One of my favorite features of Wordpress is the fact that it is so very customizable.  And it’s so very easy to add in pieces that maintains a level of control over the site without having to manually change PHP or HTML files.  You can access it all from within the back end of Wordpress.

You can customize these pieces and this extra control with Widgets.  I’m not going to go into to much detail here.  If you’ve been using Wordpress for very long you know what Widgets are.

The key point here is that you can add a Widget section and then easily control, add, edit the content of that section from the admin of Wordpress under the Appearance section.

Adding a Widget section is pretty straight forward even.  In your functions.php file, (or custom_functions.php for Thesis) you will just need to add something similar to the following line:

register_sidebar(array('name'=>'New Widget', 'before_title'=>'<h3>', 'after_title'=>'</h3>'));

The above is pretty simple right?  The “name” is set to whatever you want to call it.  And then you set the tags you want to wrap around the title. Make sure you use something descriptive for the name so you know what the widget is for.

After adding this to the function file you should be able to visit the Widgets section under Appearance and start adding Widgets to it immediately.

But we still have to decide where the widget is going to show up.

So in your template page you’ll need to add some code to set where the Widget shows up.  Usually you’ll add some default text that will display if there are no Widgets for that section yet.  Here’s an example, naturally you can style it how you want:

<div id="footer-widgeted">
<div>
<ul id="footer-widget">
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('New Widget') ) : ?>
<li>
<h3>Testing Widget Area</h3>
<p>This is an example of a widgeted area.</p>
</li>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>
</div>
</div>


That should do it. In a future post I’ll go into more detail and give some specific examples of adding widgets around a site.

I see this happen all the time with clients. The write up content in Word or Wordpad, and then later try to copy and paste into Wordpress. The resulting mess usually confuses many. In fact even if there isn’t an obvious mess to the user, there is sometimes a very large behind the scenes mess.

So how do we copy this content into our blog?

It doesn’t matter what you are using, whether it’s Open Office, Pages on Mac, or even copying and pasting content from another website. If you paste formated text into a WYSIWYG editor you will end up with a mess.

What is a WYSIWYG editor?

When you are in the back end of Wordpress and you are posting a blog entry, you’ll notice that you post it into a box with formatting icons on the top of it. You can make text bold, change it’s font size, colors, the list goes on. This is a WYSIWYG Editor, it stands for What You See Is What You Get.

If you paste already formated text from an external source into a WYSIWYG Editor you will find that it tries to keep the formatting intact. This results in a bunch of text, possibly an entire post, that doesn’t match the formatting of the rest of your site.

In fact, even if you paste the text into the box and it comes out looking half way decent, you might be surprised to find out there is a lot of hidden code in the background. You can’t see this code but it could be there.

The reason you want clean text, is not only because you want your posts to look like the rest of your site, but also because if there is a bunch of hidden code that serves no purpose it can possibly dilute what the search engines see on your site as content. In all cases I think it just serves your blog best if you keep it as simple as possible. It’s really not difficult.

How can I clean the text before pasting?

The easiest method is to just click the “Paste as Plain Text” button, or for a really cool effect “Paste from Word”. The first option will just clean all formatting from the text and you will need to reformat it all to match your document. Personally I use Google Docs and I just don’t ever use formatting, I just format it when I get it over there. It makes it pretty easy to manage topic ideas and content on the go from any computer.

The latter option is for if you actually drafted your document in Word. What this option does is take and remove all the formatting that MS Word adds, and replaces it with valid clean HTML markup. This is handy because it will keep bold text bold, but with proper HTML code. It will keep text that you marked as a “Heading” as the same heading you formatted it as. It won’t necessarily be able to replace all the formatting properly, but it should do a pretty good job of it. If you use this feature you’ll quickly be able to learn what will work and what won’t.

To find these buttons you have to make sure that you turn on “Show Kitchen Sink” it’s the last button on the top row, this will display a second row, which will give you the buttons we’ve talked about above.

In a previous article, I wrote about why you might consider CAPTCHA to be a bad method of protecting your blog from Spam. I’m not going to go into depth on that topic again, I’ve linked to it if you want to read it. The general theory is if you value your visitors communication then you should not make it harder for them to communicate in an attempt to block Spam. Instead there are many other ways to prevent it behind the scenes.

So the first method I would do, and always do on every blog I create whether it’s for a client or for myself, is install Akismet. Wordpress comes with it, it’s very light weight, powerful and effective. Since Wordpress already comes with it installing it is just a matter of going to your plugins and clicking “Activate”. There is one additional step and that is for you to go to Wordpress.com register a username only, and get your API Key.

Once you have your API Key, just enter it into your Akismet settings and you are all finished.

You’ll find Akismet is very effective. I don’t see it miss very much spam, and I rarely see a false positive. When you log into your Admin from now on, right there on the dashboard you’ll see your site stats and a link to your comment Spam. With one click you can delete it all. And it is very easy to scroll through it looking for false positives.

One thing to note though, spammers are crafty. They’ll add comments about how correct the post was and how beneficial it was to them and that they are going to bookmark it for all eternity. But if you look their name will be Viagra, and their web address will be something selling viagra. It’s all just a ploy to try and get that comment approved and get some kind of link to their site. Make sure you watch for real posts from real people that have something real to say.

Protecting email addresses and contact forms.

The next piece you should be aware of is that just by being online you are going to be subjected to spam. So as a rule of thumb I never put email addresses on a website. Spiders, and spam bots come along scraping the web of email addresses. The only reason to put your email address out there in my opinion is if you really are out of Viagra and you haven’t gotten any emails from sources you can buy it from lately.

But keep in mind it is important to make it easy for visitors to contact you. Instead of posting your email address it can be just as effective to just put up a contact form. In my opinion it is even more effective. By putting a link to your email there are many visitors that can’t click it to send you an email. By clicking it their computer will try to open the default email client and send you mail. What if they use webmail? The link won’t work, they’ll need to copy and paste. What if they are at a friends computer or coffee shop? Well I guess if they don’t use webmail they’ll need to remember you website or your email address and email you when they get home.

Having a contact form means that without leaving your site they can just type in an email and hit submit and off it goes. They just sent you an email. This is a much better form of providing a point a contact in my opinion.

It is very important to use the proper contact form. The contact form can’t allow header injection, it should check the referrer of the form post to see if the post came from your own site. These are just basic programming aspects, and if they are in place they will ensure that even if you get the occasional spam from the form it was probably manually submitted because a spammer was looking for a hole, chances are they won’t find one and they’ll move on to easier targets.

A nice Contact Form that is well programmed and secure that I use on many of my sites is produced by Dagon Design.  And naturally, in my opinion you should turn the CAPTCHA off.

In conclusion, it is my opinion that with just a little bit of work you can block or make it much easier to deal with the majority of Spam coming through your website. And this is the way it should be. YOU should be dealing with the spam, your VISITORS should NOT be having to jump through hoops just to communicate. Let me know what you guys think.

I actually don’t get this question very often. The question I often hear is, “Can you help me get CAPTCHA set up on my site/blog/etc?”. Usually people just want it but a lot of times they don’t think about whether or not its a good idea.

Think about it this way. If you didn’t know cops exist, and you wanted to drive to work. You know it takes maybe 20 minutes at 60 miles per hour, so naturally it will only take 10 minutes if you go 120 miles per hour, right? Well, then you’ll discover the cops, and hopefully you won’t discover the high speed crash.

This is kind of how CAPTCHA can be for your blog, website, and more. Naturally the negatives aren’t as harsh as being arrested or a high speed crash, but they might be pretty serious for a business.

The main reason someone would consider using CAPTCHA on their blog to begin with is probably to try and prevent spammers. You open a website, and over time you’ll notice that as your site gets found online the spam starts flowing in. It’s a bitter sweet feeling. If the bots can find you, then people will start finding you, but you don’t really want the spam bots on your site.

Normally to alleviate the extra work of dealing with all the spam many will use a CAPTCHA image in their form to prevent these automated bots from posting. But if you have a website then I’m sure you’ve visited another website. Have you ever visited a site with CAPTCHA and had difficulty posting anything because you can’t read the letters?

If you can read the letters then most bots can actually be programmed these days to read them as well. So these letters are usually very hard to read. Do you want to risk a potential contact getting frustrated and leaving the site?

A while back I found a study that a developer had created. This particular developer tested CAPTCHA on 50 websites he was maintaining for his clients. I can’t find the link to it right now or I’d post it for you. The first 3 months he had 25 sites with CAPTCHA and 25 sites without, for the next 3 months he reversed it. So he had the results of a pretty decent study.

He found on average on his well visited sites, that about 7% of the form submissions were spam, if I remember correctly. Now on the months that CAPTCHA was in place he would see that all of spam failed to submit the form properly, but the interesting part was that an additional 4-5% of form submissions were also failing. These were new unique visits as well, a total of 11-12% of failed submissions, compared to only 7% spam on the months with no CAPTCHA.

Maybe in the beginning of your site when Spam is high and human visitors are low, comparatively, then you can afford to take this risk. But even considering the time you save if you have a start up website I would think that every single contact would be important. Can you really afford to loose 1 out of every 20 visitors because they can’t get past your CAPTCHA?

Now if your offering or their reason for posting is so very compelling that they feel a strong need to do so, then they might fight through it. But the less compelling the reason for posting, the easier the person will give up. I don’t know if I want to take the risk of loosing 5% or even more. I think I’ll just find other ways of dealing with the Spam.

So a friend of mine shoots me an email today.  She had a front end website, just set of basic pages built with PHP and one of the links on the navigation was a Wordpress blog installed on the same hosting.  She wanted to display an RSS feed in the sidebar of the front end website by using a nifty little script called Simple Pie.

Looking over the script, I found it to be a handy little script.  It pulls an RSS feed and parses it easily for you and then you can output the parts you want with links to the full article.  The only problem I found with what she was trying to do, she just wanted to parse the RSS feed of the Wordpress blog on the same site and display the last 5 articles on the home page of the primary site.

This is easily done with about 8 lines of code.  You can get full access to everything Wordpress has to offer from external PHP pages on the same site.

The first thing you need to do is include a Wordpress file in order to load the functions you’ll need access too:

<?php
require_once('./blog/wp-blog-header.php');
?>

The above code is assuming that your installation is in the “blog” directory, naturally change it to reflect your installation.  Once this is included in your script you can access all the Wordpress functions.  Now if we expand on that code as follows:

<?php
require_once('./blog/wp-blog-header.php');
query_posts('showposts=5'); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link: <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php else : ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Now if you plug through the code you’ll see that we are pulling the last 5 posts (showposts=5) and then we are looping through that information and writing it in HTML.  Surround each title with an H2, or your own choice, and create a link with the appropriate Wordpress permalink.

So instead of messing with an entire separate class or script we’ve included the Wordpress functions, then just used the functions to display the information we already wanted.  Keep it simple.  Use the tools you already have available to you.

The main lesson I find with this example is that there is always 101 ways to skin a cat.  The idea is to make sure you are using the tools already available to you, and implementing the solution that keeps it simple.  Don’t get focused in on a solution and waste a lot of time, and never hesitate to ask for help.

I’ve been running many blogs, I have even built many websites for customers using Wordpress.  This includes using Wordpress as a CMS, or as a blog system.  In every case there are a few core features that each site needs, and the plugins I keep going back to deliver these features just simply work.

Here’s my list:

1. Akismet

This one is a no brainer, it’s already included in every Wordpress Installation and the plugin works very well.  Akismet has been key to blocking the spam on many sites I’ve had the pleasure of working on.  It’s easy to use.  All you need to do is activate it, and get a key by creating a Wordpress.com account.

2. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

I don’t know if this plugin is necessarily the number 2 most important, but in the order that I get them installed this is number 2.  Pinging your blog posts is kind of an overused feature that isn’t entirely effective anymore.  But it’s still available and still can provide some benefits even if just a small amount of marketing.  The best part about this Wordpress plugin is that it ensures that you don’t over ping from your blog on accident.  Any time you edit a post, or schedule a future publish date, your blog can be pinging the same posts over and over, or even pinging when the post hasn’t published yet.  This plugin makes sure that it doesn’t happen, even provides a nice log so you can see it’s effect.

3. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

This is a Wordpress Plugin that dynamically generates a visitor sitemap.  It’s lightweight, looks decent on a fresh install.  It’s easy to customize.  Has a lot of settings on the admin such as being able to set up the pagination which I think is important for the search engines.  This is not an XML Sitemap, this actually becomes a page on your site.  Visitors can use it to see all your pages, and the Search Engines will crawl it and find a link to every page.

4. Supr by StumbleUpon

I really like this plugin.  You can sign up for an account with su.pr add in your logins for Twitter and Facebook, then add the API keys into your Wordpress Admin and every time you post it will automatically post the title and a shortened link to your Twitter account and Facebook account.  If you are just starting out in blogging it can be a great way to spread what you are doing amongst your friends to support you.  As a business it’s a great way to spread the word especially when starting out.  Also from their control panel they provide tracking for the clicks, which is very handy to monitor the effectiveness.

5. TweetMeme Retweet Button

Here’s a plugin that adds a nice little graphic on your posts.  It makes it easy for people to retweet your posts right after they visit your site to read it.  It also shows how many times it’s been retweeted.  It will always show 1 if you are using the Supr plugin because you tweeted it yourself, if you have a couple friends supporting you it’ll easily get tweeted a couple more times.  It’s important to market your site, and your own group of friends can be a great place to start.

5.1 All in One SEO Pack

A quick bonus recommendation.  Personally I prefer to use the Thesis Theme, which includes many SEO improvements already and this plugin isn’t necessary.  But if you don’t have the pleasure of using a theme with these features built in, then I would highly recommend this plugin.  It adds in canonical URL’s, allows you to set custom meta tags, custom page titles and the list goes on.  This is also very valuable for CMS type sites.

I love it when I run across a certain kind of person.  You know who you are.  The type that has every possible FireFox plugin installed, some days just opening FireFox it takes 45 minutes to run through all the plugin updates.

One of the things I like best about Wordpress is how lightweight it is.  It’s simple, it does it’s job, highly customizable.  Plus, even though it is simple it can be made to be much more complicated through the use of plugins.  You can add just the features and abilities that you need for your site.

Something I dislike about other systems is maybe they are awesome because of the huge list of features, but those features can be a resource hog.

Quite awhile back I read an article that I can’t find right now to link.  It talked about some load tests on a few of the “frameworks” that are out there for programming.  One of them that they considered a programming framework was Drupal.  They included this because even though it is a CMS type script, it’s so robust and feature rich and can really be used as a programming framework.  The problem? Just to display nothing more than “Hello World” to a browser, it performed with a response time significantly slower than a lot of other systems to do the same.

I mean this makes sense in all reality.  It has so much capability that it has to dynamically load tons of classes, functions, etc.  even though all it’s doing is displaying “Hello World”.  It’s fine if you need all the features and your site is going to use them, otherwise it’s just a disability.

Wordpress is Lightweight, can you keep it that way?

That’s one thing that is really nice about using Wordpress.  It is so light.  And the way that plugins integrate is really nice.  You can add complete features with an upload and a click of the button.

Then I run into someone who asks me to help them figure out why their installation is so slow.  I take a look at their plugins screen, they have 70+ plugins uploaded, 30+ plugins activated, but only about 15 give or take actually in use.  The rest are just there because.

You know a spoiler might improve the performance of a race car, but not if you attach 15 of them.

There are always all kinds of reasons.

Well the reason I have 4 ad rotators installed is because I wasn’t sure which one I liked, and I tried them all out until I decided I liked this one

Here’s the thing, just by having them activated the functions that make up the plugin have to get loaded every single time a page loads. So maybe you are using one ad rotator, but enjoy the drop in performance of 4 just for fun!

Another point to be made, installing plugins always creates variables in your database.  Some plugins don’t properly remove these variables when disabled.  The larger your database becomes the slower it takes to pull content out of it.

How long will your visitors wait to see your blog content?

Keep your installations as clean as possible.  Normally, I keep extra installations of Wordpress around separate from my main.  Any good host should have the ability to create subdomains.  Install a plain installation there, or even make a copy of your installation, install the plugin there first.  ESPECIALLY, if you don’t even know if you’ll want it long term.

If you decide you don’t want it there is no reason to ever install it on your main Wordpress site.

Cause and Effect, chain of events.  Doesn’t matter if your content is good, if visitors get tired of waiting for your pages to load.

So here’s a fun story about some wasted time.  I configured feedburner a while back to use as the RSS Feed for the site.

I like the way Feedburner looks compared to the default RSS Feed.  The social icons are better, you can get better statistics out of the system.  Plus, it’s owned by Google.  Never hurts to supply Google with as many links to your site as possible (don’t quote me on that, I really doubt it actually matters).

A lot of times, I like to be a log junkie.  I sit back and hunt through my site logs on occasion.  I like to look for errors with the site, and fix them before they cause to many issues. Sometimes I even find malicious bots trolling the site and I can block them or deal with them at least.

Anyway, I noticed that there were several attempts to hit the Wordpress RSS feed that is the default.  The systems ( a Google Gadget, something from Yahoo, etc. ) were hitting the site on a regular basis.  It’s not that they were getting old information, but it was quite a few subscribers that weren’t getting the legitimate feed, and thus I wouldn’t see the proper tracking.

I started scouring the Google Search for a method to redirect the feed via a redirect in the htaccess file.  I didn’t want to use a plugin and create additional overhead when it can be done so easily with the htaccess.  And I didn’t want to spend the time to write it myself, when I’m sure it was out there several times over.

I found a code block from Perishable Press:
# temp redirect wordpress content feeds to feedburner
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator [NC]
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/wordpress-master/feed [R=302,NC,L]


Naturally if you are going to use this code make sure you change out my feedburner address for your own.

The problem was that after I added it to my htaccess it didn’t work.  I just popped it in really quickly, wasn’t paying attention at all.

After spending a lot more time than I wanted to spend on it, researching alternatives online.  I finally started reading comments.  There are several posts out there that all use this code, but none solved my problem.

Reading the comments, someone mentioned that the code has to be before the permalink rewrites that Wordpress uses.  Doh, I’m an idiot.  If I would have just spent two seconds to actually look at the code I would have realized it.  But instead I tried to save time and just do it quickly.

I guess in this case trying to NOT “reinvent the wheel” I cost myself a lot of unnecessary time.  Especially on something this simple that I could have just written myself.  Oh well, live and learn.

There is no reason for me to beat the dead horse about how important content is for your site.  If you are running a blog it’s really obvious, how do we brainstorm for new content ideas?  Especially if you are running a quality niche blog, it can be really easy to run out of “hot” topics for your niche.

There are hundreds if not thousands of websites out there with writers posting content and ideas about everything under the sun.  Naturally, if you start searching the internet for a list of websites to keep on your bookmarks list, and then try to keep up with them every day you’ll end up just blowing all your time on reading instead of writing.

Luckily most websites these days syndicate their content with RSS Feeds.

I use Google’s Reader to keep track of several websites.  It comes in really handy to visit one website and see the content of many websites all in one spot.

Did you know you can customize your Wordpress Admin with aggregated content about your topic for idea surfing?

Feed Reader in WP Admin

When you log into your WP Admin you’ve probably noticed a couple boxes, one called “Wordpress Development Blog” and the other “Other Wordpress News”.

I’ve found that many people don’t realize that if you mouse over the title bars a little “Customize” link shows up.

Clicking on this link will give you settings screen so you can change the Feed you want to display here as well as the title.

Feed Settings in WP Admin

You can set the number of items you’d like to display as well as a few other settings such as displaying content.

So if you are managing a blog, maybe you don’t really need to see Wordpress Development information every time you log in.

Instead let’s make it a little more valuable.

First though, let’s consider.  Maybe we don’t want to be limited to only two feeds. Maybe we are looking at this as a method to not only keep in touch with the competition, but to also feed us as many ideas about our own content as possible.

So to do this we’ll need some way to create a RSS Mashup of sorts.

Head on over to Yahoo Pipes.  This service is really excellent for combining RSS Feeds, and they in turn provide you with another RSS Feed of all the feeds combined.

I tried another site called xFruits, but I couldn’t even get their accounts to work.  I tried 2 different accounts over the course of a week and it would never work.

So once I created a Yahoo ID, I was able to log into their Pipes Utility.  I was pretty impressed with what you could do with this tool.

Yahoo Pipes

Take a look at the picture to see how I created a mashup of two feeds, and sorted the content by published date.

After I saved the Pipe, I just clicked over to view it and then selected the “Get as RSS”.  I plugged in my new Mashup feed in the WP Admin.

Now every time I log into my WP Admin I see all the content from these feeds.  Sometimes I see articles I disagree with, sometimes I see content ideas that I could expand on in more detail.  Sometimes reading through the titles I’ll get hit with a completely unique idea.

Either way it’s a very beneficial tool.  I’d love to hear from some readers about if this is beneficial, or any other “tricks” you might have found.

I’ve been working with Wordpress it seems like forever. I’ve tried so many different Wordpress Themes that I couldn’t count them all.

You have free ones, and if you try them you know you get what you pay for. But free ones can still work if you are a developer, they’ll at least put you at a starting point to make your own creation.

There are a lot of paid ones as well. As in any market some better than others.

It’s all about what features you need, and how well each theme can fill those needs.

The best paid theme I’ve ever had the pleasure of using, is the Wordpress Thesis Theme. There are many themes/templates out there that meet specific needs for a niche set of websites, but the Thesis theme is probably the most flexible theme I’ve found.

And they just released a new version with all new features:

• custom file editor in your WordPress dashboard
• dropdown navigation menu
• comprehensive font color controls and new design controls

There are a lot of other improvements in regards to the general design of the theme as well. Plus what more could you want with the included SEO abilities. I think this one theme replaces the need for several plugins, which is very cool if you think of plugins in terms of overhead. (watch our blog for an article on this later this week)

About Thesis — Find out more about Thesis and the DIYthemes philosophy

Here’s their motto:

Thesis Theme Motto

They really meet this in my opinion. It’s always being improved upon.

I’m going to put together a video later this week to show off some of the Thesis features.