blogio blogging blog

The plugin has been download over 10,000 times to date and I’m still getting a lot of positive feedback on it. This encourages me to keep working on the plugin and keep adding new features. Today I’m proud to present a feature that I have been thinking about for quite a while: country based ad serving, aka geo targeting.

A lot of CPA programs only pay for conversions from certain countries. There is no point in showing these ads to people from other countries. It would be better to show these visitors other ads.

Per Gustafsson has made the ip2nation database that enables you to retrieve the visitors country. I have incorporated the ip2nation database into the latest Ad Buttons plugin release. This enables the program to know from which country your visitor is and enables you to control which ads are served.

Unlike other ip2nation plugins that are available, Ad Buttons is currently using the latest version of the ip2nation database and has update functionality already build into the admin panel so you can update the database with one click when a new version is released.

It’s probably every webmasters dream to have his or her site featured on the front page of Digg. A lot of website owners, however, still have nightmares about the day they got Dugg. The avalanche of visitors hitting your site can cause a number of bad things to happen.

Getting shut down by your hosting provider
The sudden increase of traffic can cause some alarm bells to go of at your hosting provider. Some server administrators will mistake the ridiculously high hits on your site for a DDoS attack and take your site offline.

You can prevent this from happening by letting your hosting provider know that a page from your site made the front page of Digg. This is, of course, providing you know you have been Dugg.

Another reason, your web hosting provider might have, to take your site offline, is that your account has used up it’s available traffic resources. A page with only a few images and scripts can easily add up to a few hundred kb of data being transferred on a single page load.

Looking at my website statistics, it seems that my average page size is about 35 KB. If I would be running on a hosting account with a 10 GB a month data limit, I would be able to serve about 285.000 pages a month. That is plenty for most sites, but being on the front page of Digg can drive crazy amounts of visitors to your site, which can chew up your 10 GB plan in no time.

But there is something that can be far worse than having your site taken offline for reaching the bandwidth limit: it’s having your site stay online after using up your monthly bandwidth and
Read more »

Keeping your WordPress installation, or any other software installations for that matter, up to date should be high on your to-do list. No matter how well programs are planned, there will almost always be bugs and security holes that are only discovered after the software has been released. They are often patched by software updates as soon as the issue has been discovered and a fix has been created.

It’s these known, and fixed, software issues, that cause the most problems. There are a lot of wanna-be hackers around, that are too stupid to figure out how to hack websites by themselves. Instead they just exploit the known bugs to gain access and impress their wanna-be-hacker-friends with their l33t h4cker 5killz.

If you keep your software up to date, you will probably have a more than 99% less chance of getting your website hacked. Here’s what happened to one of my WordPress blogs, that I didn’t upgrade:

I have a blog that has been laying dormant for well over a year. At one time I just didn’t have the time to post updates and I never got back to writing on that blog again. It was still making some money from a few scattered AdSense clicks, nothing major, but enough to cover the years domain registration and hosting fees. I figured I’d keep the site and maybe one day start writing on it again.

Recently I started getting email from the hosting company, notifying me that the site was nearing its bandwidth limit. Checking the website statistics I found a sudden rise in traffic back in August. The number of visitors and page views has been steady, but the used bandwidth went up. Not just a little: in July 2008 the site used 68 MB of bandwidth, which is about the normal monthly usage for the website throughout the rest of the year, but in August the traffic jumped up to 994 MB, in September the bandwidth usage was over 5 GB and the highest peak was this past November with nearly 10 GB of traffic!

I had my email alerts for the site set to 10 GB. So, nearing this amount of traffic triggered the system to notify me on the site usage. Checking the stats, I noticed visitors finding my website through search terms that I’m not even going to mention here, just open up your average spam email and you know what terms I mean.

I went to look at the site and everything appeared to be normal, but the little icon in the top right hand corner of my browser, which indicates the page is being loaded, wouldn’t stop spinning, even though my screen showed the complete site already. Looking at the source code of the page, I found a lot of links at the bottom of the page. I didn’t count them, but there where literally thousands!

I requested a free sample from each site linked to, so I could make my friends envy me for the rest of my life. Well, actually, I just removed the links and went to bed. The next morning they where all there again! I must have forgotten to save the file after removing the links. I removed them again and double checked the site. All looked good, but a few hours later the links had been put right back into my source code files.

This WordPress installation had been installed in January 2006 and hadn’t been upgraded since, so I decided to install one of my favorite WordPress plugins: WordPress automatic upgrade. With my installation being almost 3 years out of date, I wasn’t expecting the plugin to work, but it worked perfectly, upgrading my WordPress installation to the latest and greatest release with just a few clicks (sorry Keith, I should have known better!)

The links didn’t come back, but I’m still worried about a Google penalty my site might have received for having all these links on there. I’m glad big G didn’t close my AdSense account that was displaying ads on the spammed pages.

Search engines have their bots roaming the internet, looking for new and changed website pages. There’s no telling when the bots will visit your site and indexing new pages on your site can take anywhere from minutes to days or even weeks.

If you’re running a blog and people have subscribed to your rss feed, you’ll want to let them know immediately when you have posted new content. The rss services, however, also rely on checking your site to see if new content has been posted. Checking every blog every minute of the day would be a big burden, both on their servers, as well as on the one hosting your blog.

This is where ping comes in: by pinging a service, you let it know that you have updated your site and it should come over to see what has changed. (not to be confused with the tcp/ip ping command, which tests the connection between two systems)

Within the WordPress admin panel you can find Update Services under Settings -> Writing. Here you can type in the URLs of the services to ping, whenever you post something new to your blog.

There are loads of ping services available, but be careful! Don’t just put every ping service you can find in there. Services like pingomatic will forward your ping to multiple other ping services. This will cause multiple pings, both from you and from pingomatic, to the same service. With multiple pings coming in for a single post, your blog could be marked as spam!

Here’s the list of ping services I’ve put into my WordPress installations:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

WordPress is a great software package. One of its greatest features is the plugin engine that enables programmers to easily add new functionalities or change existing ones. Many people have created great plugins, so you don’t have to. Currently there are over 3400 plugins listed in the WordPress plugin directory and many more plugins are available on the authors websites.

Here are some of my favorite plugins:

Akismet
The ultimate comment-spam buster! If I could only use a single plugin, this would be the one. Akismet protects your blog from comment spammers that put links to all sorts of nasty websites in your post comments. Without Akismet you will be spending a lot of time digging thru the spam comments. All you need to do to activate the Akismet plugin is get a free API key from the WordPress site. The plugin itself doesn’t need installing as it comes bundled with the WordPress installation.

All in one SEO pack
WordPress is not fully optimized for the search engines, but that changes after installing the all in one SEO pack. This plugin gives you full control over page titles, meta tags and keywords.

Broken link checker
Whenever you put links into your posts, there is a chance that you will have broken links on your site in the future. This plugin checks all your outgoing links and lets you know if any of them are not working any more.

do-follow
Get rid of the no-follow attribute, because it doesn’t help.

feedburner feedsmith
If you want to be able to track your rss subscriber numbers, I suggest you sign up for a free account at feedburner. Once you have your feedburner account, you’ll need to change your rss feed links to point to the feedburner feed. “Where are the rss feed links located that need changing?” you might ask. That’s where this plugin comes in: install, activate and put your feedburner feed URL in the config screen.

no self pings
This plugin prevents pingbacks from showing when linking back to your own posts.

share this
A nice little button to enable visitors to submit your blog post to various social bookmarking sites or send an e-mail to friends.

top commentators
Say “thank you” to your top commentators by giving them a side wide link.

wordpress automatic upgrade
Upgrade your WordPress installation to the latest release from within the admin panel. Upgrading this way saves a lot of worries and time.

wp-cumulus
A beautiful flash tag-cloud to spice up your blog. This is probably not helping with SEO, but it looks awesome!

There are many more great WordPress plugins available, but these are some that I really like. Oh hold on, I almost forgot to mention the best plugin of them all: my very own ad buttons plugin! Actually, it’s not that great yet, as it is still a work in progress, but feel free to download it and give it a try.

I don’t think I, or anybody else, has the time to give the thousands of plugins available on the WordPress site all a try. Do you know of some particularly good plugins, please let me know!

With your domain registered and hosting taken care of, it’s time to install your blog software. There are different software packages available for blogging, some free, some paid. The only one I have ever tried is WordPress and I didn’t ever bother to look at others, that’s how much I like it.

Being a programmer myself, I know a good piece of software when I see it. WordPress is one of the software packages that I’ve liked from day one and it is getting better with each new release. The feature I like most has got to be their plugin engine. Once you figure out how it works, it’s very easy to write your own plugins for WordPress that add functionality or change existing functionalities of the software. If you are not a programmer, there are free WordPress plugins available for most tasks you can think of and installing them only requires uploading the plugin files.

I’m wandering off, this post should be about installing WordPress, but it’s turning into a WordPress promotion, I’ll save the rest for a later post. Truth is, there’s not much to write when talking about installing the software. After downloading the latest stable release from the WordPress download page, all you have to do is edit the configuration file, so the software can access your database. Detailed installation instructions can be found on the WordPress site.

Once you have your domain name registered, you will need to sign up for a hosting account. Hosting accounts come in many forms and sizes. Think about what you want to put on your website, so you can get a hosting account that can handle the task. My preferred blog software is WordPress, which needs php and MySQL running on the server, other software packages might require a windows server and asp. Make sure you know exactly what type of hosting you need before signing up for one.

A server running on Linux is usually cheaper, because it doesn’t require an expensive software license like Windows servers. Php and MySQL are also free to run unlike Microsoft’s SQL server.

Another option would be to host your website at home, but I would not recommend it, even if you have the knowledge to run your own server. No matter how well you manage your server, there are tons of things that can go wrong and bring your website down. When things go wrong it is usually when you are not there to fix it, preferably when you just left for a long weekend away. When you sign up for a hosting account, the hosting provider will look after the server and make sure your website is accessible day and night.

Today everyone and their mother seems to have a blog. Free blog services like Blogger, WordPress and numerous others, make it easy to start your own blog at zero cost and without any specialized knowledge. Thousands of new blogs are started each day, many in a spur of the moment.

People start blogging for various reasons, which need different approaches. If you start a blog to let your friends and family know what you’re up to, the easiest way is to just sign up for a free blog service and start typing away. Many bloggers, however, want to achieve something specific with their blog. They want to promote their business or product, or, just build up a blog with a big readership, so they can cash in on advertising on their blog.

If you are in it for the cash, welcome to the club! But don’t expect fast and easy money. Building a popular blog with a big reader base takes time and effort. Some people want to make you believe that you can make some quick money with blogs and they will sell you a step by step guide on how to set up multiple blogs, quickly fill them with some content and cash in on advertising clicks. Truth is, the only one making money is the guy selling the book.