Working & WordPress-ing: Tutorials for WordPress Bloggers

WP.org-focused articles will commence soon

March 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Going over the topics related to WP.com blogs we have covered so far, it would seem that we would have covered most of the main concerns of our WP.com bloggers. We will be posting new articles, albeit short, on this site relating to WP.org blogs or the so-called self-hosted WordPress blogs to address queries hitting our mailbox.

That said, we would still be covering topics related to WP.com blogs but we would first pass it through our WP.com page before re-posting them here. That way, we would be able to sort out any issues with the WordPress.com developers before getting them bedded on this site.

Filed Under: Plugins, Side Comments, Themes Tagged With:

4 reasons why I prefer a self-hosted WordPress blog

November 10, 2009 By Leave a Comment

By way of background, below entry was meant to be posted at my WordPress.com blogsite to conclude my seven weeks of blogging there. Instead, I decided to post it to this site. Hopefully, this will explain why most of my posts and articles in this site refer to WordPress.com.

I am using the same title I have at WordPress.com for this blog, Working and WordPress-ing. In my seven weeks of blogging at WordPress.com, I have posted more than 20 entries mainly dealing with “how-to’s” which made available in this site.

***

On day 1 when I started this blog, I mentioned that I am here at WordPress.com to gain insight into how it is to blog at WordPress.com.

Now running into my seventh week into this WP blogging journey and after 24 posts, I think I can say that I have achieved my objective. I’ve learned a lot, and I thought I was able to return the favour by sharing with you what I learned plus my experience as a self-hosted blogger.

We have covered various topics by way of posts and comments including the following :

  • A PollDaddy poll outside your WP blog
  • A simple solution to tweet and retweet your WP posts
  • How to embed a Vimeo video
  • How to embed a video in your WordPress.com-hosted blog
  • How to blog spam-free at WordPress.com
  • The role of internet service providers in curbing spams
  • Displaying photos in a gallery as an instructional aid
  • If you want to customize your tweets from your WP posts, do not ignore the developer’s Support page
  • Revisiting PicApp images and embed codes
  • Experimenting with PollDaddy in my blog
  • How to encourage audience response
  • Experimenting with PicApp images in my blog
  • How to customize your blog with widgets
  • How to post by email (an experiment)
  • How reliable is Alexa in measuring your site’s traffic rank?
  • How to upgrade your WordPress theme
  • How to start a blog at WordPress.com (A quick digression)
  • How to XHTML validate a WordPress theme
    • How to select a WordPress theme
  • How to blog at WordPress.com

The above articles are available on this site as well as in my WordPress.com blog.

Now that we have covered most of the basics in WP blogging, it’s time to move on. ( Note: I exported my WP posts to this site today.)

I will still be writing articles on WordPress-related topics, but these will be posted in my self-hosted blog and if allowed, distributed here.

What makes a self-hosted WordPress blog attractive to me? Conversely, what makes a WordPress-hosted blog unattractive to me?

Here are four reasons:

Themes. I like to experiment with themes, their layout, their architecture, their CSS, etc. This, I can not do here at WordPress.com unless I upgrade my account. Currently, WordPress.com has 77 themes. They are good themes, I admit, but most of them do not meet my requirements. (Like this theme I am using right now is not among the 77 themes.)

Plugins. I am restricted from installing plugins or scripts.

Inbound Traffic. Whilst a WP-hosted blog can leverage on the traffic coming from the traffic of other WP blogs flowing from “Possibly related-posts” linked at the bottom of every post, the traffic that I generate for my blog is “credited” to WordPress.com. Should I decide later to blog in a self-hosted blog (like this one), the traffic ranking I generated for my WP-hosted blog remain with WordPress.com. It is not portable.

Revenue. On paper, there are restrictions from running third-party ads in a WP blog. This is covered by point #5 / Item 2 of WP’s Terms of Service (see part of the provision which I styled in bold, below):

the Content is not spam, is not machine- or randomly-generated, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing);

Setting up a self-hosted WordPress blog is not that difficult. If you need help, please do not hesitate to contact me. Our group offers web hosting which includes WordPress and other blogging platforms.

Filed Under: Side Comments

The role of internet service providers in curbing spams

October 27, 2009 By 1 Comment

spamhaus-10-worst-spam-serv

Top 10 Worst Spam Service ISPs

For those who have been following me and my blogs over any period of time, my dislike to spam is well known. I regularly post news and anti-spam tutorials as part of our company’s educational drive.

Today, I posted an entry, Australia not in Top 10 worst spam origin countries, but home to #6 spammer.

The gist of my blog is that Australia has been able to stay away from the Top 10 list because of its strong spam laws.

But governments can only do so much in fighting spam. The real key to fighting spam is the private sector’s network of internet service providers. Unless ISP networks cooperate, the fight against spam will be a losing battle.

But will networks cooperate?

The daily updates of the independent spam-tracking organisation, the Spamhaus Project, show that the positions and ranking of the world’s worst spam service ISPs keep on changing. Last May 2009, even one of the largest ISPs in the United States was in this Top 10 list, and it was ranked #6 worst spam service ISP.

Here is a part of the Spamhaus Project report :

Although all networks claim to be anti-spam, some network executives factor revenue made from hosting known spam gangs into corporate policy decisions to continue to sell services to spam operations. Others simply decide that closing the holes in their end-user broadband systems that allow spammers access would be too costly to their bottom lines.

The majority of the world’s service providers succeed in keeping spammers off their networks and work to maintain a positive anti-spam reputation, but their work is undermined daily by the few networks who, out of corporate greed or mismanagement, choose to be part of the problem.

If corporate greed, it would of course be foolish to assume that these networks will give away the proverbial “goose that lays the golden egg”. At best, they may stop servicing spam business only when cost structure arising from loss of customer support or from government lock-down pressure will be greater than the profits they derive from servicing spammers.

If mismanagement, networks have to put plugs to holes in their operations including a regular monitoring and reporting of any unusual activities in their network. Even that would mean extra costs which many ISPs will try to avoid as much as they can.

You can read more about this in my blog, A Matter of Sharing.

Filed Under: Side Comments, Spam Tagged With: , , ,

Experimenting with PicApp images in my blog

October 11, 2009 By 6 Comments

[picapp src="0/2/3/e/UCLA_Bruins_vs_356f.jpg?adImageId=5147881&imageId=6774884" width="500" height="333" /]

Embedding a PicApp image in a WordPress post is very easy. There are two embedding codes supplied. One is for self-hosted WordPress blogs. Another is for WordPress.com-hosted blogs like this one. To copy the code, highlight the whole code applicable to your site, and then paste it on where you want it to show in your post.

The image above is an example of a PicApp image embedded on this post using the codes supplied by PicApp for WordPress.com hosted blogs.

What if you do not want the thumbnails strip?

If you are not a great fan of thumbnails being displayed on the related-images strip, you can make them “disappear” by resizing the image. I did not even experiment with this one. The information was already supplied in WordPress.com’s support forum. Well, not exactly the way I wrote it here. But it was pretty obvious from the WordPress.com’s support page that that was how it could be done.

Below is a sample image grab where the related-images strip is removed and replaced by a PicApp-linked “Gallery” icon when the image is reduced. I reduced the image size by 50% of its original size.

[picapp src="0/2/3/e/UCLA_Bruins_vs_356f.jpg?adImageId=5147881&imageId=6774884" width="250" height="167" alt="test image" border="0"/]

How do you wrap the text around the resized and smaller image?

[picapp src="0/2/3/e/UCLA_Bruins_vs_356f.jpg?adImageId=5147881&imageId=6774884" width="250" height="167" alt="test image" border="0" /]

I admit I am no expert in CSS. But what I normally use – a simple stylesheet – to align an image left or right works.

On this example, I used a stylesheet with the image being floated to the left and with a margin to the right of the image of 10px to make way for a nice whitespace between the image and text left margin.

I am pretty sure there are other ways of wrapping the text around the image or aligning the image left or right of your post.

Will I be using PicApp images in my blog? When pressed for time or I don’t have the right photographs in my library, why not? After all, the images are free, are they not?

Well, not exactly free like in free to do what you want with them. What is “free” is free access. We still have to “pay” for them, I suppose, by way of the traffic redirected to PicApp’s where advertisements are displayed or the viral marketing effect we create for PicApp by making the embedding code of the images available in our blogs for others to use.

To me, that is a very small price to pay, especially in these days of sharing and bookmarking.

Filed Under: Experiments, Images, Side Comments Tagged With: , ,

How reliable is Alexa in measuring your site's traffic rank?

September 24, 2009 By 5 Comments

Alexa Traffic RankingEven to someone like me who enjoys browsing over site statistics and testing the accuracy of the resulting metrics, understanding an Alexa traffic rank is not an easy task.

Except for the fact that the Alexa traffic ranking system is based on information generated from Alexa toolbar users and that “A site’s ranking is based on a combined measure of Reach and Page Views” plus some kind of “data normalization” which also are not explained, there is not much information about the Alexa ranking system.

In its FAQ, Alexa also stated: “Alexa’s traffic rankings are based on the past three months of global traffic according to our diverse data sources, and are updated weekly.”

Given this minimum traffic tracking period, I wonder how a blog like mine ~ although barely two weeks old ~ was able to attract a traffic ranking. Is it because my blog is hosted by WordPress.com, and Alexa is biased to WordPress.com-hosted sites? I don’t think so. I know of other sites hosted by WordPress.com which have been online for many months now, yet they are still showing an Alexa “No Data” status. I am certain that some people are visiting those sites. (Note: The small Alexa image on this page shows “No Data” for Alexa which we could only surmise that Alexa did not like to make its traffic ranking public.)

I think I will stick to metrics like unique visits, page views and the like in gauging site traffic performances. At least, these figures are easy to understand, and I can explain the figures to other people.

But I cannot say the same thing with Alexa’s traffic ranking. After all, according to Alexa, if a site traffic ranking is beyond 100,000, the figures are statistically meaningless. For a site traffic rank to be statistically meaningful and reliable, a site should be close to the top rank. Quite a tall order, isn’t it?

Alexa’s statements read as follows:

Sites with relatively low measured traffic will not be accurately ranked by Alexa. Our data comes from many various sources, including our Alexa users; however, we do not receive enough data from these sources to make rankings beyond 100,000 statistically meaningful. (However, on the flip side of that, the closer a site gets to #1, the more reliable its rank.)

With many websites that are not even close to the top 1,000 or even 50,000 (let alone #1), I wonder why advertising placement agencies even bother to look at a website’s Alexa traffic rank!



Filed Under: Side Comments, Stats and Metrics Tagged With: , , ,

Red haze and dust storms in Sydney

September 24, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Driving through red haze and heavy dusts

Driving through red haze and heavy dusts

By this time, the news about the red haze which blanketed Sydney and surrounds yesterday would have reached everyone.

Quite true, yesterday’s phenomenon (yes, it is phenomenon) was unlike anything seen before. Walking out of our house yesterday morning to find out what was happening was a very eerie experience. Outside, the morning was painted red. The smell of dust was all over the place.

In my 30 years of stay in Australia, I have witnessed hailstorm with hails bigger the size of golf balls and destroying properties, but yesterday’s red haze was something very different and unusual.

Filed Under: Side Comments Tagged With: , ,

Changing themes is part of the exercise

September 22, 2009 By 2 Comments

romyc-wordpress-gridFor those who were following me from day one, 10 days ago, you would have noticed a big change in this site.

Yes, I am using Sadish’s MistyLook, except for the header image which I customized using other themes images. Not that there was something wrong with Derek Punsalan’s Grid Focus theme. In fact, it is one of my favorites for other self-hosted sites. I switched to a new theme as part of the exercise. I wanted to have a feel of how it is to “re-skin a blog” at WordPress.com.

Well, it was not that difficult after all. It took me only about 10 minutes to move to a different theme and re-set the widgets to display the same information.

Next time our friends ask me how it is to blog at WordPress.com, this is one story I can tell them.

By the way, is this theme XHTML 1.0 validated? I did check it and it is.

Updated 13 October: Experimenting with INove by mg12.

Filed Under: Experiments, Side Comments, Themes Tagged With: , , ,

A pleasant blogging experience at WordPress.com, so far

September 16, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I mentioned in my earlier posts that, compared with self-hosted sites which I am very much familiar with, a blog at WordPress.com is restrictive. For one, I could not really do much about customizing a theme unless of course I buy credits to allow me to add custom CSS. Also, I could not install my favorite plugins which of course I understand – considering that plugins are not for everyone.

But even within a small playing area so to speak, I thought running a non self-hosted blog could also be a pleasant online experience. I am quite happy with the way my blog here at WordPress.com is shaping up.  Its structure, content and looks are metamorphosing to those of  my self-hosted blog, thanks to the wonders of widgets. Widgets are something I would like to share with you in my next posts.

In the meantime, you may wish to check out my personal site including some Twitter updates @romycc.  Again, if you have a subject you would like us to tackle before the widgets posts, let me know.

Filed Under: Side Comments Tagged With: , , ,

How to upgrade your WordPress theme

September 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment

After selecting your WordPress theme and you are still not happy with some of its elements like theme’s font sizes, column sizes and other similar styles, you can customize the theme’s CSS through custom CSS.

Unlike with self-hosted blogs however, in WordPress.com blogs, you need to buy credits from WordPress.com via PayPal. (I have not tried buying credits for this purpose, but I imagine that with the purchased credits, you will be given an extra command in your dashboard control panel which would allow you to “edit” the stylesheet.) Based on the WPMU version I am using, to upgrade a WordPress theme, you need to pay something like $14.97 which is good for one year.

Did I hear you asking “What is a custom CSS?” If you did, then the Upgrade is not for you. The upgrade is for advanced users only. As the “Upgrades” page on my WordPress.com dashboard page states:

“This upgrade allows you to add custom CSS to customize any theme on this current blog. This is recommended mostly for advanced users who understand CSS.”

With that upgrade requirement, how then do you customize your site?

Yes, the operative word is “site” and not “theme” since customizing a theme would mean adding custom CSS which may be outside the current knowledge of a beginner or outside his/her budget.

But don’t fret. Even if you cannot add custom CSS to a theme under the current WordPress.com free blogs environment, still you can change the looks of your site and make it a little bit different from other sites using the same theme.

We will tackle that in our next posts.

Filed Under: Side Comments, Themes, Tutorial Tagged With: , , , ,

How to start a blog at WordPress.com (A quick digression)

September 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

After sending my link to this site to friends, someone told me why I don’t have the customary intro post like “How to start a blog at WordPress.com”.

I realize that in a tutorial that should be the first post, but I intentionally omitted that subject since it is assumed that the readers of my posts are already WordPress.com account holders. All they want to see are practical tips on how to go around their WordPress.com’s “My Dashboard.”

I hope my response reflects my tagline: “Sharing techniques with friends who at times fumble on their way to their blogs at WordPress.com, but are afraid to ask!”

Anyway, thanks for visiting. And please don’t be restricted from commenting and asking. I also learn from your questions.

Filed Under: Side Comments Tagged With: ,
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