Category: Wordpress

WordPress Web Optimization: 15 Tips And Plugins To Monitor, Speed Up And Optimize Your WordPress Blog

September 25th, 2009 in Wordpress | View Comments

As a famous open source and feature-rich blogging platfom, WordPress requires a stable and good hosting environment. There are a few recommended hosting providers listed on the WordPress official website. These hosting providers meet the minimum system requirements of WordPress. However, there are a lot of potential providers that meet the requirements. WPWebHost and Exabytes are among the great WordPress hosting providers.

Bloggers can actually optimize their blogs to consume less server usages and less bandwidth. There are different ways to do the web optimization for WordPress, for example you can install plugins to monitor, tweak and speed up the loading speed of your WordPress blog.

Besides installing the plugin, you can tweak your theme and remove the unnecessary features so that your WordPress system consumes less resource and load faster.

In this article, we are going to look into 15 different plugins and tips to optimize your WordPress site.

WordPress Plugins To Monitor, Cache And Speed Up Your Blog

1. WP System Health

WP System Health can display basic server info and WordPress PHP memory usages. Besides these, the plugin will shows the PHP information that related to WordPress and WordPress database table utilization status. By using the WP System Health, bloggers can easily detect the WordPress system misconfiguration and memory race issues. WordPress blog’s administrators can install this plugin to easily track the system health status and help them easily identify the problem.
Wordpress System Health Plugin

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WordPress Anti Spam: 12 Great WordPress Plugins To Help You Fight Spam

September 10th, 2009 in Wordpress | View Comments

There are thousands of spammers flood your blog everyday, and spam comments is a serious problem for all bloggers. Everyday, we need to go through the comments and read them to make sure these comments are not spam. These spam comments not only waste our time, but also the internet bandwidth.

Today, we are going to look into 12 great WordPress anti spam plugins, which will save your time by blocking spam bots to comment on your blog, prevent them from stealing email address from your articles, and help you fight against these spam bots.

1. Akismet

Akismet is the most popular anti spam plugin for WordPress. In order to use Akismet, you have to register an account at WordPress.com and get the API key. When new comment come to your blog, Akismet will check the comment through the web service to determine if it is spam. Suspected comments will be marked as spam and users can go through them later.

2. AVH First Defense Against Spam

This plugin has a different approach to check spam. When visitors come to your blog, this plugin will first check their IPs, to see whether these IPs exist in the database served by stopforumspam.com, the Project Honey Pot or a local blacklist. By this way, the spammer can be blocked before the content of your site is served.

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Extremely Simple Way To Display Delicious Counts For WordPress Users

September 3rd, 2009 in PHP, Tutorial, Wordpress | View Comments

Delicious is the most popular social bookmarking service. If you pay attention on WDB, then you may notice that most of WDB’s articles are being saved more than 100 times by Delicious users.

There are a lot of ways for you to display your Delicious saved counts. But today we are going to show you how to use Delicious API together with WordPress custom field to save and display the Delicious saved counts.

What you need to know before start writing the code?

  1. MD5 – You need the URL’s Md5 hash value in order to lookup its Delicious saved counts. You can read more by reading the PHP md5() function.
  2. serialize() and unserialize(). We will need to serialize the data before storing to the database, and then unserialize them after retrieve from database.
  3. Custom field. We use the custom field to store the Delicious saved counts to the database. By saving the Delicious saved counts to the database, we can reduce the number of calls to Delicious’s API and also drastically speed up your post loading speed. Imagine, if you have 1k visitors per hour, then you will have 1000 requests sent to Delicious per hour. So, we have to save the counts in our database in order to reduce our server load too.

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WordPress Showcase: 40+ Beautiful And Well Designed Blogs Powered By WordPress

August 26th, 2009 in Insipiration, Web Design, Wordpress | View Comments

In the previous post, we showcase 50 creative portfolios and soon there are readers who request us to share beautiful blog designs. A great portfolio will attract more clients to a designer while great blog design will bring you more visitors too.

Although content is king, but with a unique and awesome blog design, you can attract visitors and catch their attentions. So I would say beautiful blog design together with good content will definitely bring your blog stand out from the crowd.

Since most of us use WordPress as our blogging platform, we decided to list out 40+ really awesome and beautiful blogs powered by WordPress. We will see blogs from other platforms in the future.

1. Assault Blog

Assault Blog

2. BestBlogBox

BestBlogBox

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Ultimate Ecommerce Starter Kits for WordPress Users

July 23rd, 2009 in Resources, Wordpress | View Comments

Buying and selling items online have become more and more important nowadays. Probably you want to create an ecommerce websites to sell your items worldwide.

There are a lot of popular ecommerce solutions, either commercial or open source. Magento is one of the most popular open source platform for ecommerce websites. We had covered various well-designed Magento themes before. But, if you are familiar with WordPress, you may wish to use it as your ecommerce websites too.

Today, we are going to look into various themes, plugins and tutorials to build your own WordPress Ecommerce website. Let’s look into this WordPress Ecommerce solution starter kits.

Ecommerce Themes/Templates

Crafty Cart

Carfty Cart is a famous free WordPress Ecommerce theme. It is being built by Billion Studio especially for King Cart’s readers. But everyone can download it for free. It requires WP e-Commerce plugin to function properly.
Wordpress Crafty Cart Theme

Shopping Cart Themes From ShopperPress

ShopperPress is a complete WordPress Ecommerce solution. Users can download 6 different color themes for free (some of them required you to tweet them for the download link).
Shopping Cart Themes By ShopperPress

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WordPress 2.8 And 10 Things That You Should Know Before/After You Upgrade

June 11th, 2009 in Wordpress | View Comments

WordPress 2.8 had been released at 10th June 2009. There are a lot of add on features and improvements in this version. It is good for WordPress users to upgrade to the latest version. Today, we are going to summarize some of the important features and also something that you should read/consider before you upgrade to the latest version.

Before you upgrade

There are two criteria that you need to consider before you upgrade your WordPress to the latest version.

1. Plugins Compatibility

This is the most important thing that you need to consider before upgrade your WordPress to 2.8 version. We use a lot of plugins for our WordPress blog. At least some plugin to improve our SEO, right? If your plugins are not compatible with WordPress 2.8, it may crash the whole blog! WordPress 2.8 Codex does provide us a checklist that list out plugins that have been tested for compatibility with WordPress 2.8.

Besides the WordPress codex, BraveNewCode also provide us a WordPress Plugin Compatibility Checker that has more details about the requirements for each plugin. Currently, the list contains around 5040 plugins. Below is the screenshot for the list.

wordpress-plugin-compatibility-checker-checklist

If your plugins are not listed in the list, you better contact the plugin author before upgrade your WordPress.

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10 WordPress Plugins That Will Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

June 2nd, 2009 in SEO, Wordpress | View Comments

A good search engine ranking will generates more organic traffic to your site.If you are using WordPress, don’t worry. WordPress already did the hard part for you. But, there are some SEO features that aren’t implemented in WordPress core. You can easily archeive these features by installing plugins.

It is totally up to you that how much plugins you need to install in order to get a better search engine ranking. But try to keep the amount to minimum so that you won’t crash your server. Today, we are going to look into 10 WordPress plugins that will increase your search engine ranking.

1. All in One SEO Pack

This plugin enables certain modifications to your WordPress blog to achieve Search Engine Optimization. For example, you can customize your post title, post description and post tags for individual post. Furthermore, this plugin also has features such as auto generates Cononical URLS for your entire WordPress site and select index/noindex for various archives pages.

2. Broken Link Checker

This plugin will monitors links in your site and list out links that don’t work or any missing images. The reason why this plugin is essential is because you may write an article and link to www.domain.com. This link may goes down in future and become dead ends for search engine. By using this plugin, you can get notifications immediately and remove these dead ends.

3. Google XML Sitemaps Generator

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. A sitemap will help search engine spiders to crawl your content. The generated sitemap also supported by other search engine such as Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.
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