OVBlogger: Blogging and SEO

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Wow. I always wait a little while when WordPress makes sweeping changes to their software. I don’t care how great the programmers are (and WordPress is totally smokin’ awesome), there are going to be bugs. I like to wait until the bugs are worked out.

But…

I have a membership site about learning to blog and Web 2.0 and all kind of cool stuff about blogging, and decided that so as not to confuse my members, I’d better do the upgrade.

Wow.

My favorite feature thus far?

Automatic plugin updating.

OMG… It’s totally awesome. Plugins aren’t hard to upgrade, of course, but they’re time consuming, especially when you have as many as I do. But the newest version of WordPress has a new feature… the automatic upgrade. You click on the link and it downloads, unzips, installs, and reactivates the plugin for you!

Is that cool or what?

I’m in blogger heaven today. Still haven’t checked out all the cool features, but if the automatic plugin installer was the only thing new, I’d still be tooting WordPress’s horn.

Fan-freakin’-tastic!

I love it!

Popularity: 33% [?]

What’s up with WordPress? Every other day, there’s another security issue and we have to upgrade again. Argh. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could figure out everything at the same time so that we only needed to upgrade once?

Would be. Not possible, but it would be nice.

So, I’ve upgraded this blog at least three times that I can remember, and then, there are the plugins and the themes that don’t jibe, and on and on…

It’s exhausting.

People who are new to blogging are usually wary of doing things like upgrades. But here’s the thing to remember, if you don’t, you’re leaving yourself wide open for mischief.

You may or may not know this, but someone hacked my blog around September and I lost everything. It’s my own dumb fault for not backing things up properly (and WordPress Databackup Plugin is so frickin’ simple to use that I should be smacked). But you get busy and you think you’re going to do something, and who’d want to mess with my blog, anyway, and you just never get around to doing things.

How would you like to lose 2 years of posts? Thousands of trackbacks and comments, and on and on…

Very frustrating.

Still, I wish I had that stuff back. WordPress Database Backup plugin now mails the contents to me every week.

I won’t be taken to the cleaners again.

At least, one can hope.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Did you know that your blog can be hacked via your plugins folder? I had no idea. I write, not hack.

But here’s a cool post from  Deep Jive Interests, where they say:

If you’re running Wordpress, unless you’ve already locked down your Wp-content folder with some .htaccess fixes, you may not notice that your Wp-content/plugins folder is naked and bare to the world.  That is, navigate to http://www.yourblogname.com/wp-content/plugins and you may find a directory listing of your plugins folder, files and all.  How do you fix it?  Easy.  Just upload an empty index.html into the wp-content/plugins folder and its all fixed.

Well, thank you, Deep Jive! Really hard to do, eh? I don’t want my plugins folder or anything else about me naked in public.

Get ‘er done!

Popularity: 27% [?]

You know, I’m all for list building from my blog, but something in this theme won’t allow me to customize my AWeber form. I tried everything from shortening the name and address boxes to moving everything left, and on and on, and it still came up all FUBAR. You know?

Zo…

I used the pop-up for a while, but it was annoying, even to me! Everytime I tried to check the page, the dam-ned pop-up was there driving me nuts.

And zo…

One of my friends, Charles Burleigh from StayHomeDads.com to be exact, sent his list (which I’m on) a message about pinging and how with WordPress’s auto ping feature it pings every time you make a change to your blog. Well, we certainly don’t want to upset the Ghods of Pingdom and cause our blogs to be banned from the services.

Charles recommended Ping Optimizer from MaxBlogPress. It stops your blog from pinging more than once for each new post. Cool.

But then, I found that MaxBlogPress has more great plugins…

Notice my pop-up? There isn’t one, unless this is the 3rd time you’ve come to my blog. It will show you this cool lightbox pop up for my newsletter a time or two and then, you won’t see it again. It’s very neat. Also from MaxBlogPress, it’s called Unblockable Popup. Fan-freakin-tastic. I love it.

But…

Then…

I found the other one. See that little note at the top of the screen? It’s unobtrusive, right? Well, it rotates different text ads. I have one for HostGator running and one for AWeber, both services I stand behind completely. They rock! I also have an ad for my membership site up there, Blogging4Boomers. (I haven’t formally launched the site, but I’m proud to say that the members I have truly love it.)

Anyway, the pop up is called MaxBlogPress Stripe Ads .

And they have several others. This post is getting kind of long, so I won’t describe them all, but you have to check these out. All of them ROCK OUT LOUD!

Go to MaxBlogPress’s Home Page via this link, oh, and guess what? All these popups are F-R-E-E!

Popularity: 34% [?]