Wordpress Plugins

Updating the Do Follow Blogroll

April 19, 2008 by Tricia

Over the past week I’ve been slowly, and I mean very slowly thanks to my big allergic reaction earlier in the week, going over the Do Follow Blogroll that I maintain.

As anyone that’s part of the list or who’s spent time visiting the sites on the blogroll knows not all of the blogs listed on it are dofollow. Some have reverted back to nofollow.

While I know some have reverted back by choice and just neglected to inform me so that I could take their sites off the list, others might have changed blog themes or upgraded their blogging platform installation and forgot to turn their dofollow plugin back on.

Even I had a dofollow problem a while back. When I updated my Bad Behavior plugin it interfered with the do follow plugin. As it turns out the older version of the Google Sitemaps plugin I was using was interfering as well.

A month of so ago I updated my plugins to the latest Google Sitemaps and Bad Behavior plugins, and updated my permalinks (as some articles suggest you do that when you make changes to your site) and Ta Da … Lucia’s Linky Love dofollow plugin was working again.

So … if you happen to be using a dofollow plugin and it doesn’t appear to be working, try turning off all of your plugins and then turning them back on one by one. This might help pinpoint which ones are interfering with others. Also take a few minutes to upgrade your plugins as well and then update your permalinks.

This might just solve your problem.

Now back to what I was saying …

I’m going over the list and contacting any bloggers who’s sites don’t appear to be following anymore. If I don’t get a reply back within a reasonable amount of time or find evidence on the site, such as post stating they are no longer a dofollow blog, I’ll be removing those sites from the list.

The list is huge so it will take me some time to go over all of the sites.

If anyone does discover a site that seems to no longer be a dofollow blog I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know so that I could check the site for myself and contact the blogs owner.

BTW I’ve also been delayed in adding new sites so I’ll be going over requests shortly as well. If you request that your site be added to the list please be sure that your site really is dofollow and that it’s a few months old. I generally don’t add brand new sites to the list unless they are owned by a blogger who has other blogs that they update frequently.

Finally upgrading my WP sites and their plugins!

March 7, 2008 by Tricia

Over the last few days I’ve spent a good portion of my time updating all of my blogs. All of the new ones – the hush hush ones – have been updated to WP 2.3.3. It was easy to do because I was able to use Fantasico in my web hosting C-Panel to do it.

Now I have to update all of the blogs on this domain! Argh … I’ve moved those blogs to new web hosts twice in the last year and the last time was a manual update so this time round all the blogs will have to be manual updated too. It’s ok to do one or two manually, but when you have seven or eight that need to be upgraded manually it’s a pain in the butt! By the time I’m done I’ll be the WordPress upgrading queen! (17 blogs later!)

I’d also been having trouble on all my blogs when I’d try to save or publish a new post. A few months ago I had some kind of conflict occur when I upgraded my bad behavior plugin and the Google Sitemaps plugin on the same day. Ever since then I’d always get an error message when I saved or published a post. The posts were published but I’d have to check to be sure. It was a pain! I didn’t realize it but it was also messing up the do follow tags on my sites too. So there was a conflict between three plugins!

Luckily I discovered that there was yet another new Bad Behavior plugin update as well as a new Google XML sitemaps plugin. I updated those two plugins and refreshed my permalinks and TADA everything works right again!

Now I just hope that I don’t have any problems with my wordpress themes when I upgrade the sites on Feverishthoughts.com to the most recent WP upgrade. I think all my blogs on this domain are using 2.2.1 so it’ll be a big upgrade. If you drop by and notice that one of my feverishthoughts blogs is sporting a new very plain bare bones theme then you’ll know something strange happened when I updated the platform. It will only be temporary.

Once all that is done I can get back to work on the new blogs. One is a home and garden blog that will discuss mostly home type topics (my gardening blog will go back to mainly gardening!) such as decor, interior decorating, great recipes, tips for around the home and so on. The other blog is a shopping blog where I’ll talk about fashion trends, cosmetics, new home decor designs – who knows I’m sure I’ll even talk about platform beds on one or both!

Working on those two sites has inspired me again. I’m full of ideas and of course every time I find something cool to write about I also want to go out and buy it. I’ll be unveiling these new blogs shortly and I really hope that you like them. I’m trying to keep it fun, interesting and of course full of helpful information.

Have any of you updated your sites recently? Did it go well?

Anyone start any new blogs too? What is your new blog about? Are you being re-inspired as well?

Figuring out Kontera problems

October 26, 2007 by Tricia

Wow in the last couple of hours I’ve had a flurry of emails going back and forth from my Kontera rep. Since August we’ve been trying to figure out why I haven’t been getting as many impression on my blogs as I should have been getting. Seriously … I’ve only been getting 25 to 30% of the amount of impressions that I should have when I compare it to my html based website.

I’m still not sure if it’s due to the Kontera plugin I’ve been using or not. So over the weekend you might see more Kontera ads or perhaps even none at all as I experiment with a different plug and or add the codes manually on my own.

What I like about the plugin that I’ve been using – Lucia’s Kontera Control – is that I can decide exactly when the ads show up in any of my posts or comments. The new plugin that Kontera just created allows the ads to be blocked from certain categories but that’s forever … we don’t necessarily want or need them blocked forever.

Ideally if I could get the plugin that I want to work, to work properly, I’d not have Kontera in any of my new posts for a few days (that was how I had it set up originally) so that my regular readers could be ad free. As it is it’s set to show Kontera in all posts, excluding two categories, right away … but since something isn’t working quite right there aren’t too many ads showing up. So I guess it shouldn’t be too irritating for my regular readers, but it’s still not set up quite the way I want it to be.

Hopefully I’ll get this all figured out over the next week and I’ll soon have more Kontera ads showing up when and where I want them to show up. I hope!

Got a ton of work done cleaning up our blogs!

October 26, 2007 by Tricia

Well I’ve managed to keep myself quite busy for the last two days. All of our blogs, and I mean all, had their sidebars tidied up and I completely re-did my husbands blog Guitar Licks. It has a new widgetized them and if I do say so myself it looks a heck of a lot better than it did!

I’d been meaning give that site a new theme for oh … the last 6 months or so! I just didn’t have time! We’ve got 10 blogs that we write in regularly, 6 more being worked on that will be revealed soon, and of course I have my two big websites. That’s a lot of site maintenance to do let alone cleaning up sidebars, changing themes, creating graphics and so on as well as creating posts on all these sites on a regular basis!

I keep saying that this site will have a new look soon and I’ll continue to say that. Hopefully I’ll get to it over the weekend. Certainly the work that I did cleaning up the sidebars of ads and other things that might have been slowing the site down a bit will make it that much easier when I have to transfer all that info over to a new theme. Hopefully I’ll be able to widgetize the them too as that will make any future theme changes so much easier!

Translate Tricia’s Musings!

October 18, 2007 by Tricia

I don’t know if anyone noticed one of the new features that I’ve added to Tricia’s Musings and As the Garden Grows yet, but both sites are now using the Google Translate plugin.

I decided to add this feature because I know that both sites have quite a few readers who’s first language is not English. I, of course, don’t speak most of the languages that my posts can now easily be translated into, so I’m not sure how beneficial translating my articles will be in the long run.

It’s worth a try anyway.

I know that translators work best when the author uses proper syntax, grammar and spelling. I try. I know my grammar isn’t perfect, but I do make an effort.

The Google Translator plugin can translate a site or posts into the German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Chinese languages. I wish there were also a Nordic language feature.

As I’ve mentioned many times over the last few months this site will soon have a new look. It will happen soon!

None of my husband or I’s blogs currently use widgets. That’s about to change. I haven’t been using widgets because many of the codes that I use in my sidebars just didn’t work well in Widgets. I’ve known about a plugin called PHP-Exec for a while now, but it’s never seemed to work well for me.

I’ve recently discovered a similarly named WordPress Plugin called Exec-PHP and it works! Even better – it’s easier to use than the other plugin. You don’t have to wrap PHP code in another code. You just activate the plugin and tada you can use PHP code in your posts (in code mode) or in your widgets.

I stayed up quite late last night working on widgetizing my gardening blog on a test blog site. It was necessary to use the Exec-PHP plugin in order to use widgets on that site. Later this evening I’ll work on transferring the contents of my test widgets over to my gardening blog and it will officially be the first blog of ours that is fully widgetized.

I’m sure I’ll move quickly and use widgets for all of our blogs sidebars.

The great thing about using widgets on your wordpress site is that if you want to change your theme you can do so very easily as long as you pick a theme that is widget ready as your sidebar widgets should transfer over to the new theme quite nicely.

This theme is not widget ready at all. In fact the code used to make up the sidebars is very outdated coding indeed. It uses tables instead of unordered lists. Tables … that’s partly why this site takes a little longer to load than it should! So yes, a theme change is necessary.

So watch for the changes in our blogs and in the meantime if those of you who speak one of the languages that this site can now be translated in can give the translator a try I’d appreciate it. I’d love to know if the translations make sense! The translator buttons are located in the top left sidebar.

Finally upgrading my WP sites and their plugins!

Figuring out Kontera problems

Got a ton of work done cleaning up our blogs!

Translate Tricia’s Musings!

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