Up until today I have been using Wordbooker. I haven’t been very happy with it for a few reasons. One is that it occasionally seemed to switch off and another is that it occasionally posted to my personal Facebook profile rather than to my the Facebook page as it was supposed to. The last reason I wasn’t all that happy with it was that it had so many features that I wasn’t interested in using and I like things to be streamlined if possible.

Today the creator of Wordbooker announced on his blog that the Wordbooker plugin had been pulled from the WordPress depository for various reasons and that he was feeling quite disheartened and may not continue developing the plugin. I feel bad for him but I’m sure WordPress have good reasons for removing the plugin as there is no benefit for them to remove a good plugin.

So I searched for a replacement plugin and found one called Facebook Page Publish that seemed it would do the trick and be much tidier than Wordbooker to boot. The problem is that it wasn’t updated for a while and the installation guide is dated. So I decided to create this guide to Facebook Page Publish.

Use Facebook Page Publish to post WordPress posts to Facebook automatically

1. Install and Activate Facebook Page Publish.

2. In your WordPress settings menu click on Facebook Page Publish to see options.

3. Create a Facebook application. (Don’t panic, it’s easy!) You need to be logged in to Facebook.

4. Click Create New App.

5. A pop-up will come asking you to name your app. The App Display Name is what visitors to your Facebook Page will see so make it relevant. I’d just use the name of the site it is promoting. (eg. The Huffington Post) and the App Namespace can usually be the same but without spaces or capital letters. Don’t worry about it too much.

Agree to the Facebook Platform Policies and click Continue.

6. Add App Domain in the next page. Other areas should already be filled in. (See image below.)

7. Below that area click on Website and enter your full domain including http://.

Go to the bottom of the page and click Save Changes.

8. Click on the Advanced Tab in the sidebar:

9. You need to set deprecate offline_access to disabled. Scroll down the page and click Save. *

10. Copy and paste the Application ID Application Secret from your Facebook app (see blurred area of no. 6 above if you are not sure where it is) into the fields in the Facebook Page Publish Options page in your WordPress control panel.

11. Click Save Changes. (There will be an error message but ignore it.) Then click Grant Access. (The error message should disappear.)

12. In option 2 and 3 you can can choose some options like whether to post to profile or page and whether to include excerpt or not etc. Click save after you make your choices.

Test it? Working?

The End.

* I found this in the WordPress.org forum. I am not sure about what security risks there may be.

Other ways to post WordPress posts to Facebook Automatically

Of course there are other options out there. Just Google it and you can find them. Some are free, some are not. If you are on WordPress.com they have a great Publicize app already included. I hope they make it available for us sometime in the future.

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Spam Followers

I think I would classify them as spam followers. They haven’t spammed me with direct messages or tweets but I do get notifications telling me I have a new follower which I check to see whether I should follow them back or not. Well, now I don’t check because they are fairly recognizable but I do open the email. The twitter follower is not such a big deal despite the fact that it is not a true follower. I suspect the vast majority of followers don’t ever check their Twitter accounts anyway so we never really know the number of true followers.

The only thing I can think of is that they are building these accounts to sell to people who can just change the name and have instant followers. I’m not sure how effective that would be as a marketing strategy but perhaps there is some statistic that shows that the more followers you have the more like it is that someone will follow you?

Identify your spam followers

After a quick search of Google I found a tool called TwitBlock that analyses your Twitter followers and judges whether they are spam followers or not. I didn’t use it to block any account but in one of my Twitter accounts it identified 9 out of 180 as possible spam accounts. That doesn’t seem to bad really.

Link: TwitBlock

What do you think?

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Update: it seems that this is only an experiment and it will disappear at some point but the good news is that they say they are working on an even better system.

We’re working on something that I believe is even better, and when that’s ready for a public trial we’ll let you know.

Source: Dirk Balfanz on Google+

Google has created a way for people to log into a public computer without typing in your password so now you can sign in to Google safely on public computers. That’s pretty cool. You will need a smartphone with a camera and a QR code scanner app that is signed into Google to do it though.

How to sign in to Google safely on Public Computers

You just go to the following url, scan the QR code (That’s all that is on the page.) and go to the url it provides on your smartphone. If you are not logged into Google on your phone it will ask you to log in.

Link: https://accounts.google.com/sesame

I tested it and I was asked if I wanted to start with gmail or iGoogle. It took about a second after signing in on my phone to be signed in to my gmail account on the PC. Very cool.

On the other hand, I think the days of people signing in to public computers are numbered considering most people can check their email with smart phones or carry a tablet or ultrabook with them when they are travelling. I did log onto a public computer to do some work one night when I was in Paris last Autumn and maybe once on a trip back to Japan but before that I don’t remember when I did it. Probably years. And looking at the amazing lineup of new (and cheap) laptops and tablets that were announced at CES this year I think a lot of people will be tempted to splash out. I think that by the end of 2013 the number of people in the more developed nations who have some type of tablet will outnumber the ones that don’t.

In the meantime though, this does seem like a very safe way to sign in to Google on public computers. What do you think?

Source: Google+ via Lifehacker

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As you may or may not know, I have a blog called Tee Reviewer. It is a t-shirt news and review blog. Recently I posted a list of the 21 most important t-shirt blogs of 2011. (Please check it out.) I follow most, if not all of the blogs listed and the list took me a while to compile and arrange. And as you can see (if you check it out) I also wrote a comment about each blog. If you are a blogger, I’m sure you understand that making a list post like this is time-consuming and simply hard work. It was a good post and when I completed it I spent some time promoting it as well. So why am I writing a post about how not to steal blog content?

Today I found that another blogger basically copied nearly all the content from one of my posts and posted it on his own blog. Of course I am not too happy about that. The post that took me hours to write and promote is being used on someone else’s site and it probably just took them two minutes to steal it and post it. It is definitely a good example of how not to steal blog content.

This was orignially posted on teereviewer.com, you can find the original post here. I have a giant list of blogs listed on my site but haven’t made any updates in a while.

He did give me credit though (see above quote) so that’s something. But it’s not totally clear that he didn’t write the post originally on Tee Reviewer (my site) first and then re-post it on his own site. I’ll give him the benefit of doubt here though and assume that it was not his intention to obfuscate. Put aside his intentions though and let’s just look at how it appears. Below is screenshot of his introduction text. (I added the highlighting.)

Only two lines of original content

So, the first two sentences are his introduction, basically the next hardest part of creating the post after copying and pasting the content from my site. The second line of the first paragraph (his content) says:

I have a giant list of blogs listed on my site but haven’t made any updates in a while.

and the first line of the next paragraph (my content) says:

Of course you probably want to know how I created this list of the 20 most important t-shirt blogs.

I think most people would think that the “I” in both of these articles are one and the same, the author of the article. Especially as people mostly scan internet articles. As I have decided to give him the benefit of the doubt in this case I’ll say that it is laziness rather than deviousness that makes this look like his own original content rather than what it actually is, stolen content.

Lazy Thief

Of course I have a few things to back up the idea that this is the work of a lazy thief. Not just the accidental(?) obfuscation above that makes people believe he has produced original content.

1. He wrote only two short sentences of original text.
2. In those two sentences there was a spelling mistake.
3. In the image above, I highlighted two pieces of text. One of them says 20 most important t-shirt blogs and the other says 21 blogs. In the original Tee Reviewer post there were 21 blogs in the list. But this blogger changed the list to 20. But the thief was too lazy to change the one other piece of text from 21 to 20. Or perhaps he didn’t even read it.
4.  He copy and pasted my article.
5. He is hotlinking my images rather than downloading them and uploading to his own server.
6. He didn’t bother to remove unrelated content from the article. (See image below.)
7. He has his own list but didn’t bother to edit it, instead he just steals mine.

Content unrelated to the list

Evil Thief

I know I said I’d give him the benefit of the doubt but let’s for a moment imagine that he is not a lazy idiot and that he intentionally stole my content and tried to pass it off as his own. There is some evidence that this may be the case and let me lay it out for you:

1. He changed the title of the post and the number of blogs in the list.
2. His introduction, while including a link to my original post, is written in a way that allows others to think that he compiled this list and that the opinions in it are his.
3. There were originally 21 blogs.The blog that was removed from the list was my blog, Tee Reviewer, which ironically was where the article was originally published.
4. He is hotlinking my images for his post and using my bandwidth.
5. He removed two links at the bottom to two of my other websites.
6. I linked to his website and he steals my content. (Biting the hand that feeds it?)

How I am dealing with the content thief

• The first step I took was sending him an email requesting that he reduce it to just an excerpt (if he wouldn’t mind).
• Then I commented on the post saying that I had sent an email, to please check his spam folder if he hasn’t received the email.
• After looking at the post some more I emailed him at another address with more details about how I’d like the post to be: maximum 3 of the list with a link at the bottom and the top of the post to the original post, and to make it clearer that it was not his content.

It’s not all bad.

After all that I say it’s not all bad? Yes, it’s true. I don’t know how many hits his blog gets but it gets some and some of the people who see this new post may even click through to the original (if they notice the link). Also his blog has a PR4 and my blog has yet to get a PR since switching domains a few weeks back. So I may even get some Google juice from this.

How to steal blog content

So far this post has been about how not to steal blog content but there are ways to use other people’s content on your website without being seen as an asshole. Every blogger has a different opinion but here is my advice for people who want to continue using other people’s content without being the subject of  a how not to steal blog content post like this one.

1. Contact the original author and ask them. (Simple. OK, it’s not really stealing if you get permission but no one likes a thief.)

It’s a very short list but that’s it really. Some authors are fine with it, some have conditions and some just don’t allow it but at least you know you did the right thing.

Who is this thief?

You may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned any names or provided any links to this blog post. I may at a later point but probably not. I hope he will understand my point of view and do the right thing. I think with a little detective work it can easily be worked out though.

He is a blogger and t-shirt shop owner so I think he should understand what he has done is wrong. I don’t think he would be too happy if I copied one of his articles and tried to pass it off as my own or if I used one of his t-shirt designs, altered it slightly and sold it in my store. Even if I gave him credit.

Follow up – what’s next?

Update: the stolen content has been removed from his site. He apologized but only after I asked. See his response below.

Well, it’s been over 16 hours since I contacted him first but it’s the weekend. I’ll give it a bit more time before I do anything else but I have a few tricks up my sleeve. Hopefully though I won’t do anything too mean. I’ll let you know how it goes.

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I decided to learn how to import Tumblr to WordPress. The reason is a friend of mine is thinking of moving his Tumblr to a WordPress installation  because he feels that the limitations of Tumblr are holding him back so I was wondering how easy it would be do make the move. In the WordPress 3.3 update I had noticed that a Tumblr Importer had been included so my guess is that it would be easy.

Important: If you are using a custom domain at Tumblr disable it before you try to import Tumblr to WordPress as it won’t work and you will get an error message: Problem communicating with Tumblr, retrying later

How to import Tumblr to WordPress Stage 1

1. In the sidebar roll your cursor over Tools and click Import in the flyout menu.
2. Click and install Tumblr from the list of importers (assuming it is not already installed).
3. Click Activate and Run Installer.
4. On the next page enter your Tumblr email and password and click Connect to Tumblr.
5. If you have more than one Tumblr look at the one you wish to import. (It can only import one Tumblr at a time.)
6. If you have more than one author on your WordPress blog select the one you want associated with the Tumblr.
7. Click Import this blog.
8. Be patient. (You can click Refresh view to see if anything has been imported or you can check your website to see if any posts have been added.) The more posts you have on Tumblr the longer it’s going to take. The speed may also depend on how busy Tumblr’s servers are.

If you are getting the Problem communicating with Tumblr, retrying later message and you don’t have a custom domain enabled you might just need to be patient. There could be other problems though such as your web host might have a firewall to prevent sites connecting to Tumblr. Just ask your host. I occasionally saw the message with DreamHost but it transferred the Tumblr regardless.

You can easily check your Tumblr dashboard to see how many posts you have and then compare them to the number that have been imported in your WordPress panel. I waited but didn’t see any notification that all the posts had been transferred. When the numbers matched I clicked Clear account information in WordPress.

If you want to continue using the custom domain for your Tumblr don’t forget to set that up again.

How to import Tumblr to WordPress Stage 2

You might be asking yourself “you mean it’s not finished”. You have imported the posts and hopefully they look alright but in reality you should manually check each post.

First of all I’ll tell you what should have worked well.

• Post date and time transferred.
• The text and standard formatting such as lists, bold, italics and strikethrough transferred. So did the blockquote.
• The tags were transferred.
• The images re-posted but without the alt tag. The original didn’t have a title tag. The caption was also intact.

What didn’t work so well.

• Page Titles
• Photosets (Tumbler gallery) – Photosets without a post title didn’t transfer for me.
• Imports to default category – You may have to re-categorize your posts.

Tumblr Page Title Problem

From an SEO perspective the page title is extremely important and it is one reason that people move their blogs from Tumblr to the WordPress platform.

With Tumblr there is no need for page titles as it is more like a long-form Twitter than a blog. So when the blogs are being transferred WordPress has to figure out what title to give the page from the information given. It seems to use different criteria depending on the type of post you have created and the information you have input.

In Tumblr you select the type of post you want to make:

1. Text
2. Photo
3. Quote
4. Link
5. Chat
6. Audio
7. Video

(In my test I just looked at the text, photo, quote, link and video post types.)

Here are some possible outcomes:

Text: If you have used a title, it will be the page title. If you haven’t used a title, it will use the first sentence or a truncated version if it is too long.

Photo: If you have a caption, it will use that as the page title. If you don’t, it will use the custom url. If you don’t have a custom url, the post will have no title or be called “Untitled”. (Photosets don’t transfer.)

Quote: Uses the source as the title if you have one, the quote itself if you don’t.

Link: Uses the description if you have one. If you don’t an empty untitled post will be created. No link.

Video: This is the strangest one. When you embed a YouTube video the YouTube url is used as the page title and if you have a description it will be appended to the title. I haven’t tried other videos.

What should you take away from this?

The page title is very important regarding SEO but posts that are untitled or contain a url will make your site look unprofessional so you need to go through every post manually to check the titles and fix them if necessary.

While you are fixing your post titles you might categorize your posts but I will talk more about that in the next post.

Make sure all your photosets posts have a title as they may not transfer.

While it may seem like a lot of trouble to import your Tumblr to WordPress, if you are serious about your blog, I’m sure it is worth the trouble. I hope this guide on how to import Tumblr to WordPress helps you out. If you had a different experience than me I’d love to hear about it. That’s what the comment area is for.

Link: Tumblr Importer

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It’s true, Twitter is everywhere!

I just watched the 3rd trailer for this movie over on Apple. it looks pretty good and I’m looking forward to watching it. I am enjoying Liam Neeson’s action hero status. He is a totally believable tough guy. But that’s not why I am writing this post.

Link: The Grey on Apple

So, why am I saying that Twitter is everywhere? At the end of this trailer on Apple.com I noticed that the credits were a little different than you normally. As you can see in the image below, instead of using people’s real names they either used their twitter username or a hashtag version of their names for easy searching on Twitter.

Twitter Usernames and Hashtags as credits

I will be writing a post soon about why you need to be on Twitter but this is just to show you how ubiquitous it has become. Twitter is everywhere. Get used to it. No, don’t just get used to it. Get on it.

Link: Twitter

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As you know, I have several websites. I use emails from each of them as I feel it is much more professional than using a free webmail address. Anywaay, when I see a hotmail, gmail or yahoomail address from a company I have to wonder if it’s genuine.

Despite having several email addresses I only log into one email account (gmail) regularly. From there I manage most of my email. How do I do it?

So you want to send and receive your domain email with gmail too?

It’s easy. I have created a two part guide below. Just follow these steps. (I am using DreamHost but the steps should work for most hosts.)

Create Email and Email Forwarder with DreamHost (you need both)

1. Click Manage Email in the sidebar and then click Create New Email Address. The important parts here are the email address and the password and the Email Box name but check over the other settings if you are interested.
2. Click Create Address.
3. Make a note of your email address and password.
4. Scroll down and you should see your new email address under Mailbox and a link to the Mailbox Manager (forget this, you won’t need it as you will manage your email from gmail). Over on the right click Edit.
   
5. In the Fully Hosted Email section next to the line List all email addresses to forward to, one per line add your gmail address.(Important: do not use the Forward-Only Email section.)
6. Click Save Changes.

How to best set up Gmail to Send and receive you domain email

1. Log in to Gmail.
2. Click Settings.
3. Click Accounts and Import tab.
4. In the row Send mail as click Add another email address you own.
5. A new window should have opened in a pop-up. Enter the name you want associated with this account and the new email address you just created.
6. Make sure Treat as an alias is checked.
7. Click Next Step.
8. You have two options here. You should select Send through YOURDOMAIN SMTP servers. (*See why below.)
9. Now you have 3 fields to fill in.  The SMTP Server for Dreamhost is mail.YOURDOMAIN (eg. mail.deadhippo.com). The username and password are the email (use the whole email address) and password that you just set up in Dreamhost.
10. Select 587 from the drop-down.
11. It’s up  to you to use TSL or SSL but they recommend TSL.
12. Click Add Account. (If you get an Authentication Failed message, it might just mean that Dreamhost hasn’t added the email address yet. Be patient.)
13. An email with a confirmation code was sent to the email address that you just created. You need to open that email and click the verification link or copy and paste the verification code back into the previous window. And that’s it.

*Sending through gmail is easier to set up. There is no doubt about it but I strongly advise against this option as there is a high chance that email you send through gmail is likely to be marked as spam and may even be blocked my web servers. If you are a gmail user you have probably seen the warning Warning: This message may not be from whom it claims to be… That could also happen if you choose the first option.

Another benefit of this is that you don’t have to deal with your web hosts webmail outages.

You don't have to worry about your host's webmail outages anymore!

I hope this has helped you out. I’m not saying that this is the best way to manage your email but it is easy and it’s how I currently do it. If you have any questions or comments please use the comment form below.

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I saw this video yesterday and it inspired me to go for a walk every day. Well, we’ll see if that is the case because I haven’t actually gone for a walk yet. I am going to go today. I may have mentioned that I like running. I will talk about that more another time but running is not something you can/should do when you are not well. Walking on the other hand, is totally doable.

I have a daughter, she is two now, almost three years old. She catches a cold every so often as kids are wont to do but I have this particularly bad habit of catching it from her almost every time which means that I also catch a cold on a regular basis and this stops me from going for a run. (That sentence was much longer than recommended for blogging or writing in general.) To make a point, I will tell you that I am now recovering from a cold.

So I saw this video and I thought to myself, I can do this. I can go for a 30 minute walk every day. It doesn’t matter if it is raining or snowing, or even if I have a cold so today, either now, before lunch, or just after lunch I am going for a 30 minute walk. Let’s see if I can keep it up.

I have never made a New Year’s Resolution because I thought that if you want to do something why wait until New Years Day to start but as this is so close to the beginning of the year I think it qualifies as one so this is my New Years resolution: the least exercise I will do every day is a 30 minute walk. Follow me on Twitter @deadhippo to see if I can keep it.

Do you have any New Years resolutions? If not, why don’t you go for a walk?

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First of all, I think you need to be aware that there are two WordPress plugins circulating with the same name and that name is WP-Leads. One of them is created by leadtree.com and the other by a WordPress user who goes by the name OccamsRazor who seems to have the domain wpleads.com. In this post I will be discussing the latter plugin.

Same name, different plugin: WP-Leads plugin

What does the WP-Leads plugin do?

It is a very clever plugin that allows you, with a few simple steps, to add a checkbox for people to sign up for your services at MailChimp, Constant Contact or SalesForce.com when they register or post a comment. I use Mailchimp for a newsletter and I wanted this plugin to make it easier for people to sign up for it. It’s a good plugin but despite it’s simplicity, not perfect.

What I want to change.

1. Remove inline style – First of all I wanted to change how the plugin appeared to my users. I am using it at the end of a comment form and there are two other checkboxes that just look different. First of all I thought I thought I’d like to make it look like the other checkboxes but later I decided to make it stand out more. (See below.)

How WP-Leads outputs out of the box

As you can see in the image above the checkbox is on the opposite side of the text from my other checkboxes, and in Chrome at least, the checkbox it a little smaller than the others.

2. Add a div or class wrapper – Just put an unstyled wrapper ar0und the  code that will be output on the screen. That way the users can add a few lines of css to the stylesheet and make it look how they want.

3. Add option to put checkbox before or after the text – Different strokes for different folks. I’m a big fan of uniformity which improves site usability so I want the checkbox at the beginning.

4. Shorten the name of the plugin – This is a bit trivial I admit, but I find it annoying. The name of the plugin in the file is much longer than WP-Leads, actually its WP-Leads (Free) – Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and SalesForce.com Integration. And while it has no effect on it’s performace or how it appears to visitors to my site, it does distort the plugin page of my installation as well as making the edit plugins drop-down very wide. (Click on image to the right to see an example of what I am talking about.)

Fix it!

Of course I could ask the plugin developer to make the changes and I have done that in the past. Sometimes they make the changes and sometimes they don’t, sometimes they update their plugins very quickly and sometimes they don’t even reply.

I do always consider how easy/difficult the changes would be though. In most cases the coding is beyond me and I would have no hope of modifying the plugin by myself but in this case it’s just some HTML and CSS that needs to be edited. I gave it a shot and this is what I came up with.

A styled WP-Leads output as seen on the Shirt List

The Solution

I decided to fix all the problems before contacting the plugin author. Editing plugins by yourself is risky though, as you will lose all modifications when or if you update the plugin. For me though, the plugin does all it needs to and probably won’t need to be updated so I’ll take the risk. I’ll go back through the list above but this time with my solutions.

1. Remove inline styles – I simply edited one of the WP-Leads files in the WordPress file editor. (Go to Plugins, Editor and then select WP-Leads from the drop-down. This is the file I edited: wp-leads-mailchimp-constant-contact-and-salesforcecom-integration/comments/comments.view.class.php. Here is the original code:

<?php
class WPLeadsCommentsView{
 function commentForm(){
 $form=WPLeadsInterface::get_wp_settings();
 $checked=($form["comment_selected"])?" checked":"";
 ?>
 <p style="clear: both;">
 <label style="display: block;"><?php echo $form["comment_text"]; ?>
 <input style="width: 10px; margin-left: 5px;" type="checkbox" name="joinlist" tabindex="26" <?php echo $checked; ?> />
 </label>
 </p>
 <?
 }
}
?>

and here is the code I replaced it with:

<?php
class WPLeadsCommentsView{
 function commentForm(){
 $form=WPLeadsInterface::get_wp_settings();
 $checked=($form["comment_selected"])?" checked":"";
 ?>
 <p id="wpleads-subscription-form">
 <label><input class="wpleads-checkbox" type="checkbox" name="joinlist" tabindex="26" <?php echo $checked; ?> /><?php echo $form["comment_text"]; ?>
 </label>
 </p>
 <?
 }
}
?>

As you can see, I simply removed the inline style from both the <p> tag and the <label> tag.

2. Add a div or class wrapper - I created a new div called wpleads-subscription-form and added the id to the <p> tag. I added the new style to the stylesheet. You can see the CSS I used to style it below but can easily change the style to suit any site.

#wpleads-subscription-form {
 border-left: 5px #0A3A4A solid;
 padding: 10px;
 font-size: 20px;
 background: #33A6B2 url('images/email-icon.png') no-repeat right;
 color: #fff;
}
#wpleads-subscription-form input {
 margin-right: 15px;
}

3. Add option to put checkbox before or after the text - This is a bit much for me so I simply moved the code around a little in order to put the checkbox at the beginning of the text. Look at the above code and you will easily figure it out.

4. Shorten the name of the plugin  - This was the easiest to do. I simply went to the first file ( wp-leads-mailchimp-constant-contact-and-salesforcecom-integration/wpleads.php) and changed the name to WP-Leads Mod. The name was short and descriptive. Be aware though that changing a plugin’s name can potentially break it. It didn’t seem to break this one. I think one upside to changing the name is that when the actual plugin is updated it won’t recognize that it’s the same plugin and won’t ask you to update your plugin. Of course that could be a downside too as you won’t know that the plugin has been updated.

I hope this will be of use to some people. If I ever have a newsletter for this site I will probably install this plugin, or at least a mod of it. I hope the plugin designer adds these fixes though and to all plugin designers out there please use utilize external stylesheets rather than inline style whenever possible.

If you have any questions or comments I’d love to hear them and we have a comment area so why not use it?

Link: http://www.wpleads.com
Link:  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-leads-mailchimp-constant-contact-and-salesforcecom-integration/

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Do you want to improve your WordPress blog? On the weekend I decided I did. And below I will detail most of the steps I took. Some of these ideas may not apply to your blog but many them will so take a read through and maybe you can learn how to improve your WordPress blog too.

Tee Reviewer nee: The T-Shirt Review

Just over 4 years ago I launched a t-shirt blog called the T-Shirt Review. You can read more about how and why it came about on the Tee Reviewer About page. Despite posting fairly constantly over the last four years I didn’t really take care of the blog very well. The theme was outdated, there were unused plugins still installed, there were nearly 300 broken links and it wasn’t running as efficiently as it could have been. And it was slow.

New Domain

The T-Shirt Review was originally on a sub-domain (blog.ruderetro.com) but I think if you want your blog to be taken seriously it needs to be on its own domain. So four years after it’s inception I decide to do just that and I register the new domain TeeReviewer.com. It is quite a generic name but for a blog of this nature (a t-shirt review blog) it does have some SEO value. It is also easy to remember and not too long. That’s how the name came about.

Transferring the site to a new domain

On the one hand this is easy to do. You basically download your files and your database to your PC and upload them to the new domain. I am pretty confident in this area. I have done it before but I was very careful because it’s four years of blogging and I didn’t want to mess it up. I used a guide on yoast.com to help me through (link below) but here are a few steps I took first and I recommend you do too.

1. Remove all unnecessary plugins.
2. Remove caching plugins.
3. Remove unused themes.
4. Delete spam and trash.

Link: http://yoast.com/move-wordpress-blog-domain-10-steps/

I had a badly configured W3 Total Cache plugin installed and I think I had read somewhere that it was not a simple uninstall but it turned out to be easy enough. Again I used a guide (link below) but I think the plugin developer has cleaned up their act since this guide was created because steps 7 and 8 were redundant.

Link: http://journalxtra.com/2011/09/uninstall-w3-total-cache-proper/

Then I followed the Yoast.com guide almost exactly until step 8. My domain requirements were a little different so instead of this code:

Redirect 301 /blog/ http://www.teereviewer.com/

I used this code:

Redirect 301 / http://www.teereviewer.com/

Also I haven’t yet deleted or removed my old site (blog.ruderetro.com) as I think I need to be sure that everything is fine. When you do delete/remove your old site though be sure to leave your .htaccess file so that your links will continue to redirect to your new domain. I’d keep a copy of the files and database on your PC for a while if I were you. Just in case.

In Step 5 of the Yoast.com guide it says to use the Search and Replace plugin to change your urls. I also used this to change instances of the old name The T-Shirt Review to the new name Tee Reviewer. It is easy to use but it doesn’t seem to change everything. It does tell you what it didn’t change though and I was able to change the remaining text in phpMyAdmin. There is a short guide on how to do it in the next link but be warned, as mistake could destroy your database. On the other hand you probably still have a copy of your database on your computer.

Link: http://www.lancelhoff.com/phpmyadmin-sql-search-and-replace/

Removing broken links

This was one of the easier tasks. I just installed a plugin called Broken Link Checker and fixed/removed the nearly 300 broken links on the site. (Broken links are not good for your site and can have a negative impact on SEO.)

More SEO

This one took a bit more time but I probably should have spent more time at it. There are lots of SEO plugins on the market and I am using a ThemeHybrid.com theme which has SEO built into it but I like WordPress SEO by yoast.com. I installed that and filled in a few details and used it to create a sitemap which I submitted to both Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. You should definitely have a sitemap and it should be submitted to Google at the very least. I will talk about WordPress SEO plugin in more detail at a later date.

Speeding up my site

If you have read this far you will know that I had the W3 Total Cache plugin installed before but I removed it before moving my site. I think I never took the time to configure it properly (it is a bit daunting) so I decided to try out the Quick Cache plugin as I have heard good things about it. I highly recommend it because it really increased the loading time of my site and takes almost no work on my part.

Contact Form

I also changed the contact form on Tee Reviewer to Gravity Forms. This is the best contact form plugin I have used and I will be using it on all my WordPress sites but perhaps I’ll talk about it in more detail later. For now, let’s just say that it is very clean and saves me time.

New favicon

It’s a very small thing but favicons are a great way to make your website stand out in a list of bookmarks and they also make the site more professional. (New one here too. What do you think?) Just Google favicon generator for easy ways to make your own.

A Better Search

The search function built into WordPress is not that good. I don’t know why, after all these years, they haven’t worked on making it better but thankfully some people have. One easy way to improve the search on your WordPress installation is to install Relevanssi. It has great features and is simply the best search experience I’ve seen on a WordPress site.

 New theme

This is last but not least. You’ll notice that Tee Reviewer is using the same theme as deadhippo.com. As I write this anyway, they are both using slightly modified versions of the Trending theme by Justin Tadlock of  Theme Hybrid. I am posting the images here because if I have time  I will modify them even more.  For Tee Reviewer I changed the width of main content and the sidebar. I like to have sidebars the width of standard advertising banners and in my experience the 300×250 pixel banners get more clicks. There are no banners on deadhippo.com yet so I haven’t changed the width. (I will show you how to change this theme in a later post.)

I also added a search bar to the menu bar and I customized a widget for subscribing to the blog via RSS and Twitter. One of the things I love about Theme Hybrid is that you can customize anything and quite easily too. If you are interested I can post about this customization too.

Not over yet

There are a few more things that I want to fix like integrating more with social media and making it easier for people to share the content but I’m pretty happy with the improvements to the site. Even if I were finished, the web is changing constantly and we have to adapt. Rich snippets for Google search results will be the next big thing. At least that’s my prediction.

I hope I gave you some hints on how to improve your WordPress blog. If you have any questions or comments? Fire away!

Read Improve your WordPress blog: How I did it. on deadhippo.com - WordPress, Google, Running and Japan to comment or ask questions!