Archive for the ‘Blogs’ Category

WordPress Automatic Upgrades on GoDaddy

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

It’s been a while since I moved this blog over to WordPress, and my only complaint since the move has been the periodic upgrades needed for WordPress and its plugins.

Why is that a big deal? After all, there’s this prominent link saying “Upgrade” when WordPress (or any of the plugins) detect a new version.

Well… for starters, I’m hosting this blog on a Windows IIS7 machine. To complicate matters, I’m also using GoDaddy. Rather than diving into why either of these factors is complicated (if you’re interested, do yourself a favor and Google it) I’ll simply jump into the solution for automatically updating WordPress on a GoDaddy IIS7 hosting plan.

Step One: Login to GoDaddy

See those tabs at the top? Hover over the “Content” tab, then click on the “File Manager” option.

Step Two: Set the Correct Permissions

Using the file manager, find the directory containing your WordPress blog and check the box next to that folder. (For example: if your blog is installed at /(root)/mysite/myblog/, then navigate to /(root)/mysite/ and click the box next to myblog).

Click the “Permissions” button from the toolbar.

When the dialogue box opens, set the permissions for this folder to “Read/Write”. Be sure to also “reset all children to inherit” these permissions.

Click “OK”.

Step Three: Click the Automatic Upgrade links

Now, login to your WordPress dashboard. Click the “Upgrade” links for WordPress and any plugins which have new versions.

Be sure to properly backup your database and other files as needed!

Step Four: Reset the Permissions

Technically, you probably don’t have to do this — but it’s good practice to never allow applications extra security clearance when they don’t need it.

Simply follow steps 1 and 2 again, only uncheck the “Write” option. Be sure to “reset all children to inherit”.

Any Questions?

This worked perfectly for me, moving from v2.8.6 to v2.9.1. I’d love to know how this works for you!

Posted in Blogs, Web Development | 2 Comments »

The Benefit of Permalinks

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

About a month ago I finally fixed the issues I was having with the permalinks for my blog. I wrote a post titled Wordpress Permalinks on GoDaddy, where I detailed exactly how to fix the problem.

Today I decided to check my blog’s analytic data to see how the new permalinks have affected traffic to the site. Not surprisingly, they helped. . . though I was a little shocked to see a 55% increase in organic search traffic!

Google Analytics

To better explain the graph, the green line shows organic search traffic by day between 7/14/09 and 8/10/09. The blue line shows organic search traffic between 8/11/09 (the day I fixed the permalinks) to 9/7/09. In other words, I’m comparing a period of exactly 28 days before and after I fixed the Wordpress permalinks.

While my analysis of the data isn’t exactly scientific, it would appear that the changes took roughly 2 weeks to affect my search engine rankings. The analytic data shows an increase in traffic from Google, Bing and Yahoo, though my organic search traffic comes overwhelmingly from Google (about 98.8%).

The moral of this story is simple but not surprising: permalinks dramatically help increase organic search traffic to your blog.

Posted in Blogs, Google, Web Development | No Comments »

Wordpress Permalinks on GoDaddy

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Permalinks are one of the best features on any blog platform. Wordpress and other blog tools allow you to customize your permalink format, a fact that has huge implications for search engine optimization and general URL friendliness.

About six months ago I moved my blog from Blogger to Wordpress and began hosting it on my own server (I run IIS7 on a Windows server from GoDaddy). I use GoDaddy for a lot of things, and overall I have good things to say about them.

However, I quickly noticed that GoDaddy didn’t seem to allow WordPress permalinks to work on Windows. Searching Google, you’ll find something like 27,000 results for this problem – many of which are forum posts written by frustrated bloggers with no solution for the issue. In essence, you’re led to believe that any number of problems prevent you from using permalinks on GoDaddy. A few people report success with various solutions, but I had no such luck. Thus, for the better part of 6 months I have been without SEO friendly permalinks.

For some reason, I decided to give it another go today. Magically, I stumbled across a page in the Wordpress Codex that solves my problem! If you look up at your browser’s URL, you’ll notice that I now have permalinks! Yay!!!

Taking a step back for a moment, the issue was caused by a series of misunderstandings on my part.

Windows IIS is (obviously) different from Linux/Apache.
As a result, “mod_rewrite” is not supported – which causes the default permalink options to fail on IIS.
This is not GoDaddy’s fault.
I did not understand how to correctly customize the permalinks to work on Windows.

GoDaddy Wordpress Permalinks

The solution is so easy that I feel a bit stupid for not seeing this before. Rather than bothering to edit my web.config file, I decided to just use the custom Permalink option suggested by the Wordpress Codex. The settings were applied instantly.

If you’re using GoDaddy to host your WordPress blog on a Windows server give that a shot!

Posted in Blogs | 4 Comments »

Ext-Doc: ExtJS-style JavaScript Documentation

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

A while back, I posted about my struggle to find a good JavaScript documentation tool. Over the past week, I began exploring one more option which is very promising.

Ext-Doc is a JavaScript documentation tool which creates by far the best looking documentation. Created and maintained by several members of the ExtJS community, Ext-Doc outputs your documentation using a template mimicking the ExtJS documentation. The tool is compatible on both Windows and Mac/Linux (it runs off Java) and fairly easy to setup.

So far, I’ve only encountered three issues:

The instructional Wiki on Ext-Doc site (hosted on Google Code) is simply terrible. It’s clear that the focus has been on developing the tool itself, but there’s close to zero documentation supporting it. If you need help, you have to search the ExtJS message boards.
The documentation output by the tool cannot be viewed locally – it must be uploaded to a server as it relies on Ajax.
The documentation tags are different from some of the other JS documentation tools

The first issue is obviously frustrating, particularly as the Java JAR file will hit errors and give you no reason why anything fails. Searching through the ExtJS forum and talking with the community has helped me get started, but this is a huge flaw and is (in my opinion) preventing Ext-Doc from being the defacto JavaScript documentation tool available. If they can get their Wiki up to date then this tool will certainly make an impact.

The second issue is actually pretty easy to work around on Microsoft Vista. Since Vista comes packaged with IIS7, you can simply tell the .BAT file to output the documentation to your local host’s root. This way, you can update and view your docs without having to copy/paste or FTP files to a web server.

Lastly, the tags used to document your JavaScript code are different in Ext-Doc than in JSDoc Toolkit (which is what I had been using). I don’t know if either tool is actually consistent with documentation standards in JAVA, but I wish that all of these JavaScript tools would use the same set of tags. It would make testing other tools much easier, and consistency in documentation is really important. Douglas Crockford (if you’re reading this), can we PLEASE get this discussion in front of the ECMA Standards board?

At the very least, I’m biased towards this new Ext-Doc tool (not really so new, actually) because I use ExtJS and I love their documentation. Once I get my tags updated, I think I’ll be very happy with this tool.

Posted in AJAX, Blogs, ExtJs, Firebug, JavaScript | 2 Comments »

Viral YouTube Marketing Example

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

I just saw this post on the YouTube Biz Blog.

A company named BooneOakley (BooneOakley.com) has done something very cool, using the YouTube annotations feature to present each “page” of their site as a YouTube video. It’s a very cool idea, though one I don’t really agree with entirely.

First of all, BooneOakley is a full-service ad agency. They have redirected their web domain to their YouTube channel, effectively piggybacking on YouTube’s bandwidth and syndication.

They’ve obviously done something right here, creating a viral web campaign to spread their name. I had never heard of them before (not that I know anything about ad agencies), but if YouTube is willing to blog about them then this viral campaign is a wild success. If I’m blogging about how YouTube blogged about them, it’s an even more startling success.

On the other hand, YouTube doesn’t give you the ability to build a broad SEO campaign. Sure you can optimize your videos within YouTube and Google video search, but that doesn’t mean customers are going to find you in MSN, Yahoo, YellowPages, etc. Maybe that’s a consideration BooneOakely decided wasn’t important for them (they’re targeting a specific market I know nothing about… very possible).

Nevertheless, I don’t understand why they didn’t simply build their flash videos and embed them within their own hosted domain – thereby allowing for organic SEO, landing page construction, and more control over every aspect of their web presence. They could still have their videos on YouTube (a great idea!), but I honestly think that redirecting their domain to YouTube was a missed opportunity for broad SEO growth.

My friends at Fathom SEO might very well disagree with me. . . but I guess I’m entitled to my opinion. Kudos needs to be given to BooneOakley for their viral campaign, but I’ll be curious to know how long it takes them to rethink the need for a static website.