Category: Intermediate

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Plugin of the week: Autoptimize to speed up your WP site

One of the best ways to get new visitors to your website and to keep them coming back is to make sure your site loads up quickly. Most experts recommend having your home page load in about 2-3 seconds. If your site is taking more than 5 seconds for the average user, then you have a problem. One of the first steps is to get educated with Yahoo’s Y!Slow tutorials.

Next you can take advantage of some WordPress plugins to help speed up your page. We did a quick review of the popular W3 Total Cache a few weeks ago and overall we liked it. It seemed to have shaved off 1-2 seconds from our home page. The problem with W3 Total Cache is that  there are a ton of options and some of the “on” or “off” switches are labeled in a confusing way.

So if you’re looking for something simpler but possibly as effective give Autoptimize a try. Autoptimize’s features are not as extensive as seen by their control panel but nevertheless it has the important features like HTML code, CSS, and Javascript optimization and compression.

We’ve been using it for the past few weeks and think it works really well. We recently did some performance testing with a clone copy of this site on a fresh WordPress installation and noticed that Autoptimizer does make a difference and shaved off 1 second versus not having it installed.

Autoptimize also supports off loading content to a CDN but we haven’t tried it yet but we are going to jump into that water very soon to help speed up our own sites.

Neither Autoptimize nor W3 Total Cache are a magic bullet to solve your WordPress performance problems – especially if your web hosting company has server capacity and/or slow connection issues. But installing the Autoptimize plugin is an almost no-brainer way to squeeze some speed out of your WordPress server.

Get it: Autoptimize

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Creating tabbed content

If you need to have a ton of content to be presented on single page it can be challenging so the reader doesn’t become overwhelmed. Dividing your content into a tabbed module is one possible solution It’s especially helpful if one section of content is going to be really long (tall) and the user may want to jump ahead to a different section. One way to do that would be by putting the content into tabs on a single page.

Some possible use cases are for product reviews which could be broken up into: intro, review, and conclusion. Here’s a quick example – click on tabs!

{tab=Intro}
The product was designed by ACME in 2010. Steve Ive and Johnny Jobs collaborated on this brilliant design.
{tab=Review}
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
{tab=Conclusion}
It’s a great product! Buy it today
{/tabs}

So how do you do this with WordPress? We ran across this plugin called “WordPress Tabs Slides” and it works brilliantly. It’s Ajax driven so it’s almost instantaneous and the user doesn’t feel like they’re being taken onto another page. You use very simple shortcode to mark sections in your content within your post or page and you’re done.

Congrats and thanks to Abdul Ibad for coding a great plugin for the WordPress community.

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Google to fight webspam and improve search engine results

One of the toughest challenges running a web site is to get traffic and attention to your site. As we keep emphasizing, relevant content is the way to get visitors to your site. But what if other people are cheating at using important keywords and sending visitors to low quality spam farm websites? You know the ones with that lead visitors on an endless click spree with pop up windows and signup prompts.

Once Google was the king of clean and relevant results but now these days, Google search results are filled with spam sites which are designed to trick the user into looking counterfeit goods or other nefarious activities. These sites trick Google into thinking they’re relevant with various methods. Fortunately, in a recent official blog posting, Google’s anti-spam team is responding and employing un-disclosed changes to turn back the tide to show relevant content, spam free websites.

So while Google is doing their job, you should keep writing relevant content for your website as much as possible. Use a combination of creating relevant content, Scribe wordpress plugin, and sending out Twitter tweets will drive traffic to your website. You can use tools like PixelPipe to speed things up but there is no substitution for hard work.

Further reading:
How Organized Spam is Taking Control of Google’s Search Results
This article has detailed examples and analysis of spam sites results as of January 2011.

Via: Google Changes Algorithm To Penalize Site Scrapers

Reprinted from StartupInsider.net

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Replace your login with an Ajax plugin

Once in a while you run into a WordPress plugin that just blows you away. I think Login with Ajax is one of those.

On the surface it works as a widget that shows a user/password login field on your sidebar area. It will also show a user’s gravatar photo if they’re already logged in along with logout button.

The interesting stuff is the extended functionality with membership-like login role redirection rules, in other words depending on the user’s role it can redirect them to specific pages.

login-with-ajax.jpg

The plugin also supports re-writing the standard welcome email that’s sent to newly registered users. The developers, netweblogic, should get some thanks from the WordPress community for this excellent plugin.

Get it: Login with Ajax

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A few more thoughts on Mars Edit 3

I bought Mars Edit 3 a few weeks ago and wrote a quick review. So time for an update! Here are some things that I really think make it an indispensible tool.

My favorite is that it’s easy to use to cross post from one blog to another. Simply open an existing post to edit, then from the drop down menu select a new blog site and click on publish. You will loose the existing categories and need to re-define them (understandable) but the tags will stay in-tact.

I also realize this maybe a good offline back up tool for your content especially if you increase the number of posts for it to sync. Update: Just noticed the dialog box to increase the post limit has a performance warning. I’ve asked the developer for clarification.

So four things that I wish it would have are…

I wish Mars Edit had the ability to schedule posts to publish on a future date.
Update: I was informed by the developer that you can actually do this. First, open up the selected post to edit and once open, go to drop down menu for “Post”, select “Edit Date” to specify the future date to publish on. It’s too bad this feature is kind of hidden away and not part of the post editor window.

marsedit-edit-date.jpg

Secondly,  it’d be nice to be able to set line spacing aka leading in the editor. The default font is a bit too small for me but it can be increased but I don’t see a way to increase the leading.

Thirdly, I wish the keyboard shortcut to define a link was not so complicated, a simple Apple + l (for link) would be nice. And why not also allow a right click to assign a link?

And one last feature wish would be for a way to change the author attribution when editing a post.

Other than these relatively minor issues, I readily recommend Mars Edit for writing if you’re on the Mac.

Get it: Mars Edit 3

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Envato now offering Paid WordPress plugins

We ran across paid WordPress plugins now at Envato’s Code Canyon.

Some of the more interesting ones are an S3 backup tool, Cufon font custom replacement, an Ajax based WP admin login lightbox, an FAQ manager, and an internal page linker (that maybe come useless with WP 3.1 coming soon).

We’ve noticed that a handful of similar plugins can be acquired for free at WordPress.org’s plugin library.

For example, their mobile phone theme switcher ($25!) definitely has a handful of free and solid alternatives at WordPress.org. Update: The theme switcher includes 8 themes. Compare with WordPress Mobile Pack (free) and draw your own conclusions.

An advantage of buying a plugin would be if you needed almost guaranteed developer support and more detailed documentation.

Skimming through the various plugin support messages, it seems like most of the Code Canyon developers are being responsive to their customers. So if you’re on a mission critical project, this maybe a viable alternative, after all, we get what we pay for.

Get it: Envato Code Canyon WordPress plugins

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Quick Tip: Cross Browser Test for free with Adobe Browser Labs

When you’re building a site, make sure you check out  your site in multiple web browsers other than the one you use regularly.

The ones you want to pay attention to (other than Internet Explorer and Firefox) are Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

If you’re on a Mac, unless you have a virtualized Windows installation, then IE is easily not available. So a great way to QA your site is with Adobe’s Browser Labs web app that will let you see how different web browsers render your site. They also have multiple versions of IE available. Sometimes the different versions of Internet Explorer renders pages very different from each other.  Adobe Browser Labs is free and easy to use.

Remember that your site’s not going to always look perfect in all the browsers so if you’re 95% “good to go” with most of the browsers especially if it’s IE and Firefox, then launch your site and make post launch fixes.

Get it: Adobe’s Browser Labs

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What’s new in WordPress 3.1?

The WordPress.org team is busy getting WordPress 3.1 for self hosted sites ready to go in the next few weeks. So what’s inside?

Some of the more interesting features that could make the final release:

New front end admin toolbar
This new feature adds a similar toolbar used on WordPress.com and currently available through a 3rd party plugin to the top of your self hosted site. The admin toolbar gives you easy access to posts, pages, and other settings while viewing your published web site.

Enhanced theme search
Remember a few months ago, WordPress.com was upgraded with a slicker new theme finder? Some of these will be headed over to your self hosted WordPress site.

Simpler password reset
Instead of two emails to get your lost password fixed, it’s going to be reduced down to one.

Internal page/post linking
When inserting links on posts/pages you can now select the destination post or page through a pop up window.

There are also various admin UI updates including sortable columns, new pagination style, and enhanced user administration page. We’ve noticed the sortable columns can already be seen in WordPress.com admin sites.

Note that some of these changes may not make the final release so cross your fingers.

Here’s the full list of 3.1 updates at WordPress.org. We’ll keep you updated on the release of version 3.1.

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Setup a project discussion site in minutes

There are a lot of choices out there when you want to use a web application instead of emails to discuss a project. Our favorite full feature app is Basecamp but it maybe too complicated for some users and it’s limited to one project for free accounts.

A more simpler solution might be to use a new web app called Brizzly which was designed to be simple and easy to set up.

It shows the whole discussion on a single web page. If you hate tracking down the latest message thread in your email box, something like Brizzly could work well for you. I took a quick look at it over at my other site StartupInsider.net. Read the mini review…

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Make your own shortened URLs with le petite url

You’ve been probably seen those shortened URLs (example: http://goo.gl/8hsrE) on Twitter or Facebook. What’s the big deal about them? With the shorter URL, they allow more of the message to fit inside Twitter’s 140 character limit. People use a URL shortener website services like bit.ly or tinyurl or Google’s goo.gl.

But now if you have a relatively short domain name, you can do the same while keeping your URL. Install the le petite url plugin and it will display an admin widget in your posts and pages with an auto generated shortened URL. The plugin is well written has a fair amount of features and seems to be reliable so far.

Real world example: the plugin generated this shortened URL for this page:

http://wpverse.com/bfeyi

verus the full URL:

http://wpverse.com/2011/01/make-your-own-shortened-urls-with-le-petite-url/

If I was really clever, I would register WPver.se (at a Sweden registrar) and use that as for both my domain and shortener. That would reduce the length of my shortened URL by 3 characters by getting rid of the “com.”

Quick Tip: This plugin includes a widget to display the shortened URL on the sidebar so your visitors don’t have to run the page through a 3rd party URL shortener and it will allow you to keep your domain name branding.