Google Analytics

Google Analytics stopped tracking our traffic. It said it was receiving data, but the stats showed zero visitors – an internet flatline. At first I thought that the redirect had caused all traffic to this site to cease, but I knew that could not be the case since our posts were still appearing in the SERPs, which is where most of our traffic comes from. Plus, we were still getting comments, which meant that some people were visiting. My search to figure out why this was happening led me to find a bunch of other issues (listed below), but eventually I just removed the Google Analytics WordPress plugin we were using, and pasted the analytics code into the footer. That solved the problem, and the stats started showing traffic again.

On another note, it seems that you need to log into Google Analytics and update the profile to the new address. I did that, but it didn’t fix the above problem. Anyways, here says it doesn’t matter what domain name in your Google Analytics settings the tracking code is on.

Lesson: pay close attention to your analytics stats after you redirect your site to a new domain. That way, if you see a problem you can start working immediately to solve it. It took me six days to solve our problem, which meant six days of no logged statistics. I would have hated to have done that to a client!

Google Webmaster Tools

If you’ve got Google Webmaster Tools monitoring your site, you need to change some settings there in order for it to start tracking the new domain properly.

Google has complete instructions on what to do if you are moving a site to a new domain. One of the things they mention there, which we didn’t do before we did the redirect, is to update your settings in Google Webmaster Tools. If you’ve been tracking your site in Google Webmaster Tools, you need to register a change of address. To do so you, need to re-verify the old site, which includes verifying both the www and non-www versions of the site. Google says that the reason for this is that “Typically, both versions point to the same physical location, but this is not always the case.” I had only added the non-www version to Google Webmaster tools, so I had to add a new site for www.wordpressgarage.com. This was a problem since I’d redirected everything and couldn’t put the meta tag that is required in the header of the old site. So I had to remove the 301 redirect from WordPressGarage.com’s .htaccess, add the header tag, and Verify. Once that was done, I could do the change of address.

Redirect Properly with or without www

While I was trying to figure out why our analytics weren’t working, I noticed that we had set up the 301 redirect as follows: http://wordpressgarage.com > http://www.wpgarage.com > http://wpgarage.com. In other words, we had written in the .htaccess file that visitors to wordpressgarage.com should be redirected to www.wpgarage.com, but here on wpgarage.com we have it set up that all visitors are redirected to the non-www version of the domain name. Basically, visitors were redirected twice. Not elegant, that’s for sure.

Google PageRank

I recently realized that this site lost its Google PageRank in the redirection process. We used to have a PR of 4, and now it’s 0. Zero!! I would like to know why that is the case, since all of a site’s value is supposed to be passed on to the new domain if a 301 redirect is used. But in consolation, I haven’t seen a reduction in traffic. In fact, traffic has gone up since we did the redirect.

So there you go: some more things you should pay attention to when doing a 301 redirect of a site to a new domain name. All of the above makes me realize how dependent we are on Google for managing our site properly. What can we do – they create the best (free) tools, so we use them, and we also depend on them for traffic.

CSS3 is also great for rounded corners and shadows, but unfortunately we still need to keep in mind people using all different versions of Internet Explorer.

1. Download SWFir
2. Upload swfir.js and swfir.swf into a folder called swfir into  your theme directory
3. Include the swfIR JavaScript file in the <head> of your document like this:
<script type="text/javascript" src="swfir.js"></script>
4. Add this to footer.php just before the closing body tag<script type=”text/javascript”>
   // swfIR
   window.onload = function() {
   var sir = new swfir();
   sir.specify(“border-radius”, “15″);
   sir.specify(“src”, “<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/swfir/swfir.swf”);
   sir.swap(“.latest-posts-center img”);
   sir.swap(“.latest-posts-center a img”);
   sir.swap(“img.rounded”);
   </script>

   You may choose from any of these parameters:

   • border-radius
   • border-width
   • border-color
   • shadow-offset
   • shadow-angle
   • shadow-alpha
   • shadow-blur
   • shadow-blur-x
   • shadow-blur-y
   • shadow-strength
   • shadow-color
   • shadow-quality
   • shadow-inner
   • shadow-knockout
   • shadow-hide
   • rotate
   • overflow
   • link
   • elasticity
5. Add this in the loop somewhere Note: this is assuming that your images are not organized by month and day under Settings > Miscellaneous – the box is unchecked.
   Also, you can change the width to whatever you want and it will resize automatically

   <?php if ( get_post_meta($post->ID, ’rounded_img’, true) ) {
   $postimg = get_post_meta($post->ID, ’rounded_img’, $single = true);
   if((stristr($postimg,’http’)===FALSE) && (stristr($postimg,’wp-content’)===FALSE)) {
   $postimg = get_bloginfo(’siteurl’).”/wp-content/uploads/”.$postimg;
   } ?>
   <div>
   <a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>”>
   <img src=”<?php echo $postimg; ?>” alt=”" width=”140″  /></a>
   </div>
   <?php } ?>

6. When you create a post, upload an image and copy the Link URL. Create a custom fields key rounded_img and paste the Link URL in the Value Box.
   

Recently, Miriam found an AMAZING plugin, Simply Exclude by Paul Menard, which is basically excluding heaven… if there is such a thing.

Advanced Category Excluder vs. Simply Exclude

You may have come across the Advanced Category Excluder plugin, and wonder why we didn’t use that one. Here’s why:

Advanced Category Excluder (ACE) vs.  Simply Exclude:

• Advanced Category Excluder conflicts with the Exclude Pages plugin (described below) which excludes pages  from the nav bar. Simple Exclude does not. When I activated it ACE all the pages that had been excluded with the Exclude Pages plugin appeared on the nav bar.
• ACE also offers you to exclude Pages, which is so annoying since you have to go through a long list of all the pages on your site to see which you want to exclude, and they appear in long lists without any indication of parent pages and sub-pages. Also, there’s no easy way to exclude pages when you are adding or editing a page.
• With ACE you have to first publish a post in a category, and only then will that category appear in the list of categories for exclusion. This means that if you want a category to not appear in the RSS feed etc., your first post in that category has to.

How to manually exclude categories in the theme files

And here are a few tips on how to exclude categories manually from the feed and the loop if you still prefer some good ol’ fashioned manual labor.

How to Manually Exclude a Category from a RSS feed

Place the following code in your functions.php file replacing 12 with your category and commas for additional categories. Tip from Web Kreation.

function myFeedExcluder($query) {

if ($query->is_feed) {

$query->set(‘cat’,'-12′);

}

return $query;

}

add_filter(‘pre_get_posts’,'myFeedExcluder’);

How to Manually Exclude a Category in Feedburner

Under Edit Feed Details add a ?cat=-93 or whatever the category ID number is so it comes out like:  http://domain.com/feed?cat=-93

How to Manually Exclude a Category from the Loop

Add this code BEFORE the loop and change 52 to whatever category you want to exclude

<?php query_posts(’showposts=2&cat=-52′); ?>

Bonus: Easily Exclude Pages

Since we’re discussing excluding stuff from your WordPress blog, here’s a related plugin that we love called Exclude Pages by Simon Wheatley. It’s easy to use and great to give clients for excluding pages from their navigation menu. Exclude Pages adds a checkbox on the edit Page page that users can click to select to exclude the Page they are working on from any place that lists all Pages, like the navigation bar.

Thank you Automattic and the WordPress community.

While eating breakfast this morning, I started thinking about how much of our business’ activities revolve around WordPress – developing sites and blogs on WordPress, hosting WordPress sites, providing WordPress support and consultation, and more. And then I started thinking about how many people there are out there who also make a living from WordPress services. There must be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of WordPress service providers around the world.

In addition, there are thousands of others who, thanks to the relative simplicity of WordPress and the freemium hosted service at WordPress.com, have managed to set up their own dynamic web presence to help them grow their businesses or organizations.

In Judaism, our tradition teaches us that the most ideal way of giving charity is to give someone else the ability to generate their own income (similar to the saying about teaching a man to fish rather than giving him fish). Automattic has not only created their own business, but has helped others create their own streams of income. I think this is particularly significant for those in the developing world: with WordPress they can provide their services to clients all over the world, without the need for expensive software and supplies, thus increasing their ability to generate income for themselves and their families.

Automattic obviously plays a big role in the success of WordPress, but without the community I don’t think WordPress would be where it is today. Automattic’s approach to the community is of course what made it so robust, thanks to the fact that the software is Open Source, and thanks to the implementation of an API system that allows others to add on features through the development of plugins. It’s also due to the environment that Automattic created, whereby the community is encouraged to support and be active in the development of WordPress.

The WordPress community certainly took up the torch, and has helped WordPress spread like wildfire. Three years ago, when I was researching the available Open Source platforms for creating dynamic websites, one of the reasons I settled on WP was because of the amazingly useful community generated information I found. And that’s why I started this very blog: to give back to the community in my own small way.

So thank you WordPress community.

Thank you Automattic.

Thank you for WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, WordCamp, the Codex, and BuddyPress.

Thank you for creating such an awesome piece of software, and for continuing to innovate and listen to the community.

Happy New Year!

During the process, we had to do a 301 redirect from WordPressGarage.com to WPGarage.com in order to retain traffic from inbound links and search engines. It’s important in this type of situation to do a 301 permanent redirect so that all of the new pages on the new site are seen by the search engines as equivalent in terms of value and ranking as the old site.

We followed Yoast’s guide for how to Move your WordPress blog to a new domain in 10 steps! which was very helpful. However, along the way, we realized that there are a few things in his directions that might not be clear to readers (they weren’t so clear to us at times), so here are some things to pay attention to when doing a 301 redirect for a WordPress blog:

1. Put the robots.txt on the new domain.
2. Copy the database and files to the new domain.
3. Edit wp-config.php on the new domain to have the right database settings as described by Yoast.
4. Now set up your new blog install, with the same settings as on the old domain. If you import the database it will retain pretty much all of your settings from the old site.
5. The Search and Replace plugin for replacing instances of your old URL with the new one across your database works great.
6. This step is fine.
7. Yoast says to remove the robots.txt file. We left it but removed the slash after the word Disallow.
8. The code Joost gives to put in your .htaccess file refers to a site moving from a sub-directory on one domain to a the root directory on another domain. It might not be clear what you need to use if you’re moving from the root directory of one domain to the root directory of another. So, on your old blog, add one of the the following lines to your apache .htaccess or vhost-config:

   Redirect 301 /blog/ http://www.newdomain.com/
   This is if you're moving from domain.com/blog to domain.com
   OR
   Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/
   This is if you're moving from olddomain.com to newdomain.com

IMPORTANT NOTE: Don’t underestimate the importance of the slash and spacing. In Yoast’s example, we took out the entire /blog/ part of the line and the old site would only forward to the homepage of the new site. Luckily, we found this article which showed the importance of the slash placement.



9. Joost says to remove the old blog and database. I’m not sure if I would do that so quickly.
10. Change your FeedBurner account, if you have one, to pick up the correct feed and continue delivering it to subscribers..
    Note: You can only change the Feed Title and Original Feed. You can’t change or “redirect” the Feed Address itself.

Test it out and hope Google figures things out and displays your new site in the serps.

Update: After moving the site to the new domain, a few issues arose and were eventually solved, including issues related to Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and more. Read More on doing a 301 redirect of a WordPress site to a new domain for more info.

They took my advice and modified the plugin, and it worked.

Today, one of our clients contacted us saying that they are trying to install a certain  WordPress analytics plugin, and the code that the plugin produces appears in the footer when they switch to the default theme, but it doesn’t work with the theme we created for them.

I realized that it must be the same missing hook problem, and we looked into it and identified the following hook which indeed was missing from their theme:

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

We added it to their footer.php file, and the plugin started to work!

So take note theme developers for the WordPress community and for private clients (I am including myself in this): it is important to run through a checklist of code snippets that your WordPress themes should contain so that users and clients can enjoy smooth running WordPress sites.

<?php wp_footer(); ?> is just one of them. The WordPress Codex has a very handy page called Theme Development that goes through functionality and code that WordPress themes should have. Here are some important sections:

Theme Template Files List – list of all the possible theme template files.

Plugin API Hooks – list of all the pieces of code needed for plugins that use those hooks to work. Weblog Tools Collection reported that another API hook that’s regularly forgotten in themes is wp_head();.

The best place for wp_footer();

WP Designer (when he was still writing his amazing blog) wrote about this hook and discusses the ideal placement for it within your theme files. He says that often plugins will break your theme if they use this hook, so it’s best to put it in a style-less div container “that your layout doesn’t depend on. Otherwise, you might end up with an incomplete layout while waiting for a slow loading plugin.”

I’m a bit embarrassed that I wasn’t aware of this apparently basic yet important WordPress theme issue. But I hope that by admitting my lack of knowledge I can help some of you solve plugin problems or theme problems.

I installed it here on WordPress Garage so you can see it in action, but basically the way it works is key terms get a dotted orange underline (which helps differentiate them from your regular links), and when you mouse-over those terms a pop-up window appears with information tabs. These tabs display the following content:

1. A short summary about the key-term (Wikipedia style information)
2. Related News, Articles & Posts
3. Related images from Flickr, Panoramio, Picasa, etc.
4. Related Tweets
5. Related Videos from Youtube
6. Related Products from Amazon
7. How your readers Facebook friends relate to the key term (requires readers to approve Facebook connection)

For geographic locations the pop-up will display a Map tab, and for films a Trailer tab will be displayed.

The field of semantic technologies is so new that Headup is only one of 9 WordPress plugins that have “semantic web” as a tag in the plugin directory.

How to install the Headup plugin

1. Go to “Add New” in the WordPress plugin menu.
2. Enter “headup” as the search term to find the plugin in the directory. There will only be one result for this term.
3. Click the “Install” button on the far right, and then activate the plugin.
4. You can configure some settings for the plugin under Settings > Headup for WordPress. There you can choose a maximum number of annotations to display on a page, how many times the same term should be annotated, and whether hyperlinks should be annotated as well.

It will take about an hour before the key terms on your site start displaying the dotted orange highlights. Here’s a short video explaining how to install the plugin:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G20whW3yOs[/youtube]

Here’s another video overview of the Headup Blog Widget and WordPress plugin.

Why would you use this plugin?

The creators of the plugin say that by offering this type of content, you can “reduce bounce rates and increase your readers’ engagement.” Since I tend to judge the world by my own preferences, I was a bit skeptical as to whether such a feature could really achieve those goals since I prefer to find my own info rather than have it dictated to me. Luckily, my pal Mike works at SemantiNet so I decided to ask him a few questions about this plugin, their technology, the semantic web in general, and whether he agrees that Cookies and Cream is Ben & Jerry’s best ice cream flavor.

WPG: Mike, tell me a bit about SemantiNet and what you do there.

Mike: Whereas much of the activity related to semantic web is still very much academic and theoretical, SemantiNet’s products are among the few examples of practical applications of next generation web technology anyone can enjoy today.

What our technology does is identify key-terms in publications & blogs and then provide relevant and personalized related content in real-time. For example, say you’ve written a post about Barack Obama recently being elected in Oslo to be honored with the Nobel Peace Prize. What we’ll do is automatically identify the term “Barack Obama” as being president of the US, and suggest content related to him, and identify the term “Oslo” as being a city, and suggest content related to it too.

The big deal here is that the technology realizes that Oslo, the city, has different attributes from Obama, the person, so it will offer different types of information for each. For example, Oslo’s Headup results would include a city map, while Obama’s would not.

As for me, I’m a Project Manager in the company and am responsible for managing the company’s site and blog widget.

WPG: Call me an ignoramus Mike (don’t look so happy about the opportunity), but I still don’t quite get what the semantic web is about. Please explain and make me feel more intelligent.

Mike: What makes companies like SemantiNet exciting is that their understanding of online content goes beyond the basic key-word matching we’re familiar with from current search technologies, and enters the realm of true object identification. This is a fancy way of saying that whereas today, if you search for “Apple” you’ll get results related to the company and the fruit indiscriminately, the vision for Semantic Web is that the same search will deliver results that relate not only to “Apple” but also to “Steve Jobs,” “iPhones,” ”iPods,” etc. even if the word “Apple” isn’t explicitly mentioned in the text results.

For more information about the Semantic Web I recommend seeing Sir Tim Berners Lee’s excellent TED talk on the subject.

WPG: How can bloggers and publishers offer this type of rich information on their own sites?

Mike: To date we have three products people can use to get a better feeling for what this does: the Headup Firefox addon, the Headup publisher and blogger widget, and most recently, the Headup WordPress plugin.

WPG: Why should bloggers install the Headup plugin?

Mike: Bloggers who install our widget will gain longer engagement times and reduced bounce rates. Besides these advantages the widget has the ability, via the “Friends” tab, to enable readers to personalize their reading experience and see how the key terms you blogged about relate to their circle of friends. To the best of my knowledge no other widget out there has this capability.

A significant benefit is the fact that everything I’ve described so far is entirely automated. All you as a blogger need to do is a single one time installation of the plugin and within about an hour your entire archive will be covered. This level of automation is again, to the best of my knowledge, unprecedented.

WPG: How does the widget promote engagement time and reduce bounce rate?

Mike: The widget reduces your reader’s incentive to browse away by letting them access all the related content they need right on top of your pages. Why go somewhere else when you have everything you need right where you are?

In your interview with Lior Haner from Yedda you asked, quite rightly, how Yedda was solving bloggers’ need to have conversations take place in their blog. We don’t deal in conversations, however as far as complementary and related content is concerned, we’ve pretty much guaranteed bloggers that their audience won’t have to open another tab or browse away to get the little extra that was missing.

WPG: Can bloggers contact you with questions?

Mike: For sure! I’m personally available for any support needed both on twitter @headup and via email – miked[at]semantinet[dot]com. Don’t be Shy!

WPG: Anything else you’d care to add?

Mike: I agree that Cookies and Cream is Ben & Jerry’s best flavor.

WPG: Of course you do! That’s why we’re pals.

So there you have it. I’d love it if you, our readers, would check out this new feature here and tell me what you think: is it useful, annoying, or somewhere in between?