Archive for May, 2008
Using WordPress Automatic Plugin Updater
May 15th, 2008 | Author: Jim Hutchinson
For those who do things the hard way, such as hard coding HTML, PHP, CSS and other scripting, downloading WordPress plugins and installing them manually, there is a better way. One of the things I am very cautious about is entering my website login information into forms that transmit them to other sites.
That means in order to update WordPress plugins, the manual
method is to visit your plugins page, look for those with updates available, click the link to the plugin site, click the download button there, unzip the plugin, move it to the WordPress folder, open FTP and upload the new files, go back into WordPress Admin panel, disable the plugin, refresh to make sure the new one was seen, then enable the plugin.
That is how I normally do it. After going through that process many times, it has become easy enough to finish an update within a few minutes. That was until I got bold enough to put my website login into the Automated Plugin Updates form and let the software do all the tedious work.
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Using Firefox, the login information is saved, so all I have to do is select the SSL option, click the Proceed button and wait. For most of the plugins, the updating is painless. For others though, the connection is never made, so I can still satisfy my desire to “kick it old school”.
Plus with the SSL option, my login credentials are encrypted while passing through to the WordPress plugins site. The updates now take even less time so I can get back to researching and writing. Note that this function is in WordPress 2.5+. For those who have not upgraded yet, this is just one of the many options that you are missing out on.
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robots.txt and sitemap files defined
May 11th, 2008 | Author: Jim Hutchinson
One of the more confusing aspects of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is dealing with the files that control the search engine spiders or crawlers. This article will show you the uses and basic structure of each file.
A robots.txt file tells search engines what you do not want them to index. It can include commands that pertain to all search engines, or targeted to specific crawlers.
Example:
User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /eklog Disallow: /images User-Agent: MSNbot Crawl-Delay: 10
The first 4 lines are directed to all crawlers. The last 2 lines tell MSNbot to delay indexing 10 seconds between pages to prevent overloading your site.
In contrast to a robots.txt file, a sitemap file tells the search engine crawlers what you do want them to index. The search engines are very picky about the format, especially if you use the XML type. That one lists the file name, date of last change, revisit schedule and the importance on a scale of 0.1 to1.0
Example:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.websitemanagers.net/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-05-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
There are online tools to help you generate that file. Google and Yahoo have them, plus a plugin for WordPress is available free that will automate the process on your blog.
A much simpler version is a plain sitemap.txt file that lists just the URLs within your site.
Example:
http://www.websitemanagers.net/ http://www.websitemanagers.net/bloghosting/ http://www.websitemanagers.net/color-hex-codes.php http://www.websitemanagers.net/sitemap.php
For more information on creating and managing robots.txt files, visit Wikiedia. Sitemap instructions can be found at Google Webmaster Tools.
Note that both the sitemap and robots.txt file require using either a file manager, such as the one built into cPanel, or a text editor combined with an FTP (file transfer) program.
Jim Hutchinson
Website Managers – Discount Website/Blog Hosting with cPanel
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