December 14th in Wordpress etiquette by Wordpress Jedi . 
WordPress is dominating the blogging world. Most bloggers don’t even look at other options available, and there is a reason for that. I may be biased but WordPress is the best platform out there. But when you adopt a platform, you have to take the goods with the bad. In the case of WordPress, we are talking about the douche bags. There are plenty of them around. Some of them know they are being jerks, while others are just not educated enough to know what they are doing is wrong.
You are essentially a WordPress douche bag if:
- personally spam WordPress blogs: every newbie to the marketing world try this technique before learning it the hard way. SEOs keep telling folks about using blogs to get links back to other sites. Well, there is a right way and wrong way to do it. If you just post a stupid comment to get a link back, it’s going to show. Now, you are a class A douche bag if you use an anchor text such as “top web hosts” as your name. That’s like being a douche in a douche bag town.
- spam WordPress blogs, period: you may tell me that you don’t actually spam WordPress blogs by hand. You are actually smart enough to pay some jerk to write a program to automate the process. That makes you the smartest idiot in town.
- you are a troll on other blogs: you may not spam other blogs, but if you go around insulting folks on other blogs, you are definitely a douche. You don’t need to have two big horns to be an idiot. Your actions speak louder. Always respect others’ opinion. Name calling and insulting others is not going to get you anywhere.
- copy others’ ideas without giving credit: I hate copycats. That’s just it. If you copy me, at least give me some credit. I don’t mind that. But if you take my idea, copy it to your site, and don’t even think about giving me a mention, then you are an e-jerk.
- grab contact info without consent: we are entering the black-hat territory here, but there are actually folks out there who grab your e-mail from your “contact us” page and send you unauthorized e-mail. That’s not only wrong but illegal.
- keep reminding me about my typos: evrybody makes meestakes. Don’t try to be a wise-*** by bringing up every single typo that I make on my blog. Nobody’s perfect. Just because I have a few typos here and there doesn’t mean I am an idiot. But by bringing it up, you are going to make me feel like one. Why?
- hotlink to my images: let’s say you go around reading ten blogs a day. Then you see a nice article with an even nicer image on it. You should always ask permission before grabbing the image. Better yet, you should not link directly to that image. Download the image to your own server and link to it. Don’t be a douche!
Did I miss anything? Anyone?
December 12th in Wordpress Tips by Wordpress Jedi . We are getting awfully close to the release date of WordPress 2.7. I personally believe that WordPress 2.7 is the most significant upgrade for the WordPress platform. If you are a professional blogger, you are probably familiar with the goods and bads of WordPress 2.6. WordPress 2.7 is far superior to WP 2.6 in almost all areas. Here is why:
- Simplicity: WordPress 2.7 is programmed for idiots. Not literally, but if you upgrade to WP 2.7, there is no excuse for not getting things done. Almost everything is placed where it needs to be placed. If you can type and you can press a button, you can blog. The teen bloggers are highly technical these days, but even if you are old like me, you can still do what you love without having to master the art of PHP.
- Usability: WordPress 2.7 is simply in another world when it comes to web usability. WordPress 2.6 and below were good enough in this area, but WordPress 2.7 is designed to get you more productive. No more fooling around with countless menu items, searching for things.
- Backward Compatibility: I can’t tell you how impressed I am with WP 2.7 in this area. I have over 60 blogs that me and my staff manage on a daily basis. We have not had to make any significant change to make our themes compatible with WP 2.7. Better yet, we have not updated any of our plug-ins and things are still working great. The only minor problem that we had was with All-in-One SEO plug-in, and that was solved by the programmers.
- New Features: WP 2.7 seems to be designed from scratch which makes using it a pure joy for a WP junkie like me. But lots of new features have been added to bring more convenience and security to your WordPress experience. For instance, you can now search for plug-ins by tag or keywords and download them to your server automatically. You can also update your WordPress installation without having to mess with FTP and all that stuff. If this is not simple, I don’t know what is…
Overall, WP 2.7 is one of the best upgrades ever (including Windows XP over Windows ME). The full version will be released in a flash, so get ready!
Your take: how would you improve WP 2.7?
December 10th in Wordpress News by Wordpress Jedi . After months of waiting for WordPress 2.7, it’s finally here. The good folks at WordPress just announced that the new WP 2.7 is now stable and available for download. It’s truly history for the WordPress community. WordPress has come a long way in the past couple of years, but WordPress 2.7 now pushes the CMS over the top.
I highly encourage you to download WP 2.7 now. It’s going to save you a whole lot of headache. It’s very easy to use, and it’s designed to be more secure. The innovative features added will truly make the update worth your while. Here is where you can grab your own copy.
December 10th in Free Plug-ins by Wordpress Jedi . 
I don’t know about you but updating all my WordPress blogs to the latest edition of WordPress is not only time consuming but plain exhausting. And let’s not forget that sometimes you make a mistake and delete a folder that you shouldn’t have, and things get more complicated. Now there are paid plug-ins that allow you to auto update your WordPress blog, but the good folks at Fun Scripts have written a freeware that essentially takes care of the most of the process.
All you have to do is install Easy WP Installer. You are then presented with a form that contains your DB and connnection information. Once you have entered the correct information, you can set this and almost forget it. It’s a very easy to use Plug-in and a must have if you want to keep up with the latest WordPress updates.
If you have been hacked before, you know how important it is to stay out of trouble and protect your blog. Easy WP Installer is not a hacker buster but it does put the latest WordPress patches on your blog. I am just not sure why the guys who wrote this are not charging us for it.
December 8th in Premium Themes by Wordpress Jedi . 
Creating a gaming site used to be too tough before. Sure. You can pay someone to write you a website that is attractive, but I rather not waite for someone to do it for me (and obviously charge me $1000 or more for it). Well. The good folks at Elegant Themes have released a super new theme that takes care of the whole problem.
eGamer comes with a right color contract (I would say) for a gaming website. You get the standard “recent game reviews” section in the sidebar that has a star-system ranking well-integrated in it. Like all Elegant Themes, eGamer is compatible with Safari, Opera, Firefox, and IE 6 & 7.
What I like about eGamer is the fact that you get the Photoshop files for the theme as well. In essence, you can change the logo if you know Photoshop, which is something you’d have to do from scratch with other themes. I also like the fact that you can play with the footer and remove the copyright if you like. Not that I recommend it, but some themes have annoyingly long copyright notices, and that turns me off.
Overall, the theme looks fit for a gaming, or even a wrestling site. The featured article section is optional but great for promoting the best your site has to offer. I also like the fact that you get all the updates for this theme and a bunch of others for only about $20 a year. That’s way too cheap to ignore. Good luck with your WordPress gaming site.
December 6th in Wordpress Tips by Wordpress Jedi . 
WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the world and it’s used by most folks as their primary website creation package. Folks just don’t use WordPress to create blogs, but they also use it to create serious corporate or other types of sites. Popularity has a price, however. Hackers are always out there to target the most popular software packages and sites that are using these packages. The attacks on WordPress blogs have been nothing short of intensive.
One way folks can figure out how to attack your site is by figuring out what plug-in you are using or hacking your WordPress account. While there is no foolproof way to avoid getting hacked, there are ways to protect it. Here is how:
You should Prevent others from uncovering your plug-ins: many hackers use plug-ins that you have installed against you. Many of these plug-ins are not up-to-date or come with security holes that can compromise your blog. Folks just type in your plug-ins URL to get a list of plug-ins that you have in place. I personally use Redirection plug-in to redirect all invalid requests to home-page. You can also put an empty index file in your plug-ins and themes folders.
You should disable user registration: a lot of folks like to give their readers the ability to register accounts on their blogs. That is simply not a good idea as it makes protecting your blog more complicated that in needs to be. Disable registration to give yourself some peace of mind.
You should Hide Your WordPress Info: you should try to hide your WordPress version from public eyes. Many of us don’t apply the latest patches instantly, which means our blogs could be targeted by hackers. You should take out all the references to your blog presence from the public eye.
At the end of the day, you should try everything in your power to make life hard for hackers. You are never going to be able to protect your blog against hackers, but the above techniques give you a start.
In the 2nd part of this post, I’ll talk about other ways that you can protect your blog against hackers. So stay tuned.
December 4th in Wordpress Tips by Wordpress Jedi . Folks in the Internet marketing world are obsessed about losing their rankings on Google. Google drives a whole lot of traffic, and you simply cannot compare it to Yahoo! or other search engines when it comes to traffic potential. I used to be one of those folks who had this obsession with my rankings. If I lost a place on the SERPs, I would just get mad or completely overhaul my blog. I would check my rankings every hour to see if there had been any changes. Those are the dark age days…
Google does slap folks and sites that allow folks to take a shortcut to the top of the SERPs. Search engine optimization is all about hard work, and you cannot expect to buy or shortcut your way to the top. Now, you may come right out of the gate and have the best site in your niche, but Google and other engines are not smart enough to realize if you are “legit.” Besides, consistency matters as well, and website who have been around more than you have may get the nod over you.
Unless you haven’t been paying attention, a whole lot of folks have been complaining about their sites having dropped or disappeared from the face of Google results pages. That could be devastating if your mortgage payment depends on it. But blaming WordPress for your failure to comply with Google guidelines is just another way of not taking responsibility for your actions.
Google has prepared a whole list of guidelines for all webmasters to read, and just because you are running WordPress, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it. For instance, WordPress does suffer from duplicate content issues, and you will need to modify your .htaccess to fix those issues. In addition, you need to make sure you have the right permalink structure to maximize your SEO rankings. Now this is important: ALWAYS look out for nasty errors in your code. My site disappeared from Google a couple of months ago, and I tried everything I could to get it back. Nothing worked. I was lucky to try W3C validator, and found out that my code had a nasty error in it that was blocking the whole validation process. Now if the validator can’t go through your code to figure out more errors, there is a good chance Google bot can’t either. Needless to say, I was back in the SERPs two weeks after I fixed the error.
It’s true that your WordPress site can get slapped by Google. But it’s also true that you should be responsible enough to take care of your WordPress site. Blaming the platform for your woes in the organic search channel is pointless and a waste of time.
