One of the things about running a blog is getting regular content. I came across a good way of getting new content onto a poker blog the other day – basically each day the blog is set up to import a list of all that day’s poker freeroll tournaments at several of the top online poker rooms as seperate posts.
To do this, you need two things. Firstly you need a Wordpress plugin that allows automation of imports for given RSS feeds. Secondly, you need the URL of an RSS feed that has the poker tournaments.
The plugin I use is called wp-o-matic. It’s simple to set up on a Wordpress blog – took about 5 minutes. Once done, it has an admin panel where you can specify an RSS feed for import and set a time or times to interrogate the feed. WP-o-matic then brings in the latest RSS items and sets each one up as a new post. Voila! Automated content that gets Google spidering your blog on a daily basis – all good for SEO too.
As for the poker freeroll feeds, you can grab one from www.freerollpokertournaments.net or there is a good selection of poker feeds at Yahoo Pipes (there are also some gambling newsfeeds there you can import too). Grab the URL of any feed, give it to wp-o-matic and it will do the rest.
If you use Wordpress and the excellent aLinks plugin, you may notice that each link it inserts in a post has a PHPSESSID parameter tagged on the end – a PHP Session ID – which then gets indexed within SERPS. Now I’m not sure what impact this has on search engine positions to be honest, but it looks messy.
So the way to remove PHP Session ID’s is as follows. If you go Read the rest of this entry »
I decided to upgrade Wordpress 2.2 to 2.63 today and was trying to suss the best way to do it. Found all sorts of convoluted instructions and was just about to give it a miss when I stumbled on the Wordpress Automated Upgrade plugin.
Wow! Impressive. Upload it, activate it and follow the prompts – simple as that. 5 minutes was all it took and the only problem I had was with an outdated plugin (”Blogroll Autolinker”) that didn’t work until I upgraded it (through the Plugins panel). Everything else was intact and working smoothly including the database, all articles, links and layout. It even does the backup of the original site for you.
Recommended!
If you find your Wordpress admin is running real slow and you use the aLinks plugin, chances are it’s this that’s the problem. In fact the same might apply to other plugins, but you can check by de-activating the plugin(s) and see what the effect is. Anyway, here’s the solution…
aLinks checks the authors website at Headzoo for updates every time you call a page in wp-admin. If the Headzoo site is down or slow, this causes a knock-on effect. The simple and easy way to solve this is Read the rest of this entry »
Determining the best Wordpress plugins obviously has a degree of individual judgement and dependence on what exactly you want your Wordprss installation to be able to do. From my perspective, I generally want my blog to rank well, be easy to navigate and allow me to integrate different media types.
I’ve already dealt with the SEO plugins I use, and I have tried a lot of WP plugins, so here are the others that I just can’t do without. All of these plugins work on Wordpress 2.61 and earlier versions unless stated (I know, because I use them).
The aLinks plugin is fantastic and the first one I setup every time. It basically allows you to input “keyphrases” and links, so that every time a word or phrase appears in any post or page on your blog, it changes it to the link you want. You can set it up to link multiple times or just once on a page, specify targets (like new windows) and use it for external links and Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve played with a few SEO plugins for Wordpress, and up until I installed Wordpess 2.61 I was using “SEO Title Tag” and “SEO Post Link” to do my dirty work, and they did it pretty well. These plugins added fields to each post, allowed you to reword the slugs to be more search engine friendly, and redefine the META tags for posts and pages, but stopped short of doing categories and archives.
However, when I installed 2.61, I discovered a plugin called “Headspace” which not only did what SEO Title Tag does, but provided a much better GUI in so much as that apart from including the extra fields in each post, it also provides a “quick edit” function for categories, archives, tags, the homepage and the generic parts of the blog. And it’s superb.
There are a couple of minor drawbacks to this Headspace plugin however. Firstly, the quick edit GUI Read the rest of this entry »