Blogging

How to make twitter help your blog soar.

19th April 2015 By Jax Blunt 1 Comment

The official Twitter plugin helps you to share your blog using twitter cards to make your links stand out from the card, gives you a follow button and the ability to customise your embedded tweets. Alongside all this, you get access to enhanced twitter analytics, so what are you waiting for?

3 steps to setting up the official twitter plugin on self hosted wordpress.

Install the plugin.

You’ve probably seen twitter cards attached to tweets before now – they’re the ones with summaries or images attached. They stand out from the stream, and give people an idea what they’re clicking through to. The first step to getting all this goodness on your site is installing the plugin. Go to Plugins >Add new and search for twitter. You’re looking for the official plugin. Once you’ve found it, hit install.

[Note, this plugin requires PHP 5.4 or higher. If you’re not sure whether you’ve got that, it’s a question for your hosting provider.]

Setup post formats.

This official plugin uses post formats to decide what card to share with a post. Post formats are theme reliant – if you’ve already got them active, you’re looking for a radio button probably over there on the right, with a list of possible formats as described here. (If you don’t have them visible, the first thing to do is check the screen options (top left) and make sure that you don’t just have the Format option switched off. See the image below for details.)

If Format isn’t in your screen options list though, that means your theme doesn’t support them. Don’t panic, there are still options. For example if you’re using a Genesis theme, you can grab the code snippets from studiopress here and add them to your child theme functions.php. (You’ve got a child theme, right?)

If you’re not on Genesis there’s an informative article here on how to add them to your theme.

Validating your chosen card types.

The other webpage you’re going to need to make friends with is the twitter card validator itself. For each card type you want to use, you need to validate a post with the right markup. This sounds a bit complicated, but it’s as simple as filling in the setup detail in the plugin (basically your twitter handle) and then either editing old posts to be the format you want (from photo and gallery) and submitting the link to the validator. A normal post comes through as a summary card.

For each card, a good picture is a great idea, although a gallery needs 4. Once you have the cards validated against your domain, any time anyone tweets from your site, a card will go along with the tweet, and you’ll get to see all of it in your enhanced analytics (under your twitter profile).

The twitter plugin also offers an enhanced twitter follow button, and tweet button, but to my mind, the cards are the real winner here. Let me know if you get them set up.

How to choose a host for your shiny new wordpress website.

15th November 2013 By Jax Blunt 10 Comments

So, you’ve listened to the talks on self hosting your website, you’ve read around on the issues that using wordpress.com or blogger or other free systems might imply and you’ve decided to take the leap.

You know you need a domain name, and a host. But what are those things, where do you get them, and what do they mean?

Domain names

The domain name is the bit that you type at the top of your browser, the person friendly word based address for your website. (A more technical explanation of all of this can be found here.) You buy it from a registrar, and I tend to recommend that you use a registrar separate to your host, because if it all goes pear shaped you don’t want to be trying to transfer domain names as well as all your files. Personally I use lowcostnames – they are reasonably priced, and don’t sting you on renewal.

Then it’s time to look for a host.

Hosting

When you’re just starting out, you don’t need a dedicated server (the machine that all the actual files sit on), shared hosting will be fine. This just means that you are using a server that lots of other people use too, and that you are sharing the IP – there’s some funky software that keeps all the sites separate both in terms of people viewing it, and in terms of you managing it at the back end.

You won’t need a huge amount of storage space to begin with – because you are optimising your pictures for the web before you upload them, aren’t you? And you won’t need a massive amount of bandwidth (this is how the traffic to and from your site is measured) until you’re seeing a reasonable number of visitors.

Personally, I look for CPanel as the hosting interface – it’s well structured and has everything you can need. It also (usually)provides a one click installation for wordpress, meaning that your life stays simple and you don’t have to start installing via ftp (which is not that difficult, but just adds to the stress levels when you’re starting out). Do check that the host you are looking at does provide this though, it has been known for people to turn it off.

Some recommendations (which include affiliate links – please see my affiliate linking policy if you’ve any queries about this):

TSOhost – I haven’t used them personally, but I know a lot of people who have and seem very happy. Use code blogfest to get 10% off (not sure whether that applies to their lowest priced package).

EUKhost – we’ve been recommending these people for around 10 years, and not heard any complaints.

ezpzhosting – we have a server here, and they are excellent.

You can also check out a variety of webhosting review sites – be aware that many of the links on those will be affiliate links as well.

Once you’ve got the domain name and hosting sorted out, and pushed your one click button, the next step will be making your site look pretty – coming soon.

Twitter cards – what they are and how to integrate.

15th June 2013 By Jax Blunt 2 Comments

Twitter cards are the latest upgrade to twitter that allows you to add extra information to your tweet when sharing a link. They come in a number of different formats – the one that is most likely to be useful to a business or personal blog is the summary card, which adds a headline, excerpt and pic. Big platforms like wordpress.com have already implemented cards for their users – but it’s easy to do if you’re self hosted as well.

Still not sure what they are? Here’s an example – my first tweeted article from technology solved that includes a twitter card.

https://twitter.com/liveotherwise/status/345925038886748160

The card gives you that extra bit under the 140 characters, and hopefully makes your tweet that little bit more enticing to encourage click through. You’ve probably seen them on twitter from newspaper articles at the very least.

As you might imagine, there are a number of different ways to implement them for your site. Yoast’s WordPress SEO has a twitter section under social if you’re using it, or you can go for a standalone plugin that just does the card integration, which is what I’ve opted for this time, using Twitter Cards.

The plugin doesn’t require any set up, but you do then go to validate it at twitter itself. I was a bit dismayed once I’d filled in all the fields to get a message saying I’d get feedback in a few weeks – but being the impatient sort, I tested it anyway, and it worked fine.

Big hint: twitter cards apply to individual articles, *not* to your home page. If you look for the markup in your homepage you won’t find it, and if you try to validate your home page it will fail. Work from a post within your site. (There, I’ve just saved you the ten minutes I wasted doing it wrong earlier!) Also, it seems that short link tweets from the jetpack publicise don’t get the card associated with them, possibly because it’s not showing the validated domain?

And that’s about all there is to it. So off you pop and give it a whirl, and let me know how you get on. If you found this article useful, don’t forget to follow the blog either via email or on G+.

The absolute basics of SEO.

8th June 2013 By Jax Blunt 1 Comment

There’s an awful lot of nonsense spouted about search engine optimisation, as if it’s a difficult topic. It’s not. Here are the basics of SEO as I see them. Your mileage may vary.

A post should be 300-500 words. Good content is written for people, but works for search engines too. A good post summarises the topic in the title, and in the first paragraph, talks about in the main text and summarises in the final paragraph. It’s the tell them three times principle – tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them.

Stick to the point – don’t wander or go off topic. This gives you naturally keyword rich text. (If you’ve got something else to talk about, write another article!)

Use a good platform, like wordpress, which lays the article out well for you. You can use a plugin like wordpress seo from yoast, which will check your text for you and make sure you’ve got the words you need in the right places. WordPress also promotes good site navigation, allowing your readers, and visiting spiders to find all your content easily.

Lift relevant content into your current article by deep linking to related articles. This promotes your authority as having a bank of material on your topic.

And after that, it’s about the promotion, which is where the social media and social search is increasingly coming in. You need to set up authorship, so that search results have that smiling face in them. Brands/ businesses probably also ought to have a page, (facebook and g+) so that they can have a unified presence, but authorship is about individuals.

There’s also something possibly coming in about author rank, which is about authority of that author, but that’s not confirmed yet, so may or may not be worth worrying about. If you’re doing content building and authorship well, author rank should flow naturally out of it.

People will tell you it’s all about the backlinks. Once upon a time that might have been the case, though that can be argued. It’s increasingly less so. Good content will promote inlinks and sharing, which will do the same thing anyway.

So there you go. The basics of SEO coming down, as always to good content, presented well.

How to improve your page load speed using pingdom.

29th April 2013 By Jax Blunt Leave a Comment

Why would you check your page load speed in the first place?

If you’re like me, you hate hanging around waiting for a page to load. So have you considered checking how speedy your own blog is? There are some simple tests you can do to check what’s going on – one resource I’ve used is called pingdom, and it highlighted a quick and easy fix I could do that improved my page load time.

I tested my lovely personal blog Making it up – it’s quite a busy site and so I think it’s important that’s it’s reactive.

First test result

Not bad, but I might be able to do better. So I check through the results and find a warning.

Take action

I’ve got a missing file – icon-dot.png. And as it’s called from my theme it’s going to affect every page on my site. Not good. Very easy to fix though – I go and look for it and put it back where it should be.

And retest.

I’ve gone up two percent against the rest of the test base. Dropped my load time from 2.51s to 2.36s. Not a huge improvement, but if you’ve more than one problem you could easily get a much more exciting result.

Just to confirm:

That’s the miscreant file, returned to its proper position. You can see its little load bar is looking much better.

Pingdom is a great tool for testing out the page load speed of your website – and often you can find little problems, easy to fix, that will make a big difference.

(To be fair, I’d already done a variety of other interesting improvements to help with load time, but I’m letting them bed down properly before I write them up. You’ll probably want to check back to see how I get on – why not subscribe to my RSS?)

WordPress under attack – how to protect your site from the admin account hack.

14th April 2013 By Jax Blunt 8 Comments

There’s an Ars Technica article flying around right now about a massive attack on wordpress sites around the internet attempting to build a super botnet. The attack is working by targeting a particular user account that the vast majority of sites have, including this one.

According to CloudFlare’s Prince, the distributed attacks are attempting to brute force the administrative portals of WordPress servers, employing the username “admin” and 1,000 or so common passwords.

User access to wordpress relies on knowing three things. A user id, a password, and a login location. This attack is assuming that there will be an administrator account with the user id admin, and is then firing a brute force attack trying to decode the password. Advice to change your password is not necessarily going to help – it might be that your password of choice is one of the 1000 common ones being used as mentioned above. If you go for a long password with a mixture of letters, number and characters you’re going to be much safer. But if you get rid of the account called admin, you’re going to be immune to this particular attack at least.

First thing to do, check if you’ve got an admin account. Go into your dashboard, select users> all users. You should see something a bit like this. (As ever, click to see it larger.)

As you can see, I do indeed have an admin account. It will have a strong password – we have a rule that passwords must be at least 8 characters with a mix of numbers, letters and characters. But I’ve decided we’re going to get rid of it anyway.

Step one – create a new administrator level account. If you’ve only got one email address to play with, you’re going to have to take it out of the existing admin account before you can create the new one. Make sure you give the new account a strong password that you can remember.

Step two – log in with the new account. Delete the existing admin account. You might be worrying about what will happen to posts associated with that account – don’t. You’ll get this dialog up with the choice of who to attribute them to. Pass them to your new user.

And there you go. You now have a wordpress installation without the admin account currently under attack across the internet.

Of course, that’s nowhere near the only thing you can do to protect your beloved blog/website, but it’s an excellent starting point. If you want to go into more detail, you might want to explore a security plugin like this one which will, among other things, allow you to rename the admin account without going through the process I’ve detailed here. And the other thing that’s important to do is keep your theme and plugins updated. Like I’m just about to.

If you’ve found this article helpful, please feel free to share it, and subscribe to my blog. Thanks for dropping by.