A Fool of Myself

In the last month or so, I’ve set up a few brand new blogs, and for each one, I used the same skeleton of a checklist to keep myself on track. Truth be told, setting up a blog on its own domain from scratch can be a bit tricky if you’re not paying attention, so I thought I’d share my checklist with you all today.

Part I: Set Up Domain Name

Perhaps the trickiest step of the whole process. All web hosts are different in how they instruct you to set up add-on domains, subdomains, name servers, etc., so even if you’ve done one, you haven’t done them all. Just follow the directions that your web host gives you, and you’ll be fine.

1. Purchase domain name.
2. Direct domain name servers to my web host.
3. Set up domain name as a subdomain on my web host.
4. Direct domain name to subdomain.
5. Create FTP account for new subdomain.

Part II: Install WordPress

This is my overly-simplified version of the Famous 5-Minute WordPress Install. Again, this can be tricky if you’ve never done it before, but it’s really not too difficult. Just dive in and do it.

1. Create MySQL database and unique user and unique password.
2. Customize wp-config.php file to match MySQL information.
   • Change table prefix from wp_ to my site’s initials (i.e. sja_). (This amps up the security of your database.)
3. Upload WordPress files to the designated directories.
4. Run WordPress installation.
5. Change admin password.
6. Add myself as a new user.
7. Review and change default settings.
8. Create a sample post with a sample comment.

Part III: Upload and Install Plugins

For each of the plugins below, I upload them, activate them, and review/change their default settings. All of the blogs I manage get these plugins:

1. Akismet
2. All-in-One SEO Pack
3. Broken Link Checker
4. Feedburner Feedsmith
5. Google Analytics for WordPress
6. Google XML Sitemaps
7. MobilePress
8. Subscribe to Comments
9. WordPress.com Stats
10. WordPress Related Posts
11. WPtouch iPhone Theme

Part IV: Set Up Google Webmaster Tools, Analytics & Feedburner

Google provides three services that I find essential in my blog management: Feedburner, Analytics, and Webmaster Tools. If you already have a Gmail account, you can use it for these services. In the case of the Springfield Bloggers Association blog, I created its own Gmail account in case I pass the blog development to someone else.

1. Create and optimize Feedburner RSS feed for blog.
2. Create and optimize Feedburner RSS feed for comments.
3. Add both new RSS feeds to Feedburner Feedsmith plugin settings.
4. Add blog to Google Webmaster Tools dashboard.
5. Verify blog by creating and uploading the specified file to my blog’s directory.
6. Submit sitemap.xml file created by Google XML Sitemaps plugin to Webmaster Tools.
7. Create Google Analytics account for blog.
8. Add blog’s tracking number to Google Analytics for WordPress plugin settings.

Part V: Set Up Blog Theme

This step can take a long time if you’re picky. If, however, you comfortable using a theme as it was designed, it goes pretty fast.

1. Install desired blog theme.
2. Customize header with unique banner.
3. Add copyright information to footer.
4. Customize sidebar with desired widgets.

Part VI: Complete Miscellaneous Tasks

And here’s where you’ll begin to feel like you’re blogging because you are. Yea!

1. Create blog categories.
2. Create blogroll.
3. Add pages and fill with content.
4. Write a few starter posts.
5. Delete sample post and comment.

Once I’m done with all these tasks, I spend some time tweaking the design (I’m picky) and fine-tuning my content. In some cases, I’m ready to share the blog with the world right away, but for other blogs, I’m collaborating with other bloggers, so announcing the blog is put off until it’s exactly as we want it.

Hope this post helps you organize your new WordPress.org installations! (And certainly, if there are steps you think I’ve missed, send ‘em my way.)

I’m one of the lucky few who do not yet have a smartphone. That’s right, no iPhone, Blackberry, or Android for me; I’m stuck with an ancient brick of a phone, which is fine because in general, I hate the telephone. But Chris has an iPhone, so I’ve become quite aware of the need for mobile web sites, for I always hear his complaints when he’s on a web site that does not have a mobile version of itself. After checking the browser statistics on LifePointOzark.com and SarahJoAustin.com and noting that on both sites, access from a mobile device has increased even in the last month, I’m more than convinced that our blogs need to be “mobilized.”

So what do we do? The easy answer is to add some mobile plugins that will do all the work for you, and I will get to those plugins tomorrow, but today, let’s consider seven best practices in our everyday blogging to make them mobile friendly.

Best Practice #1: Base Your Blogging on Text
Unless you have a photo or video blog, more than likely, your blog posts are text-based, and text-based posts have smaller file sizes than those with video, photos, or graphics. Smaller file sizes allow for faster load times on a mobile device, which increases the likelihood that a reader will get to your blog and read it.

Best Practice #2: Optimize Media for the Web
If you must have video, audio, photos, or graphics in your blog posts, that’s OK. As you edit your media, find a balance between quality and file size. No, your media shouldn’t look or sound like crap, but at the same time, you shouldn’t ask your readers to wait five minutes for something to load. For images, this means using a compressed JPG format and setting the resolution to 72 dpi; for video, this might mean sacrificing HD quality; and for audio, this might mean compressing an MP3 file.

Best Practice #3: Add Title Attributes to Links
As good bloggers, we should already be adding title attributes to our links for search engine optimization, but I’ll confess, I just started being deliberate about this on SJA. For every link you add, include a title attribute that tells the reader more about the link before the reader clicks on it. Give your reader all the information they need about the link, so they can make an educated decision about whether or not to follow it.

Best Practice #4: Add Alt Attributes to Images
Assuming you’ve followed Best Practice #2 and have only essential graphics in your post, your images are already worth your readers’ time. But some readers turn off graphics to quicken load times, which means they won’t see your illustrative image. Instead they’ll see the image description from the alt attribute. Give them incentive to turn images on by adding a short but powerful description of the image (i.e. not picture of flower but pink and white stargazer lily, close-up). Think of an alt attribute this way: How would you describe the image to the blind? Whatever your answer, that should be your alt description.

Best Practice #5: Don’t Resize Images with XHTML
When you resize images with XHTML, your web page loads the full-sized imaged before resizing it to what you’ve specified. This takes precious time on a mobile device. Instead, edit your image in Photoshop, iPhoto, Picasa, or GIMP; note the dimensions; and add width and height attributes to your image tag. Both Blogger and WordPress allow you to resize images with XHTML when you add images, but don’t take them up on their offer.

Best Practice #6: Keep Text and Style Separate with CSS
This goes without saying for all the blogging platforms I’ve used, but I mention it nonetheless. If you add styles to your XHTML to specify how your text looks, your mobile browser has to “think” through all those styles at it loads the page. Plus, it increases file size. Instead, keep your blog’s structure and text in the XHTML and keep your visual specifications in CSS files. As an added bonus, you can create a mobile style sheet that will render your blog exactly as you like in your mobile device without affecting how it renders on a regular screen.

Best Practice #7: Minimize Javascript
Javascript gives our blogs functionality that is often useful on a regular screen but usually unnecessary on a mobile device. Sacrifice this functionality, and you’ll make your blog load faster by decreasing file sizes. If you don’t want to sacrifice functionality, add Javascript by linking to an external file rather than embedding the Javascript code into your XHTML. As with media, there’s some give and take with this best practice. For example, because I want to collect traffic data for my blog–wherever it is accessed–I leave my Google Analytics Javascript in my XHTML.

Faster Mobile Blog = Faster, More Accessible Blog
These seven practices will not only minimize your file sizes and speed up your blog on mobile devices, but they’ll do the same for your blog on a regular browser. Not only that, your title and alt attributes and CSS will make your blog more accessible to non-traditional readers: primarily those with visual disabilities who use screen readers or those who still have dial-up connection speeds. It’s good blogging either way.

Stay tuned tomorrow for tools that will make mobile blogging and reading easier for you and your readers.

So, so, so much thinking. I am never bored with web development because there is always so much to research, study, do, and test. In the last week or so, I’ve been studying the traffic sources here at SarahJoAustin.com and over at LifePointOzark.com, and at both, we’re getting a growing amount of search engine traffic. That’s good, and I’m pretty sure I can attribute a lot of that growth to the use of the SEO All-in-One Pack, a WordPress plugin that allows me to add description and keyword meta tags to each post. Bueno.

But I’m concerned about a drop in the traffic from referring sites and direct traffic. It seems as though people are finding specific posts on SJA and LPO, but they’re not sticking around to check out the rest of the site. No bueno.

So I’ve made some adjustments to both sites and their RSS feeds, and I’m keeping tabs on the stats to see if anything changes. And in case it matters, I tend to develop SJA and LPO together because they use the same WordPress core and many of the same plugins, but their audiences are somewhat different. SJA has about 40 subscribers via RSS while LPO has about 130 via email. SJA has more followers on Twitter, but LPO has more fans on Facebook. The SJA readers tend to be a bit more on the bleeding edge of the Internet than LPO’s readers. There’s some overlap, but not much.

This was the state of SJA and LPO:

• SJA and LPO were both imported to Facebook notes (my profile and the LPC page, respectively).
• SJA and LPO were both fed to their respective Twitter accounts.
• Both SJA and LPO RSS feeds were full text.
• SJA’s Twitter account is fed to my Facebook status, so my tweets about SJA go to Facebook.

And this is what I changed:

• Both SJA and LPO RSS feeds are summarized. About three lines of text are sent to the RSS feed, which means that I lose all text formatting and the first few sentences must compel people to click through to the web sites. Bleh. I don’t think this will be an issue for SJA, but I’m curious about LPO since many of its readers subscribe through email and are used to getting full text in their emails. At the same time, as LPO increases its content, summarized posts will keep the email brief and scannable.
• Both SJA and LPO are still fed to their respective Twitter accounts. This allows readers an alternative method of subscribing to the RSS feed (by following these accounts). I added instructions to the LPO site for receiving updates via text message (via Twitter), so people can receive our feed via email, RSS, or text message/Twitter.
• SJA is no longer imported to Facebook notes. My friends were commenting on my notes/posts in Facebook rather than commenting on SJA, which meant they were getting my content on FB rather than on SJA. I’m also working to delete my 300+ imported notes from FB. My friends can still read my headlines/recent posts in my FB status and can follow a link to my blog.
• LPO still imports to Facebook notes. Now these are summarized notes, so LPC fans still have to go to the web site for complete info.
• Both SJA and LPO utilize the WordPress 2.3 Related Posts plugin. This plugin finds related posts for the current page, and adds them to the bottom of the post. My hope is that SJA and LPO will be a bit more “sticky” and keep readers around for longer spans of time.

It’s been about a week, so any “trends” in traffic are hard to decipher with so little data; however, there is some difference in the stats from Google Analytics:

• On SJA, direct traffic is up about 26% and referring site traffic is up about 22%.
• On LPO, direct traffic and referring site traffic are both up about 1%.
• For SJA, clicks from Facebook have increased about 31%, 23 clicks to 35 clicks.
• For LPO, clicks from Facebook have increased 257%, from 7 clicks to 25 clicks.
• Visits, unique visitors, and pageviews are up on both sites. On SJA, 30-47%, and on LPO, 2-5%.

My best guess for the increase in SJA traffic is the closure of BloggersGuide.net last week. Any traffic that was going there is being redirected to SJA. And for the increase in LPO Facebook clicks, we added a bunch of old pictures to our page and discontinued our Picasa web albums, and our people are getting tagged in those albums and those tags are appearing in news feeds across Facebook. There are too many variables to know whether my traffic plan is working, but I’m hoping these mini trends are a sign of what’s to come. As always, I’ll keep you posted.

In the blogosphere, Blogger and WordPress are two very popular blogging tools, but they’re popular for different reasons. Blogger tends to be the beginner’s place to start because it simplifies the art of blogging and makes it easy for the novice to understand. On the other hand, WordPress tends to be the intermediate and advanced bloggers’ tool of choice not necessarily because it’s more complicated than Blogger but because in general, it produces more professional-looking blogs. I’ve used both tools, and I like features in both.

After about six months of serious blogging and reading blogs on a variety of topics, I switched my personal blog from Blogger to WordPress. When I made the announcement, several people asked me why I made the move, but I had a hard time nailing down the reason. I guess I was just ready to try something new—to take my blog to the next level—and I thought WordPress was the place to start.

Even though I had researched WordPress and how it functioned differently than Blogger, a few surprises slapped me around once I made the switch:

1. No custom URL. With Blogger, I was able to direct the original site (sarahjoaustin.blogspot.com) to a custom URL (www.sarahjoaustin.com), which eliminated the ‘blogspot’ in the middle. If I wanted to do the same on WordPress, I would have to pay $10/year and keep my blog hosted at WordPress or host my blog on my own. Instead of forking over the cash, I made due for a few months by forwarding www.sarahjoaustin.com to sarahjoaustin.wordpress.com, but I always hated having ‘wordpress’ in my URL, so I eventually broke down and bought my own hosting.
2. No JavaScript; therefore, no Google Analytics. Too many scripts on a web page can slow down or crash your browser, so WordPress prevents this problem by banning embedded scripts (including JavaScript) on WordPress.com-hosted blogs. On Blogger, I used Google Analytics to track my site statistics, but because I couldn’t embed my itty-bitty piece of JavaScript in my WordPress site, I could no longer use Analytics. But WordPress has its own stats tracker in every blog’s dashboard, so I could still see the most pertinent statistics for my blog. I just started hosting my blog on my own external server, so now I can embed JavaScript again, but even with Google Analytics available, I still use the WordPress stats for day-to-day updates.
3. No HTML or CSS control. Both Blogger and WordPress have some great themes and templates, but I have some HTML and CSS skills, and I like to customize templates to meet my needs. With Blogger, I could completely manipulate the code to make my blog function as I wanted (i.e. change layout, colors, type, images, etc.), but on WordPress, once I committed to a template, I was stuck with the template designer’s choices. Some templates allowed me to change header images, but that was about it.
   

This sounds like a list of reasons why I hate WordPress, but it really isn’t. When I made the initial switch, I was frustrated because I didn’t know I’d have to give up the control that I loved having with Blogger. I wished someone had lined them up side by side and told me how they were the same and how they were different, and that’s what the table below is designed to do. On the left is a list of features that are important to me as a blogger, and in the WordPress and Blogger columns are the details for each tool. If the specs are different for hosting on WordPress and Blogger than they are for hosting on an external FTP server, I’ve listed those, too.