Plugin of the Week: Google XML Sitemaps

Here’s our Quick Tip of the week and Plugin of the Week rolled into one. If you have not signed up for Google’s webmaster tool, we highly encourage you to do so ASAP. First like most of Google offerings, it’s free. What will it give you? It will give you some insight into the way your web site is seen by search engines, namely Google (of course), in terms of navigable pages, keywords, speed, and overall catch any problems that may prevent your site from being included in search engine results. Of course Google webmaster tools plays nice with Google other webmaster tool, Google Analytics too.

One of the things that you’ll need to take advantage of  are the webmaster tools is to submit a sitemap to help search engines make sure all your content is indexed/crawled. There’s not much rocket science in choosing a WordPress plugin to do that, we like the aptly named Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. It can be automated to generate a new site map whenever your site is updated.

Some SEO experts swear generating and submitting a Google XML sitemap is a standard best practice item, we can’t argue against since it takes you only about 10 minutes or so to do this.

Keep track of all your WP sites with a dashboard

If you’re a hardcore WP proponent with a lot of WordPress sites under your control, WP Status Dashboard can help you keep an eye on them. This self installed app can display all your WP site status on single page with the following stats: search engine indexable status, WordPress version, and number of plugin updates available. You could make this dashboard page one of your default browser home pages every time you launch your web browser.

This app costs $20 at CodeCanyon. It requires a bit of technical knowledge – you’ll need to know how to setup a MySQL database file. It’s too bad that this app itself is not built with WP to make it really easy to use.

Get it: WP Status Dashboard

Great visual tools for communicating with clients

I know this post isn’t WP related but if you’re doing a lot of web design work, using either app mentioned below could save you a ton of time…

You’ve probably heard the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words”? If you and your client just can’t get on the same page using email or even voice communication, why not try using a visual mark-up tool like Skitch or Jing? Skitch is a Mac-only tool that let’s you quickly snapshot your screen, draw arrows, write up annotation/notes, and publish to a web page very, very quickly. How quickly? Well how about under a minute start to finish?  Skitch has been in beta for almost 2 years and they’ve finally released “v1.0” that’s even more polished and better that I ponied up $15 for one year of “pro” features.

How about Jing? Jing’s advantage is that it captures up to 5 minutes of your on-screen activity and you can record your voice during the capture to annotate it. Jing’s also has a cross platform – it works on both Mac and Windows. Like Skitch, I paid for the pro version for $15/year. The only draw back is that Jing’s workflow is not as quick as Skitch but it makes up for that with the screencast function.

Get it: Skitch | Jing

W3 Total Cache debugging

I’ve been going crazy installing the W3 Total Cache plugin on all my WordPress sites up until a few minutes ago without a hitch. On my 4th site, it returned 3 permission errors which were quickly solved by applying the magical 777 permissions to the folders. The fourth error message that stumped me was “advanced-cache.php is not installed.”

This one is pretty easy to fix. First, download a copy of the W3TC plugin onto your computer. Extract the files to a folder, then upload the file inside the zip file called “advanced-cache.php” to the root of your “wp-content” folder of your site using FTP.

Thanks to A. Fatih Syuhud for the fix.

Quick Tip: Preview a Theme without a Plugin

Did you know that you can preview an installed WP theme without having to install a new plugin?
This would be useful if you’re switching over a WP site to a theme that’s a work in progress but didn’t want public visitors to see it yet.

Simple add this to the end of your published site’s URL:

?preview=1&template=twentyten&stylesheet=twentyten

For example, this site with the Twenty Ten theme would be:

http://wpverse.com/?preview=1&template=twentyten&stylesheet=twentyten

Simply replace the name of your theme in the example after both template and stylesheet equal (=) signs. What if you’re not sure what the exact theme name is – for example if the theme name has spaces in it? To find out, go to the “Manage Themes” page, then hover your mouse over the “Activate” button of the theme you want to try out. In the bottom status bar of your browser, you’ll see the theme name that you’ll want to use.

Speeding up your WordPress site – Part 1

In the next few days, we’ll look at some WordPress plugins that will help speed up your site.

Why speed up your site? If you have a WP site with more than 50 visitors a day and have 100 or more pages, you need to keep your site running fast as possible so people don’t leave your site when it takes more than 4-5 seconds to load a page. Also search engines will be more likely to give you higher rankings if your site loads faster than your competitors.

To speed up your front end pages such as home page, a cache system will store a copy of that page as static HTML which will load much faster in your visitor’s browser than WordPress having to dynamically generate a page on the fly. Here are three page caching plugins:

WP Cache is one of the original plugins if you are running older versions of WordPress. The last time it was updated was in 2007, so use with caution.

Here’s another plugin based on WP Cache, it’s called WP Super Cache. The last revision was in September 2010, so it’s well supported. I tried this plugin in a few weeks ago and had some error messages pop up that I couldn’t debug at the time so I disabled it. You may have better luck if you have the attention and time to spend on it.

W3 Total Cache screenshotAnd we’ll save the best for last: W3 Total Cache. Like the previous plugim, the last update was in September 2010, so it’s pretty recent by most standards. They claim up to a 10x improvement when the plugin is completely setup.

After taking a quick look at it, W3 Total Cache (W3TC) seems pretty damn comprehensive including a “preview” mode. You can actually preview your site without enabling the cache for all visitors. Cool, huh? They even support propagating your content on a Content Delivery Network.

My choice? Right now I am running W3TC to give it a whirl.

If you’re interested in seeing why your site may seem slow, give Firebug and Y! Slow plugins a try. Once installed in Firefox, enable the “Net” dashboard at the bottom to see which items on your page are taking their sweet time to load.

If you want someone to do the hard work for you, give my friends at LightSpeedNow a ring. They have a free site analysis tool like Firebug but you won’t have to install anything, just paste in your URL and go.

Easy ways to update your WordPress site

Sometimes I don’t feel like updating my blog (like this site) with new content because I have to login to my WordPress dashboard and click a bunch of stuff. There are a bunch of ways to avoid having to do that including WordPress’ new iPad app, 3rd party services like Posterous, or a web browser plugin.

One of my favorite ways to do that is using a web browser plugin called “ScribeFire.” It’s a plugin for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari that adds a button the bottom of your browser. Simply click on it to bring up the writing screen, start typing, and click on “Publish”.  Of course you’ll have to first set it up by entering your WordPress URL and credentials before hand. But once that’s done, you’ll have almost instant access to adding content to your WordPress blog when you see an interesting article on the web! There’s a full formatting tool bar with bold, italics, and inserting links. It even has a draft save mode so you can come back later and finish off that long post you’ve been putting off!

Get it: ScribeFire