WordPress Plugins to avoid LIKE THE PLAGUE MOFO!

Posted by David Whitehouse

Ok guys, so lots of people out there post about various plugins and how they are “great” etc. But half of the time you get all excited, install the plugin, only to be disappointed. Even worse, some of you guys might install a plugin and actually think it is doing you some good, so I thought I’d write this guide to try to help you choose plugins that don’t suck (trust me, I AM an expert at this, I install crappy plugins all the time)!

Social Bookmarking Plugins

Don’t bother installing a plugin that completely covers your blog post in social bookmarks (see example below – I won’t say what site it is from, but it does rank on page 1 for “how to make money online” in Google.co.uk.)

OMG Social Bookmarks are DA BOMB

There are a few reasons for this:

  • Each one of those stupid links is actually leaking you page rank out of your site
  • The majority of people only use Twitter of Facebook, so the chances of you attracting someone to your blog that uses one of these services AND will submit it is slim (unless your Shoemoney or Problogger, in which case you really don’t need to read this).
  • Is having your blog post announce you’ve only got one re-tweet a really good idea? I did this earlier last year, it’s a bad idea. It puts people off, and they are likely to re-tweet you from Twitter or their Twitter client, not from your site anyways!

Instead why not try using one of those “share this” or “add this” buttons – they keep the social bookmarking up-to-date and it doesn’t cover your page in links. Alternatively use WP greet box – the reason why this is good is it only shows a message appropriate to that user, so they see a Digg box if they came from Digg. If you do use WP Greet Box, I recommend adapting it to encourage:

  1. People to add you as a friend
  2. Sign up to your email newsletter
  3. Take action on your site e.g. buy something

SEO Plugins

Ok some SEO plugins are really, really, really, REALLY bad. First up, SEO plugins that remove stop words and numbers from the URL – this is unbelievably irritating and quite frankly, a bit pointless. We had a client at Bronco recently with one of these and they happened to require model numbers in their posts, but all of them were cutting short, so they were ending up with stuff like iPhone-1, iPhone-2 (for example) – yeah like that is better than iPhone-3gs?!?!?!

Next up is automatic link plugins, so basically you put in a keyword and a URL and it replaces all instances of that keyword up to a maximum of 1 or 2 per post with a link to that URL. Again I hate these – they slow your site down (my site is slow enough cos I’m a lazy bastard and I can’t be bothered to move it, so stop pestering me people)! They also create some stupid, stupid links, where you are writing a sentence and it just puts one in, but it looks totally inappropriate – not very classy seo.

SEO Friendly images plugins – HOW LAZY DO YOU HAVE TO BE THAT YOU CAN’T TYPE 50 CHARACTERS?! Plus it fills it with a load of crap, I have a horrible feeling I’ve got this installed still. Instead, when you upload an image, manually edit a beautifully crafted keyword rich ALT text.

Comment Redirect and Spam Plugins

I used these for a while, and quite frankly I think they are a little bit spammy. Comment Relish actually sends unsolicited email (unless you of course add a simple tick box on the comment saying “I don’t mind you sending me unsolicited email”) – which is obviously against all spam legislation. The other one, Comment Redirect – well to be honest I’m in two minds about it, but I think it pisses people off being re-directed after they are their comment to the post, I know it does with me – so why piss off your readers?

The Rest

Now I am the worst offender here, but I am learning through experience (I’m good at failing over and over – but thats called progress, right?). To finish this big long rant of a post off, and because I want to go to bed, I’m just going to list a few plugins I think suck to high heaven and should be avoided at all costs:

  • Twitterupdater (I used this, it is pants – use Feedburner’s socialise functionality for Twitter, like Patrick Altoft does)
  • Redirection plugin (again I used this, I’m pretty sure it slowed my site down even further, which is pretty bad as it runs at a snail pace anyways – learn to edit your .htaccess file instead, it’s much more fun)!
  • The Odiogo plugin – great in theory, but super slow load times.
  • Most of the plugins I recommend – as usually I haven’t tested them and I’m dead excited about them, but they turn out to be shit – see appendix A, B and C

Anyways, that is my rant for the night – perhaps I’ll do a post on some decent WordPress plugins, such as the superb Google Website Optimizer for WordPress Plugin (or perhaps that’s just me being excited again).

I’m off to bed. </RANT>

How to transfer your blog from blogger or blogspot to WordPress

Posted by David Whitehouse

Sometime in 2008 I started a blog called Inventive Millionaire had over 120 posts on this blog and it was very similar to make money online kind of blog.  Anyway I have decided to resurrect it because I now wish to make money from blogging and in order to do so I am going to need a lot of content and a lot of blogs.

So in order to resurrect the content I had to remove a redirect from Inventive Millionaire to David Whitehouse and then I had to export the content from Blogspot and run it through a conversion process to get it ready for WordPress, then I simply imported it into WordPress.

There is a simpler way but it didn’t work for me simply go to tools imports and select blogger from there and its pretty straightforward from then on.

htaccess redirects with regular expressions

Posted by David Whitehouse

The Problem

Ok so I hit a bit of a snag tonight, I had ended up with the following predicament.

I had a url: http://www.david-whitehouse.org/blog/ which I wanted to redirect to http://www.david-whitehouse.org/ but when I used the following code:

redirect 301 /blog/ http://www.david-whitehouse.org/

I ended up redirecting pages such as http://www.david-whitehouse.org/blog/blogging-voice-recognition/ to http://www.david-whitehouse.org/blogging-voice-recognition/ – but I wanted to keep it where it was (plus this created a redirect loop, which I could have fixed).

Twitter Friends to the Rescue!

So I asked for help on Twitter – offering a free link for the right answer (at first a site wide, then I chickened out and said “just a post”). Thankfully I found the answer – so they can all settle for a nice link in this post (see below).

Many things were suggested, some would have worked but I felt they were workarounds and I wanted to solve this particular issue in this way. I had tried some regular expressions, others passed me some more and people were passing me mod_rewrite code too. Unfortunately none of it seemed to work, some gave 500 errors, where as others resulted in the page sitting their, not moving – laughing at me, mocking at me, whispering…

Anyways!

The Solution

RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog/$ http://www.david-whitehouse.org/

redirect doesn’t let you use regular expressions – RedirectMatch does (perhaps this is common knowledge, but I couldn’t find it anywhere and it wasn’t in the code anyone gave me). I found the fix here.

Thanks guys

For those that participated in helping me, I would like to thank (in no particular order):
Malcolm Coles
David Elstob
Will Critchlow
David Cumbor
Teifion Jordan
Jaamit Durrani

How to fix _weak_escape() error after upgrading to Wordpress 2.8

Posted by David Whitehouse

I just got the Wordpress error: Call to undefined function: _weak_escape() when trying to login to Wordpress admin after upgrading to Wordpress 2.8.

I looked it up and someone mentioned it was a problem to do with the redirection plugin – but to hell with disabling that, I love that plugin!!! So instead I looked into the file causing the problem:
wp-includes/wp-db.php

At a further look it didn’t seem to like the function _weak_escape, so I simply found what this function did, all it does is addslashes, so I embedded this into the code which was calling _weak_escape and hey presto! It works!

Here is the full code I used:
function escape($data) {
if ( is_array($data) ) {
foreach ( (array) $data as $k => $v ) {
if ( is_array($v) )
$data[$k] = $this->escape( $v );
else
$data[$k] = addslashes($v);
}
} else {
$data = addslashes($data);
}
return $data;
}

Hope that helps some of you out there!

I realise this isn’t the best fix for it – ideally you want to get it so it doesn’t believe _weak_escape is an undefined function – but I’m not sure what the cause of this is, I imagine I could try removing the underscore or searching at php.net – but it’s late and I want to go to bed! If you find the solution please let me know in the comments and I’ll give you a link :)

Blog Setup

Posted by David Whitehouse

I’ve finished setting up Wordpress after following the guide on Yoast. Well worth going through by the way, I highly recommend it.

Now I’ve just got to get myself a new theme, as this one is messing up in FireFox it appears – not good. Anyone know where I can get a good theme?

Also need to remove the blog roll and start putting a post about each friend instead (sorry guys).

Wordpress almost setup for SEO

Posted by David Whitehouse

Just been going through the Yoast Wordpress SEO guide

I’m about halfway through, it’s only taken me an hour! Well worth it I reckon.

Apologies to my friends, but I will be removing my blogroll and putting a post about each of you instead – hope you don’t mind!