee, plus I’m available too :)
In general it really shouldn’t be hard to get a working site back up in an hour or so. Then the long process is figuring out how to upgrade without getting the same issues again. In some cases you may have to go find a new theme file and redo how you had your old one set up. It’s a bummer, but that’s how this stuff happens sometimes.
AWSOM plugins compatible with WordPress 2.3
After testing it has been determined that all 3 AWSOM plugins are fully compatible with the new WordPress 2.3 version. Now you just have to check your theme and other plugins :)