As you may have seen, Rebecca already wrote up a great review of Sunday’s 2nd WordCamp Israel event. I was privileged to present two short presentations at the event, which I have finally uploaded for all to see. Note that the images and titles of plugins or sites are all links, and you can click on them to get to the actual sites in question.

Setting up a blog with good foundations for the future on WordPress.com or Blogli

Many people prefer to start their blogging career on free sites like WordPress.com, or the Israeli version called Blogli. These sites take away the headache involved in installing the software and managing technical issues. They also allow for a soft start with little financial investment.

However, if you are serious about blogging, then you will want to see your blog grow. As it grows, you may find that it outgrows the limitations of WordPress.com, where you can’t upload plugins or completely customize the appearance of your blog. So while using WordPress.com for your blog is a great choice, you should make sure to implement a few things to ensure that if you do decide to move to a self-hosted blog in the future, it’s not too painful. The most important thing, in my opinion, is to use your own domain name from the start on WordPress.com by upgrading your account. It costs about $10 a month, and is worth it.

Automating your blogging and social media activity

A site or blog is no longer enough if you want to create a web presence that really works for you. It is important to integrate social media into your online strategy so that people can find you off your site as well. But we all know that managing a blog takes tons of time; how in the world do we find time to also manage social media profiles?

This presentation shows you plugins and online apps that will help you automate many of your social media/blogging activities to save you time, and make sure you can still have a bit of life offline too.

And finally, here are links to some other people who wrote about WordCamp Israel 2008 both before and after the event:

WordCamp Israel Has 560 Registrants

Photos and Links from Wordcamp Israel 2008

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WordCamp – Raanan Bar-Cohen – Tips for “virtual” company

WordCamp Israel

This post was originally published at WordCamp Israel 2008 part 2: my presentations on WordPress.com and Social Media on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Today, WordPress Garage turns one year old. Hasn’t our little baby grown up fast? Blow out the candles…

It is exactly one year ago today that I wrote my first post here. It was about Jerome’s Keywords Plugin, which was a popular plugin for creating tags in WordPress before they became a built-in feature.

The reason I started this blog is because at that time, I was building web sites for clients, but felt that I could not justify creating static sites anymore. I was searching desperately for a solution that would enable me to create sites with a content management system that wouldn’t break the bank, and that I could manipulate and customize without being a programming wizard.

I looked into many open source options, and found that WordPress was easiest to use from the designer/developer’s point-of-view, and from the user’s point-of-view. So my company started building sites on WordPress. As we built, we learned a lot and I felt like we really need a good way to organize the information we were gathering about good plugins and how to use them, themes, and code hacks.

And thus WordPress Garage was born. Between WordPress’ categories, tags, and the search function, I figured we’d always be able to locate the information we need within minutes.

Apparently, others also were looking for this information, and readership grew as well, which is good because it’s a lot more fun to write when you know people are listening.

Birthday presents

In honor of WordPress Garage’s birthday, I have two new presents:

1. A WordPress Garage facebook page! If you like this blog, please come on over to this page and become a fan. I’d really like to get to know my readers a bit more.
2. The WordPress Garage YahooGroup – I’m on the WordPress Pro mailing list, which is about the most dry and boring list on earth. I suggested that the list become more active, and while people said it wasn’t appropriate for that list, they liked the idea. So, this email list’s goal is to be a place where people can help other people with their WordPress issues. Looking for that perfect plugin? Can’t figure out why your blog is breaking? Join the list and ask!

Statistics and summary

It’s fun to compare my first month on WPG to this last month. Site visits have gone up 1,424%, and pageviews have gone up 841%. Now I get almost 8000 visitors a month according to Google Analytics, and over 14,000 page views. Most of my visitors come from Google Search, with the rest coming from StumbleUpon and other sites. My top referring sites in order of traffic are:

• Darren Hoyt
• Hack WordPress
• Emma Alvarez
• Ryan Hellyer
• Weblog Tools Collection

Most popular posts

The most popular posts on WPG at the moment are:

• Giving each WordPress post a thumbnail, and display the thumbnail on the home page
• 13 plugins that will make WordPress into a CMS
• WordPress plugin easily creates drop-down navigation
• Images, thumbnails and custom fields in WordPress

Best WP Garage tips

These posts aren’t necessarily the most visited, but the tips in them are pretty useful:

• List only child Pages of a specific parent Page – how to list all the child Pages of the current page in the sidebar
• Displaying single post pages differently in specific categories – how to give single posts a different style based on which category they are in
• The Excerpt Reloaded – how to retain HTML in WordPress excerpts without messing up your page.
• Things I do to optimize and secure every WordPress site and blog – this post listed almost every plugin, optimization and hack that I do to every new WordPress blog. It’s a little outdated by now, but it still is helpful.
• Make managing your WordPress dashboard easier with Admin Drop Down Menus plugin – Admin Drop Down Menus is one of my favorite plugins
• WordPress upgrade nightmare and lessons learned – I almost lost this entire site due to something stupid that I did. Learn from my mistakes and make sure your upgrade doesn’t crash and burn
• Giving each comment its own link in WordPress – This shows you how to make each comment into its own kind of mini-post, which is useful if you ever want to link to specific comments
• Recent Comments code snippet – this code snippet places recent comments in your sidebar for those who don’t want to use widgets.
• WordPress challenge: getting class current_page_item to work when home page is not blog – if your home page is a static page and not your blog, WordPress’ current_page_item class doesn’t work on the blog page so the link to your blog on your navigation bar won’t get highlighted if you are on the blog page. Check out the comments on this post to see the various solutions offered by people.
• How to protect your WordPress site – some good tips for a more secure WordPress site

Most controversial posts

A little bit of controversy adds color to an otherwise boring monologue about loops and plugins. I don’t like to create conflict, but getting people to participate in an active discussion is just fun.

Consumer evangelists vs. lawyers: using “WordPress” in domain names – this is the post where Matt Mullenwegg commented three times. In this post, I argued that WordPress shouldn’t shun blogs (like mine) that use the word WordPress in their domain name, and should rather embrace these consumer “evangelists” who love the product so much that they volunteer their own time to talk or blog about it. After I wrote this post I finished Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin, and he also talks about this idea.

Anyways, Matt and Lorelle didn’t like my opinion, and accused me, or those like me, of “blatant[ly] disregard[ing]…a core tenet of our community,” of being like a scraper, and of legal violations. In the end Matt kind of softened up and he said he’s “thrilled about [me] or anyone who blogs about WordPress.” He said if I want clarification about their policies I should feel free to email or call him. So, mustering up some good ol’ Israeli chutzpah, I called him and left him a message. Despite his generosity, I think this blog is still shunned by the WordPress powers-that-be. Oh well.

Would we use WordPress if there were no plugins? – I just threw out this question to make us think about how valuable WordPress would be on its own. I think it’s value lies in the fact that it supports plugins.

ZDNet says WordPress not clunky, but also not CMS – I referred to an article by ZDNet about whether WordPress is a CMS and sparked a lively discussion.

WordPressGarage is being scraped! I want to stop them…now! – I realized that one particular site was scraping all of my content and republishing it. I threw the issue out to my readers, and got some interesting responses in the comments.

Is WordPress’ security vulnerable at its core? – WordPress is being upgraded all the time because of security issues. Plugins also have constant security vulnerabilities. Is this standard, or is there a problem with WordPress? BlogSecurity.net said there’s a problem with WordPress. Read the post to find out more.

Milestones

• Someone told me that I’m one of the coolest people in the WordPress community! Can you believe it? (No, it wasn’t my mother.) While in the real world I am far from being considered cool (mother with lots of kids who works hard to pay the bills with little time for play), I guess that in the WP community my geekiness is…cool…or something.
• WordPressGarage listed as one of Top 40 Blogs About WordPress!
• I’m sure there was something else I got excited about over this past year, but I can’t remember.

So happy birthday WordPress Garage, and may we enjoy another fun year of WordPress blogging together!

This post was originally published at Happy birthday to WordPress Garage! on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

General Motors has launched a new blog, GMnext, which is built on none other than our favorite blogging platform, WordPress. Even more interesting about this blog is the fact that GM executives will be the ones blogging. I’d love to know how they are managing permissions and compliance issues.

This post was originally published at GM launches new blog built on WordPress on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Free Software Tools from Internet Duct Tape – Blog productivity tools for Firefox and WordPress.

This post was originally published at IDT Labs – Free Software Tools from Internet Duct Tape on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and Automattic, spoke at Blog World Expo on blogging, open source and WordPress. Here are some highlights from his speech, and interesting tidbits about WordPress (from News.com):

• Matt says that blogging is like music – you have to be unique and love what you’re doing. Good metaphor.
• WordPress.com draws about 100 million unique monthly visitors and is among the top 25 global sites. All this from a company with only 18 employees!
• He says that blogs are more telling of a person’s personality than facebook. I’m not so sure about that – I think that both platforms give pictures of personality, but in different ways. Blogs express a person’s thoughts and opinions, while facebook provides a more social window into a person’s life with a strong focus on social interactions, like friends.
• .8 percent of all web pages are powered by WordPress. That’s pretty incredible!

[Hat tip to Ryan Hellyer for pointing me to this article.]

This post was originally published at Almost 1% of all web pages are powered by WordPress! on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

Blogging seems to be all about content. It’s about what you write, how you write it, who you link to, etc. So how does design come into play? Most people say that design is important, and that you should have a professional design that is easy on the eyes, and simple to navigate. It is generally agreed that a bad blog design may have a negative impact on your blog readership.

But I’ve rarely heard people say that a fantastic blog design will be the key to blogging success. Well, Blogsolid is a good case study of how a unique and beautiful design can bring in torrents of readers.

Blogsolid officially launched on July 31st. The content on the site is pretty good, but not anything out of the ordinary. By August 9, the blog was picked up by a bunch of web design galleries. The onslaught of visitors crashed the poor guy’s servers for 12 hours.

Blogsolid’s design and architecture are brilliant. The blog has three categories, which appear on the home page as options for entering the blog. You can also enter the general blog by clicking on the header (this should probably be made clearer somehow – I think there should be four options for entering the blog, i.e. the three categories plus the blog with everything).

Of course, the guy/gal behind Blogsolid is a graphic designer, and it shows. As we’re not all graphic designers, we can theoretically pay someone for a unique design. However, blogging is not always the most profitable of activities, so this is often not viable. But this case study just goes to show how significant design can be in the success of your blog. So try to make sure your blog is presentable and professional, either by creating your own design, or carefully selecting and customizing an existing theme.

(I am working on customizing a new theme for WordPressGarage as we speak – even I can’t stand the way this blog looks anymore!)

This post was originally published at Case study: How blog design contributed to Blogsolid’s success on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.

From ProBlogger:

If I’d thought ahead a little, I would have realized that stuff like a wiki, forum, job board, etc., would all be a good fit, and that I’d better build out around the idea that the highest value for readers would be in having those pieces work well together — seamlessly, in context, and very much not like a blog plus a few strap-on subdomains.

What would I do different if I had to start my blog over? – Merlin Mann>>

This post was originally published at What would I do different if I had to start my blog over? – Merlin Mann on WP Garage - WP Garage - wordpress tricks, hacks, and tips.