Most bloggers who create and run their blogs on WordPress platform will agree that Spam consumes loads of precious time to clean it everyday. One part of the spam which usually bugs everyone is the trackback spam which gets generated whenever someone else links to your content or webpages. But most bloggers will agree with me that majority of the trackback, infact more than 90% trackback is basically spam and you need to delete them. The problem becomes worse as many anti spam filters including Akismet and Antispambee fail to detect or stop this spam.

One of the ways to get rid of this kind of spam is to disable the trackback option from your Blog’s WordPresss admin panel. You can do this by navigating to Options > Discussion panel and then uncheck “Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) “. One problem here is, it only stops trackback from all your future posts but doesnt do anything with old posts. Hence, you need to do something else too to fix the issue with old posts.

To completely disable trackbacks, you will have to edit each past post and uncheck Allow Pings from the Write Post SubPanel. Alternatively, you could just simply delete the wp-trackback.php file. Or just run the following SQL query inside phpMyadmin for your WordPress database.

UPDATE wp_posts SET ping_status="closed";

This query will work flawlessly in phpMyadmin if you did the default installation of WordPress without changing the prefix wp_ of the database table. If you had changed the default prefix wp_ to something else for security reasons, you must use the same prefix for the SQL query. Just replace the wp_  in the SQL query above to the actual prefix used in your WordPress database.

Google analytics has been one of the best tools available to track your website with loads of data like visitor details, pageviews, Bounce rate, Search engine traffic, direct traffic, referral traffic and much more.

One of the drawbacks of Google Analytics till now have been the inability to provide real time data on whats happening on your site at any particular instant. Till now, most bloggers were using Statcounter and few similar services to grab real time data.

Google has now come up with this new feature of tracking real-time stats for your website which tells you whats happening on your site at this moment.  They announced it on their Analytics blog about this new feature.

[quote]Currently, Google Analytics does a great job analyzing past performance. Today we’re very excited to bring real time data to Google Analytics with the launch of Google Analytics Real-Time: a set of new reports that show what’s happening on your site as it happens.[/quote]

This real time data will give you details like number of visitors at the moment, the source from where they are coming, the keywords of the search engines who are refering the visitors to your pages, location and much more. All these data will be available in real time for you to analyze what is going on your site. It will also help you find out the  immediate impact of social media whenever a new blog post gets published and you tweet about it or share it on some other social network like Facebook. With Real-Time, you can see the immediate impact to your site traffic.

This new feature is available with new Google Analytics only and is being rolled out to everyone slowly. If you’re not already using the new version, you can start by clicking the “New Version” link in the top right of Google Analytics. Real-Time reports are in the Dashboards tab. You will have access to Real-Time reports if you are an Administrator on your Analytics account, or if you have access to a profile without profile filters.

Every blogger want a piece of site links from Google Search results for their blogs and websites. Google search results adds site links to blogs and websites if the search algorithm thinks that the link is useful. This process is automatic and is generated by Google search on its own. The site links were previously displayed just as a URL below the parent website or blog search result.  Google on its official blog announced that they are releasing a change to the way the site links are being displayed with search results.

Sitelinks will now be full-size links with a URL and one line of snippet text—similar to regular results—making it even easier to find the section of the site you want. We’re also increasing the maximum number of sitelinks per query from eight to 12.

As the announcement said, the number of maximum sitelinks a site can have now being increased to 12 instead of just 8. Just look at the screenshot below for how the new site links look like.

As you can see, these site links do provide a whole lot of greater information about the useful links available on that particular search result. Google also plan to do some changes with its site link algorithm along with the way the site links are displayed. The site links wont be constant now for a particular blog or website and can vary depending on the search query. These changes are being rolled out globally and everyone must be able to see these changes soon.

]]> http://www.wpbuster.com/blogging/google-site-link-results-full-size/feed/ 0 http://www.wpbuster.com/plugins/enable-hosted-cdn-w3-total-cache/ http://www.wpbuster.com/plugins/enable-hosted-cdn-w3-total-cache/#comments Wed, 06 Jul 2011 09:12:03 +0000 Avinash http://www.wpbuster.com/?p=395

If you are a small blogger and can not afford to buy a Content Delivery Network CDN package for your blog, you need not worry. Using W3 total Cache plugin, you can use your server FTP as self hosted CDN for your WordPress blog without buying a CDN package from somewhere else. Obviously, this is not as effective as normal CDN (which serves your files worldwide using servers located near to the destination of the files being served.)

For using the self hosted CDN feature, you need to create a sub domain from your cpanel or any other control panel of your web hosting. Create images.yourdomain.com on your server (or any other name instead of images) . You need to update your DNS zone too.

Just select Self-hosted / File transfer Protocol Upload in the W# total settings >. General>> Content delivery network.

After you are done with this, you need to provide the FTP credentials like username and Password along with FTP folder path of the folder that you want to serve using this self hosted sub domain. Also, replace the site host name field with the subdomain you created e.g images.yourdomain.com in this case.

After all this, You can click on Test FTP server button. IF you did everything right, it will say test passed. If something wrong happened, try again and check if you did everything right.

In our previous post, we talked about the requirements for upgrading to WordPress 3.2 and how to check if your blog is ready to be updated to WordPress 3.2 using a WordPress health plugin. Now its time to upgrade your blogs to WordPress 3.2 as the final version is released by Automattic.

Some of the major highlights of this new WordPress are refreshed Administrative bar, New default theme “Twenty Eleven”, Full screen editor and loads of other feature additions along with bug fixes. It also drops support for outdated browser Internet explorer 6 and need PHP 5.2.4 , Mysql 5.0.15 or greater.

Highlights

• Refreshed Administrative UI – Admin redesign
• New Default Theme “Twenty Eleven” – Uses the latest Theme Features
• Full Screen Editor – Distraction free writing experience
• Extended Admin Bar – More useful links to control the site

• Requirements Changes-
  • PHP 5.2.4 or greater (old requirement – since WordPress 2.5 was PHP 4.3 or greater)
  • MySQL 5.0.15 or greater (old requirement – since WordPress 2.9 was MySQL 4.1.2 or greater)

• Enhanced Browser Compatibility-
  • Drop Internet Explorer 6 support
  • Start End-of-life (EOL) cycle for Internet Explorer 7
  • Browse Happy notify users of out-of-date browser

• WordPress is Faster and Lighter-
  • Faster page loads — We’ve gone through the most commonly loaded pages in WP and done improvements to their load time
  • Faster Upgrades — The update system now support incremental upgrades so after 3.2 you’ll find upgrading faster than ever
  • Optimizations to WP_Filesystem — Updates over FTP are now much quicker and less error prone
  • Stream downloads to the filesystem — Improves update times and lowers the memory footprint
  • Performance improvements for wptexturize()
  • Remove PHP4 compatibility including timezone support
  • More efficient term intersection queries
  • Some optimizations in the HTML sanitizer (kses)
  • Speed optimizations for is_serialized_string()
  • Cache the Dashboard RSS Widgets HTML output to reduce unnecessary Ajax requests as well as the memory footprint
  • And many other improvements and tweaks

Full list of change log can be read at WordPress codec page.

You should update to this as soon as possible as we experienced faster page load after we upgraded our blogs. Just use the automatic upgrade option inside your WordPress Admin Panel.

Most of the WordPress blogs run on a shared hosting environemnt and a small percentage of blogs which are big run either on VPS or dedicated servers. Majority of the webmasters are not aware of what version of PHP or mysql their blog runs on their host. As wordpress 3.2 is nearing its release which marks a major change in terms of Server requirements from previous WordPress versions. Is your WordPress blog and webhost is ready for this change?

What is Changing?

PHP and MySQL

Starting with WordPress 3.2, you must have PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0 or newer versions being installed on your server for running your blog smoothly. If your host is running lower versions of PHP  and MySQL, then you need to ask your webhost to upgrade. If your webhost is unable to do it, then perhaps its time to find a new webhost if you want to run WordPress 3.2 or above.

How to check if your Blog webhost is ready for wordpress 3.2:

You can find out if you’re ready for 3.2 with the Health Check plugin. In your dashboard, go to Plugins → Add New and search for “health check” (it should be the first result). Install it, activate it, and it will tell you if you need to update anything.

IE6 and Outdated Browsers

WordPress 3.2 will come without any support for the outdated Internet Explorer 6 web browser. This simply mean that your themes and plugins can get rid of IE 6 compatibility codes.

Via: WordPress News

Most of the Bloggers know that Twitter can be a good source of generating traffic for your blog posts if it gets viral. Most of us connect our twitter accounts with our wordpress blogs to tweet automatically using services like twitterfeed, feedburner etc. whenever a new post is published. Sometime Bloggers even schedule tweets at regular intervals to gain maximum advantage.But tweeting about old and random posts is difficult and that too if you want it to be done automatically. Thanks to a WordPress plug “Tweet Old Posts“, now you can tweet your old random posts automatically.

Tweet Old Posts is a plugin designed to tweet your older posts to get more traffic. Tweet Old Posts randomly picks your older post based on the interval specified by you. The primary function of this plugin is to promote older blog posts by tweeting about them and getting more traffic.

The plugin looks great as it provides a lot of options to configure as your your needs. If you wish, you can exclude posts from being tweeted automatically. You can even de-select full categories posts from being tweeted by selecting them in the options.

You can set minimum interval between two tweets, add hashtag to tweets, minimum, maximum age of posts to be tweeted, add a popular URL shortening service right inside the options of the plugin.

Update:- Looks like the plugin need to be updated with latest WordPress version and latest Twitter Authentication system as its now working with WordPress 3.1.4 now (atleast on two of my wordpress blogs). Hopefully, the plugin developer will soon update it to make it work.

Download Tweet Old Posts.

Every blogger who uses WordPress as the main platform on which the blogs are powered on need to do a lot of image editing before they upload it to their blogs or insert into blog posts. Some of the minor things that need to be done with almost every image are cropping, resizing, rotating, and watermarking functionality. Every small functionality if done on the system consumes lot of time and can be saved if the functionality is available in WordPress itself.

Thanks to Scissors plugin you can have all these functionality of cropping, resizing, rotating, and watermarking right inside your wordpress itself. It integrates itself quiet well inside the WordPress image upload and management dialogs .It also let you automatic resizing of images while uploading images and supports automatic or manual watermarking of images. By default, it maintain the Aspect ratio of the image too while the images are being re-sized.

You can configure basic settings for  cropping, resizing, watermarking quite easily in the configuration panel of WordPress plugin. It also supports automatic watermarking of all your images without you watermarking them manually every time you upload them.

If you are a blogger with WordPress as core platform and your posts have loads of images, then this plugin is must for you.

PS: Even though the plugin page says that it wont work with WordPress 2.9 and above, it does work wih latest version of wordpress i.e. WordPress 3.1.3

Download Scissors WordPress plugin.

Google has just released their +1 button which is now available for everyone and you can add it easily using a small snippet of JavaScript code to your website. Just like twitter tweet button and Facebook  like button, it is a additional button which uses recommendations from your friends and contacts beneath your Google search results for better qualified, traffic coming from Google.

To get started, visit the +1 button tool on Google Webmaster Central. Their you can find option of different sizes like small medium, standard or Tall. You can select the size depending on how it blends with your website design.

After you select the size, you can get the javascript code below i to add it to your website. The code consists of two parts. First part you need to add in your website head portion or just before your close body tag of your website. The second portion of the code is to be placed at a place where you want the +1 button to appear.

Here is a small youtube video which gives a brief description about it.

What you think about it? Are you going to add this +1 button to your website or blog?

Looks like WordPress guys dont sleep. Just barely 3 months after the WordPress 3.1 release, another version of WordPress i.e 3.2 is about to be released shortly with a whole lot of bug fixes, performance improvements and new features. WordPress 3.2 beta is released today for testing and is available for download.

The major addition is this release are a new default theme and full screen Editor. Aprt from these two major additions, here’s what that has changed: (Via WordPress News)

• Performance improvements like you wouldn’t believe. What’s that mean? Things are faster!
• Distraction-free Writing. The visual editor’s full-screen composing experience has gotten a major overhaul, and is now available from HTML mode, too. More than ever, WordPress allows you to focus on what matters most — your content.
• Admin UI Refresh. The last major redesign of the WordPress admin was in 2008. This isn’t a major redesign, just a little facelift to keep us feeling young. WordPress turns 8 later this month, you know.
• New Default Theme. Introducing Twenty Eleven, based on the popular Duster theme. Rotating header images, post format support, and more.
• Browse Happy. WordPress is made to work with modern browsers. If you visit your Dashboard using an outdated web browser, we’ll let you know there’s a newer version available.
• Admin Bar. We’ve added more links to the admin bar to make it even more useful.

As it is with any beta releases, you should not install it on any of your running websites. Just wait for the final wordpress 3.2 version to come out.

The new theme comes with loads of options including two versions of theme, a light version and a dark version. You can change logo, adjust header, layout and a bit more.

You can Download WordPress 3.2 Beta 1 here.