A Place For Stephen

Using WordPress As A Membership Site

Stephen — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:14:26 +0000

Just a quick post today to point you to a fairly detailed and sometimes technical post on how you can use WordPress composite triple beatas a membership site AND it doesn’t require any plugins or expensive membership/user management software to do it!

All up, it’s taken me about three full days to research and test this concept, so get all the juiceспални on how to set up a WordPress membership site here, including a working example!

Cheers
StephenИДЕЯ ЗА ПОДАРЪККартиниикониПравославни иконииконописikoniбългарски икониподаръци

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Get Premium Results With WordPress

Stephen — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 09:51:39 +0000

I’ve recently finished the development of a totally new site, again using my now preferred content management system, WordPress. The main difference this time, I also included a premium WordPress theme in the mix.

And I’ll tell you what… it certainly made the whole experience so much more pleasant! I found it much simpler to understand the theme and stylesheet thanks to the good annotations that accompanied it – and that of course made the modifications I wanted to make a lot easier to carry out.

I’d like to strongly encourage you to check out the post on Building Web Sites With WordPress to see what I’ve done at this new site… and how things were put together… in under 18 days of part-time work.

There are other posts also on that site in the Behind The Scenes category which are designed to let you what I’m doing there, and the results I’m getting. I enjoy letting people know all about the ups (and the downs) of what goes on with building a site.

And speaking of results… this WordPress system is amazing! To get a new article on Google in 10 minutes is astonishing, and only possible when you have your WordPress site set up properly!

Enough of the links to the new site! OK… maybe one more… get on over and check out the OnLine Marketing Fundamentals web site for a whole heap of info that you really need to know to set up your internet business properly

Cheers
Stephen

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Migrate An Existing Content Site To WordPress Using 301 Redirects and .htaccess

Stephen — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 10:56:49 +0000

Have you got an existing content site that needs more attention from search engines? Or one that you really need to update more frequently but can’t be bothered going back into the HTML code to do it?

Then migrating your old site over to a WordPress installation may just breathe a new lease of life into it, and make life a lot easier for you too!

And there’s a (relatively) simple way of doing it so you DON’T lose any link love you’ve already worked hard at getting!

If you are not already familiar with WordPress, then very briefly…

WordPress is a free blog publishing system which, through careful selection of various plugins, can become (almost) a full blown CMS (Content Management System). That allows you to easily add and maintain a variety of content on web sites of any size, without the need to know too much techno stuff at all. And… by its nature, WordPress is very search engine friendly, enabling your new content to be picked up and indexed very quickly.

So how do you teach your old site some new tricks?

Well, I’ve outlined the steps on how to do this from within WordPress a little further down, but first an explanation…

Hint – DON’T DO ANYTHING YET until you get to Step 1 below!

The technique of migrating an old set of existing web addresses (or URLs) to a new set of URLs, involves playing around with your .htaccess file. This file usually lives at the top (www) level of your web server. You’ll make some changes there, to do what they call a “301 redirect”.

The “301 redirect” tells the search engines that the page has been permanently moved, so they will update their index with the new URL. That way there will be:

no duplicate content problems
no dropping of existing links from search engines etc., and
no reduction in the number of visitors you are getting (which would happen with lost links)

And by putting the old content into the WordPress format… you should improve your standings for all your content in the search engines, because it’ll be more SEO friendly, especially if you are more careful about the NEW file names you are creating in the blog!

You should also install “The All in One SEO Pack” plugin as well… That page has some great info on other tweaks you can make to your blog to improve that aspect of it!

Back to the 301 Redirects and .htaccess…

Basically the format of each 301 redirect line in your .htaccess file is:
redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/my-new-page/

where

/old/old.htm

is the now outdated file (the leading / says to start right at the top of the domain/www root to find the file)
and

http://www.you.com/my-new-page/

if the full URL to the new location.

Notice there is a SPACE between each of the four components, and the line ends with a return.

Important:
NEVER type this type of stuff in MS Word or similar – it MUST be done in a plain text editor type of program!

So… you just repeat that line for EVERY old page that you wanted to redirect – e.g.

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/my-new-page/
redirect 301 /old/old1.htm http://www.you.com/another-new-page/
redirect 301 /old/old2.htm http://www.you.com/an-even-better-page/
redirect 301 /old/old3.htm http://www.you.com/and-so-on/
redirect 301 /old4.htm http://www.you.com/and-this-time-with-html.html
redirect 301 /older/a-subfolder-deeper/old5.htm http://www.you.com/new-section/more-and-better-keywords/

or perhaps:

redirect 301 /old/pdffile.pdf http://www.you.com/pdfs/a-better-filename.pdf

or even

redirect 301 /old/ancient.htm http://www.adifferentdomain.com/this-is-a-total-move.html

etc…

Notice the TOTAL CHANGE in the final (new) file names.

If you are going to go to this much trouble, you might as well make the new pages more search engine friendly with the careful selection of appropriate keywords!

Now… with WordPress set up on your site…

The Actual Steps Involved Are:

Step 1. Firstly get the Options/Permalinks structure right!

Better to go for the “custom” option of just

/%postname%/

and save the permalink change.

DON’T leave this as the default WordPress ?p=3 option… it’s not good enough for keywords/SEO purposes.

When you update the permalink structure, that should create and/or modify your .htaccess file to include all the necessary WordPress stuff to get the permalinks working. Hopefully you’ll get an “Update successful” message at the top of screen.

THEN

Step 2. for EACH OLD file you want to replace… write a new “post” or “page” using WordPress (don’t forget, you can modify the file name using the “slug” option on the right hand side of the post screen), and then write down the final URL for each new page/post created.

Obviously, this will take a while as you copy and paste (and format) the old material into the new post fields… but it’s gonna be worth it! (see the caveat below about leaving any in-page images in the original “images” folder… just to make it a bit easier).

So your first new page/post url might be:

http://yourdomain.com/welcome/

Now… the REDIRECT statement for this would be

redirect 301 /welcome.html http://yourdomain.com/welcome/

Step 3. Finally – go into WordPress Admin and from the Manage/Files menu, click on the link for

.htaccess (for rewrite rules)

that’s over on the right hand side…

That brings up the .htaccess file in a big box allowing you to PASTE your list of 301 lines into it AFTER the WordPress stuff. Save it and you should be done.

BE VERY CAREFUL with any changes you make to this file! You could lock up your server if you do something wrong, so make a copy/paste of the original file contents into Notepad FIRST just in case, so you can restore it!

Now… I did JUST that with a new site I’m working on, so it does work. My final .htaccess file is:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

# START list of 301 redirects

redirect 301 /subscribe.html http://onlinemarketingfundamentals.com/subscribe/

# END list of 301 redirects

So that’s the final file with the WP rewrite rules at the top… and the 301 redirects under it.

Just rinse and repeat the above process for EACH old page you want to replace.

Example

Look here for this sample I just set up to test this to make sure it worked

Note – this is a brand new site I am working on right now – not launched yet but will be soon I hope LOL – so there’s so minimal stuff to play around with in there at the moment… but based on what I heard today… I have HIGH HOPES for it!!!!

So if you click on…
http://onlinemarketingfundamentals.com/subscribe.html (this page does NOT exist)
then the redirect statement in the .htaccess file – i.e.
redirect 301 /subscribe.html http://onlinemarketingfundamentals.com/subscribe/
means that you end up here:
http://onlinemarketingfundamentals.com/subscribe/

Caveats

If you have a LOT of OLD pages to replace, then you need to be VERY methodical about all of this… Do one page at a time and copy the old and new URL’s and make a 301 redirect statement (use Notepad) as you go!

If you have old pages that link to one another from within the content, then do each NEW page as you discover the links, because you’ll need to new URL to go into the linking page. Don’t be surprised if you have several windows open at once here…

When you’ve done ALL of the new pages, you can make your blog “live” by pasting the complete (final) list of redirects into your .htaccess file (as described above in Step3).

Make sure EACH redirect works as you intended by TESTING the old URL.

Unfortunately, there’s probably no easy way to do this if you have hundreds of old pages you want to update. It’s not very likely that you can automate copying an old file into a new WP blog (changing the links and images in each file as you go) AND also find a way of updating the .htaccess file as you go.

It’s simpler to just do it as described above and create some SEO advantage by improving your keywords in the file names with the new pages!
DON’T actually remove/delete the OLD pages until you are certain that everything is 100% correct and tested, otherwise people will end up at the 404 page in your blog (which you WILL have a nice “helpful message” on I hope).

If you already have your OLD images collected together in an /images/ folder – i.e. http://www.you.com/images/ – then leave them there! It’ll be easier, as you are creating your new pages, to refer to the pics in the old /images/picname.gif format than it will be in the /wp-content/themes/themename/images/ or wp-content/uploads/ etc formats.
If your server has a different 404 error page programmed to come up… then make sure you REMOVE that option so the new WordPress 404 page can be displayed instead (hint – you should be able to do that from within your web server admin somewhere).
If you nest WP “pages” under “parents” remember that the final permalink/URL will be something like:

http://you.com/parent-page-name/nested-page-name/
DON’T EVER change the slug for a page or post (or their parents) after you’ve done all this and the search engines have picked it up… or you’ll need to do ANOTHER 301 redirect to point the old WP url to the new one.
AND MOST DEFINITELY…
DON’T make ANY further changes to your permalink structure, or else those redirects will just not work at all!
Again… don’t forget to actually test EVERY old URL to make sure it works!

According to Google it will take 6-8 weeks to see the changes reflected on your pages, so if you leave the old pages in place for a while it won’t matter.

And what you can do in four to eight weeks is to check your log files every now and then to see if any of the OLD pages are still showing up. It may be that you missed one.

Clear as mud?

I hope so

Cheers
Stephen

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My First NY Resolution – DONE

Stephen — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:42:25 +0000

One of my resolutions for the new 2008 year is to update my old sites to take advantage of the WordPress platform.

Well, it’s the first of January, 2008, and I can tick off one of those already! Rockin!

“The Internet Cynic” is a site that I developed over 12 months ago – yeah – way back at the end of ’06… and it was done as an outlet for me to vent some frustration at the time.

I’ve really done SFA with it since then… and it’s a shame ‘cos it’s a good concept that could do really well with web 2.0. But since I didn’t even KNOW about web 2.0 and WordPress back then… well it had to wait until the time was right.

Well, it is now… and in ’08, please welcome the revamped and re-launched “The Internet Cynic”.

But the point of this post is not to simply send you there, but to outline what was involved in the transformation.

What WAS Involved?

So first up.. install WordPress on the domain using Fantastico from my cPanel – an easy process.
Next… upload my new theme Blu 2c from Shinra House – and no… I can’t speak Italian, so I used Babelfish to do a translation of the site so I could work out what was what!
Upload the theme to my WP-CONTENT/THEMES folder, and then activated it.
The only plugin used (so far) is Akismet… so I activated that too, and adjusted my custom permalink structure to %postname% only.
Made a few simple changes to the theme – header, footer and sidebar files – which were easy to do thanks to the developer!
Grabbed the existing content from the old site, and created a heap (well 10…) of new posts based on that content.
Tweaked the theme again as the new stuff went in and I could see what needed work.

And that was it! One old site transformed with WordPress!

Oh… there were TWO important changes I had to make that I haven’t told you about yet…

Don’t Lose Your Search Engine Links

Because it’s an existing domain, AND is getting some traffic (25 unique visits a month LOL) I didn’t want to lose that!

So I made a few changes to the .htaccess file to tell the search engines I’d permanently moved some pages…

It’s easy with a 301 redirect.

The format is
redirect 301 /pathto/oldfilename.html http://domain.com/new/
so I did that for all the existing pages… pointing them to their new WP equivalents…
e.g.
redirect 301 /unload http://theinternetcynic.com/get-a-load-off/
and Bob’s your Uncle!

Random Pics

I originally had a selection of random “cynical” images displayed on the old HTML page, using a random pic SSI generator cgi program. Now since I don’t yet know how to do that with php – yeah I know it’s easy, I just haven’t got a round tuit yet – then I needed to include an .shtml page in my sidebar to call the SSI (server-side-includes) program to generate the pics.

How? It’s easy when you put a link the the shtml page within an i-frame, and put that in your sidebar Mix php and html includes? Not impossible!

So that’s about all I needed to do.

Updated an old site to a completely new look and all set for web 2.0 in under about 5 hours.

Now all I have to do is go over to technorati, and mybloglog, and … … …

Happy New Year to you all!

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Just a quickie update…

Stephen — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 23:20:14 +0000

No… I haven’t gone to sleep! I’ve been doing all sorts of fiddling with wordpress over the last few weeks.

In particular, I’ve been setting up a new site called the Perpetual Giveaway – which is designed for Internet Marketers to stay up to date with the latest “free” offers available….

Now the interesting thing with that one is that I’ve had to dive in and actually learn quite a bit of php hacking to modify the theme used so that it behaved properly…

Normally, if a theme doesn’t work, you’d just give it the flick and try another one that did, but I decided that this one was worth the effort to see if I could get it to do what I wanted. And I suppose the “experience” was worth it

Speaking of themes… I was wondering why I haven’t been getting any comments on this blog?

Well… it seems that there must be a plug-in clash which is stopping the comments coming through. You can post them, but I don’t know about it because WordPress doesn’t record them…

So I have to do some more fiddling here when I get a chance to work out which is the offender… and it’ll probably involve upgading to WP 2.3.1 which will be interesting in itself!

I’ll let you know how I go, but don’t be surprised if some of the functions built into this site earlier no longer work!

Ahhh… the delights of running your own web sites!!!!Картини

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Easy Access? HAH! You ARE Jokin’!

Stephen — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 03:16:34 +0000

I’ve just got to tell you how I wasted an hour and a half of my life today…

A customer brought in her computer with a problem… the keyboard just didn’t want to work – at all!

Simple enough you think… so shut down, swap to another keyboard, and restart!

Nope! Same problem.

Hmmm… download and install my favourite crime fighting software – Spybot – and see if that can find a nasty piece of software that could be doing it.

Nope. Not that either.

Another restart to install some windows updates, and then it’s time to hit Google – with a whole string of different keywords that tried to describe the problem…

Eventually, I found one very obscure reference to “filter keys” (never heard of them before), so off to the Vista “Control Panel” and the “Ease of Access Centre” to change how the keyboard works. Under the section entitled “Make it easier to type” is an option to “Turn on Filter Keys”.

Now their purpose is to:

ignore, or slow down brief or repeated keystrokes and adjust keyboard repeat rates.

Well that certainly works! Most normal people (touch typists included) would certainly have “brief” keystrokes… otherwise it’d take forever to write anything!

So next time your computer goes “beep” every time you press a key, and it looks like your keyboard is locked up… you know it’s only your computer making life “easier” for you

P.S. It seems my customer had pressed the space bar several times to insert a few extra blanks into a word doc… after which the computer decided it should ask if she wanted to turn a “feature” turned on to “improve” the performance of the computer.

Yeah… Right!

ikoni

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Fine Tune Your RSS Feed

Stephen — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 09:26:08 +0000

My previous post about using RSS feeds on your site reminded me that I was going to write an article about modifying the content your RSS feed displays.

Now the DEFAULT setup for RSS feeds in a WordPress install is to supply the FULL CONTENT of each post in your feed.

And that’s something I really don’t like… I much prefer to use an SUMMARY of the post – not the whole thing, especially on more “commercial” blogs where you should have more control over your marketing messages… and your RSS feed IS a marketing tool!

So from within WP Admin, click on the OPTIONS tab, and then the READING sub-tab.

Scroll down the screen and look for:

Syndication Feeds
Show the most recent: 10 posts
For each article, show:
o Full text
* Summary

And select Summary!

The click UPDATE OPTIONS.

That publishes the first hundred or so characters of your post into the part of the RSS feed.

But often that doesn’t look quite right… and as I’m a bit of a control freak at times, I want to specify exactly what my visitors can see.

So when I am WRITING a post, I ALSO add in an extra introductory paragraph into the OPTIONAL EXCERPT field (that’s the field under the Upload area on your write posts screen… scroll down and have a look).

And the information I put into the Optional Excerpt field is what gets shown in the RSS Feed.

There’s also another use of this field.

If you use this piece of code:

instead of

in your theme where you might normally see the full content of a post – on the index.php page for example – then you will ONLY see the text from the excerpt on that page. As you see on the home page of this blog (and most of the others I have).

It’s just a personal thing… I don’t like scrolling too much, so when a blogger forces me to scroll through the complete post after post after post scanning for something that attracts my attention… often I will tune out and go elsewhere.

Oh… and if you forget to add the excerpt when you do the post… it’ll show the starting lines of the actual post instead.

NOTE

Because the FULL portion of your post is STILL published to your feed (just in a format normally hidden from view) it means that some feed readers may still show the full post, or content scrapers (naughty software that grabs RSS feeds and places your content on other sites) will still have access to your full post.
икони

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Using RSS Feeds in Your Posts

Stephen — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 01:07:16 +0000

Well keep your fingers crossed!

I’ve just installed FirstRSS, which is a simple RSS aggregator plugin for WordPress posts.

So if you can see the latest posts below from the Perpetual Giveaway, then you know it worked!

With two CSS classes available in the final code, you can easily change the Header and Description of each item in the feed.

FirstRSS ERROR: "http://perpetualgiveaway.com/feed/" NOT FOUND!

I’m more than slightly fascinated by the potential RSS offers people for including additional useful content on their sites. And FirstRSS seems to be a VERY simple way of doing just that!

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Essential WordPress Tweaks

Stephen — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 08:41:02 +0000

A few days ago I said I’d make another post shortly so show you how you can make some simple modifications to your template which reduce the work your server has to do…

Well I’m still working on that (and trying out the techniques on a new blog I’m working on) so it’s not quite ready yet.

So in the meantime, can I suggest you check out Barry O’s 5 Essential Tweaks for All New WordPress Blogs.

Barry’s got some really great information there, especially tip #2 on Update Services It’s a triffic list of places you’ve just gotta add to your WordPress setup!

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Word Press e-Commerce

Stephen — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:01:54 +0000

I’m doing a lot to find out how I can extend my use of WordPress as a content management system and implement it on a lot of the sites that I own.

Several of these sites have e-commerce capabilities – i.e. products, shopping cart, payment facilities – so now my search moves to finding out how a blogging platform can also do e-commerce.

And I’ve just found WP e-Commerce, a fully featured shopping cart plugin suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

According to the authors, it’s great for
» Digital Downloads!
» Bands & Record Labels
» Clothing Companies
» Crafters & Artists
» Books, DVDs & MP3 files
» Members Only / Subscription sites
» Stores with over 10,000 + products

So, I’ve downloaded the free plugin and will play with it on a new site I’m working on.

I’ll let you know how it all goes.

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