Make Money from Blogs » Tips

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.

When to time your latest blog post ?

ashish — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:00:25 +0000

You are already trying your best to write on a regular basis, and you may have learnt that it makes a lot of difference if you write a post per day. However, it can sometimes be a challenge to just get to meeting this daily basis concept; after all, unless you are dedicated towards your blog in a true sense, there can be many interruptions in getting the content for your blog on a daily basis. Getting your posts out on a regular (or a daily) basis can make a huge difference to attracting more readers to your blog. Now suppose, you are able to get onto a regular pattern of publishing a post at a particular time, the next item would be to optimize the time of your posts. Does this matter ? You could after all have a software that picks up the feed from your post only at a specific interval, and so ensures that your readers get the post at a specific period of time. But as your popularity grows, there are some advantages to be gained from posting at a specific point of time.
On the basis of your posts, you have picked up a number of people who visit your blog every day, and you think that a lot of your work is done. However, over a period of time, you would have also learnt that these same blog posts can be also be circulated on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, as well as other means such as Technorati, StumbleUpon, and so on. These are all means to get more people to read your posts, and with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook being picked up by a large number of readers, making sure that your posts get to people on these networks is also very important.
So, you have configured your posts to get posted to these social networks, and feel that you have covered all your bases. What next ? Well, the next thing you need to do is to time your posts. This is especially true for social networks such as Twitter and Facebook where there can be a large number of posts / updates flowing past readers every minute. You want your post to be flowing past potential readers when they are reading these posts, rather than happening when your prospective readers are not looking at them. So, if you have a topic that relates to women at home, then you better make sure that your posts happen only at a time when they are done with the daily chores and have some time for themselves and are looking at their computers / tablets / smartphones. This is especially true for Twitter and Facebook where the amount of competition can be intense, and nobody really looks at updates that have already gone by. Similarly, if your post is meant for computer geeks, your post may be better suited to go live after dinner, when most geeks stay up on the computer and start their reading.
All blogging software allows you to time your posts, what you need to do is to determine the best time that your prospective audience is online, and ensure that your posts are live at around that time.

WordPress Hack Block: Limit Login Attempts Plugin

ashish — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 19:21:42 +0000

WordPress allows any number of attempts at login, so if somebody is trying to do a brute force dictionary attack onto the admin section of your site, at some point, they may suceed. But the basic issue is, why are you making it easy for hackers to do so; you should set a limit on the number of times a wrong login can be attempted on your site. Here is a plugin called ‘Limit Login Attempts’ that allows you to do this. Get it from this page (link)

Limit Login Attempts blocks an Internet address from making further attempts after a specified limit on retries is reached, making a brute-force attack difficult or impossible.
Features:
Limit the number of retry attempts when logging in (for each IP). Fully customizable
(WordPress 2.7+) Limit the number of attempts to log in using auth cookies in same way
Informs user about remaining retries or lock out time on login page
Optional logging, optional email notification
Handles server behind reverse proxy

Optimizing your WordPress account – 2

ashish — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:09:48 +0000

A few weeks back, I had written about how to take some basic steps towards optimizing your WordPress account. Imagine what would happen if more people started promoting your WordPress Blog, or wonders of wonders, it appears on the front page of Digg or Slashdot. In such cases, unless you have optimized your WordPress configuration already, you can be pretty much sure that your account will get to a state where the server is not able to handle the load, and will shut down; further if your account is on a shared server, you might have some uncomfortable queries from your host.
So, here are some points on how to optimize your account:
1. Since WordPress works on a database system, it pulls every bit of content from the server. If there are a large number of requests for your blog, your server has to make that many DB queries to fetch the content. This puts a lot of stress on your server. User a Super Cache plugin to Cache some of the load and serve static HTML files instead of querying the DB (link to plugin, and page).
2. When you serve various files such as binaries, videos, images, scripts, etc from your server, it becomes slow. Place them on other servers, so that the load on your server is reduced. For example, you can get videos from Youtube and Photos from Flickr, and also, you can even hire some hosting space on another server or on a service such as Amazon S3 for this purpose.
3. If you are more advanced, look at your server logs; it may be possible to determine multiple requests from a bot or script that is of no good, blocking these may make your server behave a bit better
4. Look to get stats on how your web page is loading. If it takes a lot of time to load your page, there may be a lot of plugins working, or scripts loading, and so on. Some tools you can use for this purpose are – LiveHTTPHeaders (link, displays the HTTP headers), Firebug (link, Look at loading times for various artifacts on a page),
5. Inside your wp-config.php file, remove some of the DB calls that are not necessary. For example, hard-code your Template Path, Stylesheet path (link to relevant site). You will get some improvements.
6. Review your themes. Some themes call a lot of graphics, and overall call a lot of files. If your CSS files are divided into multiple files, combine them. Replace graphics wherever possible with text.
7. Review the plugins your are using to see whether they are required. Plugins can make your site much slower, especially if they do a lot of DB access and inefficient. If you are advanced technically, monitor the performance of your plugins.
8. Refer to this quick cheat sheet for DB optimization (link to cheat sheet)
9. Reduce the number of posts on the front page of your blog. Typically, WordPress gives you 10 posts on your front page, you should reduce this to 3-4.
10. Use WP’s Built in Object Cache as described on this page (link). From the same site, refer to the MySQL Query Cache.
11. For some detailed technical analysis of what can be done (link)
12. Clean Options (Finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_ options table) – Get it from this page
13. The combating comment spam page on WordPress.org (link). If you have a good blog which is getting popular, increase in spam is only to be expected. Akismet filters out most comment spam, but just getting it into the junk spam list also adds some load to your server.
14. Page with 5 tips for making your Blog Digg / Slashdot proof (link)
15. High Traffic Tips For WordPress on WordPress.org Codex (link)

If you know more ways beyond this, please do let me know.

Getting some quick information on your site – Analytics

ashish — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:54:23 +0000

When you run a site, getting accurate information and statistics about your sites viewers is very important, and people use a combination of measures such as installing the Google Analytics Program, or using a conter program such as Sitemeter.com. Such information helps them to find out where people are visiting their site from (their users geographic location), which section of the sites are more popular, what are the top referrers that people use to find their site (through search engines, through links on other sites, and so on). I regularly use these programs to ferret out such information and have learned much. As an example:
- I discovered that Google Search is absolutely essential in order to get viewers to your site
- A number of referrers to my sites have been through email programs, which essentially means that people are forwarding the subscription mails they receive when a new post is made, and encourages me to get effective subscription tools in place
- I often get surprised about which posts are most popular, and this helps determine that users think differently from what we expect, and also reinforces the belief that using such analytics tools is a necessary part of running a site

Apart from these tools, I also use another tool for generating information about how popular the site is on several parameters:
- How has the performance of the site been in getting number of users over the last few months (have more people started visiting, vs. have a lower number of people started visiting)
- How many sites link to this site (important for generating a better result in search engine results)
- Identifying keywords (very important in terms of defining which keywords should be emphaized in posts)

So, which is this tool that I use ? It is a site, called siteinfo on Alexa, at the following link : http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo. Suppose you have a site about Indian politics called Indiapoliticalblog.com, and you wanted to find out its result on Alexa, you just need to add the site URL (without the http: //), so that you end up with the following URL: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/indiapoliticalblog.com