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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.

Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tricks – Learn how to increase visibility in Search Engines – Part 9 – Tools for keywords

ashish — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:32:32 +0000

For the first time since I began this series about Search Engine Optimization, I started talking about keywords and their importance in the previous post (Keywords and SEO), with the post explaining what keywords and key phrases are, and what are some of the ways in which you should put yourself in your readers shoes to figure out keywords / key phrases to use.
In this post, I will get deeper into the use of keywords and key phrases, where all to use them, and how this impacts your Search Engine Ranking. There are multiple places you can put your keywords / key phrases, but putting them in your meta tags is not going to get your much benefit (by all means, put them, but make judicious use of them). More important is learning as to where all putting them can benefit you.
The most important of course (and as has mentioned previously) is to have a good keyword density in the content of your article. Going by the example of the camera in the previous post, let us consider the case where a person makes a website that tries to sell cameras and camera equipment (and this can be a challenging area since the number of sites selling the same stuff are pretty large). Ideal would be to high rankings for the keyword ‘camera’, but this is going to be very difficult since this is a very hotly contested keyword and the number of people trying to rank high (and making sustained efforts to achieve that) is pretty large. It is better to also look for multiple work keywords (or keyword phrases) that people would use to search for. So, you would want to select keyword phrases such as ‘Canon Camera’, ‘Sony Camera’, ‘Nikon Camera’, ‘Digital Camera’, ‘Cheap Camera’, and so on.
One way to identify more keywords that you can use, as well as identify the number of times those keywords are searched is through the use of tools. They also give you a reality check, since you may think that the keywords you are using and focusing on are the one that your potential readers will want to also search on, but it is best to verify this through some keyword suggestion tools. You can refer to your site, or just give a few keywords, and the 3 tools (and there are a large number of other tools available for the same) will identify the alternate keywords and the number of times those have been searched by (in one case, I was very surprised, since it seemed to me that I was writing about the wrong specialty, since most potential users were searching for a slightly different set of keywords). So, here goes:
2 tools by Google and 1 other tool:
Google Adwords Keyword tool (link)
Google Search-based keyword tool (link), allows you to refer to your site as well, and is based on actual Google search queries; very useful for those with an Adwords account, although useful to other people as well
FREE keyword suggestion tool from Wordtracker (link)
Go ahead, give these tools a whirl, and you might find that some of the keywords that you thought are very relevant indeed are, while others are not so important.

Next post, we continue on the topic of keywords..

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Selectively updating your Twits on Facebook – “Selective Tweets”

ashish — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:15:21 +0000

Using social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter is an important part of how to promote your blog, but one of the challenges is how to ensure that your updates make it to all these tools. There are a variety of tools that are used to update your social networking sites; you can use Twitterfeed to update your Twitter presences from your blog posts, and you can use Networked Blogs to update your Facebook Fan Page. In addition, inside Facebook, you can update your Twitter through sending your Facebook Fan Page updates in the form of tweets to your Twitter account.
However, consider the case where you use your Twitter account to tweet, and your tweets are not only your automatic blog posts, but you manually add stuff to your Twitter account. In such cases, these tweets will not make it to your Facebook account, and you are missing out some important cross-tool promotion. In such cases, welcome to the concept of a tool called “Selective Tweets”, which takes your unprotected Twitter account (it does not work if your tweets are protected), and then these updates (marked with a #fb) are then picked up for posting to your Facebook Fan Page.
Refer to the following App page on Facebook (link)

Selective Tweet Status lets you update your Facebook status from Twitter –
BUT you can choose which tweets you want – just end a tweet with #fb when you want to post it as your Facebook status – simple!

You need to add the app to your Fan Page, and then you are set to go.
Refer to the FAQ for Selective Tweets if you need some help or have some issue (link)

WordPress Theme + Plugin: Making your site more iPhone friendly – use WPtouch

ashish — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:16:16 +0000

The iPhone is a revolution in the mobile market, leading to its becoming the top selling product in the SmartPhone market. There are a huge set of users out there who use the iPhone for navigating to different sites and consequently form a market for your blog. It would be a mistake to ignore all those users out there who use mobile browsing, especially when people who are your competitors are reaching out to all these users. Hence the quest to reach to out this market, and ensure that your site has a mobile version that will appeal to such users.
There is a counter argument that most sites appear fine on the iPhone browser, but you should think about this question only if your site is a plain site that does not have heavy graphics, or does not have Flash (the browser on the iPhone does not support Flash), or uses a lot of Javascript for rendering the menus, background, or other fancy stuff.
If you want to render your blog / site to iPhone users, you can find a lot of options on the internet, but you will need to evaluate them through actual use to ensure that you are getting the required speed and efficiency.
Here is another plugin + theme that does the same, it’s called WPtouch (site).
Read more from the site:
WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch or Android touch mobile device. It comes complete with all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. WPtouch also offers many customization features through a beautifully designed WordPress admin panel.
Not all websites are created equal, with some sites failing to translate well in the viewport of a small mobile device. Many WordPress sites today make heavy use of different javascripts which significantly increase the load time of pages, and drive your visitors on 3G/EDGE batty. So we’ve come up with WPtouch, a lightweight, fast-loading, feature-rich and highly-customized “theme application” which includes an admin interface to let you customize many aspects of your site’s presentation.

WPtouch comes with a host of built-in features. Some notables include:
User-selected theme toggle (between WPtouch view and your site’s regular look)
iPhone-like application appearance, functions
AJAX, jQuery & JS effects
Full WordPress search, pages, archives, categories, tags and links support
Theme native social bookmarking support
iPhone/iPod touch native post e-mailing support
Ajax comments, posted in real time
Ajaxed pagination (users can browse posts like YouTube videos)
Admin selectable custom icons for pages, logo, bookmark icon
Manually edit your site’s title to fit WPtouch
Show / Hide post excerpts, customize style in different ways
Easily add your own icons to customize menu appearance
Admin inclusion/exclusion of site pages shown in the theme’s menu
Compatibility suite in admin to inform of add-ons, WordPress version support
Automatic Archives page layout (if you have or create a page called ‘Archives’)
Automatic Photo page layout with Flickr (if you have or create a page called ‘Photos’ and have the FlickrRSS plugin installed)

Tools to automatically post your blog posts to social networking tools (Twitter, Facebook, etc)

ashish — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:37:40 +0000

Getting your updates on Twitter is an important part of your blog promotion strategy. Twitter (and other Social Networking sites such as Facebook) are an important overall platform, widely adopted by a huge number of users overall. At any point of time, there are a number of users who will be searching on Twitter for those topics on which you blog, and if they find your posts on Twitter, then there is a chance that they may become your follower and read your posts (and if interesting enough, even circulate them to more people).
When I started out putting posts on Twitter, I used to hand-post each post on Twitter, and that seemed a very inefficient way of doing things, so I started searching for alternatives, and found plenty. Here are some:
1. Twitterfeed (link). Free to use, an online service, although can get a bit slow sometimes. Was fairly easy to use, you need to create your account using an email id and password, add the feed URL for your blog, and then map this to a Facebook / Twitter / Other account. Once you do this, the posts from your blog will automatically be sent to your Facebook / Twitter account. You can make some customizations such as how often your blog should be checked, how many are the maximum number of posts to post, and so on.
Twitterfeed is a bit difficult to use when you have a number of such feeds, it believes in setting a short URL even when posting to Facebook (the need for a short URL makes sense when posting to Twitter, but not to Facebook)
Twitterfeed can only post to your Facebook profile, and not to your own Fan Page, which is why I stopped using Twitterfeed for Facebook updates. I now follow a different strategy for Facebook Fan Pages (click this to learn more).
2. In early January 2010, Twitterfeed was down for around a day, the result of a computer problem, and this exposed the non-contingency planning of the system. Being inaccessible also meant that posts were not making it to Twitter. I needed to look for an alternative, and found this one – HootSuite.
Hootsuite (link). From the site: HootSuite is The professional Twitter client! If you manage multiple Twtitter accounts or share your Twittering duties with friends or co-workers, HootSuite’s for you. If you’re interested in tracking how many people click the links you tweet out, HootSuite can help you. If you want to pre-schedule your messages or feed your blog to Twitter, we’ve got you covered.
3. Twitterrific (link). Runs on the Mac and on the iPhone. Not available for Windows, but well regarded on the Mac.
4. Socialite (link). Socialite is a beautiful Mac OS X application, designed to make it easy to stay in touch with the social networks and services that matter to you. From news on Digg, photos on Flickr, statuses and photos on Facebook and Twitter updates, to full Google Reader RSS syncing, Socialite keeps all your social networks in one convenient place.
5. Digitweet (link). digiTweet is an open source desktop Twitter client for Windows. DigiTweet provides Twitter functionalities with rich user interface through Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).