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

Login to your GoDaddy hosting control center.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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!

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:

1. 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.
2. The documentation output by the tool cannot be viewed locally – it must be uploaded to a server as it relies on Ajax.
3. 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.

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.

I should start by saying that I love the Google AdSense program. I have no shame in saying that I’m constantly trying to find ways to make money online, and offering ad space on my blogs and websites is easy. In fact, it’s basically free money. By optimizing my blogs and websites and posting relevant content, I make more than enough money via AdSense to support my web development costs.

However, I have also been a critic of the AdSense user interface. When I heard that Google was integrating AdSense stats into Analytics, I jumped at the first chance to see what I could do.

Two days ago, I added the new code for each of my sites. I waited patiently for a day to see what the stats would show. . . only to find that they didn’t show anything. My first reaction: WTF?

After a bit of digging, I found the source of the problem: I had added the code snippet in the wrong place.

Google (in yet another UI mis-step) tells you to add the code snippet at the top of the page in the tiniest text they could fit onto the page. See if you can (at first glance) find the part where Google tells you to put this code at the top of the page:

Now, imagine that you have 10, 20, or 30 sites listed. . . each with their own code snippet. Google does a poor job of making it obvious that the code needs to be at the top of the page. Yes, they say it, and I should have actually read the text carefully, but good UI design dictates that something this important be in larger text and probably bold.

If Google really wanted to go the extra mile, they could check to see if the snippet was installed correctly, just like they do with the regular Analytics snippet.

Long story short, I’ve updated my code snippets and I plan on checking the stats over the weekend.

One thing I haven’t mentioned is that for my primary domain (you don’t have to add an extra snippet for this domain) the Analytics stats don’t seem to match what AdSense has in its own portal. I’m not sure how to account for the differences (they’re small, but important), so the answer must be one of the following:

1. Google AdSense stats are not accurate
2. Google Analytics stats are not accurate
3. None of Google’s stats are accurate

My bet is that Google AdSense has the correct stats – though I guess it’s impossible to know for sure. I base that guess on the fact that Google has clearly spent more money on the AdSense/AdWords program, and thus the stats are more likely to be tracked as accurately as possible.

I’m curious to see what experiences other AdSense provides have had with their Analytics integration. I may update this post in a few weeks when I have more data to review.

CADIE was released to the world today, and has what may be the worst website I’ve seen ever. Period.

While that might be kinda funny to some people, I thought it was just annoying.

A list of reasons why:

• If you’re using Internet Explorer and have the JavaScript debugger enabled, you’re greeted by a JavaScript error! D’oh! (also true using Firebug in Firefox).
• Using the W3C HTML Validator, the site has 290 errors and 55 warnings. A colossal failure.
• Background music? What website since 1996 has used a background song? If it’s meant to be ironic, then it’s an epic failure.

I did however laugh at the Chrome with 3D link… that was amusing. As was the suggestion to use INTERCAL rather than actually helping you learn a programming language.

All things considered, here’s some food for thought: Since Google just laid off 200 employees, I hope they didn’t spend too much time, money and resources on CADIE because that would really be a bad joke.

As a social networking tool, I can see that Twitter could be fun for people who spend a lot of time online. However, I keep thinking to myself “How is Twitter different than Facebook?”

Facebook

• Facebook offers the “Status Update” feature, which is basically the same thing as the concept behind Twitter (minus the public RSS feed).
• You can upload tons of pictures to Facebook while organizing them into albums.
• Facebook offers an ever-increasing number of useful and fun applications which plug into your profile.

Twitter

• Twitter, as far as I can tell, is simply a tool for updating your status. There’s little or no organization.
• There’s no user profile.
• There’s no 3rd party applications — though I suppose you could write one using your public RSS feed.

The Winner Is…

…I suppose it sort-of depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

I would think companies or individuals who needed a public RSS feed would get more use out of Twitter. Thus, your updates would be viewable to anyone at any time (not just when logged into Facebook).

On the other hand, if you wanted a full profile with the ability to create updates, picture albums, and 3rd party applications then Facebook is the platform for you.

Why not just Blog?

Honestly, I have a feeling I won’t be using Twitter much (unless someone can convince me otherwise). I’ve had a Facebook account for probably 4 years now, and I login every few days — mainly to look at my friends’ profiles. I use the notes application to import my blog’s RSS feed so that my friends (who may not know I actually have a blog) can read my posts.

As for updating my status? My life is pretty uneventful, and I doubt anyone really cares what I’m doing right now, right this very second.  I feel like a blog is the perfect tool for communicating anything worth saying online. I see little value in using Twitter, and Facebook is hardly the place for professional conversation.

You may also have noticed a redesign to this blog. It turns out that creating themes in WordPress is about a gazillion times easier than in Blogger… who knew?

Some of you may be asking why I was frustrated with Blogger. My main beef with the Blogger platform is the constant issues they have with posting comments. I’ve had a handful of readers complain to me directly about it, and god-only-knows how many comments people couldn’t leave for me. That bothers me.

Good day to you, Blogger… I said GOOD DAY!

My response was that, in addition to other things, I read a lot of blogs. I find that blogs can be extremely informative, especially when they’re written by people (or companies) that I consider important and/or influential.

Here’s a short list of blogs that I read:

• Live Search Blog
• Official Google Blog
• Yahoo Search Blog
• Fathom SEO – If you’re interested in search engine optimization, Fathom SEO is a gold-mine of information. SEO is critical for anyone working in website development.
• Design Vitality – A Web/Graphic design company. They periodically post helpful links to graphic design tips/tutorials from around the web.
• Yahoo Development Network – A group of Yahoo developers and details about their projects. Cool stuff.
• Matt Cutts – A really important guy who works for Google.

Now, you might notice that most of these blogs come from the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft). Why would a web developer need to read these?

The answer has two parts:

1. Search engines are essential to a website’s survival. If users can’t find your content, why even have a website?
2. These companies are on the cutting edge of web design… they have to be to keep up with the ever-changing technologies.

Clearly, it’s not an all-inclusive list… but it’s a good start for any beginner.