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Zenphoto – doing an update the right way, manually ..

ashish — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:19:22 +0000

After experimenting with various photo blog kind of interfaces (including the use of Gallery2 and other plugins that work along with WordPress), I finally found something that I liked – namely, Zenphoto, that I have started to use to build a photo site called Tourist Photos (photos from different tourist locations) (primarily to find an outlet for the number of photos I have taken in different countries, with photos + some text provide feedback to people before they even visit a place, so that they have some idea of what to expect).
Now, my web host provides me an interface called SimpleScripts that provides a simple interface to do this upgrade process. SimpleScripts makes the process of update so simple:
1. You log into your Web Host account
2. If there are any updates, there is a message that SimpleScripts has an update available
3. Click that link, it gives an interface where the interface provides information about the current version and the future version(s) that are available. And you can proceed on the upgrade path
4. Once the upgrade is done, the user has an option to review the website to see whether everything is fine, or if things are not fine, there is an option to go back to a previous version of the application.
A lot of people try the above option 4 as a formality, and do not check. If you care about your site, then you need to do that check in the following way (atleast based on my experience):
1. Before running the upgrade, do a backup of the site and the database and save these files locally
2. Check whether site is launching
3. Check whether there seems to be any performance problem in the site
4. Login into the Admin area of the site and see whether the initial dashboard comes up
5. Check for existing plugins and other widgets, and see whether there seems to be any problem
When running updates for my sites, I go through the above checklist and it has proved necessary in some cases. I have been using SimpleScripts for many of my sites, and there have been many cases where the update has completed successfully, and then the site has had serious problems.
I encountered this problem more recently when I was trying to update my Zenphoto page, and my current version was version 1.3.1.2 with a recommendation to update to version 1.4.1.4. I went ahead, and after the update, things did not work (the site refused to load). So, after an initial round of panic (I already have around 2000+ photos added to the site), I went for the rollback and the rollback worked fine.
Next step, went to the Zenphoto site to check up their instructions for creating a new site / upgrade (link) and found the following text over there:

NOTE: We do not support and do not recommend installations or upgrading done with helper scripts like SimpleScripts or similar some providers make available. If you have any problems after using these please contact the maker of the script.

So, atleast for my Zenphoto site, I will go ahead and do a manual update with the steps written on the page and stop using SimpleScripts for any updates of Zenphoto.

Making a child theme to preserve the changes you have made in the WordPress theme

ashish — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 08:37:12 +0000

Rare is the case when people do not make a change to the WordPress themes that they have installed. They may fiddle around with the .css files, changing font sizes / font colors, etc to customize it as per their own preference. So, you have a theme that looks somewhat good, but then you realize that it needs some work; you fire up your text editor, open up the css files and the functions file and make some changes. Or you could add some new php code to your functions file and use it within your themes to add some functionality that was missing. You could even go further and add new template files, over-ride some of the templates that are being used in the theme, and so on.
And then, you know how important it is to upgrade your plugins and themes in order to ensure that the security levels of your blog remains high. So, you see a theme upgrade, and go ahead for the upgrade. What you did not really think through was that the theme upgrade replaced the files in your theme, including the changes that you had made so lovingly, and some parts of your blog get affected. That is bad, but there is really nothing you can do about it. But, there is something you can do, although it requires some effort. WordPress gives a functionality called ‘Child Themes’, that allows you to make changes, and these changes are preserved even when you upgrade your themes. Here are some tutorials that allow you to learn the scope of what you can do through Child Themes, and the process of doing so.
Child Themes on WordPress Codex (link)
Introducing Thirty Ten, my guide to creating a Twenty Ten Child Theme (link)
How to make a child theme for WordPress: A pictorial introduction for beginners (link)
Ten Good Reasons to use WordPress Child Themes and Template Parts (link)

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 12 – Where to add keywords

ashish — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:39:11 +0000

In the previous post (Learn about keyword density), I explained what keyword density is, what should be the amount of keyword density (including the main keywords and secondary keywords), and tools that help you measure your keyword density. In addition, there is an emphasis on making sure that you do not stuff your keywords too much into the site, since that leads to readers getting turned off and search engines putting possible penalties on the site.
In this post, I will talk about moving ahead with keywords, and defining areas of the post where you can add these keywords, as well as some rules for the same. I had talked about this in an earlier post as well (Part 5 of the series), but will provide some more details in this post about how to do more detailed optimization for ensuring a higher search engine ranking. These tips consist of where to place the keywords in terms of the structure of the post and the site. Some of these are more speculative in nature (since there is no confirmation or different search engines treat such behavior differently) and some of these are sure fire tips that work to improve your search engine ranking.
(Warning: None of these will do magic! Search engine ranking improvements through such optimization can take weeks or months to achieve, and you need to be patient)
- Try to ensure that the keywords are not too tightly bunched in one section of the page, although there are conflicting views on whether it makes some benefit to slightly increase the keyword density in the top section of the post content
- Keywords in anchor text. This may not be clear to some people, so consider this. You have got an option to get a link to your page from some other site, and if it is a well regarded site, then your site can benefit. However, if you do get an option, make sure that the link is something like (camera phone reviews) rather than (click here). Getting keywords in an anchor text can do a lot of good to search engines belief in you as a credible source
- Page Title. Put keywords in your page title, with the keyword appearing earlier in the title
- Images. If there are images / video on the page, then add the keywords as part of the alt/title tags of the image, and also as part of the text that forms the description of the image / video
- In the URL. Most blogging platforms give you a way to modify the URL that will be formed, and you should ensure that you have keywords as part of the URL. Typically, the title of the post is used as the URL, but consider having one set of keywords in the title, and another set of keywords in the URL
- Domain name. It is difficult to get domain names that have sought after keywords, since they are all gone. Try different variations of the keyword as part of the domain name until you get it right. You may have to make some compromises in this process.
- Title of the blog. In the head section of the blog code, you can modify the title of the blog. Be sure to include keywords as part of the blog title.
- Headings. Headings are a good way to segregate your blog into sections, and search engines also like it if you add keywords in your headings.

And of course, if you know more such tips or believe that some of them need to be modified, please leave a comment.

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Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 11 – Keyword density

ashish — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:54:43 +0000

The previous post (identifying keywords for your site) contained information on how to determine keywords appropriate for your site. This also includes determining the keywords that are more valuable, for the purpose of ensuring that your advertisements reflect the keywords that have a higher value.
This tip is meant more for the person who does not know about the benefits of using keywords appropriately on a page, and it is certainly not meant for advanced users.
How do you determine whether the amount of keywords you are using in your site are adequate or not, for search engine purposes ? Well, now we are moving to a zone that is called ‘keyword density’, which is the total number of times that a keyword or keyword phrase is used in the site. For an initial user, the temptation is strong to write text in which the keywords occur frequently, so that it would seem that you get a better ranking in search engines. However, this is not the case. Understand the logic of search engines. They are built to cater to their users who want to search for relevant sites, and not go to sites that are only trying to attract search engines, so there are penalties built into the usage of search engines (penalties means that a site that seems stuffed with keywords will occur lower in a search engine ranking).
The ideal way to cater to your users is by writing text that makes sense, looks unique, and is something that your users would want to see. Once you have such a text, you should try to make it keyword rich by adding more keywords, and then checking for keyword density in the final finished post. Most people will try to use multiple keywords in one post rather than depend on only 1 keyword (use the alternative keywords you would have defined in the process described in my previous post); so define your principal keywords, ensure that these are anywhere between 4-7% of the text content, and other minor keywords are between 1-2%. Any more keywords, and you will find that your content will start to become stiff and unattractive to your readers, and you know how search engines treat such text.

It is recommended that you run your posts in a keyword density tool such as these:
Keyword Density tool at SEOChat (link)
Keyword Density tool at SEOTools (link)
Keyword analysis tool (does not need a URL) (link)

Keep in mind that different search engines have different mathematical formulas for treating keyword density, but it is generally believed that they give some credence to keyword density (keep in mind the warning about not stuffing with keywords).
Also keep in mind that keyword density is different from the effects of placing keywords in different locations on a site (such as the title, in headings, in meta tags, etc); keyword density just checks the number of times of occurrences of keywords in the post.
You need to work at the right placement of keywords for additional benefits, and that is something that I will cover in future posts.

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Some design guidelines from Webmaster Tools at Google

ashish — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:40:27 +0000

Making your website easy to use and fast are tips always recommended for ensuring that you site loads quickly and easily for your visitors. Avoiding rich and heavy stuff such as videos (when they are not necessary) is particularly important in this regard; this is also because your visitors may have a variety of different browsers, and on some of them, the site may not load up as you desire. I have seen cases where some fanciful designs have refused to render on Internet Explorer 6, but work on Firefox (and the opposite also holds true). Imagine that you have a very fascinating menu that appears when you move your mouse over a link, but have you stopped to consider whether this works for all your users. Further, keep in mind that the search engines index your site using a bot that is similar to a text based browser, and which ignores all fanciful work, ignores all graphics (unless they have an alt attribute mentioned), and so on. In many cases of course, if you are designing a site rich in multimedia such as the fan site of a rock group, or so on, you will need to have all these things in place. Getting visitors from search engines is incredibly important, you need to ensure that you do whatever is necessary so that the search engine indexes your site and all its pages.
One site that really helped in giving a huge number of tips for creating a faster site that is accessible to search engines is the tips page at Google Webmaster Tools (link to site):

Some tips from the site:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you don’t accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you’re using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.
Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

There are a lot of tips on that site, explore and learn from there; these will help in making your page much better.