Archive for 'April, 2008'

Do you have a separate bank account for your blogging income? If you don’t – maybe you should!

I’m starting a new series called “JTPratt Recommends…” because I’ve been asked a lot of questions both in email and comments regarding the products and services I use as a blogger and online marketer. I read a lot of blogs, and it really bothers me sometimes when I see people like John Chow hawking products that they don’t really use, or letting guest-posters write about products merely to hawk an affiliate link in a high traffic place. If I tell you about something, I will disclose whether I use it or not, and give you an honest description of what I think about it. This series will be about the things that I personally recommend, and not some BS I blog about for a quick buck. I will include an affiliate link where applicable because I’m running an online business and trying to profit from my hard work, but that doesn’t mean I’ll sell you out for a quick buck by linking to crappy stuff. Anything I recommend, I truly stand behind.

The first item in this series is WAMU or Washington Mutual Online Banking. I call WAMU by “blogging bank account”. If you’re making money online (or just want to save money) WAMU could be a great bank for you. Quite a few years back, I saw their commercials on TV, and just happenned to need a place for my Amazon and other affilate payments to be automatically deposited. It was kind of at a time when you really weren’t sure if you wanted to give your main checking account number and routing number to an online bank. For some of you, there may actually be a Washington Mutual bank near you, but the closest one to me is a few states away. I was intrigued by the fact that the commercial said you could signup in 5 minutes or less AND it was FREE!

So, I gave it a try, and started my account with $5. Ever since I have all my affiliate payments for Amazon, Commission Junction, or anyone else direct deposted to that bank. I see a lot of bloggers and affiate marketers post pictures of their paper checks on their blogs – but I don’t get paper checks! I like the fact that they go into my free WAMU checking account automatically – but even better is the fact that I have a free WAMU Mastercard debit check card, and I got a box of free checks (that I still haven’t used but a few of) when I first signed up. I’ve had to deal with them once or twice over the phone, and the customer service was great. I don’t get any paper statement, and I’ve never had any trouble accessing my account online – not once. I’ve even paid bills and transferred money too and from my local bank quickly and easily. I accidentally screwed up and overdrawn my account once, but with WAMU the first time is free.

I am recommending WAMU to anyone who needs a good reliable bank and place to store or save money. Last year I also started a savings account with them in about 2 minutes, and I move money there as well for safe keeping (money I can’t spend with checks or debit card!). That’s why I call WAMU “the blogger’s bank”!

Do you have an online or secondary bank account for your blogging income?

Do you use your WordPress categories to their fullest potential? I’m going to show you 9 different ways to hack your WordPress categories into shape!

This is day #10 of 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days!

So you have your categories listed in the sidebar of your blog like everybody else. I’m going to show you 9 more things you can do with WordPress categories that will be better for you AND your blog. At the same time, customizing your blog with these hacks will begin to set it apart and make it different than all the “cookie-cutter” blogs in the blogopshere.

Top Level Categories: In WordPress when you create a category, it has to have a preface like www.site.com/category/news. In the “Permalinks” section of your options or settings in your WP dashboard you can change your “category base”, but that’s only to change it from the default “category” to another word you choose. There is (ridiculously) no way to remove it entirely and just have a category be www.site.com/news. With the Top Level Categories Plugin installed, it strips out the “category” so your category names CAN be top level all the time.

Folding Category List: Maybe you’re tired of that list of linked categories hogging up a bunch of your sidebar real estate on your blog. If so, maybe you would be interested in trying to display them using the Folding Category List WordPress Plugin instead.

Multi-Column Category List: If you’re trying to create a simple sitemap and you just want a page with multiple categories listing your posts, the Multi-Column Category List Plugin for WordPress may be just what you need.

Latest Posts from Each Category: If instead you’re creating a theme with an aside or block of recent posts for a page, header, footer, or anywhere – you can use the Latest Posts from Each Category WordPress Plugin for that, and it has all kinds of formatting options, as well as comment counts, dates, and more.

Author Assigned Categories: If you have multiple authors in your WordPress blog this plugin will be helpful to you. You can assign certain categories to certain authors so that they won’t be able to post in categories you don’t want them to. It works with “user levels” so you could assign say the “news” category to only “reporters”, etc. Very helpful if you have an admin, editor, and then some writers – all with different roles or permissions.

Category Icons: Lots of other blogging platforms have the ability to assign little pictures or “icons” to categories that you can use in your posts or the sidebar. WordPress does not. That’s why I wrote the post Very Easy WordPress Theme Hack: Show Category Images, which involves uploading the images in FTP yourself to a directory you create and then inserting some PHP code in your template files. The Category Icons WordPress Plugin automates all that nonsense, and even has additional options that hack couldn’t provide. Now it’s easy to upload and assign images to all your wordpress categories.

Category Pages: This plugin can solve all the worries of many people that have been commenting on my Better SEO and $$$ with WP Category Templates post. I wrote that post because it was the first way I figured out to place original content on every category page for better search indexing. In entailed creating a separate category template file for every category with a few paragraphs of original content in each. If you switch themes, you might have to rewrite them – it was a solution, but also a big hassle. With the Category Page WordPress Plugin, it allows you to “write” a WordPress page and then “assign” it to a category. So basically, then this plugin puts the contents of this page at the top of whatever category you assign it to. I don’t think that this is the best solution – but it is a solution that’s better than the original one I had. I will give you other options to this coming up. I have not installed this plugin, and the thing that I question is whether or not all the pages will show in the “Pages” section of your sidebar. You could easily exclude all the ones you created to associate with categories, but that could be very tedious.

Page Category Plus: This is a unique plugin that could be confused with the Category Pages one, but it does yet something different. The Page Category Plus WordPress Plugin allows you to assign categories to Pages. You know how you get to choose categories whenever you write a post, but you don’t have that choice when you write pages? Now you have that ability once this plugin is installed. So if I install this plugin and assign my 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days “page” to my WordPress Category – it will show up on the same page as my posts now. WOW – will this plugin make my job of organizing this (and other) blogs a whole lot EASIER!

Manage Category Descriptions: This is IMHO “the solution” to having original content on category pages for good SEO and more indexed pages. In your WordPress dashboard go to “Manage -> Categories” and then click on that category to edit it. Give your category a “description”. Next, if you created any category templates like category-6.php, delete them. And then on your archive.php (or cateogry.php if you have one) find this section of the code:

<?php /* If this is a category archive */ if (is_category()) { ?>
<h2 class="pagetitle">Archive for the '<?php echo single_cat_title(); ?>' Category</h2>

That’s the part of the template that say “if this is a category page, then show the title”. Well, all you have to do is paste in one line of code directly below that to print the description for the category out:

<?php /* If this is a category archive */ if (is_category()) { ?>
<h2 class="pagetitle">Archive for the '<?php echo single_cat_title(); ?>' Category</h2>

<?php echo category_description(); ?>

Of course, you don’t repeat those first two lines, you just copy the third one for the description in your template. You can also put it in a div, style it, give it a border or background color to make it stand out, etc. I personally believe that this is a much better way to display original content on category pages than either a plugin or individual templates, because it doesn’t have to create any extra pages or template to worry about. In addition, you could use the descriptions for other things on your blog in other places if you wanted.

I hope that you derived some benefit from my category hacks – and may your chisel your WordPress blog into more of “your own” each and every day. Once again, if you have anything to add to make this hack page any better, or a question – please comment now!

What is Twitter? What’s a ‘tweet’? This is my guide and review of twitter for bloggers!

Last week, I was minding my own business reading my favorite blogs when I came across Alan’s Affiliate Confession posts Twitter Doesn’t Suck Like I Thought it Did. I had heard the name “twitter” a lot, but had been avoiding finding out what it was actually all about. I mean – who needs “yet another” thing to do?! Was it a new facebook, linkedin, stumble upon, digg – I didn’t know, I had no idea what it was (and could really care less). God forbid it turns out to be the next “blogrush” or “Agloco”, if you know what I mean. I respect Alan’s opinion, he hasn’t steered my wrong yet, and if he says I should check it out – just like in the comment I left on that page, I “must” check it out. So, I went to twitter.com and signed up.

Once I signed up I still really didn’t know what it was I had signed up for. Like Alan’s post – most things I read about it told a bit about why people thought it was handy or cool, but not much about what it actually was. So, for the uninitiated (like I was), here you go…(if you already know twitter, keep reading too – because I have cool tools for you as well).

What is Twitter?

Twitter.com is a “new” kind of social networking. I new (ack!) you’ve heard this before. Really, it is. It’s breaking new ground – and I can describe it in just one word: MICROBLOGGING

Twitter does for the web what the Nextel walkie talkie did to revolutionize the cell phone. Yes, it’s that good. Imagine communicating with hundreds, or even thousands of people instantly, non-invasively, and it doesn’t require (but can use) IM or email. It doesn’t compete with your blog, it enhances it. And it can be integrated with nearly every other social networking tool you are signed up for. Are you intrigued yet? Good…

Get yourself a free twitter account and you get your own twitter home page:

At the top of the page you see an “update” box. On the right hand side, note the number “140″. I believe that’s the exact number of characters an SMS text message is limited to. Every time you write a “post” in twitter you are limited to 140 characters. That’s why a call twitter “microblogging”. The small nature of the messages is probably also why each time you “update” it’s called a “tweet”. Writing multiple posts is “tweeting”.

So, you have your own twitter home page – now what? Well, you can customize it and finish filling in your profile with your info and pic. I want you to take note of the right sidebar when you’re logged, like the example to the left from my profile page on twitter. You have the option to choose either web or phone updates. That kind of threw me for a loop at first. Phone updates?

I should have seen this coming. My daughter and son are text message crazy on their cell phones, so much in fact I had to get the unlimited plan for all of us. I had predicted for years that someday cell phones, computers, home entertainment systems, car stereos – all of it would converge at somepoint into all kinds of hybrid type devices. So – I chose “phone updates” just to see what would happen.

Next I had to find people to “follow”. I’m not going to get any updates on my phone if I don’t “follow” anyone – it’s kinda like having a feedreader without any rss feeds in it. You can search for people by keyword, or by email address, or you can just click “follow” on someone’s web site if they have twitter updates on their blog. I typed in “wordpress” and clicked on a few to follow, and then added a few bloggers I knew were using twitter now. So now I knew what twitter was, but it was time to try and figure out what I could do with it…

Your blog is online accessible to anyone in the world. Translating blog posts and pages increases your audience and monetization capabilities by at least ten-fold! Take advantage of the FULL global power of the Internet and learn how to translate your blog!

This is day #9 of the 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days Series! Subscribe by email or RSS at the top right of any page.

I’m going to tell you about the single most important plugin that you probably haven’t used (or even thought about using) yet. This one plugin can explode the readership of your blog exponentially. This could be the definitive moment where you blog goes “global”. Imagine the possibilities of having your blog read worldwide in multiple languages and how many more people you could reach? The greatest thing about the Internet is the fact that it connects a global village through a single connection. Anyone, anywhere, anytime can read your blog.

I’ve used hundreds of WordPress plugins, and currently I think I have some 4 dozen installed. Out of all the plugins I’ve ever used I think I’ve only ever paid for two. This makes number three. WordPress is open source software that anyone can use at no cost. The greater bulk of WordPress themes and plugins (probably 98%) are also free. But there are a few plugins that are so widely used, so important, so useful, so well supported that I do not have a problem with them costing a nominal fee. Especially when you pay that fee just one time – and then future upgrades are free for life!

I’ve tried a couple free translation plugins in the past that didn’t work that well. I had one installed for 2-3 days that always seemed to produce errors instead of translations. Then it just kind of slipped my mind for a few months after I uninstalled it…that was until I installed the 404 Notifier plugin. Once installed and configured, it sends you an email every time your site generates a “404 Not Found” error. I installed it not expecting to get many emails. Then the next day I woke up and had 88 emails in my inbox. About 60 were from the 404 Notifier. Looking through them all – every single one was a URL that I had an actual (working) page for, but there was something weird at the end of each one. I saw things tacked on the end of the URL like /fr/ and /ru/ and /es/ and /de/ and then it hit me that these were languages, and those were the things added on to the URL’s when I had the the translation plugin installed.

About 90% of the “not found” errors were listed as coming from the google search crawler “googlebot”. The rest were from real users. So even though I only had the poor performing (free) translation plugin installed less than three days, google was having fits trying to index those pages and people were actually trying to access them. I knew right then and there that I had to get a translation plugin installed right away.

You may not know it, but criminals and thieves are waiting for you to write your next blog post. They’re waiting so they can scrape your feed and weave it into their spam splog hoping to either build links for illicit sites or make quick bucks doing nothing on Made for Adsense of MFA sites. I’ll show you how to beat them and use your already existing .htaccess file. Whether you’ve been blogging for a long or short time you should be able to spot spammers a mile away. If not – I’m going to help you figure it out.

There are 3 ways I have to check for spam. The first is in my WordPress dashboard “incoming links”. If you don’t use WordPress, that’s ok – all you have to do is go to Google Blogsearch and do a search for “link:www.yoursitename.com”. That’s where WordPress gets it’s results.

You can’t always tell what’s spam just from the titles, but in this case – I think the first result is plainly spam. Here’s what I saw when I clicked on the link…

The splog is a scraper of the worst kind – the kind that steals your entire posts (images and all). This post contains a link to my blog, but actually it’s not a post of mine at all. This is a post written by Alan over at Affiliate Confession, and he just happenned to link back to my site. You can find lots of spammers and scrapers by looking at who’s linking to your site.

The second way I check for scrapers leeching my rss feed is by the comments I receive. Sure, you can receive spammy comments on your blog, but scrapers leave spammy “trackbacks” just like the droppings from a foul animal. I can hear a few people in the background asking “what’s a trackback?”. A trackback is kind of like an “auto-comment”. A scraper site steals your content using your RSS feed or directly from your page, and then it attempts to communicate with your blog by sending a “ping” for a trackback. Normally a blogger (or his blog software) might send out a “ping” manually or automatically to every URL linked in the latest post. The trackback comes into your blog as a comment that you have to approve.

In the example above I actually received 3 trackbacks during the night I caught this morning – which prompted my to write this article. The first one was obvious without even clicking that is was a spam trackback from the inappropriate keywords in the link title. The third was a post I recognized posting a comment on myself yesterday, so I knew that one was good. The second one I had to click on to see if it was spam or not.

Once I clicked on it, at first I didn’t think it was my content at at all. You can see in the first paragraph above the first paragraph is about sports. But the second paragraph (and the rest of the page) was clearly from one of my posts. You can see in the earlier trackback example image that after each trackback is a link to the page that was “tracked back to” (stolen). The content that was stolen on this splog was from my How to Earn Money Using Affiliate eBay WordPress plugin BayRSS post.

So – why was the first paragraph not my content? Look at it, that first paragraph has a link to auto insurance, and further down in the content (not pictured) are links to home equity loans, and business hosting. This is what they call an “auto-blog” or “re-blog” what “spins content”. I will mix your original posts (and links and images) and “spins” it together with some real content it gets from another source (to make it’s page “original content”) and then inserts important links in key points. The spammer either makes money from link building (as in this example) or from adsense (in the earlier example).

The third and last way I check for scrapers stealing my blog content is by using “google alerts”. It basically works the same as the google blogsearch earlier, except it can search a bit more AND it sends you automatic emails daily with the results. All you have to do is set a google alert for the name of your domain. I set one for “www.jtpratt.com”. You can set your own at google alerts.

The example above is a google alert I got last weekend. Look like it’s just an alert of my own post, until you look at the URL below (videositemap). I know this is spam without even clicking.

So now we’ve identified spam and some scrapers stealing our content. What to do about it? I’m going to show you how to use your .htaccess file. Read this post about .htaccess at Plagiarism Today. It explains what an .htaccess file is, and how to use it to prevent people from not only stealing your content, but also images and files (and your bandwidth) as well. If you use WordPress (or other blogging software), chances are you already have an .htaccess file in the root of your site, because that’s how your blog changes the pages or ?p=382 into pretty permalinks or URL’s like /my-post-about-dogs. All you have to do is add some additional code to that file directing your web server who to let in, and who to throw out! If scrapers can’t get to your content, they can’t scrape it!

There are many, many ways to block, redirect, and stop scrapers by putting code in your .htaccess file, but I prefer the method in that article…

order allow,deny
deny from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
allow from all

Now, the x’s aboe need to be turned in to numbers (you can use multiple lines). The number needs to be the IP address of the server you want to turn away. So – we need to find out the IP addresses of the 2 scraper splogs we found earlier. There are many ways to do this, I do mine on the command line using “nslookup” – however you can use a web based tool, like the one from zoneedit.com for free. Just enter the domain you want to lookup. I found the IP of videositemap.com is 70.87.226.18. Now I need to get the one for fantasyfootballpassport.com, which is 216.139.234.32. Now I update my code to add to my .htaccess file with that information like this…

order allow,deny
deny from 70.87.226.18
deny from 216.139.234.32
allow from all

I added that code to the top of my .htaccess file before anything else, uploaded it back to my web site root, and then visited my blog in both firefox and IE to make sure it loaded properly. Now, those 2 scrapers won’t be getting to my content again. While I prefer to block the scrapers I know regularly come to my blog, you can be proactive and use block lists of known spam and scraper sites to prevent plagiarism before it happens.

Some site owners and bloggers prefer to block “user agents” instead of IP address of computers, because IP’s (when found out) can be changed. This is a little different, because you have to have access to your “raw access log” on your server to search for bad user agents crawling your feed or content. What is a “user-agent”? Simple, when you visit a site it may say that your “user-agent” is a paticular version of Firefox or Internet Explorer. Google’s search crawler comes in on the user-agen “googlebot”. Nefarious scraper robots and indexers have known names, and you can block them by their user-agent name instead of their IP address.

As I said, I am blocking scrapers using the method I just showed you, but there are many other ways to do it – all from your htaccess file. I’m going to give you a list of resources you can check out to get more information if you’re interested.

Fighting Scrapers and Splogs Resource List

How to Block Bots, Ban IP Addresses with .htaccess
.htaccess – Blocking IP Addresses, Robots, and Offline Browsers
Blocking Bad Bots and Site Rippers (Offline Browsers)
Ultimate .htaccess Blacklist 2
Joe Maller .htaccess blacklist
How You Can Stop Dirty Feed Scrapers in 3 Easy Steps
Block Website Content Thieves, Proxy Services & Exploited Servers, with this Apache Server “.htaccess” Blocklist

As always, if you have something to add to make this article better, or a question – please comment now!

I was receiving the following error on one of my WordPress sites for the last 6 months:

Warning: preg_match(): No ending delimiter ‘!’ found in /home/jtpratt/site/wp-includes/classes.php on line 99

I decided to write this quick post because I haven’t been able to find a fix for it for at least 6 months on one of my WordPress blogs, and it just started happenning on another last week. This is what happens:

As you can see in the picture above the same 8 lines are added to the top of your blog (homepage only). This has to be the craziest error I’ve ever had to debug because I tried updating WordPress, going to the default theme, disabling all plugins – and not one of those things made the error go away. I even posted in multiple forums and nobody had a clue….until today.

I found this post which pointed me in the right direction, and for that person the “Photopress” plugin was the issue (or so he thought). He fixed the issue with some code, but I think his problem was moving web hosts and permalinks. I moved my smorgasbord.net site last week from goDaddy to Hostgator, and a few days back I noticed the error. Going with the first forum link I gave you – I disabled Photopress (it was already the current version). That didn’t help at all. Then I just “updated” permalinks (just clicked the button, made no changes), and the error instantly went away.

So, figuring I could do the same on my site that has had this problem for at least 6 months – I updated the permalinks there too. Guess what – it didn’t work! Doh! So I disabled Photopress, and STILL it didn’t go away! Then I went into the options of the Photopress plugin and this is what I saw:

I couldn’t believe it, for some reason the photopress options had been corrupted. And then it hit me…I moved THIS site from another host about 6 months ago! The path to photopress and other options had changed. Somehow all the fields changed the weird question mark symbol you see in this pic. So I updated all the options, saved, and then updated permalinks again – and the ERROR WENT AWAY!! Yayyy!

I hopes this gets indexed well in google, for all the people in the future who have this WordPress error – I hope you find this post to answer your question sooner than I did! And to all of you reading this that have had a hard time finding answers to something – please, when you find a fix, BLOG about it so it’s easier to find for the next person!

Do you know how to optimize and backup your WordPress database? Most people don’t – until it’s too late! I’ll show you how to protect yourself and keep your blog running smooth!

This is the next installment of 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days, and though we may be just a day or two behind in the deployment – we are definitely not short on content! Be sure to view all 30 days to make the most of your WordPress blog!

Today I’m going to write about one of the most important and most overlooked things you need to know as a WordPress site owner – your database. I would say the greater percentage of bloggers, even if they are bit geeky or techie, aren’t “database savvy”. It’s no different than driving a car but not knowing much about the mechanics or maintenance of it. You don’t know what nobody ever told you – so consider today your lesson in “how to maintain and backup your wordpress database”. Maintenance in necessary to ensure the backend of your site runs smooth, backup is necessary in case you have a disaster, move hosts, get corrupted files, or (god forbid) you screw it up hacking it yourself!

It’s not hard, in fact it’s about as painless as changing your oil in your car. What I’m going to show you is how to do “preventative maintenance” for your WordPress DB (database). People who are hackers, or programmers, or uber-geeks either login to the command line in telnet (very geeky!) to maintain their telnet database. More popular is to login to your web host control panel for your site and use myPHPAdmin to graphically administer and maintain your WordPress mySQL database.

There are two WordPress plugins that I use that help me with WordPress maintenance. The first is the Diagnosis plugin. This plugin doesn’t “do” anything except give you information about your site and the web host you are on. The first reason this plugin is invaluable is because it gives you a reference for information you might not ordinarily know. Do you know what version of PHP you have? Do you know your mySQL encoding type? Do you know your mySQL IP address and port number? These are all things you might need to know for installing script or troubleshooting your site in the future. The main reason I have Diagnosis installed is because it gives me 3 pieces of information about my database load that I check out either once a week, or if my WordPress blog starts acting funny (with errors or database connection).

In my WP dashboard I go to “Dashboard -> Diagnosis” and look at the mySQL load section to briefly check out the load. The more traffic you have, and the more database intense your pages are, the higher the load will be. The amount of beating a mySQL database server can take is much different on a “shared host” vs. a VPS (virtual private server) or dedicated box. Shoemoney recently wrote about the fact that his WordPress blog recently had to go to it’s own decidated server box, but it probably gets 1,000 times the traffic I do daily. The most important figure here to me is the “connection success rate”. If it’s not 99.9% – you have a problem. Either you have more traffic than your server can handle, too many connections, or something corrupted with the database.

I think the most common problem that happens is your WordPress site loses connection with the DB and you get some kind of WordPress error from your site (in a browser) that says “error connecting to database). One thing you may not realize is that when you get “shared web hosting” for $3.99 – $24.99 per month the “shared” part of the hosting is the web server and the database server. In other word, www.yoursite.com is physically on a server sharing that computers resources with hundreds of other web sites. Your mySQL database is more than likely on a different server, and all it does is host databases. Even if your web server resources are underutilized, your database server might be maxed out by a very busy (or inefficient) site. If you get database errors or have connection problems the first thing I would do would be to see what your connection success rate is, and if it’s bad call your host and ask about the “health” of the mySQL server you’re using. You might find (like I have on some occasions) that another customer (on that DB server) is killing your site.

Ever wondered how to upgrade WordPress? Want to know what WordPress 2.5 looks like and if you should upgrade? I’ll kill 2 birds with one stone in today’s hack…

Today’s hack is more of a tutorial and a guide. First, many people ask me how to upgrade WordPress to a new version, because they’ve never done it. So, in response is a quick checklist of “what-to-do” and how easy it is to upgrade your WordPress installation. In addition, since the latest version of WordPress (2.5) is such a MAJOR release, I’m also going to go over everything you need to know about it so you can decide if you should upgrade now or not.

Sometimes I wait quite a few months before upgrading to the latest version of WordPress because I use so many plugins and I want to be sure I don’t have any conflicts. Also, I had read so many reviews that said “wait” or “I don’t like the changes”. I guess since I’m admidst my 30 Days of WordPress Hacks I feel I owe it to my readers to upgrade to 2.5 and be sure that all my hacks don’t have any issues in the latest version of WordPress.

If you are considering upgrading from a previous version of WordPress to 2.5 – first look at the WordPress 2.5 Plugin Compatibility List. See if the plugins that you use are on the “working plugin” list, but more importanly see if there are “conflicting plugins” that you can’t run at the same time, or if you use anything in the “non-working plugin” list. If you use a plugin with issues, go to the author’s plugin page and see if there’s an update, or at least an announcement of some kind when it will be 2.5 compatible. You could always email the plugin author. Now you have to decide whether you can move on and upgrade without it (for now) or wait to upgrade to 2.5 until later. Another possibility is, you might even be able to look through the working plugin list and find a suitable replacement that does the same thing.

So, if you decide to upgrade to 2.5 (or any version), here’s what you do:

• Visit WordPress.org and download the latest version of WordPress
• Unzip the file to your desktop, you should have a folder named “wordpress”
• Connect to your site in FTP and download a copy of all your files “just in case”
• Backup your database (“dump” a copy you can copy or download) in your webhost control panel
• Connect to your web site in FTP, and upload all the files in the “wordpress” folder to the root of your web site, copying over all the existing ones. Don’t worry, this will not overwrite your existing theme or plugins in any way *unless* you are using the default WordPress theme (Kubrick)
• Once the files have uploaded, immediately go to your browser and bring up www.yourdomainhere.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php. You should get a page saying your database needs to be upgraded for the new version, just click on it (one time), and once it’s finished you’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.5!
• Login to your WordPress dashboard to see what’s new!

When you login to WordPress 2.5 for the first time you’ll find that the dashboard has been revamped quite a bit. Please keep in mind when you view *my* screenshots that I have a *lot* of plugins intstalled, and you might see a thing or two that you won’t have in a regular WordPress 2.5 install. I’ll try to point out my “extras” as I go along – you may want to add them as well…I’ll going to show you exactly what I saw right after upgrade, in fact I’m writing this post as I do the upgrade, so you’re going to get my first hand views and thoughts of WordPress 2.5.

Worried about Scrapers, Splogs, and Spammers stealing your content? In this WordPress hack learn how to protect your posts and content against those dreaded content thieves!

This post is part of the 30 WordPress Hacks in 30 Days Series! Stick with us the entire month and have the best WordPress blog on the block!

You know you’re starting to become a good blogger when the spammers, sploggers, and scrapers come knocking on your door to have their way with your content. There are still some “site scrapers” out there, but for the most part the sploggers and rebloggers are just setting up a dummy blog and populating posts with something like the feedwordpress rss plugin automatically, and walking away hoping for some adsense dollars.

I prefer to have full posts in my RSS feed, I just think it’s the right thing to do. That’s what I want in my RSS reader, so that’s what I give my readers. That can set you up for issues if a splogger decides to use your full post on his site, especially if you get no credit or link back. So the first thing I’m going to do is show you how to get credit for your posts no matter what – each and every time!

Protect Your Content With an RSS Signature

Download RSS Signature at smackfoo.com, upload it to your theme directory and enable it. When you go to “Manage->RSS Signature” whatever you type in goes automatically at the end of each post in your RSS feed. Here’s how it looks in my rss feed…

At the end of my posts my digital signature is “©2008, All Rights Reserved – visit JTPratt’s Blogging Mistakes for the original source of this content.” I added both a copyright AND a link back to my site. If you use the provided code snippet on the plugin options page you can also place the signature within any post on your site too, just in case a site scraper isn’t using your rss feed and harvests the content directly from yoru pages. So – step one is to install this plugin and create your own digital signature to force anyone who steals your full post to link back to you. You could also do this with Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter Plugins. There’s also Feed Entry Header.

Protect Your Content with a Digital Signature

You may have been wondering what the strange characters were in the rss signature example above, the “jt!-p|^r*a|t~t” part. That happens to be my “digital signature”. To add one to your posts, download the digital fingerprint plugin. The characters I use for my fingerprint I just made up. I made my fingerprint very unique to ensure anywhere it was found on the web had to come from my rss feed. So you may be thinking – why two plugins, couldn’t I have just put those characters in my rss feed with my copyright and link and only use one plugin? Yes, but digital signature does a couple more things. When you go to the plugin options page, the first thing it does is a “blog search” in many engines automatically trying to find your digital fingerprint. In the example below (luckily enough) mine was only found in my feedburner feed.

On the plugin options page are also links to great resources like search links for your finger print on google, Yahoo!, and MSN, and how to setup a google alert for it. It also links to what to do when you find a content thief.

The other options are whether or not to have it auto-insert the fingerprint in every post (which I do), but you can also choose where it goes. You can choose the start of a post, the end, or end of the first paragraph. You can even place quick-search search icons for your digital fingerprint in your wordpress dashboard. Digital Fingerprint is a great plugin to find spammers, scrapers, and splogs stealing your content. You could also use the Copyfeed plugin to do this – I don’t how much it differs as far as options since I use digital fingerprint.

Watch Uncommon Uses in Feedburner

In Feedburner under the “Analyze” tab look at “Uncommon Uses” to see if anything listed. Generally (like in this pic) it’s a splog who has lifted a partial or full post.

Get a Creative Commons License

I have a Creative Commons License in my sidebar telling everyone that all my content is licensed under a Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works United States License. Protect your blog if (god forbid) someday you need to seek legal help. By licensing your work with a Creative Commons license (free) you are only protecting yourself.

Foil Scrapers by Adding a Link Back to the Original Post

Patrick over at BlogStorm quotes Matt Cutts saying that linking back to your original post will help you avoid duplicate content. You can do this by adding code to your feed-rss2.php file in the wp-includes folder (follow the link for details). If you prefer not to use a plugin to force a link back to your blog, this code option may be for you. If you prefer not to do code Joost says in comments on that page RSS Footer has been updated to do this now.

Shut off Hotlinking

“Hotlinking” is when another site can link directly to your images and include them on their pages (from your site) as if they were their own. This is also a problem if your site is indexed by google images (which is fine), but then people copy and past the URL to YOUR images and include them in myspace, facebook, forum posts, etc. They are not only using YOUR images, but they use them on YOUR DIME (since you pay for the bandwidth at your host). Nearly every host now is managed with a “control panel” where you can “turn hotlinking off”, so the only time images will come up is if the call comes directly from your site. Everyone else will get squat!

Further Reading

100 Ways to Defeat Content Theives

Finding Stolen Content and Copyright Infringements

What to do When Someone Steals Your Content

How to Spot a Splog

If your daring – read this post about stopping feed scraping and how that blogger used the “AntiLeech” plugin to feed scrapers and splogs a different set of content from what was actually in posts. Essentially it sends them garbags and a link back to you. I don’t think this would work with feedburner, in addition to the fact it hasn’t been updated since 2006. However, that review and link is from just last month, so it must work with a fairly recent version of WordPress.

As always, if you have a question or something to add, please comment now!

This is Day 5 of “30 WordPress hacks in 30 Days”!

One of my WordPress pet peeves is not being able to find what I want quickly. I like options. Lots of options. Many blog owners are not web designers by trade, so basic “usability” techniques are not usually something they consider. While the “blog” paradigm has been around many years now, sometimes I think that some basic usability principles for web sites have been lost. Too much is taken for granted. The average web user doesn’t know WordPress from a printing press. Keep this in mind every time you tweak your blog. With that in mind, today you will learn how to hack and customize the following navigation points within your blog based on this tutorial:

• Breadcrumbs
• Next and Previous Links: Pagination
• Next and Previous Links: Single Page
• More Links and Excerpts
• Multi-Page Navigation
• Related Posts
• Most Viewed Posts
• Most Popular Posts
• Category Images
• Sidebar Options

So – let’s get started! Click to go to the next page below…