tek-works.com

For those that read my SEO and Marketing Review blog you’ve read this, but I’m adding it to Tek-works since it is something to add to your code in wordpress.

One of the things that many sites have are Goggle Ads or Google Adsense, but most of these sites just install them and that’s it. Adsense tries to figure out what your post or page is about and then will send relevant ads to your page, problem is, with wordpress, Adsense sees links, plugins, feeds and everything else on your page including your post.
The way to stop Adsense from seeing everything on your page and just the relevant data is to add a small strip of code to your template.

These are the before and after codes:

<!-- google_ad_section_start --> <!-- google_ad_section_end -->

In your index, single post and anyother page template that has a post in it, add the first piece of code before where the post starts and then the second where it ends.

My friend Scott of Scottjanz.com, finally wants to get his domain off of yahoo’s servers. If you want to move your domain off of a host to a different one, these are the steps you need to do.

(this isn’t moving to another domain name, this is same domain name, different host company.)

Copy all parts of your site

Before doing anything with your domain name:

Let your visitors know that you are moving your site and that there will be no post for about 3 days. (this gives you time for the move to be made without changing your database.

After the above post, no other changes, post should be made.

Get a copy of your database, most will use phpmyadmin and export all tables.

Copy your entire site, this is a cover your butt encase you or someone else made changes to the core files.

After copying your site you can now inform your new host you’d like to transfer your domain. They will then contact your current host and you will start to get emails from both sides. These emails will want you to (sometimes) login and check to make sure it’s you changeing the domain and if you really want to do it.

This will take a few days to happen.

Moving Your Site
(there are different ways of doing this but I find this one of the easiest)

Install a new wordpress site on your domain (this is a clean, new one, on your old domain name)

Using PhpMyAdmin, go into the new database, and delete everything, all tables and everything. (checkmark all and then choose drop at the bottom of the screen)

With a blank database, import your copy of your old database in to the blank one. Now all your data is there. If you went to the site you’d see the default theme but with all your old post.

Now FTP to your site and copy your wp-content directory over the one on the server (this will copy your plugins and any images you may have in that directory. The reason we copied the entire site is if other changes were made, you have to copy to replace what’s on the server.

Now check your site.. Some of the things you may have to do:
rechoose your template
check images are there (if not copy your images directory over)
Make a new post, informing your visitors that you’re back and all comments and post will start again.

(this post doesn’t talk about anything you may have to do to get the domain moved, talk with your new host to make sure all things go smoothly

I’ve talked about how to hide the author of a post or hide the categories, but what if you want to add your tags to your post?

Using UTW to add tags is the easiest, this will allow you to not just add tags but also link up with Technorati the easiest. With Ultimate Tag Warrior you can have it list your tags before or after your post, but what I like to do is set them to invisible technorati list because when you add a shown list at the bottom of your post, it looks like it was added later and isn’t really part of the post. After setting the option to invisible technorati list, I then edit my template to add the tags straight to me post.

In the template I use on Tek-Works, It had at the end of the post “Read more articles on..” and then would list the categories that this post was listed under. Since I don’t use categories, lets change it to the tags.

On your main index template, single post and search results pages you’ll need to look for
Read more articles on <?php the_category(' and ') ?>

and change it to

Read more articles on <?php UTW_ShowTagsForCurrentPost("commalist") ?>

What we’ve done is tell Wordpress to find and list the tags from UTW instead of the categories from Wordpress.

I’ve been doing some odd tech jobs the last week, and will be doing more tomorrow. Then I’m off to Raleigh, NC to help put on CarolinaCon.

Also, I’ve kept up on my reading.. This is what Google RSS reader says:

From your 108 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 4,413 items

That 147 articles a day, no wonder I need glasses now. The most articles read in one day way 515

cross your fingers

Since Friday night, I’ve sent a couple post to the blog and for some reason they haven’t showed up. Finally I figured out the hosting company was having problems. Hopefully it’s all fixed. As for the last post…. gone

This happened to most my blogs, This is why I’m now starting to have different host, not all are down at the same time

Today Technorati filled a patent on techniques to find if a blog is spam or not, while this is great and many blogger blogs will finally die, I’m wondering how well it will work and if it’s sees an affiliate link in it will it instantly think the blog is spam?

SEO By The Sea has a great simplified overview of the process described in the patent application

WordPress is alot more than just a blogging platform, I realized this yesterday when I was creating a site and needed a couple functions that Wordpress could offer me.

What Wordpress Offers
Wordpress is optimized for search engines and with all the plugins that have been created for Wordpress, think of the many things you can do.

Photo galleries: from your own site or from flickr (can you say free space)
News updates: Really the blog, but who will know
Downloads: along with counts of how many downloads
Contact forms
Block IPs or Domains
Quotes
Link pages

And many others, along with all these functions, there are other plugins that allow us to show the links or banners randomly or have total control on post, what’s shown first or what is shown at all. We can even have users login and see content that others can’t.

These reasons are why yesterday, even though I wasn’t blogging, I was messing with Wordpress. Here is an example of what I’ve done so far, Grand Theft Auto 4 Info. With this site, I created a static front page, with the look and feel I wanted. I then installed wordpress in the news directory, so once you click news, you’re on a blog. I then started changing the theme to look like my static page, this took the most time but was fun and I learned alot about themes. The site isn’t complete yet but it’s close. What other ways could you use wordpress as a backend for a website? I’ve got the news and gallery, what else would you use?

When someone first starts blogging, probably one of the hardest things to comprehend is the ping and trackbacks. I’m not going to go into what they are and how to do it, other sites already cover Sending Pings and Trackbacks perfectly.

What I do want to share with you is a site to test your pings and trackbacks. If there is a problem, this can be very frustrating and what makes it worse is, if you try more than once, it could look like you’re spamming anther site. Along comes Test Track, ping it, trackback with it, test as many times as you like, that’s why it’s there.

Tek-Works was having problems with trackbacks, after testing and changing things about 10 times, I finally found it was my htaccess was messed up and even though the permalinks were somehow working, the htaccess was completely wrong. Sites like Test Track may seem usless but for that one or two times you’re pulling your hair out, you will praise the admins for building it.

So to test if trackbacks show on your site, login into test track and write a short post and link in it to your site, a trackback should show up in your comments area. To see if your site is sending trackbacks, write a short post and link to the post you just made on test track, the test track post should now have a trackback from your blog. I’ll test this post later and you’ll see it in the comments area.
Did I also mention that it doesn’t hurt to have a page Rank 5 site pointing to your site either

For those of you reading the RSS Feed, come by and check out the new theme we are using at Tek-Works. The reason we decided to use a new theme is because the one we were using wasn’t configured to work well with the search engines as we talked about in Your Template and Google, Do They Work Well Together
I really liked our old template but it was alot easier to start with a new theme than try to change the current one. We also now only have one sidebar instead of two, which means some of the widgets and plugins had to go. As talked about eariler, MyBlogLog isn’t quite working how it use to and the space it was taking doesn’t make up for the small amount of traffic it was showing. The about me plugin has now been moved to an about page (yes, I still need to fill it out). I’m still working on what things I want on the new sidebar but it will slowly come together.

Let us know how you like the new look and thanks for visiting.