But how easy is it to actually add gamification to a WordPress blog? As it turns out, it’s quite easy actually – and it needn’t cost a bomb. Here’s 3 plugins, compared and judged.

Captain Up

CaptainUp is a relative newcomer to game mechanics, but appealed to me right off the bat. It has a distinct cartoon-esque visual style that really makes it seem user-friendly – much more “game like” than some other systems, which come across as mere corporate marketing.

Setting up requires a total of 4 or 5 form fields, and starts on the captainup.com website. Click sign up, and enter your:

• email address
• password
• brand name
• domain

Copy and paste your API key from the WordPress install tab, and paste that into the Gamification WordPress plugin setup page. I swear life would be so nice if all gamification systems were this simple.

For the most part, that’s all the setup you need. You can connect to a Facebook page to give points for liking the page, and the plugin automatically detects when something has been shared by a user.

I say for the most part, because we use the ShareThis plugin to provide a share button; it correctly detected a Google +1 share, but not a Tweet. As someone used to dealing with these systems, I know it’s due to the use of “native” buttons vs custom coded ones; Google does not provide any kind of customization or API, so you get the button they give.

ShareThis has customized the Tweet button however, so it’s serving custom code. The easiest solution to make share buttons work with Captain UP then is to just serve native buttons – most plugins will do this, it’s just that ShareThis has a particular style to it. (Digg Digg is a very simple set of share buttons, and works fine). I only mention this because most site owners might just assume it’s broken.

The only thing I’m not too keen about with Captain Up is the basic widget overlay on every screen – not the popup, that’s nice. The overlay just seems a little garish.

CaptainUp has a superb set of features including:

• Points for various actions, configurable values. Focused on sharing, visits, and even watching a video.
• Levels as your points increase.
• Badges for completing set challenges, such as liking 15 things in 2 days.
• Leaderboards and activity widgets for your sidebar.

Creating new badges is also incredibly easy, and can be integrated into your own custom site functionality thanks to a target condition based on “clicking on specific element”.

The only downside to CaptainUp is that it doesn’t appear to have paid plans; whether this is because the service is still in beta isn’t apparent, but this ultimately limits it’s reliability. There’s also no rewards program: just PBL (points, badges and leaderboards).

PunchTab

By far a more established gamification program, PunchTab covers everything from rewards and giveaways to single sign on – though not all in the free package.

PunchTab is separated into 3 sections, each of which is a distinct UI component:

• Loyalty Program
• Achievement Program
• Giveaways

The loyalty program are rewards given for attaining a certain number of points, similar to what we run here at MakeUseOf. On the free plan, you have no control over what rewards are offered – but they’re pretty impressive even so, and offered at absolutely no cost to you.

For example, installing a loyalty program, any visitors who gets 8,500 points will get a $5 Starbucks eGift card. To get your site licence key, visit the punchtab dashboard, create a new loyalty program, and go to developer. Copy and paste your access key from there.

The paid plan for running your own rewards starts at a very reasonable $99/month.

The achievements program is your standard badges, levels etc – “traditional” gamification. It’s not quite as comprehensive as the achievements provided by CaptainUp – you can change badge images and description, but not specify custom actions to be rewarded as easily. Also, if you do want to change anything, you need to disable all the default badges.

Thirdly is the Giveaway program. This is for running a DIY giveaway, and is very comprehensive. Just provide an image and description of the prize (and obviously, the prize itself), specify how users can enter, the time frame, and any additional entry methods you want to provide – “liking” your Facebook page, tweeting the contest.

On the downside, I did find the WordPress plugin to be a little buggy. The widget wasn’t sized correctly, for example, and it didn’t appear to allow for the new bottom share bar option. Therefore, I’d suggest a bit of coding experience so you’re able to add the Javascript snippets directly to the template.

Kazooky Loyalty

This one struck me as a scam initially, especially given their “$100 free promotion” (for your site visitors though, not you, similar to PunchTabs default rewards program).

After signing up, just copy and paste the access key into the WordPress plugin. You should then get a large and kind of obnoxious black bar at the bottom of your site.

Hovering over the present or any of the icons reveals the message that I should sign in to win an Amazon gift card; unfortunately, only the Twitter and email buttons actually worked – Facebook did nothing. Added to which, it’s not clear where adding your email will actually go – I still can’t help thinking it’s some kind of scam to gather emails.

The control panel is decidedly lacklustre compared to the other systems available, so given all of this it’s to recommend anything other than staying the heck away from Kazooky Loyalty.

There’s actually not that many decent gamification WordPress plugin; InCrwd was an exciting contender, but the domain is dead and the plugin developer appears to have stopped last year sometime. Others require BuddyPress, or manual assigning of badges, so I haven’t included them.

My favourite for the average blog has to be CaptainUp – it’s just such an easy plug and plug system that’s it’s hard to fault it. The lack of a premium option and rewards ultimately limits the system though. PunchTab on the other hand is a well developed product and more focused on actionable, business-led objectives – sharing, rewards and giveaways.

Have you had a chance to try gamification on your site, and what do you think? Do these systems just annoy you?

The post 3 Gamification Plugins To Take Your WordPress Blog To The Next Level appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Note: this advice only applies to self hosted WordPress installs. If you use WordPress.com, you generally don’t need to care about security, because they handle it all for you. What’s the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?

Install Google two-step authenticator

If you already have two-step authentication enabled for your Gmail account or other services, you can use the same authenticator app with this plugin for WordPress.

Thankfully, you can restrict two-step authentication to only be used on upper level accounts so you needn’t annoy all your users.

Login Lockdown

An old plugin, but still working as intended; Login Lockdown checks the IP of login attempts and blocks an IP range for an hour if it fails 3 times within 5 minutes. Simple, effective.

Take Regular Backups

Hackers won’t just change one file, but will place their own control panel hidden somewhere and other hidden backdoors – so that even if you fix the original hack, they come right back in and do it all again. Take daily or weekly backups so you can easily restore back to a point where there was no trace of the hacker – and be sure to patch whatever it was they did to get in. Personally, I just invested in a $150 Backup Buddy developer license – it’s the easiest and most comprehensive backup solution I’ve found yet.

Prevent Indexing of Folders

Check the root of your WordPress installation for the .htaccess file (notice the period at the beginning – you may need to show invisible files to view this), and ensure it has the following line. If not, add it – but make a backup first as this file is pretty crucial.

Options All -Indexes

Stay Updated

Don’t make the same mistake as we did: always upgrade WordPress as soon as an update is available. Sometimes the updates contain minor bug fixes and not security fixes, but get into the habit and you won’t have a problem. If you have more than one WordPress install and can’t keep track of them all, check out ManageWp.com, a premium dashboard for all your blogs that includes security scanning.

Not just core WordPress files, but plugins too: one of the largest WordPress hacks of the past involved a vulnerability in a common thumbnail generator script called timthumb.php, and there are still themes out there which use the old version. Although plugins were quickly updated, keeping themes up to date is harder, of course – WordPress won’t tell you if your theme is vulnerable, and for that you’ll some kind of security scanning plugin – scroll down to the Security Plugins section below for some suggestions.

Never Download Random Themes

Unless you know what you’re doing with PHP code, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of download a lovely random theme from somewhere, only to find it’s got some nasty code in there – most commonly backlinks that you can’t remove, but worse can be found. Stick to premium and well-known theme designers (such as Smashing Magazine or WPShower), or for free themes only use the WordPress theme directory.

Delete Unused Plugins and Themes

The less executable code you have on your server, the better – remove the chance of having old, vulnerable code by deleting themes and plugins you’re not using anymore. Disabling them will simply stop their functionality loading with WordPress, but the code itself may still be executable by a hacker.

Remove Tell-tale Meta In Your Header

By default, WordPress broadcast its version to the world in the code of your header file – an easy way for hackers to identify older installs. Add the following lines to your theme’s functions.php file to remove the WordPress version, Windows Live Writer info and a line that helps remote clients find your XML-RPC file.

remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_generator' ) ; 
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link' ) ; 
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'rsd_link' ) ;

Remove The “admin” Account

Most brute-force attacks on WordPress involve repeatedly trying the admin account – the default for all WordPress installs – and a dictionary of common passwords. If you either login with admin or have the admin account listed in your user table, you’re vulnerable to this.

Two ways to fix it: either use wp-optimize plugin – a great plugin that amongst other things, allows you to disable post revisions and perform database optimization – to rename admin account. Or simply create another account with admin privileges, log in as the new user, then delete the “admin” account assign all the posts to your new user.

Secure Passwords

Even if you have disabled the admin account, it may be possible to identify the username of your administrator account – at which point you’re vulnerable to a brute force attack again. Enforce a strong password policy of 16 or more random characters consisting of upper and lower case, punctuation and numbers.

Or just use the reallyLongSentenceThatsEasyToRememberMethod.

Disable File Editing Within WordPress

For those who don’t like to login through FTP, WordPress includes an easy editor in the admin dashboard for theme and plugin PHP files – but that makes your install vulnerable if someone gains access. In fact, this is how someone managed to inject a malware redirection into our header. Add the following line to the bottom of your wp-config.php (in the root folder) to disable all file editing features – and use SFTP to login to your server instead.

define( 'DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true );

Hide Login Errors

An incorrect password or wrong username can be identified by the errors given when logging in, which could be used to identify accounts for brute-forcing. This isn’t good, obviously, so kill the errors with this addition to your theme’s functions.php file

function no_errors_please(){
 return 'Nope';
}
add_filter( 'login_errors', 'no_errors_please' );

Activate Cloudflare

As well as speeding up your site, CloudFlare mitigates many known botnets and scanners from even getting to your blog in the first place. Read all about CloudFlare here. Installation is one click if you’re hosted at MediaTemple, otherwise you’ll need access to the domain control panel to change the nameservers.

Security Plugins

• Better WP Security implements many of these fixes for you and is the most comprehensive free solution there is.
• WordFence is a premium package that actively scans your files for malware links, redirects, known vulnerabilities etc – and fixes them. Price starts at $18/year for 1 site.
• Login security solution both limits login attempts and enforces secure passwords.
• BulletProof security is a comprehensive but complex plugin that deals with some of the more technical aspects like XSS injection and .htaccess problems. A Pro verison of the plugin is also available which automates much of the process.

I think you’ll agree this is quite a comprehensive list of steps to harden WordPress, but I’m not suggesting you implement all of them. If I had to do all these to every site I ever set up, I’d still be setting them up now. Running any kind of system introduces a risk, and it’s ultimately up to you to find the balance between the level of security you want and the effort you want to put in securing it – nothing is ever going to 100% secure. The low hanging fruit here are:

• Keeping WordPress up to date
• Disabling the admin account
• Adding two-step authentication
• Installing a security plugin

Doing those alone should put you above 99% of all the other blogs out there, which is enough to make potential hackers move on to easier targets.

Do you think I missed anything? Tell me in the comments.

The post How To Protect WordPress from Intrusion: Your Must-Read Checklist appeared first on MakeUseOf.

While Posterous was, in the traditional sense, a blogging platform, there’s no reason you have to stick with the same concept if you’re still wondering where you should head next. While there are a few blogging options – Tumblr, WordPress and Jux – you could also opt for a photo sharing site like Flickr. No matter what platform you end up using, you could simply opt for the auto-sharing service, IFTTT to autopost your new blog posts to any social networking site of your choice.

Tumblr

Tumblr is the most obvious place to go if you’re feeling the sting from Posterous shutting down. Tumblr brings the same ease-of-use, a simplified dashboard that makes posting easier than ever, and a built-in system that makes cross-posting and sharing links to your blog posts on social media sites automatically possible.

A few key features that will appeal to the Posterous fan is the ability to create posts on the fly in a variety of ways. You can create and publish posts using the Android or iPhone apps, or if you’d rather not download a dedicated app, you can also create posts with the simple act of sending an email. Just head over to your Tumblr settings, select the blog you want to post to, and jot down the private email that you can use to send posts to. In the same place, you can connect your Tumblr and Twitter accounts to automatically share your latest posts with your Twitter followers.

WordPress (Self-hosted)

Getting a self-hosted WordPress site is another decent (if not even better) alternative to Posterous. With the use of a minimalist theme and an array of plugins you can get close enough to the Posterous experience, so much so that you’ll never look back.

While the theme hasn’t been updated in a while, Minimous is labeled as a Posterous-like theme for WordPress. The good news is that it isn’t hard to find recently updated alternatives. A few great minimalist alternatives that you can put to good use on your WordPress site include Stack, Minimalizine and Chaos Theory.

If you want to automatically share your WordPress posts on a variety of social networks, a decent plugin to give a try is Next Scripts. Major social networks and sites that are supported by the plugin include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn and much more.

Jux

Jux is another great blogging platform that brings the same simplicity that sites like Tumblr, and the now defunct Posterous, bring to the table. The blogging platform divides posts by content type – photo, video, text and more. Unfortunately, one feature that Jux still lacks is a more convenient way to post to when you’re away from your computer.

Posting via email or using a mobile app isn’t an option, but Jux does make up for it with a few other unique features. It’s one of the only blogging platforms that makes it easy to harness the power of Google Maps Street View, as well as being able to create entire series of posts within one post (almost like a blog within a blog). To find out more about how the platform works and what features it supports, check out our in-depth review of Jux.

Posthaven

If you haven’t already migrated your content from Posterous to Posthaven, you’ve missed the boat on that feature, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take full advantage of the service. We’ve taken an in-depth look at what Posthaven has to offer, and it will just set you back $5 a month. Writing about his own personal experience with Posthaven, MakeUseOf’s Aaron Couch says, “There’s something to be said about awesome customer service, especially when a site is just run by two guys.”

Flickr

If you’re main focus on Posterous was to use it to share your photos, why not simply opt for a photo-sharing site rather than a blogging platform. Flickr is a solid option, one that makes it easy to post on the go, and while the site itself isn’t necessarily the prettiest to look at, you can always use third party services to create a slick Flickr-powered portfolio, like Flickrock or Pullfolio.

The revamped Flickr iOS app also makes it a pure joy to use the site on the go on your iPhone, while Flickr also makes it possible to upload photos to the photo-sharing site via a private email address.

IFTTT

No matter what platform you use, as long as it has an RSS feed, you could always opt for a service like IFTTT to make sure that your latest posts are shared on all the social networks and services you’ve been using on Posterous. To find out more about how IFTTT works and how you can get the most out of it, check out our in-depth IFTTT how-to.

Are there any platforms you think should be added to this list of Posterous alternatives? Let us know about them in the comments.

The post Posterous Might Be Gone But Here Are 6 Alternatives To Replace It appeared first on MakeUseOf.

It’s a rather simple operation, but one that requires a bit of testing to see how your content will look on a different platform. It doesn’t help that these are two remarkably different platforms, with WordPress making heavy use of categories which are replaced completely with tags in Blogger.

In order to see what will happen, I’ve put the import and export functions of both hosted blog services to the test. Read on to find out what I discovered.

Note: This procedure is for blogs specifically hosted on WordPress.com. While this might work for “normal” self-hosted WordPress.org blogs, it has not been tested (though if WordPress have got it right, both export and import functions should be identical).

In The Name Of Blogging

Due to the fact that I don’t currently have a blog of any length on either service, I chose to use the same two accounts I established for my recent comparison article. I realised I didn’t have much content, and so decided to create two separate posts on each platform (to accompany my Hello World entry) each with formatted, justified and bulleted text and the other with a remotely-hosted image and an image hosted on the service. I know the screenshot below specifically mentions videos, but they’re absent largely due to the fact that WordPress charges you for the privilege.

This should provide a good overview of the results, albeit on a much smaller scale than a busy blog that’s been worked on for years. On the WordPress side of things I created two categories, and left one post in the “Uncategorized” placeholder that WordPress creates when you sign up. For my Blogger posts I simply tagged them appropriately, and both sets of posts are identical on either service.

My plan was to export then nuke both blogs so that they are blank canvases, then import the counterpart backup and assess the results. Before exporting, my Blogger posts looked like this:

And WordPress, like this:

Exporting each blog is rather easy. Within Blogger’s main control panel, access the blog of your choice and head over to the Settings menu option, followed by the Other sub-menu. At the very top of the page you will see options to import, export or delete your blog. On clicking Export Blog, Blogger told me that it would create a file in the Blogger Atom export format and that I could use this to move to another service or simply have a backup on my local hard drive.

In WordPress this is a similar affair – head to the Tools menu and click Export. This is another point of sale for WordPress.com, who offer to help you move your blog to a self-hosted WordPress install for $129. You can also just click Export to grab your own local backup then choose whether you want all content, just posts, just pages or just feedback. According to WordPress this will work with another WordPress blog, but there is no mention of other platforms. We’ll see about that!

Blogger left me with a 133 KB .XML file, and WordPress.com produced an .XML file of 12 KB. According to WordPress, the file is not intended to be a full backup of my site. Frustratingly, WordPress.com doesn’t offer a clear backup solution that I could see from a good look around the admin menu. Does the $129 cover this?

Erase & Rewind

Both Blogger and WordPress.com have options for deletion, but as expected these involve the entire deletion of the blog including the domain and personal settings. WordPress advised me to contact support to clear my content, but seeing as I only had three posts anyway I chose to do it manually. This might be a problem for you if you have hundreds of posts across a couple of categories.

On each service I deleted all posts, all categories (on WordPress) and tags (on both) and left only the barebones – my blog’s name, a few settings I hadn’t changed and my domains remained in tact. This is essentially the same as registering and having a crisp new blog at your disposal. I then tried to import Blogger’s backup into WordPress.com and the WordPress backup into Blogger.

Blogger to WordPress.com

WordPress actually has an import from Blogger option which you can choose when you visit the Import menu under Tools. There are two ways of making the jump, either by authorising WordPress.com to access your Blogger account and migrate the content across for you, or by using the method I had prepared for in the form of an exported .XML database. There’s a maximum file size of 15 MB while using this upload method, so larger blogs will need to pair accounts.

I chose the 133 KB Blogger export file and clicked upload. The import happened instantly, and everything was in place by the time I clicked on Posts.

WordPress.com to Blogger

Blogger asked me for my Blogger export file, into which I fed it a WordPress.com export. After about five minutes watching a spinning GIF, I decided that things weren’t happening and tried again. Once again Blogger just sat there, telling me it was “writing blog posts” but each subsequent visit to my blog in a new tab showed no content. At no point was I given an error message, I just had to stare at the screen until I became too impatient to bother any more.

So I did a bit of searching and discovered WordPress2Blogger, a simple tool for converting the WordPress export file into a format that Blogger could understand. The only catch is that you can only use it for files that are less than a megabyte (in my case, I was fine). I fed it the WordPress file of 12 KB and it spat out a 5 KB .HTML file. I then gave this to Blogger, which imported my posts in a matter of seconds. Success!

The Results

Here is what Blogger did with my tiny converted WordPress file:

As you can see, it’s pretty much perfect. Categories, which do not exist in Blogger, have instead been added as labels (tags) which is somewhat useful.

This is what my formatted text post looks like, note the odd spacing:

And my image post, with only the remote image shown:

Both images work fine, though the hosted image is pointed at its location on the WordPress servers. Text resulted in some odd line breaks, though timestamps are all intact.

Here is what WordPress.com did with my 133 KB Blogger export file:

Not quite so good – tags are completely missing, instead they’ve been added as categories. I’d rather this be the opposite as mass categorising content is easier than mass-tagging. It will also create individual categories for every tag.

This is what a formatted text post looks like:

And the media post:

Again the hosted image is pointed at Blogger’s servers and hasn’t been locally imported. Timestamps are present and correct and text looks perfect.

Conclusions

To conclude, Blogger to WordPress results in perfectly formatted posts but tags are imported as categories and will require quite the cleanup if you have a lot of content. This is surprising considering WordPress.com has a dedicated tool for making the jump, and you’d expect it to know the difference between a tag and a category.

WordPress to Blogger seems to add some odd spacing in text posts, though images and timestamps survive in tact. This could have been because of the converter I used, but without that converter I wouldn’t have been able to import anything at all. If Google were to add a proper tool for importing from other platforms then they would probably have a lot of happy WordPress refugees who have reached the limits of their free account.

Neither solution is perfect. If you’re considering changing from one to the other I’d recommend you try it and see how your own content looks after the transfer. You won’t lose anything so long as you don’t delete your old blog until you’re happy with the new one, though you might find that you’ve got a lot of formatting to tidy and categories to delete, as well as tags to reapply in some instances.

Have you switched from one to the other? Did it go smoothly? What could WordPress or Google do to make you change your mind? Have your say in the comments below!

The post Blogger To WordPress, WordPress To Blogger – Switching Blogs Tested appeared first on MakeUseOf.

We’ve talked about Rich Snippets before – pieces of meta you can add to a page that Google will understand and potentially include in the search results. Authorship is one example; here’s one of my own search results, standing out nicely on a video game review search.

In short, users are more likely to click on something when it’s not just a bland text result.

What you really want then, is for Google to recognize that your page contains a nice juicy video that you put time into creating, and to rank that page higher or with potentially more visibility. Here’s another result from the same search result, though it’s actually ranking further down the page since it’s less relevant. Still, it highlights nicely rich, video content.

How To Get Video Previews into Google

This is not an easy task, and as ever – there’s no guarantee that your site will benefit from them. However, here are the basic steps needed:

1. Host your own videos. Don’t use YouTube.
2. Make sure they are marked up correctly.
3. Use an HTML5 video player.
3. Submit a special video sitemap to Google.

What’s Wrong With YouTube?

There’s nothing wrong with YouTube per se, but you’ll be in competition with yourself. YouTube is indeed a great inbound marketing tool. Users may stumble across your video, love the content and try to find more at a site address listed, particularly if it’s a viral teaser or “full instructions at the link in the description” type video. But they may also just click through to another related video and never visit your site at all.

The point is that when you make YouTube videos to accompany the page you’re trying to rank with, you’ll more than likely be outranked by your own video as a YouTube result; it won’t be a pretty thumbnail pointing to your page, it’ll be pointing to YouTube. There’s a time and place and a reason to use YouTube videos. Outranking your own content is not one of them.

Hosting & Player

The simplest option here is to upload video content to your own site, so we’ll use that for demonstration purposes. There are ways of using a premium Vimeo account, or some other third party hosts, but since you already have webspace you might as well use it. If you’re expecting a lot of traffic, be sure to have this all cached with a CDN (see my tips on how to speed up a WordPress blog).

Next, we need a suitable player – something that outputs HTML5, but can fallback to Flash or Silverlight when absolutely needed. For this, let’s use MediaElements.js; it’s a capable player for all kinds of media. You can find it directly from the WordPress dashboard.

Usually we would embed the video using a shortcode like this:

[video src="myvideo.mp4"]

However, this won’t result in Schema.org markup being used, so instead we’re going to manually code it like this:

<video width="600" height="400" controls="controls" preload="true" itemprop="video" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoObject">
<source src="http://technophiliapodcast.com/podcast/tech63.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
<meta itemprop="name" content="Technophilia Technology Podcast, Episode 63 - Generic Podcast Listener"/>
<meta itemprop="contentURL" content="http://technophiliapodcast.com/podcast/tech63.mp4" />
<meta itemprop="description" content="Episode 63 of Technophilia Technology Podcast" />
<meta itemprop="thumbnailUrl" content="http://technophiliapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/tech63.png" />
</video>

Which still results in this:

Warning: Don’t switch back to visual editor or your code will be butchered apart. Yes, not ideal. The best would be to adjust or code your own plugin that would load the MediaElements.js player AND output suitable markup. Nevertheless, this is what we have.

Check your markup using the Rich Snippet Tester, but be aware that it won’t show a video preview in the tool – just check if the markup is correct:

Video Sitemaps

Unfortunately, this is where things get really difficult. If you search the WordPress plugins directory for “Video sitemaps”, you’ll find a few plugins claiming to do this. However, they only work with YouTube links, which for our purposes is completely worthless. There isn’t a free WordPress plugin that will work for our needs, but you can manually code a video sitemap like this (I’m being lazy and not writing a proper description, but you should):

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
 xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1"> 
 <url> 
 <loc>http://technophiliapodcast.com/2013/63-generic-podcast-listener/</loc>
 <video:video>
 <video:thumbnail_loc>http://technophiliapodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/tech63.png</video:thumbnail_loc> 
 <video:title>Episode 63 of Technophilia Technology Podcast</video:title>
 <video:description>Episode 63 of Technophilia Technology Podcast</video:description>
 <video:content_loc>http://technophiliapodcast.com/podcast/tech63.mp4</video:content_loc>
 <video:duration>5204</video:duration>
 </video:video> 
 </url> 
</urlset>

(included above are the basic minimum of required fields, except for duration – in seconds – which optional but recommended)

Alternatively, Yoast – the creator of the famous WordPress SEO plugin (featured on our Best WordPress Plugins) – offers a premium plugin to handle this side of things, and it integrates nicely with the MediaElements.js player. The downside is the price, at a whopping $60 for a single site or $250 for a developer licence. Then again, if you’re putting at least an hour into making each video, they really deserve a little love and attention on the SEO side.

Submission To Google

Finally, log into Google Webmaster Tools and point it toward your video sitemap. Mission accomplished.

It’s a shame there’s not an easier way to do this, but that’s what you get for being on the bleeding edge of Internet developments. Video previews in the search results will give you a competitive edge, but remember – if your accompanying content or the video itself isn’t up to scratch, that effort will have been wasted.

Do you know of a better way to handle this in WordPress? Let us know.

The post Getting Rich Snippet Video Previews Into Your Search Results appeared first on MakeUseOf.

So today, I’m going to try out 3 plugins which can semi-automate this entire process for you. I’ll be migrating data from an old domain of mine, to a new site, both running on a virtual private server.

Duplicator (Free)

Duplicator promises a three-step migration process. After installing the plugin, you’ll find a quick link to the manage page from the plugins list.

It’s probably best to start to checking your servers compatibility with the plugin. Here’s what I ended up with.

Though, I’m fairly certain the Open Base dir restriction isn’t relevant due to the version of PHP I run on this server, so perhaps they need to update. Nevertheless, I will go ahead and create my first package. Packages are the contents of your database and files, all wrapped up in one. Click the create button in the top right, or if your package set is currently blank there should be a link in the center of the screen for you. My test site is fairly small, with only 30 posts and little else – this gave me a pre-zip size of 50mb.

After clicking create, it’ll go to work. You can view the log if you’re curious, but mine was completed within seconds. You’re then presented with two buttons for file downloads, and instructed to grab both the “installer” and the “package”.

There are some advanced options too under the settings panel; you can email when the package is complete, if it’s taking too long. You can exclude directories or certain file extensions; and pre-populate the installer fields (though this is not required). I kept all the defaults.

Upload both to your new site, via FTP. Duplicator aims to replicate the entire setup for you, from databases to core WordPress files, which is clever – I was expecting to have to set up a basic functional WordPress, but apparently not.

On with the testing then, I uploaded the package and installer.php file. Now the fun begins. Launch the installer.php – on the new domain now – from your browser, and you see something like this:

The only details you’ll need to add are the DB access details; while Duplicator can create the individual tables, you’ll still need a mysql user and database set up for it to use. Check the database connection, accept the disclaimer, and proceed with the install.

You’ll even be given the option of re-activating plugins, which is pretty nifty.

Finally, there’s a list of steps you need to click manually. These involve re-writing the permalinks file, deleting the installer, and finally testing the site.

I’m happy to report that everything was 100% working and fine; the site was exactly as it had been before, but with a new domain and title. Fantastic!

Total time to migrate: less than 10 minutes (though this will vary upon the size of the site in question).

WordPress Move (Free)

Once installed, WordPress Move adds a Migration Assistant link under the Tools sub-menu. It present 3 options:

• Change domain (no files will be moved)
• Restore

Before using migrate, you will need to configure the plugin from the settings sub-menu  so I proceeded to do that. this involves adding FTP access details for the new site. The only complicated bit here is the relative path; in my case this was:

httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-move/backup

You also need to have WordPress and the wpmove plugin installed at the other end. This was quite a disappointment considering Duplicator could operate without that, and it added a good 30 minutes onto the process. Sigh.

With a fresh WordPress installed, and the WordPress Move plugin also added, I headed back to begin the transfer process from the old site. Type the ftp password, the new domain name, and hit start migration.

…Error. I try changing the port number, remember that I usually connect using secure FTP (typically port 22) rather than the unsecure regular FTP protocol. Even though both should work.

Again, connection error. At this point, I’m calling it quits on this particular plugin. Maybe your luck would be better, but honestly why would you even try with this when the Duplicator plugin works so well?

Backup Buddy (Premium, from $50)

(Hint: a quick Google search will reveal a 33% discount coupon, but I don’t think it would be fair to republish that here)

The process of backing up and restoring a site is much the same as migrating, so it’s no surprise that a premium and well respected backup plugin such as this has added “magic migrate” functionality to its already extensive feature list. The only setup needed here is to first create a restoration password from the settings pages.

Before migration can occur, an initial backup must be taken. Choose the “complete backup” type, and begin. Then head over to the restore/migrate area, and select automated restore/migration. Hover over the latest backup and an option to “migrate this backup” should appear.

You’ll need to setup a new target for the backup to be sent to. I added the FTP details for the new site and confirmed they were working, but unfortunately it ran into errors along the way when it was trying to access newdomain.com/httpdocs (this was the subdirectory for public HTML files that I had to set, but it shouldn’t be in the URL); I eventually figured out how to get this working by creating a new FTP user which defaulted to the HTTPDOCS directory.

At this point, the process is basically identical to Duplicator; you can choose the manual mode which will actually give you a similar “importbuddy.php” and backup file to download then upload to the new site over FTP, or if you managed to make the FTP work it can all be done from within the old WordPress install. During the process, you enter database information, and everything else is done for you. As a final step, the install files are deleted and some common problems and their solutions are presented.

Essentially then, the migration portion of Backup Buddy is almost identical to Duplicator, just with FTP upload step removed, if you can correctly configure the access details. Of course, Backup Buddy’s real power lies in the backups, but it’s difficult to recommend it purely as a migration tool, especially considering the premium price tag.

Total time to migrate: about 30 minutes, though this was particular to my FTP accounts setup.

Don’t forget to 301 the old domain

It’s almost certain that you’ll want to redirect all traffic and search engine “love” to the new domain – use a 301 redirect for this. Simply replace the current .htaccess file with the following, replacing newdomain.com.

Options +FollowSymLinks
 RewriteEngine on
 RewriteRule (.*) http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you’re using webmaster tools to inform of the site re-location, you’ll need to add an exception for the Google confirmation file. Replace the googleXXXX.html in the following code with your particular verification URL.

Options +FollowSymLinks
 RewriteEngine on
 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/googleXXXX.html/?$
 RewriteRule (.*) http://newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

That’s it, site migrated, traffic redirected and no search engine love lost.

Verdict: Duplicator wins

I had expected the premium tool to be the superior product in all aspects, but in this case I actually want to give the prize to Duplicator – and it’s 100% free. It lacks the fully automated aspect of BackupBuddy – assuming you get the settings right, that is – but anyone running self-hosted WordPress should be able to download and upload a few files to FTP, so I’m not sure that’s to such a great detriment to Duplicator. The fact that it presents clear advice and instructions at every step is also really appreciated; I was never in doubt as to do what to do next with Duplicator. Stay well away from WordPress Move at all costs though – it’s just far too fiddly.

Do you know of any better solutions? Let me know in the comments, and in the meantime be sure to check out our Best WordPress Plugins page, to which Duplicator will surely be added soon.

The post 3 Plugins For Easily Migrating A WordPress Site, Tried & Tested appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Now Posterous did provide some instructions for backing up your blog, and point you into the direction for migrating it over to WordPress or SquareSpace, which was nice of them. I found it interesting, however, that they made no mention of Tumblr, their biggest rival, or even Blogger, which is still very much in the game. In this article I’ll walk you through the backup and migration process for six solid options that you have including Posthaven, Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress.com and WordPress.org (self-hosted). Plus, I’ll include some tips/reminders at the end as well.

Easy: Posterous To Posthaven ($5/month)

Posthaven, as you probably noticed, isn’t free. Gasp! But, Posterous was… and you saw what happened to them. I’m not going to try to convince you to try them, instead I’ll point you to their pledge, which was what intrigued me about their service. They also wrote a non-biased post featuring some of your options for migrating your Posterous blog.

Step 1: Signup

This is pretty straightforward, really. Fill out your email, password and the name of your Posthaven site (this won’t be relevant if all you’re wanting to do is migrate your Posterous blog over). Then fill out the payment options (pictured below) and you’re all set.

Step 2: Import Your Posterous Blog(s)

Once you login, you’ll be taken to the Dashboard. On the left side, there are three menu options. Click the bottom one, Import your Posterous blog, enter your Posterous login credentials and click the blue button titled Add Posterous Account.

Next you’ll choose which blogs you want to import (pictured above) and the migration process will immediately start. After the importing is completed, you’ll receive an email saying your site is ready.

Posthaven likens itself to Posterous in many ways, but they aim to keep it simple. This is reflected in their features, but shouldn’t that be what blogging is all about – writing, instead of tinkering around with the settings and trying to figure things out?

All in all, Posthaven was by far the easiest and quickest in comparison to all the other methods. There was one issue where a picture wasn’t properly imported, this was due to an issue in the Posterous API.

I emailed them telling them about my problem, and they fixed it immediately – there’s something to be said about awesome customer service, especially when a site is just run by two guys.

Posthaven Features:

• Fast and seamless migration (includes site titled, description, URL, pages and links)
• Clean interface
• Autopost to Twitter & Facebook
• Custom domain option (e.g. example.com/blog instead of example.posthaven.com)
• Password protected option
• Great customer support

Easy: Posterous To Tumblr Via JustMigrate (free for 100 posts)

JustMigrate is a tool built specifically for migrating Posterous to Tumblr. On the homepage (pictured above), start by typing in your Posterous blog URL and the email you want JustMigrate to have for you (this doesn’t have to necessarily be the same email you use for Posterous). JustMigrate will then take you to Tumblr, where you’ll need to sign in and allow JustMigrate to connect to Tumblr.

Then you will get to choose which Tumblr blog you want to import Posterous into.

IMPORTANT: If you want to import Posterous into a new Tumblr blog, you will need to create that prior to connecting JustMigrate to Tumblr.

Note that JustMigrate is only free for the first 100 posts. Below is the pricing structure, which is fairly reasonable.

JustMigrate does have some limitations, partly due to Tumblr’s own restrictions.

Below is the newly migrated blog.

JustMigrated Features:

• Simple solution for migrating to Tumblr, the most popular microblogging site
• Free up to 100 posts
• Adheres a #JustMigrated tag to posts
• Great customer support

Easy: Posterous To Tumblr Via Import2 (free until April 30th)

Import2 is typically a service that you have to pay to use when you want to import any blog (not just Posterous) into Tumblr. However, right now they are offering that service free (for Posterous) until April 30th.

To get started, click the blue Free Sample Import button and fill out the forms on the next page.

Next, you’ll need to connect Import2 to Dropbox since Tumblr doesn’t allow automated import of media files (how JustMigrate got around this, I don’t know).

Once you’ve completed the steps, your posts will begin to migrate over. Should you have any problems during this time, contact Import2 and they will help you.

Import2 Features:

• Free until April 30th
• Seamless integration with Tumblr
• Quick and easy solution

Moderate: Posterous To WordPress.com (free)

Importing from Posterous into WordPress.com is fairly simple. WordPress actually provides a thorough tutorial on how to do this, so other than walking you through the steps here, take a look at their instructions.

I will say that this process was one of the quickest and most detailed, next to Posthaven. I was quite pleased at how everything moved over and ended up looking.

Advanced: Posterous To Self-Hosted WordPress.org (“Free”)

If you have an existing self-hosted blog already, or perhaps want to create one, you might want to consider moving your Posterous blog to it. To do this, you’ll need a plugin called Posterous Importer Advanced. If you search this from within the plugins section of your WordPress Dashboard, you’ll be able to install it directly into WordPress without the hassle of downloading and uploading. Once it’s installed, simply click Activate Plugin.

On the sidebar to your left, click Tools and then Import. From the list of blog platforms, click Posterous XML.

Click the Choose File button and navigate to where you saved the Posterous file.

How do you get the Posterous file? The instructions from WordPress.com show you how.

The file will download as a ZIP file and will need to be unzipped. This is where you will find the files you need.

Follow the rest of the prompts to finish the importing, including entering you Posterous login credentials, and you’ll quickly have your old Posterous blog on your new self-hosted WordPress blog.

NOTE: ”Free” is in quotes since technically the domain name and hosting aren’t free.

Moderate To Advanced: Posterous To Blogger (Free)

Probably the best way to migrate to Blogger, is to first migrate to WordPress… unfortunately. So if you already have a WordPress.com account, you’re one step ahead. For those of you who don’t, you’ll need to create one if you want to move your Posterous blog to Blogger.

Now, like I said, that is the best way that I personally found and had success with. Some places on the Internet suggested uploading the header.xml file from the Posterous download to Blogger.

I tried this multiple times and it didn’t work. However, using the WordPress to Blogger method did. So first follow the WordPress.com instructions, then come back here for the bit on how to export WordPress.com to Blogger.

Alright, so you should now have your blog on WordPress.com. On the WordPress Dashboard, go to Tools on the left sidebar and click Export.

The next page will give you two options – pick the first, which is called Export and simply create an XML file of everything on your blog. You’ll then be able to choose whether you want to export all your content, or just your posts, or pages, or feedbacks. Choose All content and click the blue Download Export File button.

Now you’ll need to convert the WordPress file to a Blogger file format. There is a great tool to do this at http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com.

Note that the file must be under 1MB. If you have a file greater than that, you can use a splitter. Once you convert and save the new Blogger file to your computer, you’ll need to upload it to Blogger. In Blogger, there will be a sidebar to your left. Scroll down and click Settings, then scroll down and click Options.

At the top of the Options page, under Blog tools, click Import blog.

Use the Windows Explorer Open window to navigate to where you saved the Blogger XML file(s) and upload them (again, you will only need to upload multiple files if your WordPress file was over 1MB).

Once you fill out the CAPTCHA and click the orange Import blog button, you’ll be all set and the posts will appear fairly quickly.

Tip 1: Use Multiple Migration Methods

I personally recommend using multiple techniques so that you’re whole Posterous blog isn’t relying on a single service. Plus, some options aren’t as full-featured as others. For instance, if you want to migrate to Tumblr, I found that my pages from the Posterous blog weren’t imported.

NOTE: In this process Posthaven was the only blog that imported everything correctly. All other methods had something “off” with them. Blogger had gigantic pictures, my self-hosted WordPress didn’t bring in all the text for some article, and WordPress.com didn’t import pages.

So, perhaps the title should be changed to use Posthaven in addition to anything else you want to do. Even if you only want to use it as a one time solution to capture everything on your Posterous blog and then cancel your subscription, I say the $5 would be worth it.

Tip 2: Don’t Forget About Your Links

If you linked to any other Posterous sites, including your own, they obviously will be broken. WordPress has plugins that you can use to detect broken links. You also could just manually sift through them and change them (if they can be changed).

Tip 3: Don’t Forget To Turn Off Autoposting

Autoposting is an awesome feature for blogs, but in a time like this, it can be a social network nightmare – trust me, I’ve done it. It’s not pretty and usually consists of an apology to all your followers for bogging their news feed. Sounds fun right?

Not! So don’t forget to turn this off.

Reminder: The Posterous API May Be Very Slow Today

As payback for saving this for the last day, you’ll probably run into some issues… likely resulting in the Posterous API being bombarded with hits. Although, I wouldn’t contact Posterous for support. Instead, contact the service you’re using, such as JustMigrate, Import2, Posthaven, etc. – they’ll be able to help you better or advise you as to how long it might take for the process to be completed.

Conclusion

Again, out of all of these methods I was most pleased with WordPress.com and Posthaven in how they handled the importing. Posterous, it was nice knowing you – you were a good friend, but now it’s time to move on.

Do you have any last-minute recommendations for migrating Posterous to another platform? If so, please feel free to share.

Image Credit: Gravestone With Grass On White Background via Shutterstock

The post Your Last Minute Guide To Exporting Your Posterous Blog Before It Shuts Down Forever appeared first on MakeUseOf.

WordPress can be used to create an extremely interactive experience on your website, which can translated into a social network, a project management tool, a community board and more.

Create a Private Social Network

While there are options out there for private social networks such as Yammer, using WordPress to create that social network gives you so much more control over the experience. There are several ways to go about turning WordPress into a private social network – whether it’s using a theme or a plugin.

One of the easiest ways to get it done is to use the theme P2, which creates a Twitter-like experience, allowing you to create and add users, post updates and more.

P2 also comes with threaded comments, real-time notifications for new comments, keyboard shortcuts and more. It can be used to create a private social network, or as a live-streaming tool of your own.

You can see the theme in action on WordPress’ very own blog for its core development team.

If you’re looking for something even more elaborate, you can give BuddyPress a try. We’ve taken an in-depth look at what it has to offer, so check out our review of BuddyPress here. It allows you to create user profiles, add friends, send private messages, create user groups, discussion forums and more.

Create a Help Desk

If you want to use WordPress to incorporate a more heavy-duty customer service experience on your site, there are a few themes that will get the job done. You can create a help desk, allowing customers or users to submit questions, support tickets and more, with complete functionality to manage these submissions.

One great example of this is Woo Themes’ SupportPress.  With the paid theme, users can submit tickets, while on the backend, you can assign the tickets to members  of your team. SupportPress also goes one step further by allowing you to create a knowledge base as well so that users don’t submit duplicate tickets on questions that have already been addressed.

Support Desk is another option available to users. The responsive theme, which will set you back $50, also allows you to create a community forum and knowledge base, as well as FAQ pages. You can see the theme in action here.

If you’d rather not spend a little less in order to get a Q&A site up and running, you can opt for a plugin instead.  Q&A will set you back $19, while ClickDesk is free. The latter allows you to place a live chat feature on your site, and if you aren’t online to answer questions straight away, users can leave a message.

Create a Wiki

Another way you can get more out of WordPress is to use the CMS to create your own personal Wiki. The WordPress Wiki Theme, which costs $40, allows you to create user accounts, post content, categories and more. The theme is also completely searchable. See the theme in action here.

Woo Themes also provides users with the $50 option, Wikeasi, but if you don’t want to spend a penny, you can opt for the WordPress plugin WordPress Wiki Lite, but with the caveat of your Wiki sitting on one WordPress page within your website.

Use for GTD

WordPress can also be used as a pretty impressive productivity tool. You can use it as your own personal GTD tool or as a collaborative tool for project management.

With the plugin, Project Tasks, you can turn your WordPress website into a project management tool where you can create and assign tasks, keep track of progress and keep a log of your completed work.

If you’re looking for something even more robust, CollabPress allows you to create projects, create and assign tasks, upload files, and view tasks in a calendar.

Create a Directory, Classifieds, Jobs Board, etc.

WordPress also lends itself to creating any kind of information board or directory. You can use it to create a business directory, a jobs board or a classifieds board. No matter what kind of information you want to collate into a directory on your WordPress website, there’s likely a plugin or theme that will get the job done.

There’s nothing to stop you from creating your own Yellow Pages-like service that could become a useful resource, and with the Business Directory plugin you can even monetize the service by enabling users to submit and post to your directory for a fee.

Can you think of any other creative uses for WordPress? Let us know about them in the comments.

The post Get Creative With WordPress – 5 Interactive Ways To Use The Platform appeared first on MakeUseOf.

With Google+ comments, blog owners will not only see direct comments from readers on their blog, but also people talking about their content on Google+. So if people are publicly discussion a blog posts on Google+, that conversation will appear in the comment section of the owner’s blog. This is designed to create a more engaging place for both the content creator and readers alike.

The design is set up to allow users to control the kinds of comments they see on a blog: You can view only top comments, only comments from people in your circles, or all comments on a particular post. This gives you more control, allowing you to visit the blog on their own terms. Google claims that this new feature “not only encourages more meaningful sharing—it can lead to more blog traffic.”

Enabling the new comment system is easy for blog owners: Head over to the Google+ tab on your Blogger dashboard, and check the box labeled “Use Google+ Comments.” This will allow old comments to appear as normal, and new comments to come in using this new feature. If you’re curious what it looks like before enabling it, Google provided an example to a post using the system so you can see it in action.

Will you enable Google+ comments on your blog?

Source: Google

The post Google Battles Facebook Comments, Brings Google+ Comments To Blogger [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

I joke, of course – but there are actually some legitimate uses for this “new” technology, so allow me to cut through the messy marketing speak and tell you exactly how making use of the cloud can speed up your website.

Do You Need a Faster Site?

Even if you have just a small blog or e-commerce with very little traffic, slow load times are undoubtedly hurting you. With a relatively good load time of 4 seconds, 25% of users would rather abandon the page than wait. Beyond that, and you need to have some pretty dedicated users.

Your site’s bad performance may also be affecting your placement in search engines – Google prefers fast loading pages that present a good user experience, and has admitted that page load speed is a ranking factor.

It’s in your interests – no matter how small your site – to have the page loading as quickly as possible. Want to test how fast your site currently loads? Head over to pingdom.com and type in the URL for a comprehensive report.

CloudFlare (Free)

CloudFlare encompasses a variety of services, but is best thought of as a firewall for your website. Sitting in between your servers and the public, it intercepts requests made to your site, and can therefore deny access to a variety of malicious bots and automated crawlers, or serve a cached version to legitimate users – including your entire website, should you go offline for some reason.

Activating CloudFlare is easy if you’re hosting with MediaTemple (who are sitting proudly on our Best Web Hosts page), since they now own the company. After logging in, from the sidebar select Add New Service or Domain, then Activate the CloudFlare option. You should now see a CloudFlare admin button on your overview dashboard – enabling or disabling the service is then a single click away.

If you’re not hosted with MediaTemple, head over to the article I wrote before – How to Protect and Speed Up Your Website With Cloudflare - for a full guide on setting the service up. It does require some fiddly work with DNS, so follow carefully.

Once set up, there’s no configuration needed so you can basically just let it run, safe in the knowledge that your site is faster and serving less requests. There are however some stats you can view at the CloudFlare site if you’re curious about just how much bandwidth is being saved.

Given that the service is completely free, there’s really no reason not to go and enable it for your site right now.

CDNs (Costs Depends On Traffic)

CDNs, or Content Delivery Networks, are cloud storage for static resource files – images and scripts generally – which are optimized to deliver files to the user much more quickly than a typical web server.

If you’ve ever visited a site and watched the images download one by one, bit by bit, it’s because they weren’t using a CDN. If they were, the images would be loaded almost instantly. This is in part due to the fact that browsers are limited in how much data they can request in parallel from a single domain. When using a CDN, images are stored on a different domain, and hence the browser can download more items in parallel. It’s also down to copies of the files being available on a fileserver more local to the user; as opposed to one central server that hosts the actual website.  It’s an astonishing difference, so if you feel your page is loading a little sluggish – particularly the images – then considering purchasing CDN services.

At MakeUseOf (and on my personal sites), we use MaxCDN – the basic plan is just $35/year which includes 1TB of bandwidth, with overage charges of $0.069/GB. In addition to the speed gains, you’re also going to save money if you’re currently going over the bandwidth provisions of your webhost – common if you host large files or videos.

Setting up a CDN is easy if you’re using WordPress, but requires a little work for other systems. Basically, you need to have URLs for resource files rewritten to your CDN domain. w3 Total Cache handles this all for you in WordPress – just click the CDN option from the Performance menu, and the “I have MaxCDN” button to get started.

Register a new application (don’t worry about callback URLs, just make up a name and description). Copy your Consumer key and Consumer Secret back to w3 Total Cache, then click Back to find your Alias on the right side of the dashboard (this is just the name you chose for your CDN when you signed up).

Host Non-Essential Files On Cheap Cloud Storage

If you host large downloads that aren’t critical to the page load – music, videos, PDFs etc – move these over to a cheap cloud storage solution like Amazon s3 services. Though not quite as blazing fast as a CDN, they still take the strain of serving large files away from your web host, leaving it free to concentrate on generating and serving the HTML pages. Though Amazon is a premium service, you might even consider using filelockers for very popular files, which can in fact make you money by showing advertising to users (though this isn’t exactly the best user experience, so consider your audience well).

Do you know of any more cloud services that help to speed up a website? If so, let us know in the comments – because as you can see from the performance report above my website is still appallingly slow. Sigh – must be all those fantastic WordPress plugins.

The post 3 Ways To Speed Your Site Up With The Cloud appeared first on MakeUseOf.

However, there are times when you realize that an ad or maybe some other content needs to go into an area of your blog that isn’t so easy to get to. Sidebar content is one thing, and usually fairly easy to modify, but when it comes to other areas of your website that might be dynamically generated by code, inserting single content isn’t so simple.

For example, in the case of a WordPress blog or a WordPress website, the central content of your home page is most likely a stream of excerpts from your blog posts. People can click on “Read More” to open up the post page itself. You can create a sort of a template for your blog posts to carefully insert the required ad in your post exactly where you want it to go, but inserting an ad into your main blog page is a little more difficult.

It’s difficult mostly because that isn’t a single flow of code that develops the page content. It’s actually a loop that goes through your most recent posts, pulls out the excerpts, and outputs the text, footer info about the article, and the “Read More” button.

Inserting PHP Content Into Your Blog Loop

So, what does that mean exactly? Well, let’s take my Adsense example. Google tells me that I’d do well if I added a third graphical ad closer to the fold. Now, the perfect location for such an ad is just slightly down the main section and to the right of the navigation bar. That’s right, dead center of the area where my blog excerpts are listed.

Ideally, the ad would go right after the first blog post excerpt, and right before the line separator between posts.

With WordPress, there are a few places where this sort of post excerpt code takes place, but it really depends on your theme. Usually, you’ll see it in the “page” or “index” PHP files. Again, it depends on your theme, so your best bet is to run a simple, local web server for testing like XAMPP, and load your entire blog or website onto that server. Play around with the PHP file that you think is the right one and see if it changes the page.

Typically, in WordPress, you’ll see the code that runs through your latest posts using a while statement, as shown below.

Now, I use the Ikarus theme, which has several different layouts depending on your blog configuration. These are stored in a “layout” folder, and in my particular case, since I chose the “blog” layout, the code I’m looking for can be found in the “blog.php” file.

There are a dozen and a half ways to force something to display only the first time through a while loop. Everyone is going to have their opinion, and everyone is going to feel their way is the best way. I’m not going to claim that – I’m just going to give you code that works.

Either at the start of your PHP file, or anywhere before the “While” statement, just paste the following code.

<?php 
$a=1;
$b=2;
?>

What this does is sets two variables to different values. That’s it. A is 1 and B is 2. Not equal, right? A is less than B.

So now, as you enter into the While statement, you’re going to check if A is less than B. The first time through the While loop, you know this is going to be true, so you display whatever you want to display, and then set A equal to B so that the next time through, the “A is less than B” check will no longer be true, and the thing you wanted to display only in the first time through will not be displayed again.

Here’s what that code looks like.

<!--START OF MAIN PAGE CONTENT AD CODE-->
<?php if($a < $b): ?>
 
<center>
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "ca-pub-xxxxxxxxxx";
/* 336x280, created 12/4/09 */
google_ad_slot = "xxxxxxxxxxx";
google_ad_width = 336;
google_ad_height = 280;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</center>
 
<?php else: ?>
<?php endif; ?>
 
<?php if($a < $b): ?>
<?php  $b = $a; ?>
<?php endif; ?>
 
<!--END OF MAIN PAGE CONTENT AD CODE-->
 
<span class="article_seperator">&nbsp;</span>
<?php endwhile; ?>

Now, if you think about it, you can use a similar approach to place something after the first 3 or 4 post excerpts, right? Your approach then would be to set A equal to 1, B equal to 4, and then every time through you would add 1 to A. Eventually, after 3 times through, A would equal B and your code snippet wouldn’t be executed for the rest of the times through the While loop.

Running the first example of code on my blog to insert a Google ad after only the first blog excerpt on the main page worked like a charm.

Again, yet another way to do this would be to set A as a flag equal to “true” and then set it equal to “false” the first time through the loop. Like I said, six or a half dozen – one or the other. Whatever you choose to do, so long as the condition is true only the first time through the While loop, your code will work perfectly.

How do you do a php insert into a loop? How do you create such “one-time” conditions in your PHP code? Share some of your own techniques and tricks to doing this sort of thing in the comments section below.

Image Credits: PHP Coding via Shutterstock

The post How To Insert PHP Content Into the Loop of Your Blog Excerpts appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Running a curated blog can be a great way to build a community, to share the things you love, and to even become a trendsetter within your own niche. In order to keep a successful curated blog, you need to be selective, organized, passionate and knowledgeable about your topic of choice. A bit of good karma will always help, so always be sure to link to the original page where you found the content.

Choose Your Niche

The first thing you have to decide when creating your curated blog is deciding what you want to blog about. Like writing, with curation, choose what you know, and what you feel you can become an authority on. You can get as specific as a selection of “the finest articles and essays saved with Instapaper,” which happens to be the topic of one of the most popular curated Tumblr blogs out there, The Feature.

If you’re a designer, focus on the kinds of design that suit your aesthetic. If you’re a writer, hone in on the best that the literary world has to offer. If you’re into social media, keep an eye on how brands and people are reaching out on social networks. But most important of all – pick a topic you love.

Pick Your Platform

Picking your topic is likely to be the easiest part of getting your blog off the ground. The next choice you’ll be faced with is picking a platform. This is something you shouldn’t get too hung up on. While it’s important to have a platform that you feel comfortable using and also gives you access to extra features that will come in handy for sharing content – it plugs into other social media networks, you can use handy plugins or bookmarklets, and a decent sharing and commenting system built into the blogging platform – at the end of the day, it’s all about the content.

One of the most popular blogging platforms that would suit your curation needs is WordPress because of the sheer amount of options available to bloggers whether in themes or plugins. If you’re new to WordPress be sure to check out our in-depth WordPress Guide which will teach you all you need to know about setting up and running a blog using the platform. If you haven’t already discovered it, WordPress’ Press This is a great bookmarklet for sharing content from around the Web on your WordPress blog.

Another popular option is Tumblr, because of its ease of use and built-in audience which certainly lends itself to curation. Again, if you’re new to Tumblr, we have a great post filled with tips and tricks for Tumblr newbies.

Lastly, a lesser known option is Overblog, which is a great option for curation because it helps automate the process by automatically pulling in content from your social networks.

Another option is to ditch the blogging platform altogether and head over to a space with a ready-made audience – using Facebook or Google+ to curate the content you want to share. While it does give you access to an audience that is already on the network – you risk losing people who aren’t on Facebook or Google+ and also risk losing the opportunity to put a little bit of your own personality into the design and look of your blog. Instead, you can always use those social networks, along with Twitter, to share your posts using these great autoposting services.

The final option, which we’ve took an in-depth look at, is using third-party services like Storify and Clipboard to curate your way to an Internet following. Whether it’s a service you want to embed on your own blog, a service you want to use as a stand-alone, or that you want to use on your own sub-domain – we’ve got you covered.

Stay On Top Of Your Topic

Once you’ve got your blog set up and are ready to start sharing the best of what the Web has to offer on your topic, you have to make sure that you’re keeping up with the most interesting news to emerge. One of the keys to becoming a leading voice on the topic of your choice is to uncover hidden gems that no one else has heard of, and to get to the big news before anyone else does.

There are several ways you can do this. First, you need to set yourself up with an RSS reader, following other similar blogs and news sites so you know what else is out there. With the sad news that Google is shutting its RSS reader down, we have a few great alternatives to Google Reader that won’t leave you out in the cold.

An RSS reader is not the only option available for keeping up with your topic of choice. Google Alerts delivered to your email inbox as they happen or as daily digest are a great way to discover hidden gems from around the Web. In addition to Google Alerts, there are several ways you can monitor Google’s past 24 hour search results, including the extremely handy TrackEngine.

A third option for keeping up with the topic is to use third party apps like Flipboard, Pulse, Zite and Prismatic. These are all services which you can choose your favourite topics, sources, social network accounts, and more, to create a curated personal magazine of sorts that delivers only content that you are interested in. You can then take that content, parse through it, and decide what you want to share with your followers.

Be Consistent

Once you’ve made a commitment to run a curate blog, you have to be consistent. The best way to do this is to set a schedule and workflow for yourself. If you have a long commute, use that time to filter through the content that you want to share. Use a tablet, or even your phone, and save items from Flipboard, Zite, your RSS reader, Twitter, and wherever else you’re finding it. Create a dedicated Evernote notebook where all the content can go, or opt for a read-it-later service like Pocket or Instapaper. Whatever you choose – make sure you have both mobile and desktop access to your content.

You should also make sure to schedule your actual blog posts. With both Tumblr and WordPress you can schedule posts, making it easy to space out your content so that you don’t flood your followers with a ton of content only when you have access to a computer or Internet connection.

And remember – part of building an audience is meeting expectation. If you don’t keep a consistent posting schedule, people are less likely to come back, and even less likely to find you in the first place.

Promote. Promote. Promote

While the old adage, “If you build it, they will come“, has some truth to it, there also has to be a certain amount of effort on your part to promote your content. Make sure it’s easy to subscribe to your content using an RSS feed, or even offer users the option to receive an email digest or weekly newsletter.

Use social media, like Twitter, Google+ and Facebook to promote your posts, and make sure there are easy-to-use buttons for your readers to share that content. Adding read-it-later buttons is also a great way to make sure that your content gets the attention it deserves.

Great Examples

Looking for some inspiration? Here are a few recommended curated blogs that are among the best in their field:

• Brain Pickings
• Swissmiss
• Kottke
• The Feature
• PetaPixel
• Retronaut
• Daring Fireball

What tips would you add to the list? Do you have a favourite curated blog? Share it with us in the comments.

Image credit: Scissors via Shutterstock

The post How To Create a Successful Curated Blog appeared first on MakeUseOf.

This question comes up a lot, so I’ve decided to write a definitive guide. If you’re too lazy to read 1,000 odd words – and that’s cool, I won’t judge, I know we live in a world of 140 characters limit – then here’s an easy to understand set of bullet points for you.

WordPress.com Advantages

WordPress.com Disadvantages

• Limited choice of themes, plugins, and settings.
• You can’t make any money through advertising.
• Custom domain costs $25/year and is essential for future proofing.
• No control over anything.

WordPress.org Advantages

• Full control over everything.
• Install anything you want.
• Customize themes and plugins, or code your own.
• Learn PHP programming.

WordPress.org Disadvantages

• Heightened security risks from malicious themes, plugins and core hacks.
• No one will help you if things go wrong.
• Depending on your hosting, costs may be on you when additional bandwidth is needed.
• Slower at the cheap end; you need to expend effort and money for a fast self-hosted site.

Explaining the difference between the two is actually quite easy, but choosing between them may prove more difficult.

WordPress.com = Hosted for you 

WordPress.org = Open source, self-hosted

WordPress.com is a hosted blogging platform – which means the WordPress.com site hosts your blog for you. Similar to Blogger or Tumblr, you are free to focus on your blog posts without a care in the world for how the system actually works. It is by far the easiest way to get a blog up and running for a complete beginner.

WordPress.org is where you can download the open source version of the software that drives WordPress.com – you can upload this to your own web hosting and run everything yourself.

So Which To Choose?

It really depends upon you.

How Much Control Do You Want?

A hosted WordPress.com blog will handle all the technical aspects, but this means you’re only given a limited set of plugins and themes from which to choose. You get what you’re given, and that’s it. Chances are, if you find a cool “WordPress plugin” (such as those on our list of best WordPress plugins ever), you won’t be able to use it.

As a result, WordPress.com sites tend to be somewhat “cookie cutter” – you can tell when a site is hosted on a free blogging platform, and it may affect your perception of that site. Personally, I give more credence to something I read on a “real website” – after all, anyone can start a free blog and write anything they like pretty easily.

How Much Money Can You Spend?

A basic WordPress.com is completely free, but you’re going to be stuck with http://yourdomain.wordpress.com, which is basically the worst thing in the world you could ever do. Why? For the simple reason that if your blog ever gains some traction, and you want to add advertising and host elsewhere – get a little more creative control over everything –  you’ll lose all the SEO value and traffic you’ve built up to that point. At the very least, you should purchase a custom domain for your WordPress.com site – but this is an optional upgrade that costs $25/year.

On the other hand, the cost of purchasing your own web hosting on which to install WordPress.org varies wildly depending on your needs. Personally, I pay $100/month for a virtual private server upon which I can host up to 100 of my own domains and WordPress sites, with full control over the server architecture – and it can easily handle a few hundred thousand pageviews a month. That’s a little more than most people will want to spend of course, but remember if your blog is popular the advertising will pay for all that and much more.

On the lowest end of the hosting scale, GoDaddy has some ridiculously cheap unlimited hosting for about $5/month (though I really don’t recommend them for anything other than just buying domains). Luckily, we’ve compiled a list of the best web hosts here, so you needn’t spend too long looking around. The point is though – hosting your own WordPress.org will cost money. 

How Much Effort Are You Willing To Put In & Are You Happy To Learn?

With a WordPress.com hosted site you’ll never need to worry about upgrading plugins or core WordPress files, because it’ll all be done for you. You won’t need to scramble to upgrade when a new security exploit is found, and you’ll never have to wake up to find your entire site has been overtaken by Russian hackers and is currently redirecting everyone to an obscure scam phishing site. You won’t need to double check any themes you install for malicious links and obfuscated code – because they won’t be available to you in the first place.

When you host your own WordPress.org site, you are of course free to install any plugin or theme you want – so malicious code is something you need to be aware of. Thankfully, WordPress now has an bright yellow warning at the top of the admin panel if a core upgrade is available – either for new features or security patches – but when you manage hundreds of sites, those upgrades can be overlooked for quite a long time.

There is a security risk in hosting your own site – no doubt – but regular backups, keeping up to date, and sticking to only themes and plugins found on the WordPress repository can mitigate this risk 99%. Sometimes though, you will need to dip into FTP or the command line on your server in order to fix things. If you’re not willing to do a few Google searches to figure out why your site is currently showing a blank page, for instance, it’s best you just stick to WordPress.com. Things can and will go wrong with a self hosted install, and it’ll be on you to fix them.

Scalability should also be mentioned – if you hit the front page of Digg Reddit for instance, you’re going to see a huge influx of traffic just dying to see your new cat meme. If you were hosted with WordPress.com, there would be no problems. WordPress.com is built on cloud hosting, and whether you have one visitor a day or a million, it will cope just fine. You won’t need to pay overage charges for additional bandwidth. If you were self hosted on a budget web host, your website would simply collapse.

Now, there are certain things you can do to scale a standard WordPress.org install – after all, MakeUseOf handles millions of pageviews daily on a WordPress.org install – but these cost money. More powerful servers, complex caching plugins such as W3 Total Cache, a CDN to host your image, CSS and Javascript files, different server software, using CloudFlare to provide a backup copy of the site in case you go offline. It’s possible to scale a self-hosted WordPress.org, certainly – but just more difficult.

Still Can’t Decide – Just Make This Choice Easy, OK?

Do you just want to write? If the sole purpose of getting a blog is to provide a creative outlet for those thousands of words that pour from your mind everyday, WordPress.com will handle your needs just fine. If however, you want to create a popular and profitable website, something you can perhaps learn a little web development on, experiment with different plugins and have full control over – then you’re looking at WordPress.org. 

If you do decide to go the self-hosted route, my complete guide to WordPress is also pretty much essential reading.

I hope that’s explained things clearly for you. If you have any question, or you think I’ve missed out some important differences, then please do add them in the comments because we’d love to hear from you.

The post What’s The Difference Between Running Your Blog On WordPress.com & WordPress.org? appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The alternative is to use a “sign-up” service like Blogger, Tumblr and WordPress.com which provides a quicker way to start writing rather than creating SQL databases and fiddling with plugins. While this method is more appealing for newcomers, there are some drawbacks and potential concerns and we’ll be looking out for them here.

Hopefully you can then decide which service is right for you.

Choosing A Service

The hardest thing you’ll have to do if you opt to not host your own blog is decide on the service you want to use. A few years ago this was easy – LiveJournal and Blogger dominated, providing a generation of teenagers with a place to moan about the wrongs in the world but these days there are more services to choose from than ever before, each with a niche.

WordPress.com might be the first port of call, largely because it’s very similar to hosting your own WordPress install with a little less control over the end results. You get 3GB of free space, social integration and analytics as well as the ability to change themes and such. Premium features include themes, custom domains and the removal of adverts, each of which is billed yearly.

Tumblr is home to a mixed bag of content creators, with an emphasis on visual and rich media. That’s not to say words don’t belong on Tumblr, and there are some great themes with an emphasis on typography. Blogger, a Google product, is used by the company to release news about new and existing products which received a facelift a few years ago and continues to focus on being a primarily written-word platform. Last of all, there’s a crossover platform in the form of social media.

Tumblr, Blogger and the big two “publishing” social platforms that are Facebook and Google+ are all infinitely more “social” than your self-hosted website. Tumblr has the ability to follow users, like Twitter. Blogger can use your Google account to keep track of updates and Facebook and Google+ are built on top of swelling user bases and a demand for shared content. Facebook has the subscribe button for individuals, or the Like button for pages and G+ is all about circling people you like. These are now viable options for publishing your thoughts, though the price is customization and an opportunity to appear unique. Put simply, everyone’s Google+ and Facebook posts look the same.

Once you’ve come to a decision the hard part is over – next you’ve got to name, theme and get on with it. Theming such services is often restrictive, though Blogger, WordPress.com and Tumblr all have options for custom themes, with the latter two offering a range of premium themes as well. In addition to this, each service can be used with a custom domain, though WordPress.com will charge you for this.

These “sign-up” services will never ask you to maintain the workings of your blog – it will all be taken care of for you. This is in contrast to a self-hosted WordPress blog which requires constant maintenance to patch security holes in both the core engine and plugins.

Made Your Mind Up?

As a blogger looking to use one of these services you should be prepared for restrictions, particularly those designed to make the providers money. Small premium upgrades can add up to more than the price of a hosting plan and domain, so be wary of this. You’re also bound in writing when it comes to submitting yourself to the service’s terms of service and privacy agreements which can (and do) change at any time. Don’t agree with something? Time to move your musings elsewhere – and what a hassle that can be.

While it’s true that the maintenance of your blog using a service like this is not necessarily down to you, that’s not to say you’re safe. No website is safe from attack, and the implications of a service-wide attack can be just as damaging as an isolated attack on your personal webspace. Tumblr recently exemplified this when their support system, Zendesk, was compromised…though the support system is also used by Twitter and Pinterest.

The company admitted that: “subject lines of your emails to Tumblr Support may have included the address of your blog which could potentially allow your blog to be unwillingly associated with your email address” and “other information included in the subject lines of emails you’ve sent to Tumblr Support may be exposed“. For some people this could be a devastating event, particularly if the whole point of the blog is to remain anonymous.

One Last Thing

Despite the restrictions, the chance that your blog will look virtually identical to someone else’s and those small premium upgrades that add up to a lot of money, there is one far greater potential drawback to choosing to host your blog using such a service: the potential for closure. Who is to say that Google, who have recently closed iGoogle and Google Reader, won’t just pull the plug on Blogger? For the moment that looks unlikely, because Google still uses Blogger but the point still stands for any of these services.

Posterous was a real alternative to Tumblr that had been running since 2008, providing tight typographic layouts and manageable mini-sites to professional, Twitter-types. Unfortunately for the many who still use the service it has been announced that on April 30 of this year the service will be switched off, a direct result of the service being acquired by Twitter. Thankfully the service has made it easy to export data, and there is even talk of a premium alternative. The fact remains that this could happen to the service you choose, and you should be aware before making a decision.

Pros to choosing an existing blog service:

• Fast and easy set up, the quickest way to get blogging.
• No maintenance on software.
• Themes, custom domains and other limited customizations.
• Social, community-driven services aided with sharing.

Cons to choosing an existing blog service:

• Restrictions on what you can do to your blog, some premium features.
• Must adhere to terms and conditions as well as privacy policies.
• Potential closure of the service.
• Security breaches can affect a whole network of users.

Whatever you choose remember that the real reason people will visit your blog is for the content. Without this, you don’t even have a blog and take it from me, spending ages trying to work out which option is right for you only slows down the process of actually publishing some content. Make your choice, and stick to it – happy blogging!

What do you think – is it better to pick a self-hosted blog or sign up for a service? Have your say in the comments below and don’t forget to read part 1 of this article.

The post Setting Up A Blog Part 2: Tumblr, Blogger, And Other Services appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The open source blogging engine is still massively popular, even MakeUseOf uses a heavily modified WordPress install to bring you articles like this. For individuals, casual bloggers and newcomers to the art of expressing yourself online the question remains – what’s better: a self-hosted WordPress blog or membership to one of the free “sign-up” services? It’s time to work out which blogging option is right for you.

Getting Your Hands Dirty

The answer to this conundrum is going to be entirely subjective and differ based on your personal requirements. One thing you should do is make a decision and stick to it – if you intend on starting a blog to further your career, cause or simply because you’ve got something to say then the longer you spend considering the inner workings the more time you could spend actually writing. As someone who writes regularly for a living, that comes from the heart.

Setting up a blog requires a few components: web-hosting, a domain name and some software. While there are cheap web-hosts available, a small personal blog should not be expensive to host and is almost always worth the money. If you’re looking for good web-hosting beware of quantity over quality – 10GB of hosting might be enough space to host 100 websites but poor uptime and unreliable support will spell disaster. It’s always best to buy within your means and upgrade at a later time if you find you need more space, transfer or features.

If you do choose to go the self-hosted route then you’ll enjoy the amount of control you have over your website. You can literally change the bricks and mortar that is your website – your code, images, plugins and of course the blogging engine that will power everything. WordPress seems like a good starting choice with its abundance of themes and massive library of free plugins, though alternatives like Joomla exist.

WordPress is famously easy to get up and running, though you will need to make sure your webhost supports the necessary versions of Apache, PHP and SQL. These terms shouldn’t put beginners off, though be aware setting up your own self-hosted blog requires some basic knowledge of FTP and SQL (databases) but it isn’t hard to learn. Of course if you’ve purchased web space and have all the tools and features you need then there’s nothing stopping you hosting other content management systems, galleries or other web apps of your choosing.

Self-hosting also allows you to take care of your own SEO and analytics, though services like Tumblr take care of a lot of this for the end user. If you’re optimising product reviews then this is more important than say sharing a story about your recent travels abroad. I’ll say it again: subjective, personal requirements.

Hosting Hassle

Hosting your own blog can also be a lot of work, something you won’t have to worry about too much if you opt for a sign-up service like WordPress.com or Blogger. While you’ve got all that control over your website, you are also your own tech support. That means you’re responsible for setting up, maintaining and updating the software.

WordPress takes care of much of this for you, with simple one-click updates for plugins and the core application, though if you’re not the most up-to-date of individuals you might want to think twice. New versions of WordPress come out every few months, most of the time focusing on bugfixes and the odd revamp of an old feature. Security is another angle that needs to be carefully considered – an out-of-date WordPress blog might just be the open door an intruder needs to deface or run malware using your domain, hosting and bandwidth.

This can be potentially more damaging than you might think. While web hosts often keep backups and can be contacted should you lose the keys to your webspace, a domain that has been used to distribute malware will quickly make it onto blacklists such as Web of Trust and even buried in search results. Often in this scenario the only resolve is to wait a long time until your domain is no longer linked to such activity.

This isn’t to say WordPress.com, Tumblr and so on are infallible – we’ll take a look at that side of things in the next article – but it’s within every webmaster’s interest to protect their patch to the best of their abilities, and that’s why many refugees would rather not worry about the technical side of things when it comes to setting up a blog and get on with writing.

Finally the cost of a blog is, in my opinion always worth it, but for some people the expense might not be justified, and so hosting costs as well as domain renewal (or outright purchase) must be taken into account. Such a setup requires you have your own domain much of the time, though you can use it for all sorts once you’ve acquired it.

Pros to hosting your own WordPress blog:

• Complete control over your website – from the theme to the plugins as well as content.
• Huge range of themes, plugins and other web apps to install.
• Domain name and web host required, both of which can be used for email and other projects.
• You’ll probably learn a thing or two about setting up blogs!

Next Time

In the next article I will take a look at the flipside – hosting your blog for free, using a service like Tumblr or Blogger. These services are a lot quicker to setup and require virtually no maintenance, but they’re not without drawbacks or restrictions.

Despite the drawbacks in this article a self-hosted blog comes with tons of benefits – customisation, control over the core aspects of your website as well as the ability to do more than just blog with your webspace. If you enjoy a “project” or would like to learn a bit about how the Internet ticks then it’s a great primer and can be very rewarding. Don’t forget to check out tomorrow’s article before making up your own mind.

Do you host your own blog? Any advice to pass on to new recruits that are setting up a blog? Leave a comment below!

The post Setting Up A Blog Part 1: The DIY Self-Hosting Method appeared first on MakeUseOf.