Best Of
Following are some very useful links if your looking for some software.
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WordPress Hosting
A short blurb on WordPress and some of your options when it comes to Hosting.
What Is WordPress?
“WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on web standards and user experience we can create a tool different from anything else out there.”
Why WordPress-
In our opinion, WordPress is one of if not the best open source Content Management Systems (CMS) available. You may have noticed that I revered to WP as a CMS, that’s because WP with its hundreds of active developers and plug-in library has evolved into more of a CMS than just a blogging platform.
WordPress.org, WordPress.com, or ?
WordPress.com: This is the free site place. Though you may feel like you need to read no further, here is the downside. Yes, the price is right, but you may find that you are very limited on the themes that you have available along with the plug-ins. If what they provide works for you then you will have a very low maintenance site. The upside with the dot com sites is they always have the latest updates and you will have little to do but add content.
WordPress.org: WordPress.Org is the open source side of the project. This is for people who want to self host on their own servers or a shared hosting environment. The upside is that you will have full control over your site, can add whatever theme or plug-in you would like. Where some shy away is that they don’t want to invest the time required to learn the program to successfully have a solid web presence.
This is the option we have choosen due to the flexibility it provides, but then this is our business.
TruPressNet.com: What we are able to offer is the best of both worlds. We will install and maintain your site to be sure it has the latest updates, plus we can offer you the flexibility you may need when it comes to custom themes and plug-ins.
A Blogger’s Worst Nightmare.
I can only speak for myself, but I’m sure that most people who have ran a blog in the present or past will agree with me in saying: It is the endless amounts of Spam in comments. Right now I am averaging between 400 – 600 of these a week. The majority of which are generated by auto bots.
The dilemma is that you don’t want to make your site overly restrictive and make it easy for the user to be able to communicate without opening up the site to tons of bot generated comments. I have found that most of this type of spam involves drugs, sex or the such. I now find myself in a position to either turn off commenting, which defeats the purpose of having a blog or community interaction or require commenter’s to register on the site.
I have decided to tighten security by requiring anyone who wants to comment will need to register on the site. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but in the long range, I hope this will give me added time to dedicate to content and conversations with people who deserve it.
Previously many commenter’s would have to wait till I got around to approving their comment. Now all a site member will need to do is register and confirm their email and your comments should start appearing instantaneously. This will also allow us to have greater flexibility in blocking those who are looking for free advertising or just evil.
I am sorry for the hassle, but going through hundreds of spam comments each week is more than I want to contend with.
Anyway, thanks for understanding.
-Rob
Want To Register Now?
Do It!
Categories: All, Tips & Tricks, WordPress Tags: amazon, Blogging, color 000000, community interaction, endless amounts, free advertising, SEO
Small Business Podcasting
Podcasting, or Netcasting is an area that many small or home based business owners overlook. Today, it takes very little to create your own radio or television program with little or no outlay. In this article we will discuss the why’s and how-to’s of this subject.
Why:
The biggest and most expensive issue for most small businesses is marketing and advertising. Every small business owner has a message they want to get out to their designated demographics. Creating a Video On Demand (VOD) or Audio On Demand (AOD) program can help in this endeavor. Running an ad on a radio or television station is no longer guaranteed to reach your target audience. This is because, these mediums are not the only way your current and future customers receive their content.
Content:
Once you have made the choice to do it, now you need to decide what to use for content. This of course depends on your business and your target audience. Its a no-brainer for Real Estate or Mortgage Brokers, but for other types of businesses it becomes a little more difficult. Many businesses will do a show that discusses their upcoming sales, discounts, etc., where others will focus on community events or a meet the owner type of program. This is totally up to you. The point for many is that, as your customers start to follow your show, they learn more about your business, the owner and staff. Its all about building relationships.
Software:
The tools that you will need, will of course depend on what type of show you plan on doing. Some start out with just an audio show, then move up to video. Much of this will depend on your audience. Following are some suggestions that we have used to help our clients set up their own shows with:
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Hardware:
Hardware again depends on the format of your show. For most shows you will want to have a computer that has a built-in webcam or you will need to purchase a USB Webcam. The other item that we recommend is a microphone headset. You wont need to purchase the most expensive on either of these items, but don’t buy the cheapest either.
Where To Upload:
Making your show easily found is not as difficult as it sounds. Below are some sites that you can upload your finished product to. It is highly recommended that you have a blog to create an RSS feed of your show. This will make it easily found by Google and other search engines. There are many free blogging platforms available such as Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad. It is also possible to add a blog to your current site, this is probably the most desirable.
- Your Website
- iTunes: Desktop Install
- YouTube: http://youtube.com
- Feedburner: http://feedburner.com
Well Thats It…Happy Casting.
Sample Video:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk06RAi5gjU
Categories: All, Business, Featured, WordPress Tags: based business owners, building relationships, Content Once, Happy Casting, netcasting, Sample Video, Skype, small business owner, Software, target audience
Our Favorite WP Plugins
We have a group of plugins that we use on almost all of our WP sites which is built on WPMU and now 3.0. Here are the plugins we use the most and can recommend.
Windows Live Writer – A Nice Surprise
I use WordPress as more than a blogging platform, more along the lines of a Content Management System. When it comes to formatting pages, the existing visual editor; TinyMCE, leaves me wanting more control.
Windows Live Writer has undergone some serious improvements. So serious, I’d wager it rivals many, if not most other desktop blogging clients — free and commercial. Here is a quick overview of its Pro’s:
- Advanced text formatting features, such as headings and tables, are included in the WYSIWYG editor.
- Extensible via plug-in (Much like WordPress)
- Auto Save
- Choice between HTML/XHTML on a per blog basis. This is good if you’re a stickler for clean and well formed code
- Supports FTP upload to multiple blogs
- Supports date modification, which means you can set a post to publish in the future (or the past if you so choose).
- Tag support with a variety of providers, including custom providers.
- Advanced image insertion that supports thumbnails and lets you add some basic styles, such as drop shadow and photo style borders, to your images. You can even apply some more advanced image styling such as black & white conversion, sepia tone, as well as others.
- Video insertion
- Customizable ping list with trackback support
- In line spell checking
- Multiple writing views including layouts that mimic your blog and a full in software preview of the entry as it would appear on the blog.
Even though it doesn’t have everything on my wish list, it does come pretty darn close. Plus, the fact that developers can create plug-in’s to add functionality that’s not included by default only instills more confidence. In fact, With the growing base of programmers willing to develop plug-in’s, I can definitely see it going places. Microsoft has a winner on its hands with this product, but they can’t allow themselves to get too lazy.
For me, the fact that it saves me countless hours when it comes to formatting either pages or posts makes it a winner in my book
My best advice is to download the software (It’s Free), play around with it for a few weeks and decide whether it has all the features you need to help your productivity. Be sure to check out the plug-in repository.
Categories: All, Software, WordPress Tags: content management system, image insertion, image styling, style borders, video insertion, Windows, Windows Live Writer, WYSIWYG
WordPress – CMS Lite
Whats All The Buzz With WordPress?
Many of us who use and love WordPress realize that WordPress is not so much a Blogging platform, but has evolved into a Content Management System, much like Joomla or DotNetNuke. As a Technology Consultant, I have opted for WordPress for many of my clients due to its ease of use and shorter learning curve.
Many of my clients are small business owners, or non-profit organizations here in Tucson Arizona. They are not overly geekish and have a limited background when it comes to web technology. I have found that after the site is installed and layed out it takes about an hour of training on the admin section and they are pretty much up and running and able to modify or create new content for their site.
Read more…
Podcasting Made Easy
Having your own podcast can be as easy as posting to your Blog.
For many the thought of having your own podcast sounds like a real time hog, not to mention recording our own voice for others to hear can be somewhat frightening. Well, for WordPress bloggers this just got really easy.
I came across a plugin that will convert your articles into audio MP3 files along with integrating your podcast with Feedburner and iTunes. The Odoigo plugin has the following features:
Turn readers into listeners, and transform your blog into a high quality, ad-supporting broadcast that can vastly expand your audience reach!
- Automatic podcast generation.
- Near-human” quality text-to-speech.
- Listen Button feature deployed in next to no time for WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, BlogEngine.NET and Terapad platforms.
- Detailed download statistics.
- Make money from embedded ads.
One of the greatest items with Odoigo is that the files created are really above average when it comes to Text To Speech and with some minor adjustments in your witting style you can really produce some great sounding files for your readers (listeners). Here are a couple of tips that may help:
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Use of heading tags in your articles.
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Use of quotes and blockquotes in your articles.
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Use 2 spaces between sentences.
Give it a try.
Categories: All, Tutorials, WordPress Tags: Blogging, button feature, feedburner, human quality, Listen Button, minor adjustments, NET, quality text
Locking Down WordPress
So if you care about what’s being said on your site then you end up spending a lot of time moderating whats being said. That brings us to; locking your site down. I may be writing this too soon, but I think I have found a fairly good system to fight this.
First, I decided not to allow links or HTML inside of comments, I know, drastic. But hang in there with me. My thought is do I care about the number of comments or the quality of comments. So what I started with was the basic setting inside of WordPress. Under Settings-Disscussion, I added the following to my Blacklist so any comments with the following will automatically be sent to moderation. Those terms are: ‘http:’ and ‘https:’, so now any link will be sent to moderation.
Second, I added a plug-in called: Comment Link Manager
I also added an announcement on the home page letting visitors, that we were no longer allowing links in comments. Now if everything works right, people who want to comment can do so and their comment will be posted without moderation. Anyway, I will be posting updates to let everyone now how it goes.
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Posted by Rob Truman - December 8, 2010 at 8:31 pm
Categories: All, WordPress Tags: admins, attribute, Comment Link Manager, HTML, moderation, whitelist, wordpress