Get old versions of wordpress

For those of you who are not aware, you can get old versions of wordpress from the wordpress release archive. I am one of the few who is not happy with the current release, it breaks some important plugins that are no longer supported so I deleted the newer version (2.3) and restored my old database.

I learned a valuable lesson, never upgrade until you have fully tested new versions of wordpress. Setup a test server on a sub domain or home computer.

Posted by admin 29.Sep.07 Optimize Wordpress Read more Comments (0)

Meta Description in Wordpress

There is a never ending debate between webmasters that meta tags and meta data are either needed or not needed for search engine ranking. One thing is for sure, it is smart to include the meta decription tag in your blog just incase. You can do this with a neato plugin called Head Meta Description (download it here)

Head Meta Description automatically takes a snippet from your content and displays it within the head. It also allows those who like more control over their meta description tag to do the following:

1. Override the use of the tagline - A tagline that appears on all pages is repetative so it can be removed.
2. Increase or decrease the length of your description - The default 20 is a good length.
3. Auto generate an excerpt for the descriptions - Good for most people who do not like to optimize every part of their blog.
4. Name the custom field key used to override.

For those of you who do not always put keywords in the first sentence of your content (and would like to insert the third of forth sentence) simply cut and paste into the custom fields area in your Wordpress console.

If you click here then to the toolbar in your internet browser and to: View > Source Code you will see that I have chosen to cut and paste the second sentence in this post to be used in my meta description area because it better describes what this post is all about.

Posted by admin 24.May.06 Optimize Wordpress Read more Comments (0)

Optimizing Wordpress Cache

Ricardo Galli’s WP-Cache is great for speeding up your Wordpress blog. Wordpress Cache “caches” pages and stores them in a static file for serving future requests rather than loading, compiling and building the page from your database.

WP-Cache began with Staticize Reloaded by Matt Mullenweg and Bill Zeller and will hopefully be added to future versions of Wordpress as a plugin?

Jeremy Gillick (software engineer and cool prankster) says:

Last week my keyboard prank post was promoted to the front page of Digg and within minutes my WordPress blog was down for the count. Being slightly embarrassed I tried get my site back online and along the way found several things you can do to prevent this from happening to you!

MySql is only part of the issue — why abuse your database server if you don’t have to? WP-Cache is a WordPress plugin that caches your posts to static HTML files to save your database and server cycles.

This saves your MySql server by keeping the number of connections to a minimum. Also since WordPress is written in PHP, which is an interpreted language that must be parsed each time a page is requested, caching the pages as HTML saves your web server cycles and speeds up the load time for your viewers.
By default the cache is used for an hour until it’s expired and refreshed with new content. Since I wanted to view the recent comments quicker than that I changed the expiration time to 4 minutes (or 240 seconds). To change this click Options > WP-Cache and change the expire time value and then click ‘Change Expiration’. Be sure to read the WP-Cache instructions on how to install and configure it.

So there you have it, the exact reason why you might want to download and use WP-cache, it is the first step in optimizing your blog. Now if we can just get Ricardo to use Trev’s Translate Widget we can read what he is saying in his blog.

Posted by admin 11.May.06 Optimize Wordpress Read more Comments (0)

Avoiding Infinite Loops

Making your blog less noisy by avoiding the infinite loop

Webmasters are often concerned with duplicate content; Matt Cutts @ Google posted snippets from Google’s Press Day 2006 today in his blog. They talked about the Infinite Loop and Duplicate Content which is very common in blogs.

Alan Eustace is up. He’s our Senior VP of Engineering, so he doesn’t have to wear a suit. Cool, Alan’s going to walk through the life of a query! He runs through the need to crawl, index, and then score relevant results. “Speed matters.” With 8 billion pages, it would take 253 years (I think I got that right) to fetch pages if you fetch one page per second. “It’s important that we gently crawl the web at very high speeds.” Alan talks about duplicate pages, which can vary from 30-50% of pages with a naive approach. Alan notes that you have to avoid infinite loops such as calendars. Freshness matters. Size matters, especially with long-tail queries.

So how can we help the search engine bots get through our blogs gentle and quick? Do all the noisy attributes of a Wordpress blog make it not search engine friendly? Having a calendar in your sidebar is extremely noisy and even the monthly archives could be seen as duplicate correct? Do people actually use archives and calendars? My stats tell me they do not so why not remove them?

To make Wordpress less noisy I am removing the calendar, archives and replacing them with a “sitemap”. Yes you can put a rel=”nofollow” to these areas so Google will ignore them but what about Yahoo and MSN?

Here is my Optimizing Wordpress category where I will show you how to remove and replace features in Wordpress.

Posted by admin 10.May.06 Optimize Wordpress Read more Comments (0)