Website Managers

Archive for October, 2009

During the past few weeks my blog and other sites had been painfully slow. The page loading time was in excess of 15 seconds. When in the WordPress dashboard, I would click a button to update a setting and go do something else for 2 minutes while the page loaded.

As a marketer, we are told that we have 7 seconds to grab the attention of visitors. If the page takes longer than that to load, there is a good chance they will go someplace else.

The slow loading became so frustrating that I called our web host, Pagematic. Since some of the sites I run are on a Virtual Private Server (VPS), things that others do on that server can affect the performance of my websites. For instance, if someone ran intensive or poorly written scripts on their VPS, the entire srever can slow down. In this instance, Pagematic located the sites that were running scripts which are not allowed on the server and shut them down. Read the rest of this entry »

There is a lot of publicity lately with a WordPress plugin that allows you to tweet your WordPress posts automatically with Publicize. That only works with WordPress.com though. For self-hosted WordPress blogs, there are other plugins you can use.

If you want to get the most out of publicizing your post, there is a more involved method that works even better than a single plugin. Using the steps below, you can make sure your posts are announced on all the sites you belong to. This will take you less than 30 minutes and well worth the effort!

1. Register for Ping.fm and choose all the sites where you want your posted.
2. Get a HootSuite.com account and add your Ping.fm application (API) key in the Settings.
   • The API key is obtained by clicking on Application Keys from your Dashboard
3. Install the WordTwit (or your favorite Twitter announce) plugin on your WordPress blog

Now when you write a post, it gets sent to Twitter, which is picked up by Hootsuite, passed on to Ping.fm, then sent to all the sites you have enabled there (Facebook, LinkedIn, Plurk, Yahoo!, MyBlogLog, plus many other sites). Sounds complicated, if you spend 30 minutes to set up, you will achieve greater results.

If you know of a better way, let us know.

This short cpanel video tutorial teaches you how to create a MySQL database using cPanel.