Setting up a WordPress Blog Part II

Pre­vi­ously, I had writ­ten an arti­cle on set­ting up a Word­Press blog. Since then, I have learned a bunch of new tricks and plu­g­ins as I’ve got­ten to know Word­Press a bit bet­ter and I wanted to let the read­ers here know about these changes.

A New Web­site Host

Recently, I migrated all of my web­sites from Total Choice Host­ing over to a new host at Medi­atem­ple which caused me to rethink my prior Word­Press setups. I also pur­chased a few more web­sites that I had started to work on. Prior to this post, I had rec­om­mended Total Choice Host­ing as an easy setup. I still think TCH is still per­fect for some­one that only hosts one web­site and is look­ing to save some money. But if your site is rel­a­tively heavy or com­pli­cated, then you’ll prob­a­bly get what you pay for. Please note that I’m not receiv­ing any pay­ment or kick­backs for rec­om­mend­ing any­thing in this arti­cle — this is purely based on my own per­sonal pref­er­ences and experiences.

There’s quite a few ben­e­fits of this migra­tion to Mediatemple:

1. Speed #1. Gzip com­pres­sion is sup­ported by their servers. Gzip can increase a website’s load time by 80%.
2. Speed #2. Their servers are set up for grid com­put­ing which means faster pro­cess­ing and bet­ter han­dling of web­site traf­fic spikes.
3. Speed #3. Faster speeds means greater reader retention.
4. Speed #4. Google has been hint­ing that they may start look­ing at speeds as a fac­tor into bet­ter rank­ings with their search ser­vices. How­ever, no one out­side of Google is 100% sure whether or not they’re cur­rently imple­ment­ing rank­ing based upon speed. They usu­ally don’t release spe­cific details for war­ranted fear of peo­ple tak­ing advan­tage of the system.
5. Speed #5. I’m fairly cer­tain Medi­atem­ple has newer equip­ment which prob­a­bly means more mem­ory and bet­ter processors.
6. Stor­age. They give you 100 giga­bytes worth of stor­age space which is per­fect for host­ing my eStore files over at HDR­Source.
7. No reselling. Total Choice Host is a “reseller.” Basi­cally, they look around the coun­try for other host­ing com­pa­nies. They are more or less mid­dle­men. This is just one more layer you have to go through in order to get some ques­tions answered, or if you do encounter issues with your server and need things to get fixed (as I had once.) As a result, they are also often slower to update their tech­nolo­gies (gzip sup­port is one that they are lacking.)
8. Sup­port. 24/7 tele­phone tech sup­port in case some­thing goes wrong. They also have one of the best knowl­edge bases in the industry.
9. Cost. It’s cheaper for me to host my eight plus web­sites under one $20 pack­age ver­sus pay­ing $9 sep­a­rately. You can host up to 100 web­sites. All of my bills are also con­sol­i­dated this way.
10. Con­sol­i­dated. All of my web­sites are now under one login and admin­is­tra­tion panel ver­sus hav­ing to man­age eight separately.

The neg­a­tives to this web­site host­ing transfer:

1. Slight hic­cups when it came to migrat­ing my Word­Press data­bases. This is to be expected and varies on a case-by-case basis depend­ing on which host you are trans­fer­ring from/to as well as the com­plex­ity of your web­sites. I had some issues regard­ing image upload paths once every­thing was trans­ferred. I went man­u­ally through my data­base and had to reset some paths. Now it should all be work­ing again.
2. Get­ting used to a new system/administration panel after all of these years. It was a lit­tle awk­ward for a day or two, but I quickly got over that.
3. I noticed some impor­tant emails were get­ting bounced to spam and have had to keep my eye out to keep that from happening.
4. Slight inter­mit­tent email down­time. That’s the one thing I will say about TCH that was great. In all of the years host­ing with them, I prob­a­bly can count the email out­ages on 3 fin­gers. I have faith how­ever that Medi­atem­ple will sort this out as they are a rel­a­tively new company.
5. I miss my web­site log analy­sis tracker AWStats. I think you can install it if you wish, but I didn’t have the time to tin­ker with it. Medi­atem­ple by default cur­rently uses Urchin, which was recently bought out by Google. Google is incor­po­rat­ing Urchin into Google Ana­lyt­ics. Some say Google Ana­lyt­ics is bet­ter than Urchin. I per­son­ally think it’s great, but the one down­fall is that it cur­rently doesn’t track real-time vis­i­tor sta­tis­tics and only appears to update once a day.

I think if you have more than one web­site and are not look­ing for a com­pletely ded­i­cated web­site host, than a host such as MT is the way to go. It’s not per­fect, but it’s much faster and the inter­face is eas­ier to use. If you do decide to go with them, please feel free to drop my name as I could always use a dis­count (and no, I’m not get­ting paid to say any of this lol.)

Installing Word­Press

If you’re look­ing to start fresh, then this is fairly straight-forward as they pro­vide a one click install. You just basi­cally cre­ate a new name and click a but­ton then wait while the process finishes.

Most of my instal­la­tions were trans­fers. I could sim­ply add the domain on MT and copy all of my files over to the new MT folder via FTP. I also had to back up the data­base from TCH using php­MyAd­min and import it into the MT php­MyAd­min. After that, I needed to update my wp-config.php user name, data­base name, and pass­word to the new loca­tions. Once Word­Press was installed, I man­u­ally went through the data­base file (using Textpad) re-exported from MT to check and fix some URL/file paths. From there, I pro­ceeded to load fresh copies of the plu­g­ins I had used.

If you have any trou­bles or ques­tions regard­ing a Word­Press web­site trans­fer, a sim­ple Google search for “Word­Press trans­fer to new domain” or “Word­Press data­base trans­fer php­myad­min” will pull up a lot of results and tutorials.

Word­Press Themes — Look and Feel

I’m fairly con­fi­dent you can use Word­Press to set up any type of look and feel. It doesn’t even have to look like a blog nor does it even have to con­tain one. The rea­son I’m start­ing to use them is because it’s fast and there’s a lot of free plu­g­ins which are avail­able that save a tremen­dous amount of time and add func­tion­al­ity (such as con­tact forms, gal­leries, online stores, search engine opti­miza­tions, etc.) If I do want to add a blog later on, then I can do this with rel­a­tive ease. It’s also eas­ier than hav­ing to man­u­ally edit code or cre­ate some­thing from scratch.

There’s lit­er­ally thou­sands of free Word­Press themes avail­able on the Inter­net. All you have to do is to log into your WP admin and go to the themes sec­tion. There’s also a lot more avail­able beyond the Word­Press site. A search for “Word­Press themes” will pull up pages upon pages of doc­u­ments for you to choose  from.

If none of those themes you find seem to sat­isfy, there’s even free online “Word­Press theme gen­er­a­tors” which can take you most of the way there to your final design. I just hap­pened to be check­ing out a free trial of a paid ver­sion yes­ter­day called Artis­teer, and I was fairly sur­prised at how much it would let you do with­out hav­ing to code. I was expect­ing the worst but came away think­ing the oppo­site. There’s prob­a­bly even bet­ter ones out there, but I really didn’t have the time to look any further.

If that still doesn’t work, you can always just cob­ble the code together your­self. I often try to find some­thing approx­i­mat­ing the over­all look and feel that I’m going for — two columns, one col­umn, side nav­i­ga­tion bar, etc and then go in and mod­ify the code to obtain what I want. Most of it is gen­er­ally CSS parameters.

Last but not least, you can always make it another person’s prob­lem. Find a free­lancer online and pay them to mock up a site for you.

Word­Press Plugins

Word­Press by itself is a very pow­er­ful blog/CMS (con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem), but it’s bare-bones and not too attrac­tive when it’s a fresh instal­la­tion. While it has every­thing you’ll need to get up and run­ning, there are things you will want to add to extend its use­ful­ness and func­tion­al­ity. A note of cau­tion is to use the min­i­mal amount of plu­g­ins as nec­es­sary. A lot of plu­g­ins are coded incor­rectly and can result in slower per­for­mance, mem­ory leaks, and even break other plu­g­ins as well as your lay­out. If you’re not using them, then delete them.

To install them, it’s pretty easy. All you do is ven­ture to your Word­Press Admin­is­tra­tion screen and go to the plu­g­ins sec­tion. Click ‘Add New’ and search for the plu­g­ins below. Install and activate.

Below, I will post a list of plu­g­ins that I’m cur­rently using on a Word­Press 2.9 instal­la­tion. Some of the plu­g­ins from my pre­vi­ous arti­cle on “Set­ting up a Word­Press Blog” have been dis­con­tin­ued or changed:

Design Related:

1. Light­box Plus: A light­box is a method of dis­play­ing your pic­tures, movies, and images. You’ve prob­a­bly seen it in action before. When you click a pic­ture, it enlarges into a popup win­dow and the back­ground may fade out. I’ve tried just about every light­box plu­gin — both man­u­ally and even within Word­Press, and so far Light­box Plus is my favorite. It works right out of the box and doesn’t seem to break things. It also pro­vides you with a bunch of ready-made designs of which you can always tweak too.
2. Page Links To:  If you have navbars and menus at the top of your site with sub­menus, this allows you cre­ate a dummy page (and hence another sub­menu item link­ing else­where.) This is pretty hard to explain but I’ll try here: I had one user click­ing the submenu’s but not the main but­tons and he couldn’t fig­ure out the main but­ton was also a sep­a­rate page… Basi­cally, this is an inep­ti­tude checker.
3. Pro Player: There’s many ways to embed videos into a Word­Press site. This plu­gin pro­vides an easy way to embed videos into your posts from sites such as Vimeo or Youtube. If all I wanted to post was Youtube videos, I’d prob­a­bly go with Tube­Press instead. How­ever, Tube­press requires a lit­tle bit of shortcode.
4. WP Typog­ra­phy: Believe it or not (it’s hard to admit), most of us use incor­rect gram­mar and punc­tu­a­tion. WP Typog­ra­phy helps cor­rect com­mon mis­takes such as em dashes ver­sus en dashes, quote marks, ellipses, math sym­bols, wid­ows, etc.
5. WPTouch iPhone Theme: If you have a smart­phone or an iPhone, than this plu­gin auto­mat­i­cally shrinks your web­site down to some­thing per­fectly read­able for an iPhone. It def­i­nitely makes surf­ing this web­site much eas­ier on the eyes.

Secu­rity Related:

1. Secure Word­Press: This plu­gin helps to help fix holes. It also removes infor­ma­tion which really isn’t anyone’s busi­ness such as which ver­sion of Word­Press you are running.
2. PHPSecInfo: This isn’t a Word­Press plu­gin. Instead you install it man­u­ally into your root site direc­tory and browse to the link. It will tell you which php holes exist. This requires a bit of advanced knowl­edge to tweak these set­tings. Most peo­ple prob­a­bly do not need to even bother with this.
3. CHMOD 755 and 644: This isn’t a Word­Press plu­gin. I just thought I’d men­tion it here since I’m on the topic of Word­Press secu­rity. All fold­ers should be set to 755 on per­mis­sions (via FTP) and 644 on indi­vid­ual files for secu­rity pur­poses. There’s prob­a­bly a plu­gin which per­forms this function.

Social Book­mark­ing:

1. Cute Pro­files: On the side of my blog, you’ll see a few but­tons that take you to my Face­book page, etc. If any­one is inter­ested in fol­low­ing me, they can always click those items. By adding these options, you may increase your read­er­ship. Plus it’s kind of cool. Of course, you don’t have to use this as you could also pro­vide links in your blogroll as well as wid­gets for many of these Social Net­work­ing websites.
2. Socia­ble: This pro­vides lit­tle but­tons below each of my posts. These but­tons allow read­ers to select an arti­cle they like and post a link back to it on other web­sites such as Buz­zfeed, Face­book, Tech­no­rati, etc. I use Socia­ble on most of my blog web­sites, but unfor­tu­nately the lay­out broke on this par­tic­u­lar web­site when it was used with my trans­la­tion fea­ture. I’m not quite sure why the break hap­pened, but I did spend time try­ing to fig­ure out the cause as well as dig­ging through code. I ended up using Sexy Book­marks instead.
3. FD Feed­burner Plu­gin: This redi­rects all of your RSS (really sim­ple syn­di­cate) head­lines and sends them to Google’s Feed­burner. Google’s Feed­burner site pro­vides a handy gate­way and options to redis­trib­ute your RSS arti­cles in a stan­dard­ized for­mat to those who use RSS feeds. If you have a home­page set to iGoogle, MSN, or Yahoo — most of those arti­cles that appear are noth­ing other than RSS feeds/headlines that are appear­ing. Some peo­ple pre­fer to view daily head­lines through RSS feed­ers as opposed to hav­ing to man­u­ally comb through web­sites which may (or may not) be of inter­est to them. More infor­ma­tion on Feed­burner setup can be found here.
4. Sexy Book­marks: a XHTML com­pli­ant social book­mark­ing set which allows users to select arti­cles they like and post to other web­sites or email. I’m cur­rently using this over Socia­ble on this website.
5. WP to Twit­ter: I had set up a Twit­ter account specif­i­cally for my web­sites Lunarlog and Lunarstu­dio. Basi­cally, when­ever I post to this web­site, WP to Twit­ter takes the post link, short­ens it, and auto­mat­i­cally sends it to my Twit­ter account. It’s hid­den on the back-end, but it is there. I could install another plu­gin which pulls infor­ma­tion down to this web­site for dis­play, but quite frankly, my Twit­ter account isn’t all that inter­est­ing. There’s a lot of these Twit­ter inte­gra­tion plu­g­ins avail­able — I haven’t had time to exper­i­ment with all of them. Sug­ges­tions are welcome.

Spam Related:

1. Askimet: Ships with Word­Press. Enable and signup unless you really like get­ting spammed.
2. WP Spam­Free: Another anti­spam plu­gin which appears to have blocked over 70 com­ment spams since I enabled it last week. It includes a con­tact form as well. I just hope it’s not block­ing valid users… I can’t seem to check.

Speed Related:

1. Autop­ti­mize: This opti­mizes your web­site by con­cate­nat­ing your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS into one nice, tidy bun­dle. It works in most instances, but occa­sion­ally breaks other plu­g­ins and even your lay­out. I’d save this plu­gin for last as once you install it, you’re going to want to test your site out to see if any­thing went wrong. For this blog, it kept break­ing my trans­la­tion flags so I turned it off. Instead, I am cur­rently using WP Minify.
2. Cache Images: Every­one should be using this if pos­si­ble. It basi­cally tells a reader’s browser to store to tem­porar­ily store an image (such as a logo used through­out a site) on their hard drive. This way, their browser doesn’t have to down­load an image every sin­gle time they move to a new page. It makes things seem faster and reduces the load on your server sav­ing both band­width and pro­cess­ing. The nice thing is that in-case you do get ham­mered from a pop­u­lar site link­ing back to you, you’ll be bet­ter pre­pared to han­dle a huge spike in traffic.
3. OSSDL CDN off-linker: A CDN stands for Con­tent Deliv­ery Net­work. A CDN redis­trib­utes your files around the world and caches them. That way if some­one else on the oppo­site side of the world goes to your web­site, instead of hav­ing to sit there and wait for infor­ma­tion to down­load, their request will hit a server that is closer to them and the pages will load much faster. CDNs gen­er­ally cost extra, but if you want your web­site to be fast — then this is some­thing you should use. At the moment, I am using Max­CDN with my web­sites. They are cur­rently run­ning a pro­mo­tional deal at $10 signup for a 1 TB of infor­ma­tion trans­fer. OSSDL CDN off-linker sim­ply allows you to con­nect to your CDN and for­mats all of your images and scripts to be fetched from CDNs such as Max­CDN. I was using W3TC (W3 Total Cache) but it was break­ing some of my plu­g­ins (Pro­player killed my RSS feeds and eStore.)
4. Use Google Libraries: A lot of plu­g­ins use code that comes from other sites (for exam­ple, many light­boxes use libraries from Google.) But why keep all of those libraries local when you can take advan­tage of the lat­est and great­est directly from Google itself? Google runs on a CDN as well. This ensures that these libraries are pulled from there instead of your web­site, and it will reduce the load times for your viewers.
5. WP Opti­mize: This helps clean up your data­base. Over time, you install plu­g­ins, remove them, write arti­cles, save drafts, delete things — all of this adds holes to your data­base. On a very busy web­site, you may have a lot of holes which ends up slow­ing down your web­site. WP Opti­mize is basi­cally a “disk defrag­menter” for your data­base — it removes these holes which can slow down your site and puts every­thing back together again.
6. WP Minify: This plu­gin con­cate­nates JavaScript and CSS files much like Autop­ti­mize does and helps speed up your web­site. Basi­cally it puts all your scripts together in one neat bun­dle, and strips out unnec­es­sary com­ments and white space. Where Autop­ti­mize broke my Trans­posh Trans­la­tion flags, WP Minify didn’t. So as much as I liked Autop­ti­mize, I’m using this for now.
7. W3 Total Cache: This is a new-comer to the whole scene and has some of the high­est rank­ings on the Word­Press plu­gin site. It sets out to do a lot of things men­tioned above (Autop­ti­mize, WP Minify, Cache Images, and OSSDL CDN off-linker) but it can be some­what con­fus­ing to novices. And although it has close to 5 stars from over 150 users cur­rently, I found that it broke some plu­g­ins that I used. In par­tic­u­lar, I couldn’t get it to work with my Word­Press eStore plu­gin — the cart wid­get wouldn’t refresh prop­erly. Sec­ondly, it com­pletely killed my RSS feed (which is pretty bad) when I had Pro­Player installed (a huge bug.) Fred­er­ick Townes is the author of W3TC and CTO of Mash­able — I’m fairly pos­i­tive that he is look­ing into these issues right now after I had men­tioned it. Tem­porar­ily, I’m using sev­eral of the plu­g­ins men­tioned above to help com­pen­sate for W3TC.

Func­tion­al­ity Related:

1. Con­tact Form 7: Pro­vides a con­tact form on your blog/website. Instead of hav­ing to pro­vide an email which peo­ple could reach me at, now they can send me emails via the built-in form. Not only is it con­ve­nient, but it also serves as a spam bot check. You have your choice of choos­ing ques­tions and answers or CAPTCHA for secu­rity. You can also add func­tions such as allow­ing attach­ments, etc. I know this type of form is very use­ful. Over on my web­site www.lunarstudio.com, I have a php con­tact form that I hand-coded many years ago. I also pro­vide an email address. Guess what — most peo­ple tend to use the form instead of send­ing me emails. It’s prob­a­bly a 9 to 1 ratio. I absolutely love this plu­gin. You can see it in action here.
2. Dagon Design Sitemap Gen­er­a­tor: This auto­mat­i­cally cre­ates a handy sitemap on your web­site. Instead of hav­ing users click on cat­e­gories, tags, and next but­tons — all your arti­cles appear on one page that’s eas­ier to fol­low. I also spec­u­late this helps search engines fig­ure out and spi­der your site more eas­ily. You can see it being used as a page here.
3. Ever­more: This adds a “read more” link to each abbre­vi­ated post. I used to use a more in-depth plu­gin called Post Teaser, but I think it has been caus­ing some slow­downs recently.
4. Post Teaser: Same func­tion­al­ity as Ever­more men­tioned directly above, but adds a lit­tle more infor­ma­tion such as read­ing time, word count, etc. I have it tem­porar­ily dis­abled because I think it was slow­ing down my sites.
5. Google Ajax Trans­la­tion: This is a trans­la­tion plu­gin for your posts and com­ments. It’s very handy. Unfor­tu­nately, it leaks PageR­ank (although you can hack the code if you desire.) Sec­ondly, it was break­ing with some of my opti­miza­tion scripts. Instead, I’m using Trans­posh Trans­la­tion Fil­ter for now.
6. Gurken Sub­scribe to Com­ments: This is per­haps one of the lamest things Word­Press doesn’t pro­vide by default. If some­one com­ments on your arti­cle, you might want to pro­vide them with an option to sub­scribe to the thread. That way if any­one replies to them, they will get noti­fied via email.
7. High­light Author Com­ments: This plu­gin allows you (an author) to eas­ily stand out from the rest of the peo­ple com­ment­ing by allow­ing you to eas­ily adjust your com­ment col­ors. Some themes may have this func­tion built-in. Many do not.
8. OpenID: This allows users with an OpenID account to have it auto­mat­i­cally sync up when­ever they comment.
9. Sim­ple Tags: This helps you tag each of your pages and posts more eas­ily than the one pro­vided by Word­Press. It gives you far greater options. Tags are basi­cally key­words (or impor­tant words) found through­out your site. Often, you will see tags appear on the side­bars of blogs — some­times they are referred to as “cloud tags.” They get indexed as well, and helps both users and search engines to nav­i­gate com­monly used phrases and top­ics. I was using WP Cumu­lus which is really nice to look at, but I think it just adds to the pro­cess­ing on peo­ple with slower con­nec­tions and com­put­ers. Dis­abled for now.
10. Trans­posh Trans­la­tion Fil­ter: These are the flag icons on my side­bar which helps for­eign users trans­late my web­site into the pre­ferred lan­guage of their choice. It should also help get your site seen inter­na­tion­ally. I was using Google Ajax Trans­la­tion men­tioned above but stopped because of incompatibilities.
11. WP Cumu­lus: A pretty method of tag­ging top­ics. I have it dis­abled due to pro­cess­ing loads and I am cur­rently using Sim­ple Tags instead.

Sum­mary

This is my setup cur­rently. While you could go with a basic install, I find that the Word­Press plu­g­ins men­tioned above improve, vis­i­bil­ity, speed and func­tion­al­ity. Upon installing the plu­g­ins I men­tioned above, you may want to acti­vate them one by one and test to see if they break any of your other plu­g­ins or themes. You’ll want to clear the cache in your browsers — with Fire­fox, you can sim­ply hold shift+refresh. With IE, you can do that within your tools\options menu.

As always, I’m open to bet­ter sug­ges­tions from the com­mu­nity. If you have any com­ments, please feel free to leave them here. I hope you find this arti­cle useful.