A few pet peeves with WordPress 2.5
Please keep in mind that these are just my opinions and that the behavior I’m experiencing may be due to my server configuration, but there are a few things about the new WordPress Admin panel that just really annoy me.
- I don’t mind fixed width layouts but please, if you’re going to use fixed widths, center it, and keep everything in the layout the same width. There’s nothing more annoying to me than a variable width header and a fixed width, left aligned body. Make it consistent!
- I don’t know if this happens to you, but If I’m writing a very long post or one that I’ve had to walk away from for a while, I end up with multiple drafts of that post, all with different Post ID’s. At what point did the software decide that I’d started over or created a new post. How many drafts will I have to delete when I’m done typing this, and why should I have to. I think that section of the codebase is still a bit buggy.
- This one I’m pretty sure has to do with the fact that I’m running Linux, but it’s annoying nonetheless. Every so often the links on the write page simply don’t do anything. Apparently something happens that times out the Ajax connection or something. I have not been able to come up with a reproducible pattern, so I’m not sure if there is a trigger for it.
- The media uploader…. Ugh! I’ve given up trying to sort anything out with that and just hit “save all changes”, then go to the gallery and insert whatever I need inserted…
Well, that’s it for the rant session. I’m off to do more work in 2.5 and get the rest of my sites upgraded.
Monetize your blog with Smorty
There are a bunch of different Paid Post services out there, but not all are created equal. don’t get me wrong, I belong to nearly all of them and I’ll use them if the payout on a post or review helps me to achieve my daily income goals. (Yes I have one, but that’s a different post, for a different blog.)
The problem with most pay-to-post systems is the lack of available topics to post about. There’s an endless amount of checking back in with the service to see if there are opportunities available, then it’s a race to grab that opportunity before someone else gets to it. There’s only one service I’ve used so far that hasn’t had this limitation, and that service is Smorty.
To this date Smorty’s blog advertising service has had an opportunity available for review whenever I needed one. This is a wonderful opportunity for a blogger that’s interested in earning his or her keep. Depending on your specific niche, they may even have more work than you can handle!
Give them a try!
Protecting or regaining your Google PageRank with meta tags
If you are a blogger that accepts paid posts or paid reviews, you have either experienced or will experienced Google’s policy of wiping your PageRank to zero. I have seen several methods posted on other blogs for counteracting this issue. The most notable of these methods has been to cave completely to Google and ad rel=”nofollow” to all sponsored links. While this method will work, it isn’t a real help to those of us who depend on paid posts or paid reviews for a revenue while we’re waiting for numbers large enough to drive affiliate sales.
The next most effective method was spelled out by Andy Beard, and included using a robots.txt file to limit the posts that Google indexes. While this method works perfectly well, there are issues involved, especially for people who aren’t all that familiar with updating this file or are uncomfortable doing so. It also has the inherent issue of having to update two files for each and every post that contains a paid advertising link, something that can seriously add to a bloggers workload, which is something I avoid at all costs.
I wanted a method I could use on a post-by-post basis to keep Google happy and to keep advertisers happy, and I think I’ve managed to do so in just a few easy steps In WordPress. I’m not sure how to do this on other platforms, but I’m sure there’s something available for your specific blogging tool of choice if you dig around enough.
- Verify your blog with Google by using the Verification tool at Google Webmaster Tools. This step is crucial if your blog has already been penalized.
- Download and install a plugin that allows you to modify meta tags on a per-post basis. I used the MetaTagz plugin by Brandon Buttars, but there are others available, take your pick here just as long as the plugin allows you to modify the robots meta tag.
- In each and every post you have with a sponsored link, or a link that looks like it might be a sponsored link, modify your robots meta tag to look like this:
<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow" />
This tells the Google spiders to avoid indexing the page or follow any link on that page. Other spiders may or may not honor this tag, but Google is the only spider we’re worried about in this instance.
Be sure to modify the robots tag on each new paid post!
If you haven’t already had rank lowered or removed by Google you should be all right at this point. If you have had rank penalized or removed, run over and file a reinclusion request. In my case it took about a week to see results, but my main site is now back up to a happy PR4. The nice thing about that ws that the blog only had a PR3 when they hit it!
As I said, I only know how to do this for a Wordpress powered blog. If anyone out there knows how to pull this off using another platform, let me know and I’ll add the instructions here, or just give me a link and I’ll do the legwork.
Peace!
A little Structure for your WordPress Powered Blog
It’s not often that I come across a WordPress theme that I almost instantly fall in love with. It’s even less common when that theme claims to be a “Magazine Style” theme, but when I downloaded the Structure theme from Justin Tadlock, I was hooked from the get-go.
Let me say right off the bat that this is not a theme designed for people who just want a drag and drop experience. To get the full power of this theme working on your WordPress install, you’e going to have some theme tweaking to do. If you’re comfortable making some simple modifications to theme files, you’ll have little trouble getting this theme humming like no other you’ve ever seen.
The primary advantage of this theme is flexibility. Nearly every single aspect of layout can be modified to suit the site owner’s needs without any major modification. All three of the columns on the home page are widgetized, allowing for infinite layout possibilities either by hard coding or just by moving widgets around. Default theme sections are available as widgets as well, so no functionality is lost in the process.
The only downside to the theme that I can see is that it is not GPL’ed, though the license does allow for customizations and use on any type of site you can imagine. All the author asks is that the credit link remain intact.
If you’re looking for the future of WordPress theming, you’ll find it in Structure.
Does a loss of pagerank really affect your traffic?
Google’s PageRank smackdown has left a lot of bloggers bemoaning the loss of traffic and prestige their blogs recieve, but does having your Google PR wiped out or lowered really affect how many visitors you will get on a daily basis?
From my experience, the answer is a resounding “NO”.
The first of my blogs to get slapped for selling paid advertising was my food and recipe blog, Cooking… by the seat of my Pants! One day I had a Google PageRank of 3, with the hopes of easily making a 4 or a 5 on the next update. The next day I sat at a PR of 1, the following day I had a firm PR of Zero and it has sat at this level for over 3 months now. In that time my traffic has tripled and I have seen no loss of referrals from Google itself.
As a concrete example, on October 7th last year, when I still had a PR of 3, I received 17 referrals from Google searches. On March 6th 2008 and with a PR 0, I got 84 visits from Goolge search referrals. I’d call that a marked increase, wouldn’t you?
In the end, the loss of toolbar PageRank hasn’t cost me much of anything in the way of traffic or exposure. What the lack of measurable PageRank has affected is my ability to sell advertising. Since most companies that use the Internet as a marketing tool still use PageRank as their benchmark for ad pricing and availability, it has become difficult to sell any of the higher profile advertising that I was able to use in the past. I have hopes that advertisers will begin to look at Izea’s new RealRank as aviable number in the future, but until then I am working on a few concepts that may get my PageRank reinstated without precluding selling a few advertisements here and there in the process.
That, however is another entry.
