Recently, Wordpress 2.7 was released and the good news is that it may be the last time you ever have to upload a file to your server using FTP again! Why is this so? Well there is a new feature in Wordpress 2.7 called Core Update, which will allow you to automatically update your entire Wordpress installation via the Wordpress admin panel!

Note that this feature will only work with some web hosting companies, not all. You can see if your hosting company supports this feature by checking out the Core Update Host Compatibility list.

Ok, so if you’re not at 2.7 yet, then how do you upgrade WordPress? Well, there are two ways, using the Automatic Upgrade WordPress plugin or using FTP. I am the conservative type, so all of my upgrades I do manually using FTP because I don’t trust plugins very much.

However, it does work for quite a lot of people and is a popular plugin, so if you want to upgrade WordPress to 2.7 without having to do anything, then check out the Automatic Upgrade plugin here.

In this article, though, I am going to walk you through how to update WordPress using the method I have used for the last 6 to 7 upgrades I’ve had to go through.

How to upgrade Wordpress

Step 1: First, download the latest version of WordPress and unzip the package, which will leave you with one folder called “wordpress”.

Step 2: Perform a backup of your WordPress database and Wordpress files stored on your hosting server. You can use a free FTP client to download the web server files and usually the control panel for your site to backup the database.

You can also use a Wordpress database backup plugin like wp-db-backup.

Step 3: Deactivate all of your WordPress plugins before upgrading the installation.

Step 4: Now that your files are backed up, FTP into your site using a free FTP client like FileZilla or WinSCP.

Step 5: Now this is the important step! Delete the following folders and files:

• wp-admin folder
• wp-includes folder (if you have a languages folder inside, do not delete that)
• wp-*.php (except for wp-config.php)
• readme.html
• xmlrpc.php
• license.txt
• index.php

Everything else, DO NOT DELETE. That means you do not want to delete the following files and folders:

• wp-config.php
• wp-content folder
• .htaccess file
• robots.txt

Step 5: Once you have deleted the appropriate files, upload all the files and folders in the wordpress folder that you unzipped EXCEPT for the wp-content folder. Just leave that folder out completely. Upload EVERYTHING else though.

Step 6: Upgrade the database by going to http://example.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php and clicking on Upgrade.

Step 7: Re-activate all of your plugins!

You should now be back in business and hopefully everything loading up fine. Everything is pretty easy except for the deleting part, but once you do it a few times, it’s not as scary as it is the first time.

This may be the hardest way to upgrade a Wordpress installation, but it’s also the most reliable. Plugins and “automatic” upgrades don’t work for every host and every WordPress installation out there and can fail in the middle. When that happens, you’re screwed.

It’s better to learn how to manually upgrade WordPress so that you do not have to rely on plugins or someone/something else. Again, the new Core Update feature in WordPress 2.7 looks promising, but I am sure there will be many people for whom it will fail!

If you are trying to upgrade WordPress and are having problems, post your issue here and I’ll try to help you out! Enjoy!

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• Change auto-save frequency when editing Wordpress posts

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How to upgrade Wordpress to the latest version

The default interval for auto-saving an edited or unsaved post is 60 seconds. The feature was introduced in Wordpress 2.1 and has been around ever since. It’s kind of like the MS Word auto-save feature, which I might add, has saved my life numerous times!

If you want to change the auto-save frequency for whatever reason to something lower or higher, you can do so by editing the WP-CONFIG.PHP file that is stored in the root of your Wordpress directory.

All you have to do is add a constant called AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL to set a new value for the duration.

Here is the line that you would need to add to the config file:

define(’AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL’, 180);

In the above case, I am setting the auto-save duration to 3 minutes. Note that you should put the value in seconds. Now Wordpress will auto-save a post or a page every 180 seconds.

You should add the line at the bottom of the section where all of the define statements are located. Usually, it’s the first section and starts with define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘yourdatabasename’);, etc.

That’s it! I found this useful for my own site because depending on what plugins you have installed in Wordpress and your hosting server, an auto-save can take anywhere from a second to 10 seconds or more! If it takes a long time to save posts, it might be a good idea to increase the auto-save interval. Enjoy!

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I have found this to be terribly useless and also impossible to really track who is linking back to me. Of course, Technorati has been having problems as of late and people are no longer looking it as the "best" tracker of the blogosphere, but it’s tracking of links between sites is a great plus. Eventually, I’m sure the Wordpress developers will filter out links from your own site, but in the mean time it’s better to have Technorati links from other blogs rather than your own!

With that said, you can download a plug-in created just for this purpose called Technorati Links Wordpress plugin, which will completely replace the Google Blog Search feature with Technorati again. In the first version, you had to enter your Technorati API key, but in version 1.1 all of you have to do is activate the plug-in!

Another nice feature about this plug-in is that you can configure the Blog URL so that if you have Wordpress installed at youdomain.com/blog, but you want to see all links coming to yourdomain.com, you can configure this option.

Enjoy your new links!

Source: Hack Wordpress

[tags]wordpress, technorati, backlinks, inbound links, dashboard, plugins[/tags]

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If you’re really thinking about being a serious blogger, then it’s a MUST to take some time out and secure your blog as much as you can from splogs or other content nabbers. Here’s a quick list of what I’ve found so far, pretty please comment if you know of more so that I can add them to the list.

Detecting & Fighting Plagiarism

1. AntiLeech - Prevents content theft by detecting splogs and producing a fake set of content for the spam blog. Regular users will see the normal content as will RSS aggregators. AntiLeech will add a small image to the feed of each post so that it can detect new agents taking your content. Very useful and one of the best. Download AntiLeech

2. Digital Fingerprint – Inserts a unique “digital” fingerprint created by the user into each blog post. The fingerprint is only visible in the RSS feed and it allows for the quick search of your fingerprint in Google, Yahoo and MSN. The plugin also gives you a list of resources that you can use to detect stolen content in other ways or what do to if your content is stolen. Download Digital Fingerprint

3. Bad Behavior – Analyzes HTTP requests to determine whether your feed is being accessed by a spam bot and then block access to the feed completely. Should be a little careful with this plugin as it might block legitimate feed readers. Download Bad Behavior

4. WP-Ban – Another plugin that bans users by IP address, host name, or referrer from visiting your blog. It will display a custom ban message to the blocked sites. Download WP-Ban

Creative Commons License

1. Creative-Commons-Configurator – Ability to easily set a Creative Commons license for your blog through a configuration page in the admin panel. The license can be added to any blog post page, Atom or RSS feed, or into the head section for search engine robots. Download Creative_Commons-Configurator

2. WP-License - Another plugin for teh Creative Commons license. This one only works on self-hosted WordPress blogs. Download WP-License

3. WP-CC – Allows of easy usage of the Creative Commons licenses in each of your blog posts with images or text. Also adds license information into the HEAD portion of the page. This one has not been updated since 2005. Download WP-CC

Copyright Notices & Disclosures

1. Blog Copyright – Displays a dated copyright mark on single posts and general, category, and archive queries. Completely customizable through tag parameters for name, copyright term and copyright text. Download Blog Copyright

2. Disclosure Policy – Can be used in a variety of ways, one of which is to write out some copyright information for your site at the bottom of your blog, including company name and a message. Download Disclosure Policy

Protecting Feed Content

1. © Feed – A more robust and useful plugin that allows you to add more than one type of item to your feed, including a copyright message, IP address of the feed, a digital fingerprint, comments and related posts. Download © Feed

2. Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter - A simple plugin that adds a copyright message to your feed items. No customization is required. Download Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter Plugin

3. Sig2Feed – A plugin that allows you to add a custom tagline, signature, or copyright message to your WordPress generated RSS feeds. Download Sig2Feed

4. FeedBurner FeedSmith WordPress plugin – Redirects your WordPress feed to FeedBurner and protects it from scrapers. Download FeedBurner FeedSmith

Third Party Proof of Copyright Tools

1. NUMLY ESN ID - Plugin that automatically requests an Electronic Standard Book Number (ESBN) from www.esmb.org and provides proof of copyright in real time. They act as electronic timestamps for your posts. Download NUMLY ESN ID

2. Registered Commons - An alternative to the NUMLY plugin that might be better. I know NUMLY only allows a certain number of posts to be registered for free, so check out this one as it might be free for all your posts. Download Registered Commons

[tags]prevent stolen blog content, stop plagiarism, numly, stealing blog content, comment spam, akismet, bad behavior, spam karma, comment spam wordpress plugins, taragan, referrer bouncer, copyright, copyright notice, content theft, splogs, what is a splog, fighting splogs, stopping splogs, digital fingerprint, antileech, wordpress tips, wordpress help, evil doers, blog evil, protect your blog, blog protection[/tags]

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A complete list of anti-plagiarism and content-theft fighting WordPress plugins

1. Permalink Redirect – A very nice plugin that supplies a 301 redirect if the requested URL is different from the post’s permalink. For example, if you were to type in this address into your web browser, http://www.online-tech-tips.com/wordpress/the-best-way-to-move-from-blogger-beta-to-wordpress, it will automatically be changed to include an ending “/” after the post name. This ensures that there is only one URL for each blog post entry and avoids duplicate content issues. Download Permalink Redirect

2. WWW Redirect - This plugin is used to avoid having different PageRanks for www and non-www versions of your site. Using WWW Redirect, you can either redirect everything to the www or non-www version depending on how your site is setup. This avoids the same pages being indexed under various forms of of the same domain. Download WWW Redirect

3. Add Meta Tags – Unfortunately, WordPress does not automatically put meta tags into your post pages for you. However, it is quite essential to have meta tags for search engines and for the tags to be unique for each post. Add Meta Tags adds XHTML Description and Keywords tags to your blog’s front page as well as to each post, static page, and category archive. Download Add Meta Tags

4. SEO Title Tag – This plugin is similar to Optimal Title, but has a few extra features. This plugin will change the order in which your blog name and post name are displayed in the title. It is considered better for search engines to have your unique post name first followed by your blog name. It can also be used with Ultimate Tag Warrior to put the tag name in the title for tag pages. Download SEO Title Tag

5. Similar Posts – A plugin that displays a list of posts that are similar or closely related to the current post. This is good for search engines, especially Google, because internal link structure of your blog is very important when it comes to getting a higher PageRank. The more pages that are interlinked, the more PageRank they will receive and the higher those pages will be in the Google search results. Download Similar Posts

6. Google Sitemap Generator – One of my favorite plugins so far! It’s painless to install and generates an XML compliant sitemap for you and automatically updates Google every time you publish a new post. And it generates a sitemap not only posts, but also static pages, categories and archive pages. It also gives a priority to each post based on the number of comments. Download Google Sitemap Generator

7. NoIndex Feed – A simple little plugin that will prevent Google and Yahoo from indexing your WordPress feed by adding a META tag to the feed. You can also use a robots.txt file to do this, but this plugin can take care of it for you easily. Download NoIndex Feed

8. Duplicate Content Cure – If you are using the default settings for WordPress, a single post on your blog can be indexed numerous times through archives, categories, built in search, and home page paging. Mostly it’s summaries or posts or exact copies of the same post. This plugin will ensure that the pages and posts are the only things that get indexed. Download Duplicate Content Cure

9. Link to Me Textbox – This plugin will hopefully give you more links and hence raise the number of backlinks to your blog post. More backlinks will give your posts a higher PageRank. Simple and yet useful way to get more links. Download Link to Me Textbox

10. Sociable or Submit It – Use these plugins to add social bookmarking sites to each of your posts. Readers can easily bookmark your post on Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, Furl, StubleUpon, and lots more. This will give you more backlinks and more traffic. Download Sociable or Submit It

11. SEO WordPress Plugin – This plugin is exactly what the name suggests, a smart plugin that creates a robots.txt file for you with the disallow statement to block certain directories from being indexed by the Google bot. I had not seen this plugin on most sites, but I currently also use a robots.txt file manually to block trackbacks, feeds, archives, and other directories from being indexed. I think this will be a very useful and effective SEO plugin. Download SEO WordPress Plugin

12. Permalinks Migration Plugin – This is another great plugin if you currently are not using an SEO friendly permalink structure on your blog, this plugin will redirect your old link to your new link without effecting your search engine rankings. It uses a 301 redirect in order to accomplish this and therefore you don’t lose any of your PageRank. Download Permalinks Migration Plugin

13. Simple Tagging – A simple, yet powerful, plugin that allows you to attach tags to each post so that you can create tag clouds, display lists of related posts, add tags as meta keywords in the header, add tags to your feed which will index your tags with Technorati, and embed tags directly into a post. Download Simple Tagging

Updated: July 24th, 2007

14. All-In-One SEO Pack – A great plugin mentioned by San Diego in the comments. It fixes, the Home Title, Home Description, Home Keywords, rewrites titles, uses noindex tag for Category and Archive pages to avoid duplicate content, and auto generates meta descriptions. Download All In One SEO Pack

I will post more SEO plugins for WordPress as I can find them. Please let me know if there are more that I may have missed!
[tags]wordpress plugins, search engine friendly wordpress plugins, wordpress, plugins, seo plugins, wordpress seo[/tags]

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1. http://jayajha.wordpress.com/2005/09/27/bloggercom-vs-wordpresscom/ - Gives a good comparison of both blogging platforms with negatives and positives of each.

2. http://bambit.kusangpalo.com/?p=71 - Quite the happy WordPress blogger!

3. http://www.blogtrepreneur.com/2006/03/13/battle-of-the-blogs-blogger-vs-wordpress/ - Another point by point comparison where WordPress wins!

From my own personal experience, I have to say that the best thing that I like about WordPress is the fact that it allow developers to create plugins that enhance the platform significantly. Actually, if it were not for the plugins, I would not have switched to WordPress. Blogger Beta currently only has about 10 to 12 widgets that you can add to your blog; however, with WordPress there are hundreds of plugins.

Using the plugins, you can make your blogging life a million times easier. For example, Google puts a lot of weight on the internal link structure of your site, so it’s essential to do things like link to other related posts at the bottom of each post. In Blogger, you have to do this manually: find the related posts, create the links, and go back to the post to put the links in. On the other hand, WordPress has a plugin called Related Posts which uses MySQL’s full text search capabilities to find almost perfectly related posts automatically! I used to spend almost an extra 5 to 10 minutes on each post manually adding links, which takes away from your real goal of blogging. On top of that, being a human, I missed a lot of entries that the plugin finds!

Anyway, getting to the point of this post, what is the best way to switch over from Blogger to WordPress? This is actually a fairly tough question with a couple of different paths. You might have read elsewhere that you can simply import your entire blog from Blogger into WordPress and within a few minutes start on your jolly good way! And that is actually true, but if you do that and nothing else, your blog will lose all of it’s traffic, end up in Google’s supplemental index, and die a miserable death.

So why is that? Let’s say you have written about 500 posts in Blogger and now you decide you want to switch over to WordPress. That means it’s been around for a while and your site has probably already been indexed by Google. So all of your pages are in their main index. When you import all your posts into WordPress, you now have your original blog and your new blog, both with the same content. Google will crawl your new site and looks at it’s current cache to see if there is something very similar already in it’s cache. It will of course find the exact same content and will put your entire new site into it’s supplemental index because of the duplicate content. The supplemental index can be debated whether it is bad for your site or not, but it’s definitely not in the main index and that’s where you want your site to be. You can see which pages in your site are in the supplemental index by typing “site:www.mysite.com” into Google search. If you see “Supplemental Result” in green next to the URL of the site, that page is in the supplemental index.

So the obvious answer is to simply delete the blog right after importing the posts into WordPress right? WRONG! If you delete the Blogger blog, the Google bot will crawl your site and get a 404 error for that page and it will simply KEEP what it has in it’s cache. It does not believe in deleting content from it’s index. So even if you delete the blog completely, you’ll still get tagged with the duplicate content penalty since your site will remain in Google’s cache.

There are two ways around this: 1) Redirect your blog and every post automatically to it’s corresponding location in the new blog or 2) Get your original site out of the Google index completely and then allow Google to index your new site. There are of course advantages and disadvantages to both. Hands down, the best solution is to redirect your blog to the new one. The reason for this is that your Google juice (the PageRank you had developed on the main page of your old site and the inner pages) will get transferred over to the new site.

However, Blogger does not support this and there is some code I managed to find written by someone that tries to do this for you, but unfortunately it does not work perfectly.  And from what I have read, it is quite essential to have each page redirect to the appropriate page in the new site. Simply redirecting everything to the main page on your new site will get you into the same trouble as before.

If your site has a PR of 5, 6 or higher, you may want to simply stay with Blogger. It might not be worth the lost traffic and lost AdSense reveune to switch. But if you’re like me, just starting out with only a couple of hundred posts and a PR of 4 or lower, then the fantasies of WordPress might just be worth it! If you simply must move from Blogger and you don’t want to lose your PR, then check out these links and see if you can use some tech savvy skills to get the redirect code to work perfectly!

http://www.techcounter.com/?p=47&cp=2#comments

http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2006/05/move-blogger-to-wordpress

Ok, now on the the second method! Note that the second method does not take into account retaining your PageRank! Unfortunately, it will be lost in the process. But from what I’ve read and heard from other bloggers who have made the move, your PageRank and traffic will come back quickly once your site is indexed. It might take a couple of months, but it will eventually come back. That kind of patience might be ok for some, but not for others, so choose your method carefully or don’t move at all!

The second method basically is to edit the template of your Blogger blog so that for each and every one of your posts only the skeleton of the post is left with no content, then a META tag is added to the main template that tells Google not to index the page, and finally you use the Google URL removal tool to remove each post individually from the index. If this sounds like a good amount of work, then you’re right. It’s not terrible bad if you have 200 to 400 posts, but if you have a significantly larger number of posts, then it will be a pain to submit each post URL for removal.

Firstly, you want to switch your Blogger blog to the old Blogger template. You can do that by going into the Edit HTML section in your Blogger blog and choosing Revert to Classic Template. Then you want to remove all of the code between the <Blogger> and </Blogger> tags, leaving just those two tags.

Then you want to add the line <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> section in the template. Then you want to create an account for Google’s Automatic URL Remover tool and then choose Individual URLs: web pages, images, or other files after you click New Removal Request.

This method of removal is from the Blogger team itself and this is how I removed all of my pages from the Google index. The information is listed under How to Delete A Blog in the archives. You have to scroll down about half way down on the page. Within a few days, most of my pages were removed. The nice thing about this method is that it’s very fast and all of your posts are still in Blogger so you don’t have to import everything into WordPress before doing this. All you’re doing is deleting the code that shows your posts on the web site, it does not actually delete your posts from Blogger.

A third method you can use to get your blog out of Google’s index is to delete all of your posts, create a stub post, and then wait a few weeks or months and let Google replace it’s cache with just the stub post. This method of deleting a blog is outlined in an article written by a Blogger user. This method is in the context of deleting a blog so that sploggers (Spam Bloggers) can’t use it again, but it also works in our scenario.

I hope this helps someone in there move from Blogger to WordPress. If you have any questions and comments, please feel free to speak your mind! This may not be the best way, so any updates would be greatly appreciated. I guess the main lesson is to make sure you don’t simply delete your old blog. You either want to redirect it or get it out of the Google cache! Enjoy!

[tags]best practices move from blogger to wordpress, switch from blogger to wordpress, blogger to wordpress[/tags]

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But if you’re getting serious about blogging, then you must switch to WordPress! WordPress has so many features that you can’t even think about having in Blogger! This, of course, is through the myriad of plug-ins that are available for WordPress. The “widgets” on the Blogger site itself are the only ones you can use in your blog. Currently, I think there are only 10 or 11 of them. Compare that to hundred’s of WordPress plugins!

And let me tell you that the WordPress plugins are AWSEOME! In about two days, I downloaded at least 15 plug-ins to place links to automatically share my post on the main social networks, create a Top 10 most popular posts, show the most recent comments on my blog, show 5 related posts to a single post automatically, add meta tags to each post page, block spam comments on the blog, convert my WordPress default feed to FeedBurner, automatically generate a Google sitemap, create SEO friendly permalinks for blog posts, and automatically backup my WordPress blog weekly! That’s a lot of stuff and it only took 2 days!

On top of that all, you get your own custom domain name and full control over things such as your .htaccess and robots.txt files. These are extremely useful for doing things such as URL redirects (from online-tech-tips.com to www.online-tech-tips.com) or blocking the Googlebot and other search engines from getting to a single post in 10 different ways. For example, in Blogger there is no way to stop Google from indexing your archive pages, feeds, and comments in addition to your original post. This means that a lot of your site ends up in the supplemental index and that’s never good.

On a side note though, moving from Blogger to WordPress is not super easy and definitely takes a good amount of time and research. For example, it’s quite easy to import your Blogger posts into Wordpress, but what do you do then? Do you simply delete your Blogger blog or do you redirect your old blog to your new blog? Each way has it’s advantages and disadvantages and should be considered carefully before hastily switching over, especially if your blog is already ranking well in Google and has a decent PageRank value.

Actually, after I’m done switching to completely to WordPress, I’m going to write up a nice long post on how I went about doing it and if I was able to save my PR and traffic or not!

Anyway, thank goodness for WordPress! I love this thing!

[tags]wordpress, blogger, blogging, blog[/tags]

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My first post on WordPress and I’m loving it!