Courtesy of 3nhanced.comYou may or may not have realised there are two different flavours of WordPress, denoted by the TLD extension. WordPress.com is where you can sign up to a free blog, hosted for you courtesy of Automattic, the company behind WordPress. WordPress.org is where you can download the software for use on your own web server - a so-called self-hosted installation.
So why two versions, and what are their different strengths and weaknesses? Essentially it’s a trade-off between flexibility and ease of use. For more detail, check out this WordPress support page that lists some of the main differences between the two.
Continue reading ‘WordPress.com versus WordPress.org’
I always recommend using self-hosted WordPress instead of the free version, as you end up having much more control over your site. However, one area in which I’ve always felt a bit cheated with WordPress.org sites is the lack of built-in stats monitoring. I guess this is why most bloggers end up using sites like Google Analytics to keep track of things - myself included.
There are also third-party WordPress plugins available which provide some of this functionality - I wrote about one such statistics plugin a few months back. But a couple of days ago I stumbled across another plugin - that provides the bona fide WordPress.com stats within a WordPress.org blog! Now, this is not a new plugin - it’s been around for a couple of years already by the looks of it - but it’s the first I’d heard of it.
Continue reading ‘WordPress.com statistics plugin’
Following on from my last post about translating your website, Dennis alerted me to the fact that there are WordPress plugins to do this too. Well, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that - I haven’t yet been able to think up a desirable bit of functionality that isn’t contained in a plugin - why should website translation be any different!
Sure enough, a quick search turned up several candidates. The Global Translator plugin looked the best, so I went right ahead and installed it - it’s those bunch of flags near the top of my sidebar.
Continue reading ‘WordPress Translation plugin’
I bet you log into WordPress as an Administrator, right? Yup, so do I. Nothing wrong with that - after all, most of us run single-user blogs. But did you know that WordPress has built-in support for a wide range of Roles and Capabilities?
WordPress Roles
By default there are five Roles, each of which has progressively more power:
- Subscriber
- Contributor
- Author
- Editor
- Administrator
Continue reading ‘WordPress Roles and Capabilities’
Have you ever wondered how to take online payments via your website for your own products and services? Well, there’s an easy way: PayPal. Yes, you can accept donations, payments for products and services, even set up recurring payments and subscriptions. And the good thing is you’re not restricted to buyers who have a PayPal account, because this mechanism allows your customers to pay via debit or credit card if they choose.
There are a number of benefits to using this service:
- Simplicity - PayPal handles all the technical details for you.
- Security - no secure connection required by you - PayPal handles this too.
- Trusted brand - because PayPal is one of the most popular payment methods on eBay, it is a very well-known and trusted service - and trust is vital when payment details are being exchanged online.
- Cost-effective - setting up your own merchant account is expensive and simply not worthwhile unless you have significant turnover. PayPal doesn’t cost you anything until someone buys something, and even then you won’t be paying much more than 3.4%.
So, before this starts to sound any more like an advertorial, I want to show you how easy it is to set up a Donation button to allow your adoring public to shower you with gratuities.
Continue reading ‘Easily take Online Payments with PayPal’
Every day I use several tools and services for creating, maintaining and promoting my blog, tools that are absolutely fundamental to various aspects of the blogging process. Sure, I probably could get by without some of them…but I sure wouldn’t like to try! And I’m not referring to electricity or the World Wide Web - obviously blogging would be impossible without those!
The common denominator in this list is that they are all free, which probably has something to do with their market penetration. But their value is definitely far higher! Without further ado, here they are, roughly ranked according to how indispensable they are - although as I’ve already pointed out, I couldn’t really do without any of them:
Continue reading ‘10 Essential resources for Blogging’
In the last 24 hours, I’ve had two seperate phishing emails, pointing to dummy banking sites, as they do. Both had set up shop, so to speak, by commandering someone else’s site and setting up their replica pages in a deeply nested sub-directory - exactly like the parasites they are! Presumably, the site owners did not even realise there was anything afoot.
This prompted me to wonder how the perpetrators had gained access, and how secure my own sites are. So I did a bit of research, specifically in the area of securing WordPress (although many of the principles apply to other kinds of site too)…
Continue reading ‘How secure is your site?’
Despite all best intentions, broken links are a fact of life on any website that’s been going for longer than a few months. Even if you rigorously follow the advice I gave a few days ago about redirecting urls, you can only control your own urls this way. But what about all those external pages you point to in your posts? If one of those sites closes down, or is less conscientious about maintaining the integrity of their site, broken links appear on your site!
Now, there is no shortage of link checkers on the internet, but for all you WordPress-ers, there’s an easier way - the broken link checker plugin. I recently installed and ran it on one of the sites I look after, and it came up with a list of more than 20 broken links - I had no idea!
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Every blogger or website owner should check their stats regularly to measure the progress (or lack thereof) of their site - things like:
- traffic
- subscribers
- revenue from ads and affiliates
The key, as with so many other things in life, is not to overdo it. Every minute you spend checking your stats is a minute you could have spent crafting that latest post or networking with other sites via commenting, social bookmarking, or whatever other means you choose to build your traffic.
I know I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to this, which is why I was thrilled the other day to come across a plugin that automates the process for you and brings your stats right into the WordPress dashboard.
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Have you ever felt a need to alter one of WordPress’s default page listings so that it doesn’t show up certain pages? I did when I was first starting out with WordPress, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out a satisfactory way of doing it (sure I could have hard-coded the links into my template, but that’s not what I consider a satisfactory solution).
In fact, at the time, I wasn’t even sure if I was supposed to be changing any of my theme’s template files at all, after hearing all those dire warnings not to hack the core. Now that I’m a bit more experienced, it’s obvious that most people use a theme as a starting point for their site, but then customize it to suit their particular needs and taste, and to give their site a unique look.
Continue reading ‘How to exclude pages from WordPress’s page listings’
