Archives for January 2007

Blogging Tools: Introducing 103bees

January 17, 2007 by 3 Comments

 

I've been using the 103bees.com service for a couple of weeks now, and it's definitely a must-have search engine traffic analysis tool for any serious blogger.

 

 

From the 103bees official website:

What is 103beees.com?

It's a real-time online tool for webmasters and bloggers that is highly focused on natural search engine traffic analytics. It provides tons of detailed statistics and in-depth information on the search terms that drive visitors to your webpages.

103bees is an indispensable tool for search engine optimization and internet marketing – everything you need to know about your search engine traffic in one place!

This tool allows you to easily get various views of your search engine traffic in real time. At any time, you can view a list of the latest searches which brought visitors to your pages, as well as see your top landing pages, top keywords used or SERP rankings of the all search requests which generated traffic. All this is provided for free, and you get a 30 days of historical data to analyze for as many websites (you call them projects in your 103bees account) as you like.

I'll write a review for it in the coming few days, but for the moment just wanted to share this tool with you and point you to a great review by Darren Rowse at ProBlogger: 103bees: Search Term Analytics Review.

Filed Under: analytics, blog, SEO, tools

WordPress 2.0.7 is ready

January 16, 2007 by Leave a Comment

WordPress 2.0Yet another update of WordPress has been posted yesterday: WordPress 2.0.7.

Here is what the WordPress official blog has to say:

Recently a bug in certain versions of PHP came to our attention that could cause a security vulnerability in your blog. We’re able to work around it fairly easily, so we’ve decided to release 2.0.7 to fix the PHP security problem and the Feedburner issue that was in 2.0.6.

Here are the changes which the above comment mentions:

  • Security fix for wp_unregister_GLOBALS() to work around the zend_hash_del_key_or_index bug in PHP 4 versions less than 4.4.3 and PHP 5 versions less than 5.1.4 with register_globals set to “On.”
  • Feeds now properly serve 304 Not Modified headers instead of mismatched 200/304 headers (a.k.a. the FeedBurner bug).

For a full list of changes since 2.0.6, please have a look at the original post with WordPress 2.0.7 announcement.

You can't be too secure, and with this in mind I've just updated both my WordPress-based blogs and strongly suggest you do the same.

Filed Under: wordpress

Questions To Ask Yourself Before Starting A Blog, Part 2

January 15, 2007 by Leave a Comment
This post is a second part of the Questions To Ask Yourself Before Starting A Blog series, with the next three questions you should be asking yourself before starting a new blog.


4) Is your niche blog friendly?

With everyone blogging about something today, you probably don't want to end up being one of the invisible and rarely visited blogs about something static and not interesting.

Due to their nature, blogs are best to cover dynamic and ever-changing areas of our life. That's why it is important for you to make sure that the niche you'll be blogging in is dynamic enough. You will want to have a natural flow of ideas and news for your blog, and unless your topic is popular and dynamic, you will run out of ideas faster than you think.

 

5) Have you done your research?

We all are unique human beings, and quite often we get amazing ideas worth living and dying for, but please don't take it for granted that you're the first one to blog about your topic. Chances are, you're not even in the first hundred! But here is the key: being the first to blog about  something doesn't mean being the best authority on the topic. What I mean by this is that there are many topics which are greatly covered by hundreds of blogs, yet only a handful of these are considered to be authorities in the field.

With great content and determination, you  can always join the ranks of authorities, but depending on the niche it may take you longer than just a few months. For most niches, it takes years to become really popular and trusted.

That's why it is important for you to do your research and estimate your chances of becoming a leading blog in your niche (providing that's one of your original goals).

 

6) Have you got enough content to start with?

Starting a new blog is always a commitment. If it's not your first one, you will probably have an idea of how much of your time it will require for you to maintain yet another blog. But if you're thinking of starting your very first blog, your estimations are practically bound to be wrong.

In any case, it is always a good idea to have enough content to start with. Write at least 10 posts, so that you can regularly post them while working out your blogging routine and coming up with new posts. The idea behind this is that if something goes different from your plan, you will have a number of posts to cover the delay until you're ready to go on with posting new articles.

The more content you have before you start your blog, the better. Please take your time and prepare full posts, ready to be posted at any minute. Don't count raw ideas or sketches as ready posts – these will need more of your time before you can post. What you need is a number of polished-off articles waiting for you to click the Publish button.

 

This concludes the second part of my Questions To Ask Yourself Before Starting A Blog series. Please feel free to let me know your answers to the above questions, or suggest more questions which you believe to be important for any blogger.
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Filed Under: blog

Moving To or Launching A New Domain

January 10, 2007 by Leave a Comment

I've switched my Personal Development Ideas blog from greyspk.com domain to a new one – personaldevelopment.ie. It was a planned event and I do know what to expect from such a move – for instance, my Google rankings will inevitably drop and will be regained in 3-6 months, after most of my newly located pages will be indexed and available by Google search.

But SEOmoz have just posted a great article on Expectations and Best Practices for Moving to or Launching a New Domain. What I really liked about this article is not only the realistic expectations set for both scenarios, but also truly the best practices for achieving your goals.

Here are just some of the really good advices given in the article:

  1. Submit and verify your sitemap to Googe's Webmaster Central.
  2. Get as many links to your new domain as possible
  3. Update all your own links to reflect the new domain and not the old, redirected one.
  4. Monitor your logs and contact major resources linking to you to update their links

An excellent article, Rand! Thanks a lot for sharing!

Filed Under: blog, google, promotion, SEO, sitemaps

Creating a theme in WordPress

January 10, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Rachel Cunliffe has started this year with a wonderful series of posts on creating a WordPress theme.

First off, she's given us a list of useful resources for creating WordPress themes, and then came the actual posts.

So far, there are two posts describing two steps of creating a theme:

  • Creating a layout

    In this post, Rachel talks about the basics of your new theme layout. Before you get to actually code your WordPress theme, you really need to get absolutely clear about what you want your visitors to see on you blog and why.

    Your layout is supposed to be a well-thought positioning of your blog elements like logo, main menu, actual posts and additional content.

  • Creating a theme

    This step helps you getting started with actual coding – it explains how to create your theme template and CSS style definitions. Not only examples are shown and explained, but you can also download a ZIP archive with two files of the new theme.

 

I think this series will prove to be invaluable to anyone who's interested in creating WordPress themes of their own. I personally had never created a theme from a scratch, but have customized a number of them – so it is a good opportunity for me to understand the whole process even better.

Filed Under: blog, design, wordpress

Google Reader Gets A New Feautre: Trends Page

January 4, 2007 by Leave a Comment

 
Matt Cutts has just pointed out that Google Reader has a new trends page, which shows you a nice-looking summary of what exactly and how much you read daily.

I really like this new feature: it will save a lot of my time now because I've been trying to identify similar trends myself. Just recently I've deleted 50+ feeds from my Google Reader, because they produced 3+ posts each on a daily basis, and were not useful at all. This allowed me to concentrate on the rest of what I have so far:

PerfectBlogger - Google Trends

Note: my blog design does not allow for wide images, so I've combined two portions of the report myself by aligning them vertically.

Google Reader Trends page for your account is accessible using this URL: http://www.google.com/reader/view/?page=trends. 

Update: I see Darren Rowse has just posted his first impressions of this page, too. Please follow this link to see some of his Google Reader trends  and how they correlate to Darren's reading and browsing patters: Google Reader Adds Reader Trends. Very interesting. Thanks for sharing, Darren!

Filed Under: blog, google

Security Alert: templates.php XSS vulnerability in WordPress

January 3, 2007 by Leave a Comment

Thanks to Thilak of TechBuzz, I've just learned about wp-admin/templates.php (part of your WordPress administration functionality) seems to be vulnerable to a rather nasty XSS exploit.

All the versions of WordPress prior to the future 2.0.6 are vulnerable to this issue, so it's highly recommended to back up your current templates.php file and replace it with a patched templates.php file (mind you, it's a WordPress 2.0.5 version of this file).

For more details, please read the WordPress Persistent XSS post by David Kierznowski who is credited with discovering this vulnerability. David has also posted a proof of concept for this exploit: WordPress template.php exploit.

For a structured description of this problem and a fix for it, please consult the relevant Security Focus discussion.

Filed Under: blog, wordpress