Welcome to Smuggle Me

Email is still the most used application by internet users. I don’t know many people that are online that don’t pretty much go straight to their email when their online. Checking your email for new messages is an addiction for many (including myself). It’s my connection with my social life and it connects me to other things happening around the internet. In fact, one of the first things that new users of the internet do is get an email address.

Since email is so ubiquitous, then it only makes sense that getting your blog posts in people’s email box is one of the best way to drive traffic to your blog and encourage comments from users interested in what you’re posting to your blog. In fact, my wife has a friend that would manually send out an email to everyone telling them that she created a new blog post. That’s how much people like the idea of using email to “promote” their blog.

The crazy thing is that these people were sending out their blogs posts manually. What a pain in the butt. Plus, there might be some blog readers that aren’t on your personal email list.

If you’re manually doing it, then stop it and start using Zookoda. It’s a free service that basically turns your blog into a newsletter. Here’s a short list of features.

-Manage email newsletter subscribers.
-Enhance your blog with custom newsletter subscription forms.
-Design eye-catching newletters to match your blog design.
-Schedule recurring broadcasts for each day, week or month.
-View real-time open, bounce, click and unsubscribe reports.
-Access mobile users by emailing blog content in text format.

Did I mention it’s free? Trust me, that’s a good deal. I had personally worked on projects like PHPList to do the same things, and it was a pain in the butt. A hosted email newsletter service like this is so much better.

It looks like Wordpress 2.5 is going to arrive possibly next week. Either way it will be coming really soon. Is your blog ready for it? I found a pretty extensive check list of things you can do to prepare for the upgrade. I think that it is a little over the top myself, but I guess you kind of have to be to avoid that person that gets mad at you for saying that the upgrade should be very easy. That’s why I’ve basically limited myself to the plugins that are so mainstream someone is going to update them or the ones offered by Wordpress themselves (ie. Akismet and Wordpress Stats). It’s always interesting to see what features they come out with next.

I’ve been working the past couple evenings to get a Wordpress blog to integrate with a bbPress forum. They’re both from Automattic so I thought that it would be a no brainer. Turns out it should have been, but I just missed one link. I’m putting them here for those looking for a reference on integrating Wordpress with bbPress.

Here’s the Wordpress plugin that you need to integrate it. I didn’t activate it until after I had created both the Wordpress install and the bbPress install. This plugin also requires you to set the prefix for your bbPress database name. Simple enough to do on the tab that’s created for bbPress once the plugin’s activated.

This is the bbPress Wordpress Integration plugin that is used in bbPress to do the integration. Of course this is activated after installing bbPress. Just make sure when you install bbPress that you set all the right information in config.php I won’t detail that out since the documentation is good for that and is really very straightforward.

A lot of the documentation points to a Display Name plugin to show the Wordpress display name in bbPress rather than the login. It’s a great idea and would be great if it worked. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work, but the comments made on the plugin have a better workable method to make this happen in the bbPress template which in reality is probably where it should be anyway. Although I would shy away from loading all of Wordpress on the bbPress pages if possible. I can imagine that it will slow things down.

The Spaces and special character in login name Plugin isn’t even an official plugin and I haven’t tested it myself, but it loads well and seems like a simple enough plugin that I added it in to prevent errors in the future. Let’s hope now that they’re putting some resources towards bbPress we’ll get some things like this in the core.

I haven’t added the Human Test Plugin yet, but I expect that I’ll probably need to do that sooner or later or we’ll be swimming in fake accounts before we know it.

There are a bunch of other plugins that would be cool, but we’ll see what the manager of Crowdsource This wants to do. A signature plugin might be cool. The Private Message plugin might be useful. Probably a few more I haven’t looked at yet.

Well, hopefully this helps some people trying to integrate Wordpress with bbPress. Next up is to find a good theme. Possibly a look and feel designed for Wordpress and bbPress would be best. I’ve read that there are a few out there. If someone knows where they are, please let me know.

Today I decided to do my first official install of bbPress. I’ve worked with it on Greedy or Needy and a few other places, but the is the first install that I’ll be using in production. I’m planning to use it to support my first attempt at a simplified version of my marketing mob idea. Should be interesting to see how it works out. I debated whether to use a forum like bbPress or a wiki and I decided to try the forum first.

I also have an ulterior motive in that I’ll use this experience setting up bbPress to make sure that I’m well versed in it before installing it for the website Crowdsource This. Should be a pretty cool site that you should all check out once it’s up and running.

Now that I have the base bbPress forum installed, I’m going to have to start looking through all the various themes and plugins and see if any of them are must have items. I don’t really want to develop my own theme and so I’m pretty sure I’ll just use one of the ones listed on bbPress Themes or bbPress Showcase. In the end, I don’t care as much about look for this one as I do function. So, the theme might actually be easier to decide than the list of bbPress plugins.

Either way, I find this pretty exciting and interesting stuff. bbPress has been almost exactly the same install as Wordpress and so it’s been a walk in the park so far. I’ll have to see how the integration with Wordpress works. It looks like there’s a few options. I’ll have to decide which one is best.

Also, if anyone reading this is interested in participating in this round of the marketing mob, let me know and I’ll fill you in on how it’s going to work.

UPDATE: This post was completely tongue and cheek about someone who is non-technical and shouldn’t know how to do these technical things. See my comments below for further explanation on my intentions with the post.

My friend from Cambrian House decided to step into the blogging world with his blog Web Fugitive. I think he’ll actually be a really good blogger with his knowledge and writing skill. I guess time will tell.

However, his tech skills and implementation of Wordpress sucks. Sorry Web Fugitive, but there’s a reason you shouldn’t expose yourself. I’d be embarrassed to admit who I was if I’d committed so many mistakes. Here’s a few helpful hints to get you started.

1. Turn on permalinks. If you don’t know what that is, then find out. It’s easy and Google likes permalinks. Don’t be lame and link to a page with ?p=12
2. Turn comments on on all of your posts. I was about to comment on a post and comments was turned off. How lame is that. Well, I guess maybe it was a good strategy, because it motivated me to blog about you. Otherwise, I think it sucks. I bet it was just an accident, but fix it already. Comments are what makes blogs interesting.
3. Get rid of the “Uncategorized” category. Choose a topic like Web 2.0 which will encompass all your posts and then make it the default. Uncategorized just makes you look lazy and uneducated in the art of blogging. Not to mention good categorizing is liked by Google bots too.
4. I already told you this so do it already. That lame hostmonster favicon not only makes you look lame for using hostmonster, but it shows you don’t care about your website.
5. I can’t tell this for sure, but I bet you don’t even have the Wordpress stats plugin turned on and maybe not even akismet. I’d even settle for Google Analytics, but I’m confident you don’t have that. Get some stats already.

Ok, I will give you one prop. At least you have the latest version of Wordpress installed. Of course, you don’t have to listen to anything I say, but I’m sure you will since you know better than to not listen.

Welcome to blogging. It’s addicting!!

PPP/Izea has rolled out their new RealRank measure for blogs. Honestly I don’t personally believe that this rank will have much meaning outside of those blogs that participate in PayPerPost. However, it will have significant meaning to the 70,000 (or however many it is now) bloggers that use PayPerPost. Plus, it will be great for all of those stats addicts out there like me.

Of course, I’ve been in Hawaii and so I haven’t been able to check my PPP tools (now called ITK) to make sure it was installed properly. Looks like when I was trying out the Argus beta stats I messed up my PPP tools. I’ve fixed it now and tomorrow I’ll finally be able to see my RealRank.

If anyone else needs help with this let me know. I’m always happy to help people when I can. Even if it will be a bit busy over Thanksgiving.

I think that everyone that blogs should know that they need to backup their blog regularly. Unlike a paper journal, blogs can be backed up easily and copied to a zillion different places if you want. However, the key element to a backup is to do it regularly and verify they work. Backups get outdated quickly.

Luckily Wordpress blogs have a variety of simple backup solutions. In fact, they even have a whole section of the Wordpress Codex for backups. Here’s a few simple things you can do to backup your database.

Wordpress Database/Data Backups
MySQL Database Backup - There are at least 2 ways to backup your blog’s MySQL database. One is using the backup utility your host provides. I’ve found this a pretty nice way to backup the entire blog database. I recommend this backup method for most people. Other more advanced users may want to use phpmyadmin to backup just specific portions of your blog. I know I often will backup my blog without all the statistics data. It makes my backup much smaller and easier to restore.

WP-DB-Backup Plugin - As of a few Wordpress releases ago, Wordpress has bundled the WP-DB-Backup plugin with the base Wordpress install (similar to Akismet and Hello Dolly). That means that most of you already have it available as a plugin on your system. Everyone else can easily download the latest version of WP-DB-Backup. Here’s good instructions and FAQ on using it. This backup will save the backup file to your webhost by default and can be configured to regularly email you a backup of your blog. Pretty slick. Just don’t close your browser when doing it.

Export Option - As of a recent Wordpress release (yes, I’m too lazy to check the exact release), Wordpress has provided a very nice Export option. It’s a really simple way to backup the most essential part of your blog: posts, comments, custom fields, and categories. This backup method is so simple. Just go to Manage–>Export and then click the “Download Export File.” This create a really nice XML file that will be really easy to restore. It doesn’t backup your theme, all the options section, plugins, links that you might have setup. However, all of that can be recreated if needed. Your blogs posts and comments would be the hardest to replace.

Wordpress Files Backup
Host Provided Backup - Every hosting service I’ve seen provides some sort of backup utility. Most of them use CPanel which has a pretty robust set of backup options. On CPanel you want to do a home directory backup. This will backup every file and any file you have uploaded or configured on your website. This is my preferred method, because it zips it up and names it nicely when I download it to my hard drive.

FTP Backup - This is a really simple method to backup all the files that Wordpress uses to display your blog. If you are blogging on Wordpress and don’t know how to use an FTP program like FileZilla, then now’s a good time to learn. Basically in this backup you just create a folder on your local computer and copy all of your blog files into that folder. The key challenge here is to make sure that you selected the right files and that your ftp program didn’t error downloading any of the files.

I haven’t tried to make an exhaustive list of ways to backup your Wordpress blog. One time I lost my entire blog (there was no option to backup at the time) and the only way I could recover it was using Google’s cache. Trust me, you don’t want to ever have to do that.

The decision on when to backup your blog is up to each blogger. The question you need to ask yourself is how much data I’m I willing to lose if something happens to my blog. For some people this may be a day and others a week. Once you’ve answered that question, then you’ll know how often you should backup your blog.

If anyone else has suggestions on other Wordpress blog backup methods, please let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

Side Note: This post only applies to personally hosted Wordpress blogs. If you are using a Wordpress.com blog, then you can only use the Export option listed above. Luckily, that export option should be all you need to restore your blog if Wordpress.com decides to take down your blog.

Today I was reading over some information about using Google Apps with your own domain and I just happened to see a post about highlighting authors comments in Wordpress. I’ve seen it all the time in Techcrunch and I really like that they do that. I’ve just always been too lazy to change my template to search for how it was done. Turns out that it’s really easy. In fact, the link I sent above makes it sound harder than it really is.

I basically added an If the comment author email equals the admin’s email account, then list a style. Otherwise, don’t change the style of the comments. How do you like that pseudocode? Anyway, it was really easy to do if you know php and css. As I did it, I realized that my css still needs a lot of work. However, I think it turned out pretty good. I think the comments look much nicer with a little color.

I was just looking through my long list of draft posts and I found this post that I never published. It’s a little dated, but still a good read.

I recently posted about making it to #1 on Wordpress.com. At first I made it only to the top of English blogs, but I eventually made it to top of all 480 thousand blogs.

Well, it turns out that being at the top of Wordpress.com brings even more traffic to your website. I always wondered how much extra traffic Scoble was receiving from being the top of Wordpress.com. Now I know and so I’m going to share it with everybody.

First you have to understand that there are a number of ways that Wordpress.com sends your blog traffic. The two methods I’m talking about in this post is Wordpress.com and Blogs of the Day. Tags is another method, but that’s a topic for another day.

Referrals from Wordpress.com to So You Think You Can Dance blog:
11-13 36 Referrals
11-14 40 Referrals
11-15 127 Referrals
11-16 396 Referrals (Hit #1 English Blog)
11-17 487 Referrals (Hit #1 Blog)
11-18 52 Referrals

Referrals from Blogs of the Day to So You Think You Can Dance blog:
11-13 3 Referrals
11-14 3 Referrals
11-15 11 Referrals
11-16 22 Referrals (Hit #1 English Blog)
11-17 29 Referrals (Hit #1 Blog)
11-18 12 Referrals

The best part of getting all this new traffic is that you are finding new readers that will often post a link to your blog on their blog. I should also acknowledge that the name of the blog will affect the numbers above. I guess Wordpress.com is much more important than the Wordpress Blogs of the Day.

It was still fun to think that my blog was the most visited that day out of 480 thousand blogs.

I’ve been with PayPerPost for pretty much as long as anyone else. After all, I am Postie #61. Well, it’s been a great ride. I’ve made a chunk of cash. Learned from watching Ted the marketing genius. Made a lot of interesting friends.

However, there are a number of things that just get my panty hose all bunch up. All you ladies out there know how much fun that is. It’s not. So, here’s my list of Top PayPerPost pains. I decided to not specify a number. Instead I’d just spell it out.

1. 2 emails every time I get paid - this is a minor annoyance, but one would be better
2. Filling out a captcha when commenting on their blog - If they had used Wordpress akismet would have stopped spam and saved me the heartache
3. Opportunity Sort is by Date Entered - The first thing I do when looking at opportunities is to sort it by $$. I’ve been doing this for a year and a half and I wish it was the default (or at least my default)
4. I have 2 bans that should be benches, but it was before benches existed
5. My pile of payperpost referrals hasn’t paid me squat. I keep hoping that one will pull through and make me some cash, but it might be hopeless. I guess that program wasn’t as good as I thought it would be.
6. It doesn’t remember my username on the login screen.
7. Brit won’t hook us up to her Tropicana model pictures
8. My PR 5 blog dropped to a PR 4 blog and Google’s PR update is taking forever. Ok, that’s not PPP’s fault, but I’m blaming them because my other PR 5 blog is so niched focused I’ve only been able to do one opp. Therefore, it shows me a long list of high paying opps which I can’t do, because my PR 5 blog is so niche focused. That’s like the proverbial dangling the carrot. I wish I could “delist” my PR 5 blog so I didn’t have this problem.
9. Ted use to dangle weekly marketing ploys, announcements, etc that were entertaining and interesting. The celestial ARGUS will be essentially 5 months of anticipation. 5 months pretty much translates to a disappointing release in November. I expect it to be like moving a computer from 2-4 gigs of RAM. The 4 gigs of RAM is sexy, but doesn’t really add much value to my experience.

Of course, I hope I’m wrong about number 9, but 5 months of dreaming is hard to fulfill. I guess we’ll see if Argus is more like iPhone or Vista.