But as I was trying to come up with some new graphics for the homepage, I noticed that my images were being served from a Jetpack-based URL. This served as a good reminder to be mindful of the size of the new banner I was making.

I thought I'd share some thoughts about image size with you if you're interested. After I finished my design, I went to export the image from Photoshop and this is what I found:

Using PNG

The image is 680px by 358px. Initially, I wanted to export it as a PNG to take advantage of the transparency in case I decide to change the background color where the image is going to be displayed. This means that If I changed the background on the website, I wouldn't have to update the banner image to match. But this made the total image size 167KB. This image alone would be almost as heavy as the homepage without it, as you can see in the previous post the homepage is only 228KB right now and I'd love to keep it under 1MB ?.

Using JPEG

The easiest answer to reducing the size of this image was to use the JPEG export option instead of PNG. JPEG has better compression and the size difference is a significant gain. Compromising on making the background a solid color, white in this case isn't a big deal, so I tested that out. Using JPEG reduced the image by over 50% to a size of 89 KB. Huge difference!

But then if I'm going to use JPEG I also should also reduce the quality during export. I remember reading years ago somewhere that people can't tell the difference between an image exported at 100% quality vs one exported at 85% to 87% quality so I turned the quality down to 85%. This brought down the size by another 36KB for a total size of 52KB; that's a little bit less than one third from the original PNG size. Can't complain about that!

But what about WebP

Ideally, I should use WebP if I want the smallest size, but for the sake of expediency, I'll leave that for a round of fine-tuning that I can do after launch. Doing this right now could add more work, more time, more plugins, or all of the above. And I'm already late in launching this. Besides, I did a quick test by converting the full-size PNG that I mentioned to WebP and it turned out to be 47KB, not a huge difference between that and the JPEG.

TL;DR

If that was too geeky for you, or too long for you, when you create images you need to keep quality high but also mind the size of the images so your visitors can have the best and fastest experience you're able to offer. In this example, I reduced an image from about 167KB to 52KB, a size savings of about 70%. If you're using Photoshop, use the export to JPEG feature, not the save as feature, and reduce your original image quality to 85%. If you're not using Photoshop, maybe you're using something like Canva, you can find a ton of image optimizer sites out there.

The post When Almost Every KB Counts appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I'm super excited about the speed of the website. That's the main reason I'm doing this update, so check out the screenshot at the end. And stay tuned, since I will detail everything I'm doing to build this site.

There were a couple of things I didn't really think about until a few days ago. Refunds and returns.

I didn't think much about returns and refunds because I'm just excited about starting this. However, as an internet marketer and affiliate marketer, I'm very familiar with refunds and chargebacks. One of the rules of thumb you must follow in my business is not to count your money until the time period for chargebacks has expired.

This is easy with affiliate marketing because most of the time, your commissions don't get paid out until said time period has expired. For example, you don't get paid until 30 - 90 days after a sale has been made.

Since this ecommerce store involves physical products, I just didn't think about how I would handle returns and refunds. This is the first time I sell a physical product directly as the seller, so by nature I am on the hook for providing a return system or mechanism for my customers.

I would like to offer a no questions asked 30-day return policy, so part of setting up this new business requires I set up a mailing address for customers to return products when needed. I believe I need to upgrade my PO Box from a regular personal PO Box to a business PO Box so I can receive mail under the website name instead of my personal name.

I don't believe I can afford to offer to cover shipping costs for returns, we'll see how that goes. As far as refunds go, the payment processor (Stripe) should make it easy for me to issue refunds.

Now, about that speed.

I think this is pretty amazing. Load time is under one second, I'm pretty happy about this. I know that I have to add a few more things to the home page and possibly add one or two more plugins that will inevitably add to the page size and the load time, but I'm pretty happy starting at this point.

What is running on the new ecommerce site?

First, hosting.

Hosting is provided by GreenGeeks, they haven't really let me down and obviously they can deliver a solid experience. The website is built with Kadence and although I haven't done my own testing, Adam from WP Crafter says it's one of the fastest and leanest themes out there right now.

There are 20 active plugins at the moment. But the one that really made the load time and speed results you see above is WP Fastest Cache. Prior to installing and configuring this caching plugin, the site was loading at about 2.7 to 3.5 seconds. I was extremely surprised at the difference it made to setup WP Fastest Cache.

Plugins running

On my previous post I said I was doing this for almost $0.0. I think that's a bit inaccurate since some of the stuff I'm using costs quite a bit of money. But when I wrote that I was just thinking about not spending any money out of pocket.

In a recent post on Tiktok, I said I'm going to show you how to do this for about $100.00 to start. So I'm going to try to do that.

With that said, the actual list of plugins is this:

• Elementor by Elementor.com (free).
• Elementor Pro by Elementor.com.
  • Get Elementor here.
• Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights by MonsterInsights (free).
• Jetpack by WordPress.com by Automattic (free).
• Kadence Blocks - PRO Extension by Kadence WP.
• Kadence Blocks – Gutenberg Blocks for Page Builder Features by Kadence WP.
• Kadence Pro - Premium addon for the Kadence Theme by Kadence WP.
• Kadence WooCommerce Elementor by Kadence WP.
• Kadence Woocommerce Elementor Pro by Kadence WP.
• Kadence WooCommerce Extras by Kadence WP.
  • Check out all the Kadence WP products here, Kadence has a great free suite.
• Printful Integration for WooCommerce by Printful (free).
• Printify Shipping Method by Printify (free).
• Rank Math SEO by Rank Math (free).
• Really Simple SSL by Really Simple Plugins (free).
• WooCommerce by Automattic (free).
• WooCommerce PayPal Checkout Gateway by WooCommerce (free).
• WooCommerce Shipping & Tax by Automattic (free).
• WooCommerce Stripe Gateway by WooCommerce (free).
• WP Fastest Cache by Emre Vona (free).

I know I will be adding Optinmonster and possibly WP Forms soon, but since I don't want to annoy visitors by implementing the wrong pop-up, and I don't have a clear vision of how I would use WP Forms yet I'm going to hold off on those two for now. They're also not free.

Why aren't you using Inmotion Hosting?

As you know Inmotion hosting is my host. I've been with them for about 7 or 8 years and they are great. But my hosting account with them is based on a VPS and I wanted to keep this new project separate from my other projects.

I also want to demonstrate that it can be set up on any hosting, from basic shared hosting like the entry-level plans at Greengeeks (they also have VPS and dedicated servers), all the way to fancy setups like a VPS, dedicated or WordPress managed hosting like WP Engine.

One last word about "Free"

Like many Internet users, I often fall into the trap of expecting things to be free. But as a business owner, I can tell you that free isn't necessarily the best way to go about it. In many cases I've tried doing things for free, or with free options, free software, etc and then I come to find out, that for a nominal fee all the issues I've been going through are simply washed away.

Please keep this in mind when you're trying to start a blog, or an ecommerce site like I am. Sometimes plugins are totally free, and amazing, like Woocommerce, Rankmath or even the free Kadence WP version. But sometimes plugins, or extensions cost $50 or $100 and they save you dozens, if not hundreds of hours in the long term so consider paying if the solution is right for you.

The post eCommerce with WordPress Update. Questions. Speed! appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I've heard something similar a dozen times, sometimes even a WordPress expert will say this. "WordPress is just a choice, like any other website platform." 

That is wrong and inaccurate. And in this video I tell you why. I have worked with WordPress since 2004. I have also worked with dozens of other website and content platforms. Sharepoint, Joomla, Mambo, Netsuite, Concrete5, Blogger, Medium, Wix, Squarespace, Drupal, Shopify.

The Main Reason WordPress is Better

Video Timecodes

0:00 Why talk about this
0:40 Inaccurate comparisons
1:25 Analogy to car buying
2:20 WordPress in a class of its own
2:57 WordPress' DNA is world-changing
4:30 Free and Open Source
6:40 Turn it into a profitable site
7:30 WordPress resources are available
8:45 A matter of function
9:12 Principle, functionality, freedom.

Video Transcript

Video transcript and closed captioning for the video provided by Otter.ai

Hey guys, what's up Oscar here for Notagrouch, Notagrouch dot com go visit, go check it out, click like, subscribe, all that good stuff. And Whoa! They're making big changes here. I just drove by a Trader Joe's they're remodeling.

So in any case, I want to talk to you a little bit about WordPress yet again, what a surprise, right? So the reason I want to talk to you about it is because some people say, Well, isn't, isn't this better? And isn't this better how come these people use this. And that's really just... it's a normal question I get all the time. The analogy someone said... I was in a conversation and one person said, "Well, why can I just use this" or "why can I just use that?"

I mentioned names a minute but the other person said something that is completely inaccurate. And I want to make sure that if you hear this you know that that person is doesn't know what they're talking about at all. The person said, "Oh, you know, it's just a matter of preference. It's like, when you go buy a car, some people like to buy a Toyota Camry and other people like to buy a Honda Accord."

And that's absolutely not the case. using WordPress versus other systems is not just a matter of choice. There are so many different layers of why WordPress is better, that it doesn't really compare in that way.

For example, some you know, if you go get a Honda, or Toyota or, you know, if you're looking between, say a Honda Accord and a Toyota Camry, the two most popular cars for each of those brands, you are going to get more or less the same thing, just different brands, slightly different features. The buttons are going to look different, where the shifting gear is maybe different. Maybe one has a little bit of technology that the other one doesn't have and things like that.

At the end of the day, it's a vehicle that sits five people that takes you from A to B, with really good gas mileage, really good reliability, outstanding warranty support all that stuff. Price may be a little bit different, but they're in the same class.

WordPress is in a class of its own, because it is both free, but also profitable. If you run a website with WordPress, you can make a profit. And it's not WordPress that does it is what you do with it. If you run a website with, say, Blogger, your profits are going to be very, very hard to find. It's just very hard to get a Blogger website to last a long time and also be profitable. They're great for some things, but not as flexible as WordPress. There's also the principle of how WordPress is built that makes us so important. WordPress has changed the world. Some of the other things like Shopify...

take Shopify, for example, Shopify is a good example of a very specific purpose. Shopify does e commerce. And you can do e commerce in a matter of minutes. You can be up and running, and you're ready to go.

But if you want to deviate from that just a little bit you can't. Is difficult. If you want to add custom code, you're going to find it's very expensive to find a good developer that will do not only what you need, but that will do it right. It's also it also costs money up front you have to have, you have to be paid for it right away on a monthly basis, ongoing, whether you're selling your stuff or not. I've seen so many people have a great idea to sell a product. "So I just start a Shopify store" and they start a Shopify store and three months later, they quit because they haven't made money and they paying into their monthly fee.

And they give up. There's nothing wrong with Shopify, there's nothing wrong with Blogger. There's nothing wrong with any of it. Well, I mean, there are some things wrong with some platforms. But for the most part, all of them have their strengths and their weaknesses. WordPress included. But the reason why you use WordPress, for me, from my perspective is because it's free, free beer like free beer, you download it, and now it's yours. You can use it, do whatever you want with it. It's also free and open source, which is critical. Open Source is one of the most important things that people don't know or understand.

Open Source is the idea that you can look at the code of the software that you're using for review or modification. And you can make modifications with that restriction that is crucial to humanity as a whole. Other big open source projects that you may know about and not realize they're Open Source, are Firefox, the underlying operating system for Mac, you know, OS X is built around open source. Windows is now doing a lot of open source stuff.

And the reason why that's so important is because it prevents people from doing malicious stuff with your code from taking over and doing a tech monopoly, like, you see Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all those people have a hold on their audience. And you don't really know what's going on. You don't know how the algorithm works. You don't know how the code works. You don't know if the code is tracking you. How far is tracking you what the extent of it is tracking you and all those things.

That's because it's a closed source. Open Source means you can review the code, you can change it you can say, Oh, you know what, I don't want this piece of code here. You can remove it. Of course, you have to have the ability to do that. But any PHP developer can do that. PHP is a language in which most of WordPress is written. Now they're introducing a lot of other stuff. But it's still open source. You can go and read the code, understand what it does modify it, you can build a new edition for it and say I want WordPress to do this this way.

And you do it without asking anybody for permission, you simply just do it. And that is what is so beautiful about WordPress. That is why I recommend WordPress, more than any other piece of software out there in the part that is profitable. That is really up to you just like it is up to you to make Shopify profitable. It is up to you to make WordPress profitable, you can install a plugin named WooCommerce. And you can start running a web shop just like Shopify, maybe even better and it didn't really cost you anything.

You can start putting content out there and put some links to affiliate products and start selling that you could start a website where you collect payments for whatever type of service you offer, the list goes on about all the things that you can do with WordPress. But if you go into Shopify or say Squarespace, now you you're stuck with them, you can't really change a lot of the stuff in there, you don't know how the code works. So you don't know what kind of things you can do to improve that code or to modify it to suit your own needs.

And that is what really gives you a lot of freedom with WordPress that I think is the best thing that you could have. WordPress takes a little bit of learning. But there are so many there are so many resources out there that help you get started, how to post, how to do basically everything. And all you have to do is watch some YouTube videos. When you say "Oh, how do I make a link?" You go to YouTube and say how do I make a link on WordPress? You will find a three minute video on how to do that.

Say "how do I post a picture on WordPress" you go to YouTube and look for that somebody has a video teaching you how to post a picture on YouTube on WordPress, whatever example I can come up with. There is somebody out there that shows your own WordPress. For some of the most advanced things that you can do with WordPress, or maybe I should say sophisticated, like how do I build an affiliate marketing website that may require you to watch a few videos, or even buy a training course that tells you how to do that.

So it all depends what you want to do, but the knowledge is out there for you to just use it. With Shopify, they may or may not have a knowledge base, or they want you to do things certain way, not necessarily the best way for you. So the analogies are not the same. It's more like saying, oh, the difference between WordPress and all this other platforms. It's not just a matter of preference, it's a matter of function.

It would be more like saying It's like buying a Honda versus buying an 18-wheeler. Yeah, they both take you around and they both take fuel have wheels to move, but they're not the same. So don't let people tell you that is just a matter of choice. No, it's a matter of principle. It's a matter of functionality. It's a matter of freedom. It's matter of a lot more than just a choice. So, consider WordPress next time you use this and as I mentioned before, use wordpress.org not wordpress.com.

Talk to you guys later. Bye.

The post WordPress is Better Than Other Platforms appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Maybe you are wondering why. I've been a proponent of those themes for such a long time and this decision may seem puzzling to some, especially if I built a site for you.

But the truth is that WordPress has evolved a lot since I first made Studiopress my main home for WordPress themes. They no longer serve my goals and unfortunately, they aren't keeping up with current trends in technology, or design.

For a long time, I ignored the quasi-documented themes with missing information or the little quirks and glitches you face with every single installation of any Genesis based theme. The documentation is incomplete and the themes aren't consistent from one to the next. Some haven't been updated in years.

In their defense, It's worth noting that for a while I really loved the Genesis themes. I told everybody to use them, I promoted them as an affiliate. But this feeling of being left out to dry has been lingering for some time. They do have about 23 themes that have been updated in 2020, but you would think that after all this time they could have figured out a way to make the themes share the main code and make update them all every few months. Little details like this matter, in my opinion. In fact, I don't think these details are so "little" and they also speak volumes about the business decisions behind the brand; we won't get into that for now.

About two years ago, Studiopress was acquired by WP Engine. A questionable move by WP Engine my opinion, but I'm sure they had a good reason. I thought this would re-invigorate the theme collection, maybe standardize them and give them a refresh, but that didn't happen. They have since added them for free if you are a customer with WP Engine.

I thought I needed to move off of Genesis when I saw this acquisition, but I didn't. Call it procrastination or life just getting in the way. But then COVID 19 happened. That's the main catalyst that brought this change.

With some of my clients going out of business or scaling back their digital marketing spending, and some of my income decreasing due to the lockdown, I decided to go back to building more sophisticated websites for clients.

I still offer the free website setup and configuration to anybody that needs it, but as I pursue new high-end clients, I needed something more robust and modern to offer as a product and service.

What's Next?

Over time, this will happen again, things change and what's great today may not be great tomorrow.

I tried using Genesis one more time a few weeks ago, and frankly the process of getting the theme to look remotely close to my wireframe, let alone what the client actually wanted was a total nightmare. It was soul-draining and I knew there had to be a better way.

I had watched some of WPCrafter's videos about Elementor and it looked great. Based on a video from Adam Preiser, I decided to go with Blocksy, a free minimalistic but highly configurable theme, paired with Elementor.

After a day or so playing around with the Blocksy and Elementor combination, I had most of the things I needed figured out for a facelift I needed to do for a client. Shortly thereafter I delivered a the new site to the client. You can see it live here.

We have a phase two coming soon that addresses the e-commerce part, but it was critical that we revamp the front page and main portfolio. It would have taken me weeks and weeks to do this with Studiopress, and only if I didn't call it quits half way through.

Right Now...

Notagrouch.com has always been my website playground, and with a little more time on my hands right now, it was time to refresh this site. At the moment of this writing, the site is running on a plain vanilla Blocksy setup.

I haven't integrated Elementor into it yet, but I thought I would start with the theme first, complete a content and plugin audit, delete plugins, clean up other content, then layer Elementor on top. Thanks, Adam for the great recommendation!

Thank you for reading and I'll update you soon to show you how it goes.

The post Bye Bye Genesis Themes, It’s Been Good. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I have a WordPress "kit" which I normally use to set up a new site, then I remove the stuff I don't need. This process saves me time and effort and I do it mostly to get my clients' sites up and running within 48-72 hours.

I highly recommend you do something like this if you're setting up more than one site each day. But sometimes, check yourself too.

Just recently I started working on the revival of an old blog I had, and this time I decided to do it all from scratch, and one small step at a time. Instead of using my go-to kit.

The joy of seeing a blank slate, unencumbered by dashboard pop-ups, and admin notices that scream I should do this, and go here, and upgrade that and the other was refreshing.

Out of curiousity, I headed over to Pingdom to test this fresh WordPress install plus Wordfence, and it just made me rejoice. Check it out.

I wonder how it will be when the site is "ready" for public consumption, with the plugins I need, widgets in place and whatever theme I decide to go with. But if I can keep the site loading under 2 seconds, and the page size under 1.5-2 MB.

I'll post an update when that happens.

Update ( a few hours later)

After I started added new content and trying to backfill the archives, I decided to add a theme. I went with Maker Pro, from the Genesis collection by Studiopress.

I was pleasantly surprised with the results. Performance grade went up one point, page size dropped almost by a factor of 5, load time went up by 0.03 seconds which is negligible, and there were 5 fewer requests than before.

This just reaffirms my affinity for the Genesis themes.

The post The Beautiful State of a Virgin WordPress Installation. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I've been using WordPress for a long time, and I still feel this way sometimes. The theme just doesn't look or feel like the demo. I can imagine if you're new to WordPress, this is even a bigger issue for you.

Sometimes starting from scratch is too intimidating – or too time-consuming.

The latest Genesis themes, using version 2.8 or above when running on WordPress 5.0 or later, include a new "onboarding" tool. This allows Genesis theme users to import some homepage demo content, just to help get things started.

This means that you can make your site look like the demo really quick and then you can build from there and customize your site to your heart's content.

I'm slowly embracing the new Gutenberg editor, or as WordPress is referring to it, the new "block editor." And the StudioPress folk being the smart people that they are designed the latest Genesis themes so you can build your home page with the new editor.

The way to take advantage of these new features with Genesis is really simple. Just install the theme as you normally would, and the onboarding tool will walk you through the process.

This new feature only requires a config file (loaded using the new config loader), and no special code!

You can check out the onboarding feature in action by using the Genesis themes, available here.

In case you didn't know, I love and use Genesis for almost every project I work on, this includes my WordPress sites and those I build for clients.

The post The 1 Reason Genesis Themes Makes It Easier to Get Started With WordPress Quickly. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

It was released officially a few months ago and it wasn't received well. The ratings for the plugin in the official WordPress repository are dismal with an average rating of 2 stars.

The ratings are one thing, but then if you look, the comments aren't positive either.

That's rough. As someone that has been part of software projects and various website launches etc, it's really rough when your userbase dislikes or outright rejects your new update or your new development.

It hurts.

It has sparked so much backlash in some circles that a group of people even started a fork of WordPress.

If you don't know what a fork is, in short, a fork means someone has split the original source code and decided to develop it further in its own separate path.

It's easy to see why people aren't receiving the new WordPress block editor well.

At first, glance, when you try Gutenberg, you'll notice that your writing canvas, has been dramatically changed. You no longer have a blank canvas to start typing on. Instead you add content in terms of "blocks."

What used to be a straight forward proposition, you know, writing, is no longer that simple. Now you have to add a block and then start typing, but if you press return then it creates a new block.

Adding a new block as you press enter may seem logical within the context of this UI, but it isn't. If you think about the places where people write, and how they do it, you'll think of Gutenberg as being totally alien.

When you write an email on Gmail, it's just text. You can add fancy formatting later. When you write a document on Word, it's just text, you can then add fancy formatting. When you use Google Docs, same thing.

This new design, and maybe even paradigm breaks the process of writing. It's distracting and inefficient.

If you want to add an image, you also need to add a block. And each block has its own properties and settings. At first, this can be maddening.

After some time with it, maybe you'll figure out how it works. The problem right now is that the learning curve is so steep that people are simply giving up and moving back to the classic editor.

If you are feeling like this is what you want to do, you just need to install the Classic Editor as a plugin and activate it. This will then revert the editing window in WordPress back to the way it used to be before Gutenberg.

The WordPress development team has said they will support the classic editor for years to come.

Credit where credit is due

As someone who has been involved with software development, qa, testing, and training, I can appreciate the work that the WordPress dev team has put into this. It shows.

For example, a few months ago you couldn't even delete text that spanned several blocks. You had to select each block, then press delete to erase what you wanted. That is fixed now and if you just press your backspace key, it'll keep deleting stuff until you stop, even jumping to the block above, and continuing on.

That's how you expect that to work. But so many things are still quirky.

Not Out of The Woods Yet

Though many things work, and many bugs have been squashed, we're not out of the woods on editing problems just yet. You can't seem to be able to select several paragraphs of text and delete them at once.

When you try that, the browser seems to take over and instead of deleting the paragraphs, it tries to jump back to whatever previous page you were on before you started editing.

? #annoying

No, you now have to delete one block at a time, through some multi-click process to delete a block.

Let's not even go into the annoying toolbar that appears over every block when you click on a block. This is fucking frustrating because it blocks the content you have added on the block above. Look at this screenshot to get an idea what I mean.

The main gripe with Gutenberg, I think is that it breaks the flow of writing. Gutenberg has a strong focus on the layout. It has a lot of facilities for media-heavy content and lots of emphasis in the presentation of content.

Gutenberg, in a way, it feels more like a desktop publisher app. It makes me think of it like a hybrid between Squarespace and Clickfunnels. And both of those are great applications, but they're not centered around the writing process or blogging.

I have tons of friends that blog, many do it for a living and their answer to this new editor for WordPress has been unequivocally a big fat no.

I can't blame them. The only reason I'm trying it out is because I want to know how it works and find the good things about it. Also it is the default editor for new WordPress installations, so I need to know how it works and be able to teach people how to use it and how to get the most out of it.

What is Next?

Gutenberg is definitely rough for most people, but it may be really great once you get the hang of it. I want to remain positive and think that the peacefulness after the storm will be really great.

Right now, I'm diving into Gutenberg, and it feels like that picture above, this is my first post written 100% with Gutenberg. I hope to bring you some great tutorials around Gutenberg, but for now I need to learn it.

Remember, if you have to go back to normal, just get the classic editor. If you are feeling a little adventurous and maybe even progressive, then give Gutenberg a try. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it, your feedback, what you love about it, what you hate about it and stuff like that.

The post Gutenberg. The New Block Editor in WordPress. Expect Rough Weather. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I think this is particularly true today, especially with some of WordPress' latest "political" internal issues and conflicts like the Gutenberg debacle. But we're not going to get into that part right now although I have more to say on the matter.

But I want you to check out this and learn a little bit more about it on this link, and see how you could utilize this system to improve your current business.

Not just the next level but in the words of Grant Cardone, 10x your business. Whether you run a blog, a beauty salon, a software company, a plumbing service or you sell arts and crafts at your local flea market, this can help you increase your revenue.

Now, I get it, Grant Cardone isn't for everybody but his success is undeniable. You owe it to yourself to at least learn about the 10x secrets and the whole 10x funnel system it's by ClickFunnels so it's good.

I've been using ClickFunnels for 2 or 3 years and it works wonders on productivity and efficiency because its purpose is to drive revenue for your business.

With ClickFunnels, there is no need to update, patch, secure or maintain anything, no distracting plugins, widgets or stats.

ClickFunnels just works, whether you need to build one page to promote your latest product or service, or an entire website or campaign.

Yes I still love WordPress, but sometimes it is not the right tool. In the case where you already have WordPress, you should know that you can integrate the two very easily since ClickFunnels has a plugin for WordPress.

Check out the Driving with Oscar video below and give Clickfunnels a try. You can thank me later.

The post Better Than WordPress? That’s Blasphemous! appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I like knowing a few blogging statistics about my blogging habits. Things like how many words I've typed using Word Count Pro, which type of grammatical errors and spelling errors I make with Grammarly, and specifically for this plugin, how much time spent actually editing a specific blog post.

It is really simple

Install it just like any other plugin. Search for Worktime Logger in your dashboard from your WordPress blog to install automatically, or go directly to the plugin's page to download and install manually.

Once you install it and activate it, the default settings are fine for most cases.

The moment you start a new blog post and while it's being edited, the plugin keeps track in minutes and it provides you that information directly on the edit screen or in the "all posts" listing in its own column. Just make sure you do a quick save as soon as you start a blog post.

Easy to configure

If you'd like to adjust the settings, you'll find them really straightforward. Here's a screenshot of the settings available and my actual current configuration.

If you don't like the idea of the plugin tracking your time automatically, you can change the settings to manually start, stop and pause the timer as you wish.

Current worktime on your blog post

But in the case of this plugin, what will happen is that it will show you how long you've been working on the post under the edit window. At the time of writing this sentence, this is what it said I had spent working on this blog post:

All view shows in a column

And if you want to see the "all posts" view or "all pages" then you'll see the time tracked for each blog post. It looks something like this:

If you install the pluginWorktime Logger right now, the plugin can't tell how much time you spent on posts created prior to the installation, although it would be cool if it could give a rough estimation based on the revisions time.

Each time you save or WordPress autosaves a post, that is timestamped, so I suppose it would be cool if this plugin could calculate that for posts created prior to its installation, but for the time being that's what it is.

Maybe the author will read this and consider that an update for a future release. Which leads me to one more thing.

A small warning the plugin hasn't been updated in a few releases of WordPress and it has a very low numbers of people using it. This could be just because it's not very well marketed or cataloged or maybe people just don't see the need for this yet. But it can also be that the author has abandoned it. I'll ask and see if the author replies.

In any case, I think it's a useful plugin to give you an idea of how much time you spent working on a blog post. This is especially important if you're writing sponsored posts or editing for multiple authors. I also checked and it works just the same with custom post types in case you need that functionality.

In Conclusion

I think this is useful and well done. Easy to install and configure, it keeps track of time spent writing a blog post or a page on a WordPress website or blog. There's one small warning about the reliability of this plugin as future releases of WordPress are made available. I also think there could be a neat feature added to the plugin in regards to the calculation of time.

But If I can pass this over to you, Do you find this plugin useful? Do you already use it and would you use it now that you know about it?

The post WordPress Plugin to Keep Track of Time Spent Blogging – Worktime Logger appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

If you don't know what the difference is between the two, WordPress.com is the commercial version of the free and open source software provided in WordPress.org. The goal of WordPress.com is to get you to sign up for a free account which provides a free basic blogging experience.

Eventually you'll realize you can't do much with it and you'll need to upgrade, or better yet move to WordPress.org which is a self-hosted solution.

Self-hosted means you need to get a web hosting account and setup WordPress yourself, have someone like me help you or have the web host do it for you. The benefits is that you can do whatever you want with it and aren't restricted too much.

A few years ago, Automattic, which is the parent company of WordPress.com and the biggest contributor to WordPress.org started merging little plugins into Jetpack. But Jetpack sucks. I've always thought that and even years after it came out, I still dislike it a lot.

I wish they'd leave the plugins as standalone modules. There's quite a few plugins and functionality that have fallen "victims" to the Jetpack beast.

Getting Rid of Jetpack and Reliance on WordPress.com

I've decided to get rid of Jetpack in my sites after I went through a catastrophic website crash where I had to deactivate all plugins and carefully fix the problem before reactivating plugins.

My entire site was only partially functional for two or three days. This wasn't the fault of Jetpack, but Jetpack added to the headaches when restoring it.

I'm still fixing things now, but the process of reactivating Jetpack was painful and frustrating so I decided that it was enough and I started to find replacements for any of the modules that I use which Jetpack provides.

I also want to replace any plugin that requires a WordPress.com account.

There are two main plugins that I care about. Jetpack stats, formerly known as WP Stats. And Akismet a plugin designed to prevent comment spam. Akismet is actually standalone plugin but still requires a WordPress.com account.

I might also address the caching module and the "better search module soon.

But First, Akismet.

The first plugin I want to replace is Akismet. Akismet is great at preventing spam, and it's by far the biggest anti-spam comment plugin for WordPress, but it isn't the only player in town.

Furthermore, the terms of service clearly state that Akismet is NOT free if you're monetizing your site or if your site is a business site.

I've never heard of Automattic going after someone for using the free plan of Akismet in a commercial site, but the terms are pretty clear:

Akismet Is Not Free

If you want to do the right thing, you will not use Akismet for your money-making blogs. That's just what the terms say. But you can find other plugins that are free and you can use without paying.

I'm going to try the plugin that is the most popular and seems to cover what I need. Even though I don't get a lot of comments on this blog, when I had Akismet deactivated for two days or so, I received over 150 spam comments so it's necessary to have something in place to prevent comment spam.

Free Alternatives to Akismet

There is a trend where the best plugins are getting converted into a hybrid model of free and paid features. Many of the alternatives to Akismet aren't free either, but there are still some. That was one of the requirements I have for this type of service.

Other things I considered were wether the plugin is actively updated and how many active users it has.

I consider it active if it has been updated within the past few months or up to a year, and it should have about 10,000 active installations or more (Akismet has over 5 million).

Here's are the alternatives I found:

Spam protection, AntiSpam, FireWall by CleanTalk

No CAPTCHA, no questions, no animal counting, no puzzles, no math and no spam bots. Universal AntiSpam plugin.

Free trial, then yearly subscription (link)

Shield Security for WordPress

Shield is easy to setup – you simply activate it. Then a step-by-step wizard will walk you through the basic configuration. Shield Security does it what it needs to do, and alerts you if and when you need to informed.

Free version and Pro version with extra features (link)

Stop Spammers

Stop Spammers is an aggressive WordPress defense plugin against comment spam and login attempts. It is capable of performing more than 20 different checks for spam and malicious events and can block spam from over 100 different countries. Stop Spammers uses multiple methods for detecting spam and may be too aggressive for some websites.

Free  (link)

Anti-Spam

Anti-spam plugin blocks automatic spam in comments section. No captcha required. The plugin is easy to use: just install it and it should just work.

Free and Pro version available (link)

Antispam Bee

Say Goodbye to comment spam on your WordPress blog or website. Antispam Bee blocks spam comments and trackbacks without captchas and without sending personal information to third party services.

Free (link)

I Decided to Go with Antispam Bee.

Antispam Bee has a good number of downloads and active installations at a little over 300,000. It also gets regular updates.

The plugin was easy to install through the regular dashboard, and after activating it the settings page is really simple and straight forward.

So far it seems to be good and working as expected. I haven't received any spam comments in a few days but it caught about 65 of them so it seems promising. In a few months I might come back and do an update to this or a proper review.

Let me know in the comments if you think there's anything I should add or if you have any questions!

In Conclusion

Despite what some people will tell you, Akismet isn't technically free. I also don't like the reliance on WordPress.com so I decided to do away with it.

I evaluated a bunch of plugins first, and decided to go with Antispam Bee. It seems reliable, it's free, and it has a good amount of usage. It also gets regular updates.

I'll run with this for a while and post back if I find any problems with it, but if you're looking for an alternative to Akismet, then this should be a good place to start.

The post Gripes with Jetpack and Alternatives to Akismet Plugin appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Now, 3 years later, 2017 has been deemed the year of SSL, and it even seems that maybe it will be required for some sites. Heck, Moz shows that at least half of first page results are served via https.

SSL is no longer for Ecommerce and geeks only

It used to be that you really only needed SSL if you were collecting or providing sensitive information. Personal, financial or healthcare data. But due to problems with phishing, spoofing, and the growing number of vulnerabilities, it makes sense that all websites should be "verified" through an SSL certificate.

Until the past couple of years, SSL was really only an option that bloggers would consider if they were making money because it was an added cost to hosting, domain registration and any other paid service they needed like Vimeo, or Aweber and similar.

There was also a technical challenge with setting up an SSL certificate in a shared hosting environment. I won't get into the details of it but it's a bit of a challenge to make a certificate work when there are shared accounts under one IP address --the way that most shared hosting works.

SSL is now free... mostly

But recently a few companies have surfaced that provide free SSL certificates, and they take care of the technical issues regarding multiple websites under one IP address and one server.

For the free SSL certificates offered by these companies to work, your host has to support their process. Both of my preferred hosting companies did not support this fully, until recently. Greengeeks and Inmotion required that you have a dedicated IP and at least a virtual server in order to install an SSL certificate, and you had to purchase it from them or from a 3rd party.

But to my delight and yours, Inmotion has just enabled the use of free SSL certificates in all of their service plans.

Quick guide on how to set up free SSL for your Inmotion hosting

If you have a shared hosting account, you'll find detailed instructions on how to setup the SSL certificate here. If you have a VPS account then you'll need to follow this guide instead.

In the process of doing this for my own VPS, I only had an issue with the guide because I had forgotten how to login to WHM as the root user. I tend to use SSH and I have that setup without the need for a password. But I was able to look up my password on LastPass and a few moments later, I was logged in.

To login as the root user, you need to go to the WHM address for your server directly and enter the root username and password. The URL for your WHM panel should be something like this: https://serverid.inmotionhosting.com:2087.

If you have any trouble with this, just open up a support chat with them and they'll help you right away. After I enabled auto SSL in my account, it took about 30 minutes for the SSL certificates to be ready.

I was expecting the process to be more complicated than this, but it wasn't. The next step was to activate the certificate on my WordPress blog, here at Notagrouch.com.

To "turn on" the certificate for WordPress, I used a popular plugin that takes care of most of it. The plugin is Really Simple SSL. If you want to follow my steps, then install and activate the plugin (instructions here).

Once the plugin is active, go to the Settings area in your WordPress dashboard and click on SSL. Then click on enable SSL.

Your settings screen should look like this afterwards:

The settings tab in the configuration screen also has a few options. Ideally, you should make the plugin work by using the htaccess configuration instead of the WordPress or Javascript options.

If everything works fine, you may want to try switching to using htaccess for a slight performance boost.

Once everything is installed and configured, you may get kicked out of the WordPress dashboard. This is expected, and you just need to log back in. Notice that when you log back in, you'll be accessing your site via "https" instead of regular "http."

To verify the plugin is working, just visit any page on your blog and look to make sure your browser shows that the connection is secure and the protocol (the part before the URL) says https.

Conclusion

Inmotion introduced free SSL for all plans. It's easy to install, follow the instructions for shared hosting accounts or VPS accounts. You can then use a plugin to activate the SSL on your WordPress website. Voila!

The post How to Get Free SSL Certificate from Inmotion Hosting appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

As I've been working on optimizing WordPress, I decided to take a look at the server side of things. If you're looking to improve the performance of your website, this may be useful for you. Please keep in mind the things in here are exclusive for VPS or Dedicated type of servers, they will not work with shared hosting or managed hosting, but may work for other hosts besides Inmotion Hosting.

If you haven't done so yet, you may need to configure SSH first so you can access your server from the command line and do the stuff I talk about here. Check if your host allows you to do that, and how to set it up. If you have a VPS with InmotionHosting, you can setup SSH as explained here.

Most web hosts allow you to ssh into your VPS.

As a quick disclaimer, I run all the commands listed here as root. This can be risky so be careful when you're running this on your server; you should always run commands with your own username and use sudo to run commands as root when needed. But I'm awesome, and I live dangerously, so I run as root, deal with it.

Turning off unnecessary services.

The first thing you should do with any server if you're going to optimize it for performance is to turn off unnecessary services. There are usually a half dozen or more services that run on every server but aren't needed, they're there for your convenience and just in case.

Conversely, you should know and remember that if you turn these services off and you need them later, you'll need to turn them back on.

How to find out what services are running.

Depending on the operating system your server is running, you'll need to run some commands to see what services are running. In my case, my server is running CentOS which is a spinoff from RedHat. To find out what's running on a RedHat server, you can  run these commands:

service --status-all

To narrow down to a much smaller and useful list of stuff you can run this command:

chkconfig

And to eliminate even more noise, we can filter the output of the chkconfig command to just the stuff that is running right now at our runlevel, like this:

root@servername [~]# chkconfig |grep 3\:on

That command shows only what's running right now under runlevel 3. Let's take a look:

root@servername [~]# chkconfig |grep 3\:on
apf            	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
atd            	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
cpanel         	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
crond          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
exim           	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
fastmail       	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
filelimits     	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
httpd          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
ip6tables      	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
ipaliases      	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
iptables       	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
mailman        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
messagebus     	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
modules_dep    	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
mysql          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
named          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
netfs          	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
network        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
nscd           	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
psacct         	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
pure-ftpd      	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
ror            	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
rpcbind        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
rsyslog        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
saslauthd      	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:off	5:off	6:off
sshd           	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
sysstat        	0:off	1:on	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
udev-post      	0:off	1:on	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
vzquota        	0:on	1:on	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:on

From the services listed (notice the 3:0n column) that are running, most of them are necessary for the proper operation of the server. The ones I am questioning are exim, fastmail, mailman and ror.

My server doesn't work as an email server and I don't want it to be a relay, the first 3 services I listed are related to mailserver stuff. If I know my stuff, then I'm willing to bet that those services aren't needed for my WordPress site to operate properly.

But what about email sending from WordPress? WordPress sends email out sometimes, like when there are updates, or sometimes certain plugins send updates and alerts. I believe that the sendmail script is all that's needed for that, but I decided to test this theory.

Then the 4th service I found suspect is ror which is the Ruby on Rails service. I don't have any ROR apps running so I don't know why that would even be active.

Turning services on and off

You can turn a service off and on with a simple command:

root@servername [~]# chkconfig servicename off

That turns off a service named servicename. Changing "off" to "on" turns it back on. Note that this command is temporary until the server restarts, so if you make a mistake or shut down a service that you shouldn't have turned off, you may need to reboot the server and the service will restart automatically.

This is how I test to see if I need a service. I first turn it off and then check the site, then if all works fine, I make the service permanently turned off, so it stays that way even after the server restarts. You can see more information on how to use the chkconfig utility here.

To make a service stay turned off permanently, I use this command:

root@servername [~]# chkconfig --level 3 servicename off

Testing services before making permanent changes

To verify that the services I want to disable will not affect my WordPress site and prevent it from sending email, I'll turn off each one at a time and then test my site's ability to send an email. In this case, I'm using a basic contact form from WP Forms to make sure sending email still works.

So I run this command to turn off exim:

root@servername [~]# chkconfig exim off

I then use the test contact form to confirm the site can still send email, I also check the inbox to make sure I received the message. If you're going to follow my steps, I also recommend you test all this before you make any changes to the services running to make sure it's all working fine to begin with.

After I turned off exim, I could send messages just fine. Next up fastmail.

root@servername [~]# chkconfig fastmail off

This also resulted in being able to send emails fine. Next is mailman.

root@servername [~]# mailman mailman off

I turned off all four services, fastmail, mailman, exim, and ror without any adverse side effects. So the next step is to permanently turn off each of those services, like this:

root@servername [~]# chkconfig --level 3 fastmail off
root@servername [~]# chkconfig --level 3 exim off
root@servername [~]# chkconfig --level 3 mailman off
root@servername [~]# chkconfig --level 3 ror off

To confirm that all the changes are permanent, I rebooted my VPS using the restart server button from my Inmotion account dashboard. I don't use the built in reboot or shutdown command from the command line because the server never seems to come back up if I do that. There must be a routine that happens when the server is rebooted from the dashboard instead of the command line so keep that in mind if you feel like restarting your server from the command line.

I confirm one more time with the chkconfig command to list what is running on runlevel 3:

root@servername [~]# chkconfig |grep 3\:on
apf            	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
atd            	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
cpanel         	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
crond          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
filelimits     	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
httpd          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
ip6tables      	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
ipaliases      	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
iptables       	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
messagebus     	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
modules_dep    	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
mysql          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
named          	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
netfs          	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
network        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
nscd           	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
psacct         	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
pure-ftpd      	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
rpcbind        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
rsyslog        	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
saslauthd      	0:off	1:off	2:off	3:on	4:off	5:off	6:off
sshd           	0:off	1:off	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
sysstat        	0:off	1:on	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
udev-post      	0:off	1:on	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:off
vzquota        	0:on	1:on	2:on	3:on	4:on	5:on	6:on

Notice the services are not listed as being "on" for runlevel 3, success! There are a few other services that other sysadmins would question, like named. In my case, I'm pretty sure that I need everything else listed here for now.

While the active resources that these services may not be very significant, I don't need any mail services running. I also noticed in my mail logs that spammers have been trying to use my server as an email relay, turning off all mail related services should help minimize this activity. To be sure that gets shut down as well, I should turn off all ports that aren't needed. I will tackle that in another post soon.

Conclusion

If you want to start squeezing every bit of performance out of your VPS server, this is an example of some of the things you can do. In this case, I showed you how I turned off 4 services that were running but not being utilized. They may not impact your server significantly, but every bit counts and this is easy to do so why not start with this. You may have other unused services running, but this should be a good guide to show you how to find said services, test them and then turn it off if they're not needed.

The post Server Performance Improvements for WordPress – Turning off Services appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I use a plugin called WP Word Count Pro. This keeps track of how many words there are on your blog and it gives you nice little statistics. In a way, this plugin makes blogging a bit of a game. There is also WP Word Count, which is the free version of the plugin.

WP Word Count Pro comes with built-in achievements to encourage you to write more and to give you analytics on your word count. The achievement that caught my attention was that I've now written 500,000 words!

Other interesting statistics and achievements are shown below.

Thre are 15 achievements that escalate as you write blog posts with more words on each one. It starts with writing a post with 500 words and it increases by 500 words until you write a 10,000 word post. I don't know if I'll get to a 10,000 word post but I might if I write a comprehensive guide or something like that.

The most I've written in one post is 3,500 words for How Do You Get Traffic to your Blog Part 2.

The overall word count achievements start counting at 500 words and go all the way up to 4,000,000 words. As you know by now, I just achieved half a million.

I also have about 30,000 words in drafts. I wonder if I can get to 1 million words written by this time next year. I don't know, maybe the 100 day challenge will help.

I had a quick email conversation with the author of Word Count Pro because he was asking for feedback about the plugin, I told him hit would be nice to have the ability to customize some of the achievements. He's working on a lot of improvements but he responded to my feedback to learn more and to tell me how he's prioritizing his development.

Another cool thing is that he sent me a coupon code for you to use if you want. Unfortunately, he doesn't have an affiliate program, but if you want to give it a try, you can use coupon code NOTAGROUCH to get 30% off from WP Count Pro. It costs $12.00, but for $8.00, why wouldn't you get it and see how you're doing and progressing with your writing?

Oh yeah, there is also a limited free version of the plugin if you want it. You can find it here.

The post One Half Million Words! appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you ever wondered that, then this post is for you. Even if you work by yourself on your blog, this may be useful when you need to review some of the work you've done recently.

I want to showcase a WordPress plugin for you. This plugin helps you find out what has been happening on your blog. It lets you know who ran an update, who published a page and who changed something on your site. This plugin is ideal for any WordPress blog or website that has more than one admin, or multiple authors, but can be beneficial for you even if you're the only one that works on your blog.

As the new "tech resident expert" at O.C. Writers, I thought it would be useful to have something like this to keep track of changes made to the site since we have several admins.

When you work with enterprise software, activity tracking is an expected feature, but for years, WordPress didn't have anything like this. Unless you went into the server logs and trudged through thousands of log entries, it was almost impossible to find out who did what at any given time. But WP Security Audit is one of the plugins that allows you to find this information.

WP Security Audit keeps a log of most of the activity on your WordPress blog or website. Let's take a look.

You'll find the plugin in the WordPress plugin repository. Install it any way you prefer and activate it like any other plugin.

Once activated, the plugin creates a menu item on your dashboard. This menu is how you access settings and various options for the plugin. You'll notice some options are only available to the premium version, but this post focuses on the free version only.

At first, you'll see a blank log because you just installed the plugin, so head over to the settings page to review your options and set some parameters to fit your needs. In the settings page, you'll find options to set an email address from which the notices will be sent.

You can adjust the permissions to access the plugin and turn it on or off. You can also change some of the display settings, as well as set exclusions based on WordPress roles, specific WordPress users or IP addresses.

The other section that will be interesting is the Enable/Disable Alerts section. Here is where you can select what activity to capture and display in the logs.

I turned off the 404 alerts because we keep track of them elsewhere and I don't want to clutter the log with these. My primary focus for this plugin is to keep track of administrative changes.

The alerts are broken down by section, and each alert gets classified into a notice, a warning or a critical event. You'll need to decide if you want to turn any of these off; they are all turned on by default.

Some of the alerts may be too "nosey" or unnecessary, like when a user views a page, but many of the other ones are critical if you're trying to figure out why something changed or how to revert a change that is causing unintended consequences. The primary alerts that come to mind are updating plugins or WordPress; adding, removing, or modifying pages and posts; changing permalink structure, installing or removing plugins and modifying widgets.

Event though you can figure out what went wrong by looking at these logs, you should always have a backup procedure in place to help you revert if a major catastrophe happens. You can and should use something like Backupbuddy, Updraft, or even Vaultpress.

The plugin has explicit tracking of activity for some other major plugins, namely BBpress and Woocommerce; it can also track activity on a WordPress multisite installation.

You can see that after a few minutes of running the plugin and doing some basic routine maintenance tasks, the log started showing activity. That's the kind of information I was looking for.

If you run a blog that has more than one administrator, or more than one author, this plugin should help you keep tabs on what's happening and who's working on what.

WP Security Audit can also help during development or when you're designing your blog because it will tell you if a plugin modified a post or a page, or what impact some of your changes have on the site. As any good webmaster will tell you when you come to them with a problem: "Did you check the logs?"

The post Wp Security Audit Log Tracks Activity on Your Blog appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

The only way to really put it to the test would be to put a real website on it. I decided to move How To Blog Tutorials to the hosting to put it to the test.

The move was easy but I had a couple problems. I tried moving the site exactly as it was and that wasn't very smart.

I cleaned up unused plugins, updated all existing plugins, theme and WordPress core. I also optimized the database and generally cleaned up the site.

After I went back to the site and properly prepared for it, the move was very simple and went through smoothly.

I will be doing further testing and sharing that with you. The basic steps were simple:

Once I cleaned up and prepared the site for the move, the basic steps to move this site were simple:

• Backup the files from the original host.
• Backup the database using Phpmyadmin.
• Import the files to the Greengeeks hosting account using the web file manager, no FTP needed.
• Create the database by hand at Greengeeks using the MySQL database wizard.
• Import the database to the newly created database using Phpmyadmin.
• Adjust the wp-config file to the new database information.
• Change the DNS settings from Godaddy to point to the Greengeeks hosting account.

I have moved this site over and I'm now using Greengeeks to host it. Next I will move another site and create a tutorial to walk you step by step how to migrate. Perhaps I will move my daddy blog, Papidaddy.com.

Here are some of the benefits that Greengeeks offers:

Greengeeks claims to be powered by 300% renewable energy. I'm not sure how that number works, but I do think that it is important for companies to use sustainable energy systems. I will be asking what exactly the 300% means. I would be happy knowing that the hosting is powered by 100% renewable energy.

One of the earlier benefits that Greengeeks boasted was that it was optimized for Drupal, and while that is still the case they've now branched out into WordPress as well as other types of applications and web-hosting so they should be able to service most people's needs.

Their three core competencies are WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. If you've read any of my tutorials on this blog, I recommend and favor WordPress.

The hosting plans are managed with Cpanel and provide industry standard solutions. I've been exploring their dashboard and it's easy to use, easy to navigate and they use standard applications you have come to expect on shared, vps and dedicated hosting services. You can install software by hand, or using Softaculous, Cpanel lets you manage all aspects of your hosting account.

What about support?

While the software capabilities and the green aspect of their company are great and shouldn't be understated, for me and my readers and customers, the most important thing is reliability and customer support.

Things are going to go wrong, and it is important to know that your hosting account will help you recover from problems that may arise, tomorrow or in a year.

These are the customer support promises from Greengeeks:

• 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
• 24/7 Email Support
• Live Telephone & Live Chat Support
• Complete satisfaction, or your money back within the money back period.
• 30-Day Money Back Guarantee

In the web hosting world we call that uptime guarantee a 3-nines guarantee. That is about the best you're going to get with this type of hosting at these price levels.

24/7 email support is expected and I never recommend a host that doesn't provide live chat AND phone support.

When I migrate the other site, I'll put the chat support to the test by creating a common problem the average blogger may run into and see how they handle that.

As far as their money back guarantee, I can't really test it since my account has been provided at no cost for the purpose of testing and reviewing it.

Customer experience

The dashboard of the Greengeeks account is clean and easy to navigate and as I mentioned earlier, the control panel is powered by Cpanel so it should be familiar to most people that have had a website before, and it's easy enough for beginners to get around.

In addition to the aforementioned, Greengeeks has a large collection of information and resources available to help you get the most out of your account.

Overall, so far I'm very happy with Greengeeks and I look forward to moving another site and doing further testing. But I'm comfortable recommending Greengeeks to you for your blog or website. You can check out their plans here.

This post was originally published at: How to Blog Tutorials.com

The post GreenGeeks Web Hosting Review – First Impressions appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

This move was a bittersweet experience because I've used NextGen for every single photo project and for all my blogs since it came out.  I used it for client sites too, but over the past couple of years and since they were acquired by Photocrati, I've had many problems. It served me well for many years.

For a while, my publish button would disappear if the plugin was activated so I had to play this game of deactivating the plugin, publishing my posts and then reactivating it. Then it started getting really complicated to use. On top of that, P3 profiler would report that it was taking over 30% of my server's resources.

Even though I have a dedicated server with Inmotion Hosting, 30% of resources for a photo gallery plugin is not acceptable. Actually that's not acceptable for any type of plugin unless it's doing some really active heavy lifting, all the time.

Configuration wasn't simple, neither was user adoption whenever I installed it for a client. That part was great because the client would have to hire me again to help them learn it or customize it, but it certainly didn't help the client much to have to pay every time they needed something changed. That kind of defeats the purpose of using WordPress.

The plugin used to have really high ratings, but lately they've decreased to around 3 in the WordPress.org codex so I'm not alone in the feeling that NextGen needs a good kick in the ass to get it back on track, or it just needs a good replacement. I was not in the mood to do any ass-kicking so a new plugin was in order.

The time to move to a new plugin came

Unfortunately there were no good plugins available to replace NextGen, that is until Envira Gallery came along. Even then, I waited until now to make the transition.

I wanted to see how the WordPress community would react to it, and how the market would react to yet another photo manager plugin, and a paid one at that.

Then I saw enough good things that I decided to jump on it. It had everything I think I wanted and then some, and a great pedigree. One of the features I like is that it is lightweight but extensible with a huge collection of addons.

I'm still working through migrating all my photos over to it and recreating some of my galleries and albums. Most of my previous albums and galleries were broken already anyway so I'm in no rush to fix all that. But I tried using the NextGen to Envira migration tool and it worked flawlessly, it took a looong time, but it worked great.

You can see some of my photo galleries over here. Let me know what you think.

My experience with Envira has been awesome so far

Before, managing photos on my blog was a dreadful proposition. This is why I don't have many recent photos. But now, it is different.

I like how well integrated Envira Gallery is with WordPress. It uses the built in media library to hold your photos so even if you create a new gallery and upload the photos directly to a new gallery, they will still be available in your media library. The opposite is true too, you can create a gallery from existing photos in your media library.

Creating galleries and albums is really easy. Drag and drop type of stuff, and you can customize the galleries very easily through a few screens available to decide how your pictures should be displayed.

This is very handy because you can use one of the photos from a gallery as a featured image on your post. NextGen never got this right. They tried to give you a "featured image from gallery" option but that never worked for me.

It's very easy to add galleries to your posts and pages too, you create your gallery in the Envira Gallery section in WordPress, then you click on the icon to add it to your post. But you can also use WordPress shortcodes or even PHP functions to add your galleries to your website.

One feature I'm really excited about is the dynamic galleries feature. This feature is available through the addons, and it allows you to tag photos or designate certain rules that will automatically place photos into a gallery. This way, whenever you upload a photo, if it matches the desired parameters then it will automatically show up in the gallery. Pretty neat huh?

It is not just for bloggers

You can also use it to run a full blown photography ecommerce site. First, setup your WordPress site (I can do that for you at no cost - ask me how), then add the Woocommerce plugin.

After that, add and configure Envira Gallery Pro, then get the Envira Gallery Woocommerce addon. If you are a portrait or event photographer then you might want the proofing addon so your clients can review the photos. If you feel particularly feisty about copyright then you'll need the watermark addon.  After that, give yourself a high-five, because that is basically all you need to setup a photography ecommerce site with WordPress. Boom!

I am taking Envira Gallery for a spin, and I will give you a full review and all the notes I can about the plugin, including some of its addons.

Should you get Envira Gallery Pro or Lite? Anything that is worth doing, is worth overdoing so go all the way and get Envira Gallery Pro.  It is the best premium WordPress Gallery Plugin I could find so far and I'm not just saying that because I got it for free. Stay tuned for a full writeup about it.

If you're interested in a side by side comparison to NextGen, then I might do it if enough people ask for it in the comments.

I should disclose to you that I received Envira Gallery Pro at no cost. In fact if I haven't told you before, most of the plugins you see me using here or on any of my blogs are usually given to me for free in exchange for serious QA & feedback and to tell you about them. So there, that's my disclosure. The FTC thinks I should tell you this stuff, I think you're smart enough to understand this.

The post Envira Gallery Pro Replacing NextGen Gallery appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

You can get an amazing deal if you want to get ALL of the Genesis themes. Just have to get it before Wednesday!

The clock is ticking on your opportunity to get the Pro Plus All-Theme Pack for the best price it will ever be available for, so we wanted to send you this quick reminder email.

Here’s the reminder:

You only have two more days to lock in the lowest possible price on the Pro Plus Pack, because on Wednesday, August 26, 2015 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time, the current $100 discount* goes away.

*Note that you still receive your returning customer discount as well.

So, your price for the Pro Plus All-Theme Pack, with everything above included, is just $224.96, a savings of nearly $2,000 if you were to purchase everything separately.

http://my.studiopress.com/pro-plus-offer/

Also of note:

At the end of August, the normal price for the Pro Plus Pack goes up from $399 to $499.
Then, at the end of this year, new Pro Plus customers will be required to pay a recurring annual fee to maintain access to support and new themes.
But those of you who grab your Pro Plus Pack prior to Wednesday at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time will get every single StudioPress theme available now, and that we release in the future, all bundled with world-class support, for just $224.96.

Don’t wait and pay more later.

To get started today, click here:

http://my.studiopress.com/pro-plus-offer/


For the price of three to four themes, you get all of them. That's hard to beat. Take advantage of it if you want to have all the flexibility offered by ALL of the themes from Genesis. This is not a coupon but a direct link that will get you the  sale price.

The post Genesis Theme $100 Off Summer Sale! appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I wanted to show you my latest bill for my web hosting. You can see the amount on the screenshot below.

This is a perfect example of using that phrase in great context. A website can be started for free. Sure you can start one at Blogspot or WordPress.com or anywhere else that offers "free" websites.

You may even be able to sell a few things and make some money.

I prefer to start a website with the resources ready for "the next step" and I then migrate from that to the next and so on. But I'm always one step ahead.

It is because of this that I always recommend that you pay for 2 things. Webhosting and your own domain. These two things could be the "next step" for your blog or business if you were to tart with a free website that you don't control 100% like it is the case with blogspot or WordPress.com.

But believe me, it is really complicated and difficult to move from one of those services to a system you own and control fully. So why not start there and be ready for the next step from the beginning!

That's how I see it. If you believe in yourself enough to even start, then start off right. That's how I started. I've had web hosting accounts since 2002. I have used dozens of companies and still use many now. Why because when oen of my site gets a lot of traffic or continues to grow I can just grow my hosting plan accordingly.

I don't need to move my site, or migrate to a new platform that is more capable. I literally need to just request more resources be added to my hosting account.

So check out my latest invoice and then tell me that "it's too expensive to get my own hosting." Inmotion Hosting has plans that are perfect to start and they cost less than $5.00 a month! I started in a plan just like that, and with time as I grow and add more websites and resources are needed, my plan has grown.

It doesn't mean that you have to keep moving up, but I run some specialized stuff for clients so I need specific resources. That's why it costs me that much. But even just my blogs use a higher plan than the base one because I am already for the next step.

Look at my bill again... yours could be $5.00 a month or less. Look at my bill again... $5.00 a month. Look... $5.00.

Seriously you have no excuse. For less than my favorite drink at Starbucks, you could start a business. Right now. Go visit Inmotion Hosting and get a website started.

The post It Takes Money to Make Money appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I cover some of the features Optinmonster has for you there.

My favorite is the exit intent feature, but they have added quite a few others that are worth checking out, so I show you a few in the video. More info about this whole thing on the link after the video too, where I published this originally. But here's the video in case you missed it.

This video originally published here: http://wp.me/p3Sinl-lr

The post OptinMonster Features and Exit Intent appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

But truth be told, I don't have a lot of time to muck around with testing, reviewing and testing again. I started working with the Customizr theme and I will stick with it for the time being.

Customizr is free and you can find it on the WordPress.org repository and it has quickly become one of the more popular themes on there. It is built by Nikeo and it seems that this may be his first public theme. Good for him, it works great so far.

For being a free theme, it's pretty cool because it is responsive and it has a lot of configuration options to help you adjust sidebars, the slideshow and other elements. One of the things I like about it is that it uses the built-in wordpress customization system instead of some unique higher-than-thou I-do-my-own-way approach to customizations like most other themes do.

After about two hours of adjusting it, customizing a few images and placing things where I wanted, this is what my homepage looks like. I'm still working on it and will probably finalize it in the next week or so but it's a start and it's way better than the canvas theme I was using before.

I'm still using quite a few plugins to do some of my special customizations and configurations but I will cover those in an upcoming blogpost. This theme is good for advanced users because everything will be easy to find and you can also customize it further by using CSS. And if you're a beginner, this is a great theme because it offers a way to customize most of the parts of the theme without having to code anything. It's a great theme for beginners or advanced users that don't want to spend a lot of time polishing little details or designing layouts from scratch.

It's good enough that it will be added to the themes available for my free website service. So if it's good enough for that, it should be good enough for you too!

If you're looking for a new fresh theme for your blog, you may want to check it out. I like it and will be using it for now. The only thing I'm not sure about yet is whether I will keep the slideshow on the front page. I'm thinking I should remove it since most people don't stick around in one place just to see 3 or 4 slides fly through.

The post It’s official, my new theme is Customizr. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

But menus are special because they can be organized very differently based on the website owner's vision or the needs of the company or product. Thankfully, WordPress makes it very easy to customize the menus on the themes. At least the order and naming of each menu tab, or menu item. Things like colors or font or other design-type of cusomizations may or may not be available on your particular theme. You could always customize a lot of those elements using CSS, but we're not going into CSS today.

So the menus on WordPress can be arranged in whatever order you want, simply by clicking and dragging. If you want a menu that has other sub-menus that appear only when you move your mouse over them, then you just click and drag that menu so it is indented in the menu structure. If you want to change the "About us" Page, to "Learn About Us" or simply "About" you just click on the name and edit it. It's that simple.

Go ahead and give it a try, or watch this video and see how it's done.

The post How to Customize the Menus on your WordPress website appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

First, an intro to the problem

Ever since the beginning of the Internet, websites have been displayed in a variety of screens. Mostly different sizes, but eventually we'll have other display mechanisms, like a 3d system or a virtual display, we'll get into that later.

Almost everyone that visits a website now does so on a tablet, a phone, or a traditional monitor like your desktop monitor or even a tv. Back in the day, the sizes for screens were more or less uniform. You had a uniform ratio of maybe 4:3 (like old-school televisions). Then wide-aspect became popular and over time, we've added so many different sizes and ratios to our display systems that it has become nearly impossible to keep track.

As a designer, this can be a nightmare because something that you built and looks awesoem on your screen may not look so good on someone eles's screen. Put aside color variances, and pixel sizes and resolution, the size of the screen makes a huge difference. I've experienced this first hand. I have a big 27" monitor with a high-resolution. So when I make graphics, they look awesome, but if I then go to a smaller screen or one with less pixels then it may not look so good.

Previous attempts at solving this problem

Designers, programmers and web geeks have known about this problem for a while and several solutions have been put in place to address it. For example, you could have your webserver detect if someone is coming from a mobile device, and instead of showing them your normal website at http://www.example.com you could show them or . Functionally this is an acceptable solution and many current website do this; Facebook, Twitter, and others. But this approach requires a lot of technical ability and resources to maintain.

Another approach is to have your website serve an entirely different website but on the same domain. You can accomplish this easily with a plugin if you are using WordPress and the plugin pretty much takes care of all the technical details for you. You just need to configure the plugin, adjust the settings to your liking and you're done. It's also a good approach but the downside is that you require some expert level knowledge if you want to customize the experience for mobile as much as you have for your desktop.

There are also other less popular approaches to fixing the problem, like having javascript re-write the page on the fly when a mobile device is detected, or having a totally different application serve as the website in certain scenarios. But these aren't very popular and they're so laser focused on a specific issue that I won't talk about them much.

Both the first two  solutions I mentioned are still in use today and I don't think there's anything wrong with them. I use them from time to time depending on the application. But responsive design offers another layer of customization.

So finally, what is responsive design?

So the newest solution to the problem I mentioned earlier is to make your web applications or websites be responsive. This in short, as the title implies means that the design isn't static but instead it "responds" to its context. Primarily and today, the context is really just the size of the screen. One day when we have a different system for viewing or interacting with websites and applications, the experience may be totally different but the idea will be the same. The application and or website will adjust to the location where it is being accessed from.

[pullquote position="right"]One website, multiple versions. - Copyblogger[/pullquote]

To explain a little bit more in detail, when you find a website that is responsive, you'll notice that the overall look and feel of the site is similar across your big screen browser, your iPad or tablet, and your iphone. Notice I didn't say that it's the same. But your colors, your text, the layout and the content is easily accessible in a way that makes sense for that device. This website is responsive, although I've not adjusted it to be perfect, the theme I'm using is responsive out of the box. (side note, don't use this theme, I don't recommend it but I'm stuck with it until I have time to rebuild)

The main thing being done with responsive design is adjusting the elements of a website to fit the screen, or morph entirely so that the visitor can find the information they need. It's easy to test and see what I'm talking about. One of the cool things about responsive design is that it reacts in real time, there is no need to reload a page to see the differences.

For example. Right now, on this blogpost that you're reading, take the bottom right hand corner of  your browser and make the window smaller, make it narrower and do it slowly and you'll see how things get moved around for you as you reduce the window size. After you get to certain width, things start changing completely, for exmaple, you'll notice that the Menu at the top changes to just "navigation" and you can then click on it to have the menu items drop down. You'll also notice at this point that the sidebar is no longer visible and has been moved to the very bottom of the page instead (scroll down).

So how do you get responsive design on your website or blog?

Currently, this is still a new technology that has only been adopted by cutting edge designers and agencies so you'll pay a pretty penny to have this applied to your website. But you can also find some really great themes that are responsive out of the box and do a really good job at this. Newer Studiopress designs have responsive built in, and in the free side of themes, a theme called Responsive shot up to the top of the charts recently, it does a really good job of helping you implement a responsive design. So  you can pay someone to do it, see if your theme has an update that implements responsive, or you could move to a new theme that is responsive out of the box.

So What's the Big Deal?

When you have a responsive design, your website is more accessible. We live in the age of mobile and people are accessing websites on mobile devices more often than they are from their desktops. Many times people will leave the site or close their browser if the website doesn't load and fit their screen. If you don't use responsive design, your website will not load or it will load in a way that is so small on your screen and you have to pinch and zoom a lot and scroll all over the screen to see what you're looking for. The website experience without responsive design is pretty bad in most cases and bad experiences will make your visitors leave and probably not come back for a while, and by a while I mean ever.

When you get a chance, invest some time in learning and hopefully applying a responsive web design to your website. I think you and your readers will appreciate the efforts. I have to make a few adjustments myself, but I'm 3/4 of the way there.

Here are other resources you may find useful:

From mobile browsers to netbooks and tablets, users are visiting your sites from an increasing array of devices and browsers. Are your designs ready? Learn how to think beyond the desktop and craft beautiful designs that anticipate and respond to your users’ needs. Ethan Marcotte will explore CSS techniques and design principles, including fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries, demonstrating how you can deliver a quality experience to your users no matter how large (or small) their display. Responsive Web Design (Thanks Steve!)

Wikipedia says this about Responsive Web Design: Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones)

Responsive Design on Twitter

Responsive Design Newsletter: A free, once–weekly round-up of responsive design articles, tools, tips, tutorials and inspirational links.

Mobile Responsive Design 101, an essay by Copyblogger.

Designing for a Responsive Web, by webdesign tuts+

On a side note, this is day #3 for the 31DBBB that some of us are running on my blogging group. Today's task is to promote a previous blogpost so I'm promoting my previous post, the list of 10 reasons nobody ever told you of why you need a website. 

The post What is Responsive Design? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

So, what's this about sweetening up the deal?

My friend Marcie Taylor aka @suburbanmama asked me if there was anything I could do to sweeten up the deal for her friends and mommy bloggers group. A free website installation with all the bells and whistles is already a pretty good deal, but  I thought about it and I said, sure. I'll make you a great deal.

So here's the deal Marcie. I will not only do the free website setup, but I'll throw in a transfer from wordpress.com to their own wordpress hosted website. AND I will even setup Google Apps for them for free.

And you wonder why am I posting this here publicly? Because I'm goign to extend that deal to everyone that signs up this month. From today on until the last day of the month at midnight, I'll give everyone that signs up, those two bonus items:

• Google Apps Setup (** Please note, Google Apps is no longer free! - I will still set this up if you'd like but Google will ask you to pay them for the service after a free 30 day trial**) -- But if you want to use standard email (free with your hosting), I will set that up instead.
• Transfer posts from WordPress.com, Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Typepad and a few more.

Can't use the deal? Why not tell someone that can? Use the buttons to share this post to your favorite networks.

The post Sweetening up the Deal. Free Website and More appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you can't find a theme that you want to use from the ones I installed for you, you can find additional ones and install them and I also teach you how to do that. There is a very cool bonus in the video where I explain the basics of a responsive theme.

Back to the Free WordPress Setup Guide

The post How to Activate a Theme for your Free WordPress Website appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you have trouble watching it on my website, here is the direct link on youtube.

Back to the Free WordPress Setup Guide

The post How to Log-in to your New Free WordPress Website appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

If you don't have a free wordpress website from me, a lot of this video will still help you if you're new to WordPress for some of the information will be exclusive to those that got the free site, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Back to the Free WordPress Setup Guide.

The post Quickstart Guide for your Free WordPress Website appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

This video shows you the easiest way to add youtube (and other networks too) videos to your WordPress site. I picked up the tip at the Orange County WordPress Meetup group where Jeff Turner showcased the plugin. I also cover a couple other tools I used during the video. Hope you enjoy it.

If you want something else in particular, just leave me a note in the comments. I'd also appreciate it if you could thumbs up the video, and share this post and the video to your favorite networks.

The post Posting Youtube Videos to WordPress appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Lots of people start blogging at WordPress.com. WordPress.com is easy to use, you can get started quickly and it's free.

Other benefits include the built-in community that exposes your blog to millions of potential readers and a technical benefit is that WordPress.com is robust and reliable.

Your blog there will probably never go down. If it goes down, there are some major problems going on and you can rest assured that someone is working on it, double-time.

But then there is WordPress.org the Open Source version. This is the WordPress that you can install on your own server or on a hosting account that you buy from a hosting provider.

Hosting your own WordPress website comes with its own list of benefits. More control, no restrictions, and the ability to do pretty much whatever you want with your blog or website. This is the best choice for many people that want more control than WordPress.com allows.

Practical examples of having more control are

• The ability to run your own ads or ad network.
• The ability to charge for special access to restricted content. Courses, private support, product downloads or sales.
• The ability to customize it and build any functionality you can imagine.
• Building your own photo gallery
• Building your own ecommerce store
• Building your own social media platform

It's awesome to have the WordPress.org website instead of just WordPress.com -- don't get me wrong, I have several WordPress.com blogs too. I use them to support other efforts. I can talk about that later if you're interested.

So what happens if you start out in WordPress.com and then later you want to move to WordPress.org? Moving is relatively easy.

Updated for 2015. I updated the entire post with some new information and finally answered the most asked question. What host do you recommend? I answer is at the end of the document so it doesn't get in your way of the instructions. But if you want to know right away, just scroll down until you see: Webhosting Recommendations.

If you don't have a custom domain already, you'll need to buy one. But if you already have one, you can transfer it over.

Once you have a hosting account and your new domain, then you can move over your WordPress.com blog into your new hosting account and start showing your website under your own domain.

The following video shows you how to do it.

In this video I show you the mechanics of exporting your blog posts from WordPress.com and then importing them into a brand new installation of WordPress.org in a webhosting account (there's that 50/50 link again!)

The post Moving from WordPress.com to WordPress.org (video tutorial) appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Well let me tell you, there's plenty it can't do. Gravity Forms is by far the best form maker system I've used in WordPress.

I know it may seem pricey, but when you really explore the form making capabilities, you can do almost anything with Gravity Forms. If you couple it with some custom post types you can create any kind of website you need. Check it out when you can, it's worth every penny. I use it on all my sites and it comes included in our packages at OscarsTech and OC Web Pro.

You can get Gravity Forms right here.

So far I've used it for a restaurant menu, for standard contact forms, surveys, and for a donations collection page. In a few weeks I will show you how I integrated Views, Types and Gravity Forms into a really cool Wedding registry. Views & Types are two other plugins I'll tell you more about soon.

But you could start a free WordPress website and with Gravity Forms, you could start taking surveys like the one in the picture. You're not doing paper surveys still are you?

I've heard of some amazing sites and tools built on Gravity Forms, have you done anything exciting or out of the ordinary with them?

The post Gravity Forms a must have Premium Plugin for WordPress appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

As a follow up to a previous post recaping some of my experiences at Wordcamp Orange County #WCOC, I put together this quick video using Visibletweets.com - The music is standard Youtube stock music and it was just about the only song I could tolerate that covered the length of the video.

The post Wordcamp Orange County Visible Tweets appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Some tweets and commentary from Wordcamp Orange County

I got to attend Wordcamp Orange County, and here are some of the highlights in forms of tweets and commentary. I tried to do this earlier this rmorning but the wifi at #wcoc wasn't working.

Ross Teasley - @RossTeasley
At #wcoc @notagrouch is plugged in, literally n figuratively. http://t.co/n67W0O98

Jeremy Lehman - @jeremylehman
Looks like all the cool people are in the end-user awareness session #wcoc #imnotcool

Jason Tucker - @jasontucker
Playing around with some query and some instagram libs: #WCOC Instagram wall http://t.co/SFbjKONn

Jason put together a nice streaming wall of instagram photos from #WCOC. check it out, definitely cool stuff.

alex vasquez - @alexjvasquez
I like hearing people say my name. #wcoc preso @zengy

Steve Zenghut from Zeek saved the day and presented on WP-Multisite and Alex became the example for the user, sites and stuff. Alex liked this. :p

Oscar Gonzalez - @notagrouch
This broken wifi business is starting to suck at #wcoc

The WiFi system was unavailable for a long time, just around 2:00 @thefrosty seems to have fixed it. Woot... live blogging and curation with @dashter is now live!

Kathy Burckhardt - @kmburck
RT @perezbox: My WordCamp Orange County 2012 – WordPress Security Presentation http://t.co/rKq5DsUX #wcoc #wordpress #security

Recap in case you missed the security session at #WCOC "End-user Awareness"

This post was generated by Dashter

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I intend to do section reviews and tell you about stuff I learn as I go along. Hope you join me, and I hope the authors don't take it the wrong way.

First off... page 38. "Security through obscurity" is not an accepted security approach worth peanuts. Don't even think that you're making your site "more secure" by hiding it in a sub-folder. If your site is worth hacking, it will not be protected by hiding, but rather by maintaining proper secure defenses against possible attacks.

The post WordPress book Digging into WordPress first looks appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

For me, one of these issues came up when I tried to work in the media dashboard. I was just uploading images so I could use in my new facebook page, but after uploading each file, the images just wouldn't show up on the dashboard.

They were still visible if I went to their URL, but I couldn't access them from the media gallery view, or when trying to attach an image from a post or page.

But... they were working... just fine, earlier.

Turns out this is a bug with a recent update in WordPress and it may show up or may not show up for you depending on certain plugins you could be using. For me, the plugin that made this surface was WP-ecommerce.

It was easy to determine this because I saw a thread about this problem at wordpress.org, and then a thread at the getshopped.org forums indicated the problem and solution.

The easy way to get this fixed for now is to get the plugin called "hotfix" by Mark Jacquith. Hotfix provides quick and small updates to WordPress that haven't yet made it onto an official WordPress release.

Install that plugin, activate it and you should be good to go! By the way, this is my new facebook fan page: http://facebook.com/oscarstech and I'd love it if you checked it out, and if you like it... well, like it!

The post Media library not showing images on WordPress appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

So far these are the ones I've found:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fblikebutton/ (out of date)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-like-button/

The post In search of the perfect Facebook plugin for WordPress appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

So far I've had to update these plugins, but I expect to have another dozen or two updated in the next couple of weeks. Keep an eye out for updates and stay on top of them to prevent issues and potential security problems down the road.

Always make a backup before upgrading...

Oh yeah and for those of you using my managed services, of course your site will be updated shortly if it hasn't already been updated.

These plugins got updated recently:

• AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button
• Plugin Contact Form 7
• Ozh' Admin Drop Down Menu
• Sidebar Login
• Simple Tags
• TinyMCE Advanced
• The Welcomizer
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

The post Recent Updates to WordPress appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I got pretty tired of going into the code of the post and replacing the links whenever they changed or whenever I got a new site I wanted to share out. There had to be a better way, especially when using WordPress.

I always thought of using the links section to manage groups of links, especially for cases like this one so I decided to give it a stab.

What I found is that you have a few ways of getting that information out of WordPress. Namely, there are two functions that will do the job for you, depending on what you need and what you want. The only issue I had with it was that the two different and distinct functions almost seemed like the same thing. Obviously they aren't or the development community in WordPress would have done away with one.

The two functions are:
get_bookmarks and wp_list_bookmarks. At first glance they seem like the same thing, and they take a lot of the same arguments and give you similar output, but they're not the same. I've noticed this happens a lot in the OpenSource world, where two methods or calls are very similar but differ in function at a fundamental level. Such is the case with this. And perhaps its just me in being naive and really not even a programmer, that even notices these things. I'm sure experienced programmers don't give this a second thought.

For the rest of us hacking away at WordPress the key here is in the description of each function.

The description for get_bookmarks in the Codex reads:

This function returns an array of bookmarks found in the Administration > Links > Edit panel.

while wp_list_bookmarks' reads:

Displays bookmarks found in the Administration > Links panel. This Template Tag allows the user to control how the bookmarks are sorted and displayed.

It is important to note that one says "... returns an array" while the other one says "Displays bookmarks." The difference here is that get_bookmarks is just going to get those bookmarks directly from the database and let you manipulate them till your heart's content, and wp_list_bookmarks goes one step further and actually creates a nice display of the bookmarks.

get_bookmarks requires that you format your data so it can actually be displayed on your site, you have to explicitly tell the code that you want the bookmarks in a list format, or in a paragraph, and it lets you add other code with which to manipulate the actual data before presenting it to the user.

wp_list_bookmarks goes one step further and if you don't change any of the defaults, its smart enough to give you the list of bookmarks you asked in a nicely formatted manner.

Both functions allow for basic things like sorting and using the descriptions and titles for both individual bookmarks and categories.

So how do you know which one to use? If you are developing a theme, creating a plugin, you might want to use get_bookmarks. And if you're just trying to get the bookmarks and list them somewhere without a lot of thrills or frills, you should just wp_list_bookmarks.

For my purposes in my About page, and in the post: Adding a Social media icon box anywhere on your blog, I use wp_list_bookmarks.

Other use cases I can think of go along these lines.

• A nicely formatted blogroll page, instead of a whimpy widget.
• Links to your favorite books in Amazon.

A top 10 list of anything you want. (go crazy with this and power an entire WordPress site with it). All you have to do is add categories, links with descriptions, and pages for each one. Then copy/paste code and change the ID.

An alternative and more sophisiticated solution to this would be a custom post type and a custom post type form and theme logic built in, but that's a topic for another day. Thanks for reading!

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions I can help you with.

The post WordPress — get_bookmarks VS wp_list_bookmarks appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Essentially post formats will let you customize a number of different looks for your posts so that you can pick the style and look for different types of content. Remember that whole "context" talk? This will help with that by providing different CSS options and styling for specific data types. Read all about Post Formats at the codex.

The post WordPress 3.1, closer to full custom post types in the UI. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I've been asked how to do this before so I'll show you how I did it.

There are several ways to do it of course, and the most basic one is to manually add the icons you want. That is simple enough that you can just do it from the edit pane in a wordpress post or page. I won't cover that on this post.

Getting Started

The cool way of doing it, and as far as I'm concerned the better way is to use the links feature that is built into WordPress. First you'll need to create a link category that will be used for this purpose only. Also, if you're good at working with themes, this would be even better if you integrated it into your theme. This post deals with using this code directly in your posts and pages.

Need a unique category

I created a category called: Where in the Web is Oscar Gonzalez? - I gave it a proper description and used the slug of "oscar-gonzalez" as shown below:

Then the code

Then comes the tricky part, making the code to display your links where you want them. First, you'll need to get a plugin called PHP Exec. This is also not covered in this post, but if you need help with it, let me know on twitter or email and I'll give you a hand or post a tutorial on that. You can find Exec-PHP at the WordPress.org repository. Onto the code.

After you get it installed, you'll be able to use PHP code in your posts. With the handy Codex guide and some trial and error, I figured out what I wanted to do and how it would work.

Here's the code I used:

&after=&class=oglinkcat&show_description=0
&show_name=0&orderby=rating&order=DESC'); ?>

Which in turn displays this:

&after=

&class=oglinkcat&show_description=0&show_name=0&orderby=rating&order=DESC'); ?>

The way this works is as follows:

I'm asking WordPress, to use the wp_list_bookmarks command --if you will, to ask for the links under the category with ID of 443 which is the category I have for this purpose, remember Where in the Web is Oscar Gonzalez, yup same one. The real name for something like "wp_list_bookmarks" is a function, by the way. You can find the ID by moving your mouse over the title of the category. There are other options and numerous combinations you can work with to determine how your list will display. The full documentation showing you the options and commands you can build with this function is located in the WordPress.org Codex.

After the ID, I've told the command to show the images attached by saying to the links by saying show_images=1; these images are attached to the links when you create them. Its really a choice you have to use or not to use an image, but because we want to be all spiffy and all, you do want to attach images to these links. In my case I am using 32px by 32px images in general.

Then I tell the function to give me each result wrapped in a list format by using:

before=
&after=

. When I want to use styles to further customize the display of the links, I use the class argument and in this case, the value is oglinkcat, Then the rest of the commands are really to help me sort out the order in which the links will be displayed and what elements will be used.

For example, these mean:

• &show_description=0 means Don't show the description
• &show_name=0 means Don't show the name
• &orderby=rating means That the links should be sorted by using the rating feature
• &order=DESC); That the order should be in a descending manner instead of ascending.

The CSS I'm using is as follows, but I won't explain it because I'm really not an expert at this and it took me some trial and error to finally get it right:

.oglinkcat ul li {
   padding-top: 10px;
   padding-bottom: 2px;
   padding-left: 2px;
   /* border-left: 2px solid gray; */
   list-style: none;
   display: inline;
}

So how do you use it? Each time you want to add a new link to our little nifty Social Media icon display box, you simply add a new link, following the designated fields in WordPress and assign it to the category that we're using in the code. Give it an image and set the other configuration options as you wish.

If you add your icons this way, you can easily choose to show different icons in different sections of your website really easily. I choose to show this box in my About page, but I also show it as a widget on some other pages. I could show it at the bottom of each post, or anywhere else I choose and still only have to update the links from one place. That's the beauty of this approach.

Here's how I add a new link to my social media icon box.

Make sure you give it an image, like an icon for the service you're trying to add, then click on save and your link should now start showing up inside the box. After you add and save the link, you can then refresh the page where you show the box of icons and find the new icon showing up.

I'll explain what the XFN options are in an upcoming post. If you want to receive an update when that comes out, please sign up for my WordPress and website tips newsletter.

The post Adding a social media icon box anywhere on your Blog. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I've been diving into the world of consulting a lot more than ever before. I have always been pretty hands on the projects I work on, usually I'm the guy installing WordPress and configuring it. Usually I'm the guy installing the Linux repositories and cloning devices. I'm the guy that manages Active Directory while keeping tabs on the backup system. Lately though, I'm being called to serve in as a consultant, where I bring forth my expertise instead of my technical skills --though, these are always just within reach.

I've discovered something both about my own abilities and about the abilities of other people. We should never assume anything about somebody else's technical ability on a computer. This is especially true when you're working with a client instead of a peer. I recently had to help somebody who was struggling with a new wordpress sitte. They paid someone to produce a website and they did, but when they finished, they simply passed it on to the client and expected the client to know where stuff was. They didn't explain that the sidebars were hardcoded for example, so the client couldn't change the content via the widgets... They didn't even know they had widgets. The vendor dismissed the client saying that this is "basic" website stuff and quoted them some exorbitant amount for training.

As a 10+ year veteran in the technology field, I take for granted what I know. Often I forget that most people don't install blogs, wikis, webservers and databases on a daily basis. Most people will never install one of those in their lives. Sometimes the challenge is much less technical and it involves something simple like posting a link on a website. As sysadmins and heavily web oriented people, we must keep in mind that most of our clients will never have the ability necessary to maintain their own stuff, or to learn to do "it all" by themselves. They have a business to run and widgets to sell, chances are they don't want to know how to post a properly crafted XFN link or other stuff like that.

WordPress is very easy, compared to how difficult is used to be to make a website... but remember, it is easy for you, but not necesarily so for your client. They have to learn, they are usually unsure if they should click here or there, does it matter if they create a new page or a new post? Do yourself a favor and your client as well, teach them how to use the tools you provide them with. Better yet, provide them better tools.

The post Just because you know WordPress… appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

As much as I discourage the use of Microsoft Word, I know its widely used as the preferred method of writing for some people. Be it for a letter, a resume, or even in some cases, a blog post. Some people use Word to write their blogposts, then copy and paste them into WordPress.

This isn't unusual at all, and in some cases I would even encourage it. Using an editor like Word has tremendous advantages for some people, for example:

• Comfortable environment. You've been using Word for ever and you're comfortable with it.
• Custom dictionaries and strong spell check. If you've been using Word for sometime, you might have customized your dictionaries to suit your language and even the niche in which you write. For example, a technical writer may have certain terms added to the dictionary over time and adding all of these into the browser's dictionary would be a lot of work.
• Automatic saving and backup. You can take full advantage of your existing backup system without having to worry about your blog too much. I've had friends loose hours of writing because something; went wrong in their editing window in the browser.
• Offline writing. If you're on the go a lot, you may or may not have access to the internet. Sometimes it may be safer to keep your work offline until you're ready to publish it. This way you always have the latest version in your computer. -- I use Evernote for this by the way, it lets me work online when I'm online and offline when I'm not.

With all that said, if you're using WordPress, you should be aware of a cool little function that is provided to Microsoft Word users. After finishing an article or a composition, most people would simply copy and paste the writing into the WordPress post screen, publish and be done with it. But that's just for the inexperienced.

WordPress has a paste from Word function that cleans up the text and code from Word and makes it more web friendly. If you're using Word and want to publish in WordPress, you should take a look and use it, it could save you time and effort, not to mention a lot of headaches.

How to Use it

The paste from Word function is only available through the Visual Editor in WordPress.

To access it:

Create a new post for WordPress

Make sure you're in the Visual mode. There's a tab on the upper right hand corner of the editing box, if you're on the HTML tab, click on Visual.

To paste from Word, use the clipboard icon with the MS Word logo on it. Its the 2nd icon to the right of the "Paragraph" type of selection:

A new window will pop up where you can paste the stuff you copied from Word. This should help you maintain your styles in Word, like bold, italic, and headings as well.

Conclusion

This little handy trick should help you publish faster and more consistently when you use Microsoft Word as your editor of choice. Whatever you do, do not, go back and forth between the Visual and HTML tabs (unless you know exactly why and what you're doing).

If you're going to use Word to publish in your WordPress website, you should stick to one or the other while writing any one single post. WordPress tends to change a few characters when you go from Visual to HTML and you don't really want that because your posts could come out with the wrong formatting or not be visible at all.

The post Write in Word, publish with WordPress appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

For example, did you...

• Categorize your post properly?
• Use proper title (h1, h2, h3,...) tags?
• Give it some tags to contextualize it?
• Did you add your trackback links?
• Have you optimized your slug?
• Spell check?
• Did you remember to give your post an image or a thumbnail?
• Did you remember to ____________?
• Linkify the post?

The list can go on an on depending on your own workflow. But stop worrying about these things, note them down on a list so you can keep it handy as reference. Better yet, get this plugin.

About Pre-Publish reminders

The plugin is written by Nick Ohrn and it is highly rated. Despite its low total download numbers, it serves a very good purpose for those of you that want to make sure you cross all your t's and dot your i's.

Pre-Publish Reminders is a great little plugin that presents you with a customized list of stuff to do before you publish your post; hence the name.

Quick & Easy

Installation is pretty standard. Go to your plugins section, click on add new, then find the plugin and install it. Nothing special about that; you can activate it at the same time.

After you install it and activate it, the plugin shows up under Tools and its listed under its own name. Configuration for the plugin is pretty simple. The configuration page gives you all the options needed to start using the plugin, you can add, delete or customize reminders.

Adding reminders

Type in the text you want to show up as the reminder. Tip: Don't make the text there too long. You'll be seeing this text in your post edit screen when you create a new post so think about that. I prefer brevity in the text field because I put my list of reminders on the side directly above the save/edit/date panel. Notice the nice touch to where you can add a color and a color background to our reminder with a slick color picker. You can add one more level of customization to your reminder and make it Bold (strong), Italicized (emphasized) or Underlined. Click on Save then your reminder will be available from your post page.

Using the Reminders

Simplify things and actually make this plugin a useful addition to your toolset, I suggest you do the same. Drag the panel up to the top of your page and place it directly above the Publish panel as shown on the picture.

As you work through your post, use the reminders to keep you on track. The reminders have a nice little check-box next to them to mark them as completed allowing you to focus on your content and not the stuff you need to do to publish.

Instead of just text, I wish you could put hyperlinks as the reminders. This would come in handy for some of you; for example if you want to do some keyword analysis before you publish, you could have one of the reminders actually take you to your keyword analysis tool.

Deleting Reminders

I almost feel silly telling you how to delete reminders because it is so simple, but here it is. To delete a reminder, just go to the options page for the plugin, select the reminder you want then click delete.

The post Featured Plugin: Pre-Publish Reminders appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

That's a tough question, and one that many people will answer right away with their first choice for hosting. But you really should ask yourself... really, is anyone else's opinion of a host the most important thing you need before making a decision? I don't think so.

Many different things come into play when you begin to answer some of the questions that really matter. Below are a few hosts I recommend and the reasons why. I have personally used these services with varying degrees of success, keep in mind this is mostly for LAMP style of hosting. Consider your needs, budget, ratings, reliability and support.

Rackspace. This is my number one choice currently. Late in 2010 I begun working on their platform and I love it. I recently moved notagrouch.com and oscarstech.com to it and I'm happy as can be. I like running my websites again! In the case of Rackspace, I recommend their Cloud Servers. This requires that you know how to manage your hosting and stuff like updates and security and stuff. It's also a pricier choice but absolutely worth every penny. You have full root access and the ability to do whatever you want with your server, and if you find that you need more memory or disk space you can easily add this through their friendly control panel. They also have a strong support team that is available 24x7.

Dreamhost. Is my 2nd choice.
I have to admit, I've complained about Dreamhost many times before. Sometimes in their blog, sometimes on twitter and I've even bitched them out on email. The support guys take it in stride each time. The past couple of times I had a problem, I handled it differently and approached them nicely. It all got resolved within minutes. You must be thinking the fact that you contact them enough to notice these kind of things should be a sign on its own. Granted once or twice a year my services will be unavailable for sometime.
There's another side to that story, every host I've worked with for more than 2 years has gone down about 2 or 3 times during the year. It happens. Sometimes its a datacenter outage, sometimes its just a mistake or spike in traffic. Fortunately for us as consumers we'll be seeing less and less outages as our data gets distributed across the cloud. In the meantime, for the price you pay, and the services you get Dreamhost cannot be beat. You need to be a developer, or a geek like me to actually need or use their stuff. I'll have to write a review to show you all that you can do with Dreamhost. Some of it you can do it with other hosts, some of it is only available in premium plans, and some of it is just not doable in other hosts. If these terms make a twinkle in your eye, Dreamhost is for you: Perl, SSH, SVN, Shell (bash,tsch, and fish can be installed) *unlimited* storage, users, domains and bandwidth ((Unlimited is of courseimpossible but it is marketed as such. I'm just using the same terminology. I encourage you to learn what it really means when a host says they offer unlimited anything.)) , RSYNC, PHP, and there's so much more. I pay from ~14 to ~18 USD per month because I use one of their private server plans, but you can find deals for 3 - 7 dollars per month.
DO NOT GET DREAMHOST. Their quality and service has declined tremendously over the past couple years. I no longer endorse them and I've removed all of their sponsorships from all of my sites. You've been warned.

Bluehost is a web hosting provider that has managed to serve 1000s of customers. Up until a couple years ago they were my choice host for new projects and for clients that needed basic hosting. They have a full service line of products and some people swear by them. I no longer use them for my own personal reasons. You ought to do your research if you really want to use them before you hand out any cash to them, refunds can be tough and watch out for auto-renewals. They make you jump through a couple of hoops to cancel your account if you want to do so. Otherwise they are stable and very reliable. Support isn't that great, a little slow for my taste, but they get the job done. They offer all the hyped and standard bells and whistles, like Dreamhost as far as the unlimited things go. However you don't have SVN for example. You'll be using SFTP/SSH after you give them your Driver's License, or you can use FTP & the ubiquitous cPanel. Highly rated always and one of WordPress' recommendations on their hosting page. --But then again, they recommend Godaddy for hosting, and I would just simply never make such a recommendation. That leads me to my next point.

Godaddy. Don't get it, I warn you now. I sigh if you got it already, but let me know if I can help you get out of trouble. In the other hand I will probably not help you if you went against my advice not to get it and you still did. Especially Windows based hosting. IMO, it is useless, cumbersome and poorly implemented. Godaddy does domains better than any other registrar I've tried, I currently host all my domains with them.

I must say that I don't recommend shared hosting from Godaddy. DO NOT get it... If we talk about dedicated server hosting, they are pretty good. I used them for a heavily trafficked server for about a year (250k pagevies/month is a lot for me.) And never had a problem I didn't cause myself. The only problems I ever encountered with their dedicated hosting service there were caused by me running the wrong command, or updating the wrong RPM. I had a Dedicated Fedora server. BTW, you'll never learn as much about hosting as when you host your own server completely. But for 99% of the websites out there, you don't need a dedicated server (plus they're about 100/month)

JustHost. Has a large fan base, I admin 2 WordPress blogs hosted on JustHost and it has been a pleasure working with them. Haven't had any downtime since I started working with them. I would recommend it if its within the budget. I have not done a full through review and have not used for personal projects or clients. I've always had clients come to me with hosting already on JustHost. I think they charge extra for SSH access if I remember correctly and I thought that was the only downside and kind of a tacky thing to do IMO.

Liquidweb. By far the best host I've worked with for standard LAMP type of websites, with the basics like PHP, MySQL, Apache and the usual suspects. (Joomla, WordPress, Wikis). They truly have support heroes there. I moved a client from a crappy ancient host named XO, and there were some issues with DNS and MX records during the transfer. The Liquidweb guys responded super quick to all my emails, I chatted with some of them and even called in a couple of times. Each time I interacted with them, they knew exactly what to do, where the problem might have been and what to tell the other host. If you can afford slightly higher than the cheap hosting online, these guys are for you.

Hostgator. I find it to be highly rated by everyone. I got a chance to work on a couple of sites recently and I find their service up to par, fast and always reliable. The DNS instructions were a little bit fuzzy, on your control panel you have your DNS servers shown there but in some other locations it says to use more generic name servers. With this uncertainty of what the right settings should have been, and a super slow time to update records, it made a site move take about 10 hours longer than it should have. I don't think its Hostgators' fault, but I never have to wait longer than 20 - 30 minutes for DNS to update. Maybe its the network that Hostgator is being hosted from, or I was simply on a busy host with a busy name server.
Update Jan 2012. This is my host of choice at the moment and I think I'm going to be with them for a while. I've moved about 80% of my customers to it. I've been blown away by their level of support, it compares to liquidwebs and they are simply awesome. I've even got a discount for you if you want to use them. When you go to hostgator to buy your hosting, use coupon code Oscarstech25 and it will get you 25% off the sticker price.
Also, since I last wrote this post, they've fixed what I thought were a couple of DNS issues and the setup is now dead simple (as it should be) and extremely reliable.

InMotion Hosting. I learned about them at WordCamp LA 2009. I actually won a year of free hosting with their business class hosting plan. I'm using it for the development of the muychingon.com site that went down earlier this year for a facelift. So far they are fast, reliable and quick to work with. I think certain things are a little bit rough around the edges, but in general things work as they should and support is outstanding. Good as any other good host. They seem to have a lot of awards and stuff and they've been around for a while. I don't think they're going away anytime soon.

Do your shopping around. Take your time, if you're itching to get your content up and make it available to the world right away, why don't you setup a free account at WordPress.com, then you can take a little bit of time to really research your hosting options. Most of the prices you see advertised with super low rates like $3.99/month or something like that require you to pay two years in advance. You want to make sure you've made a good decision when you agree to a two year contract. Also, I recommend Dreamhost again in this regard, because you've got nothing to loose. They give you a 97 day return policy. That's 3 full months of time to completely take their service for a ride. Okay, enough about hosting and dreamhost... but I'm just sayin.

My previous article shows some of the questions I ask when checking out a new host or evaluating a current one.

The post Recommended Hosts for Self Hosted WordPress appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

This is very much a work in progress, and you're looking at version .01 of this. Your feedback is appreciated in the comments and come back soon. The corners will be nicely polished and you'll be confident when you buy your next hosting package. Questions in the meantime? send me a tweet @notagrouch

For Any kind of Hosting

• On a shared plan, do you get SSH access?
• On a virtual server plan, do you get root to your own vm?
• Do you get regular shell user access?
• SFTP access but no shell access?
• Can you create additional users to manage your account?
• What operating system do they use for their hosting services?
• Do they offer upgrades in case you need to expand quickly? ((Do you need to move your stuff to a new system if you upgrade or can they upgrade you in place))
• Do they offer 24x7 phone customer support? If not included with my hosting package, can I pay for it?
• Can you schedule scripts and commands? This is usually called "cron"
• Can you create "unlimited" databases?
• Can you host "Unlimited" domains?
• Can I send e-mail out from my host? ((especially important for CMS and Forums))
• How many users on my server?
• Do I have processor & memory guaranteed?
• What is the upload/download speeds, practically.
• Do they use cPanel? usermin? custom? no control panel?
• Do they provide you with installation scripts for the software you want?
• Can you have long running processes?
• Do they have a trial period? ((Some hosts give you 30, 90 days to evaluate and give your money back if you change your mind))

For High Availability Hosting (need to list more)

• Where is my data?
• Is it distributed in multiple geographical locations? in the same data center?
• What type of internet connection does your datacenter have?
• Review SLAs & service features.
• How long before my site is up in case of hardware failure?
• What monitoring system watches over your hosts?
• What is your downtime to alert policy? ((This is how long before you alert me that my server/site is down))
• How long before I'm back up after a hardware/datacenter/process failure? ((This should be like 4, 8, 24 hours. How long do they have after your stuff goes down to bring it back online))

For Special Application hosting (more needed)

• What version of the software do you run? (PHP, Ruby, Java, Python)
• Can I run multiple versions of it in parallel?
• Can I run my own version?
• Do you have SVN?
• Can I setup my own?

A good place to check on the quality of a webhost is to visit their support forums. If the forums don't exist, for once, run away. Then, sign up to the forums, most of the time you can sign up before you are a customer. If the forums allow you to browse without signing up, then just browse around. Look for the recent dates, make sure the forum shows recent activty. Check the questions and responses, are people helpful? Are they understanding of your needs? That's a good way to see if the service will be good.

The post How to evaluate a WebHost appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

WordPress has this type of mechanics, ((for lack of a better word)) for some things, for example, the Auto save feature.

If you open up a draft of a post, you might get a warning like this one:

But then when you actually go to the linkprovided and try to compare the versions to make sure you're working on the right one WordPress might tell you this:

Why?

If WordPress knows or can know that the revisions are identical, why take me through all the clicks and follow-up with this? Seems like a costly operation and a waste of time for me as a user.

A better approach would be to present me with a warning that says that there is another revision that was autosaved, but the current one and the autosaved are identical. This would just be an alert that can be dismissed. Some built in support could come along with the alert, like a warning to the user to check other tabs or windows they might have open that are causing the auto-save to trigger and prevent mangling your working document. But there shouldn't be anything for WordPress to do.

There is no need to take me through a bunch of clicks and page loads just to see that there's nothing for me to actually do.

The post Tiny WordPress improvement. appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Optional plugins:

Adsense-Deluxe
All in One SEO Pack
Articles
Category Posts Widget
Contact Form 7 ((With one basic contact form installed.))
Display Widgets
Inline Posts
Lifestream
NextGEN Gallery
OpenID
Ozh' Who Sees Ad
Page Links To
Photo Dropper
Popularity Contest
RSS Footer
Redirection
SEO Smart Links
SexyBookmarks
Statpress Reloaded
Subscribe to comments
Subscribe-Remind
TweetSuite
Twitter Tools
WP Since Last Visit
WP-Polls ((Installation only))
WP-PostRatings ((Installation only))
WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam
WP-Syntax
WordPress Download Monitor
cForms II ((Installation only))

Included:

Akismet
Google Analytics for WordPress
Google XML Sitemaps
Maintenance Mode
Ozh' Admin Drop Down Menu
Really Simple CAPTCHA ((Included when you use Contact Form 7))
WP-DBManager
WordPress.com

Additional Options

There are some plugins that require extra configuration. The plugins listed below can be installed for an additional fee.
wp-e-commerce ((Please note: This plugin is free, but desirable addons may be purchased directly from Instinct))
Featured Content Gallery
FeedWordPress

More Plugins

If you would like to add a plugin to the list, please speak up in the comments. I'll probably add it to the next revision of this list, or you can do it in private.

The post Favorite WordPress Plugins List appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.