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My favorite thing about Wordpress is the vast array of add-on functionality that is available. If you were wishing that Wordpress had a feature or function, chances are someone has already developed it. The following are the plug-ins that I lean on heavily on my various sites:

Essentials

• Akismet: I find this to be probably the single most important plugin I’ive ever installed. On my Tigers site alone it has saved me from having to moderate over 300,000 comments
• Wordpress Database Backup: Another essential tool. You can set it to backup your database at regular intervals and have the backups emailed to you, or stored on the server. With this plugin there is no excuse for losing more than a week’s worth of posts should something happen.
• Google XML Sitemaps: Want Google to know about all of your pages? Want Google to know how often you are updating those pages? Just install this plugin and it will generate a sitemap that is recognizable by Google and will even ping Google to let them know when you’ve made an update.
• WP-ContactForm: Readers have to be able to get in touch with you right? There are several Contact Form plugins available. Just make sure you use one of them.

Accessibility

• Wordpress Mobile Edition: Have you looked at your site on a mobile device? Did you let the whole thing load or did you get discouraged? This plug-in adapts your existing site and puts it into a mobile browser friendly theme. It’s so easy I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it.
• Full Text Feed: If you’re not a full feed kinda blogger this probably doesn’t apply. In later editions of Wordpress the feed truncates if you use the more tag. This will prevent that from happening delivering the full post in the feed.
• Chunk Urls: Don’t you hate it when someone leaves a link as a comment, but it is several hundred characters long and breaks your theme? This plug-in will cut those links down to size keeping your site pretty.
• Share This Deportes: Make it easy for others to evangelize those great posts. Share This was originally developed by Alex King and provided icons for many popular bookmarking/social sites as well as the ability to email posts. The deportes version is tailored to sports blogs with links to sites like BallHype and Yardbarker.
• Smart Archives: Many blogs are shying away from displaying date based archives. However I think that for sports blogs they are still worthwhile because many readers may want to search for information by season. But if you’ve been blogging for a while this can get unwieldy. This plugin neatly arranges those archives into a more manageable format. Here it is in action.

Stickiness

• Get Recent Comments: Make it easy for your regular readers to see when new comments have been left, so they know where to leave comments of their own.
• Articles: I use this plugin to create a “Best of” page. Just mark those popular articles with a custom tag, and they’ll display on a page of your choosing.
• Related Posts: Keep people on your site longer by pointing them to other articles they may care about.

This wasn’t an exhaustive list of all the plugins that I use, just the ones I consider most important. One that wasn’t mentioned in the list was In Series which can link a series of posts together. It’s what is driving this series in fact. Are there plugins that you use or recommend?

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written by Bill Ferris \\ tags: plugins, wordpress

This is the first post in a series that will look at various elements of blogging, and what I’ve found to work for me. This is hardly a comprehensive list about blogging, or a best of the best list. It’s simply stuff that I’ve tried, that I’ve had success with. It may not work for everyone, and there may (and in many cases are) probably better options or solutions. But hopefully this will prime some discussion and I look forward to feedback and letting others know what works for you.

The Blogging Platform

Wordpress is my tool of choice. I started on Blogger and it served me well for a very long time. But 2 years ago I got to the point where I needed functionality that just wasn’t available in Blogger. Blogger has since added quite a bit of that functionality, like categories for example. But because of the hundreds of plug-ins available with Wordpress, I don’t think Blogger can ever really catch-up at this point.

Now with Wordpress there are two options, a hosted version called Wordpress.com and a version you host yourself. There are advantages to the hosted version. The big 2 as I see it are:

1. It’s free. It costs nothing. No hosting costs are required. No domain needs to be registered. It’s completely free and not a bad route to go if you’re unsure of how committed you are to this blogging thing.
2. You don’t have to know anything about programming, or maintaining a web site. It’s all taken care of for you. The software is updated automatically as new versions come out. It’s all handled for you which definitely has an appeal in terms of time, and expertise.

Still, I use the .org version. I want control over everything, including access to all the great plug-ins that exist. I also want control over back-ups and control over my content into perpetuity.

Now mind you, I’m not a web expert. I have some programming experience, but none of it is with PHP - the language that Wordpress is coded in. And even with that limited knowledge I’m able to get by.

As for the cost, that is really pretty minimal because there is lots of cheap hosting out there.

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written by Bill Ferris \\ tags: blogger, dreamhost, feedburner, godaddy, scribefire, wordpress

Now that I’ve been off of Blogger for a week, I of course found things that broke in the transition.

The biggest issue was probably that the transition seemed to break the “tables” I made using pre tags.  It didn’t seem to handle the the line breaks with in the tags well - or at all.  The result is that the the line breaks aren’t observed and it overflows the area.  Depending on the browser, this can either screw up the template, or just look really bad.

Fixing it also proves difficult using the WYSIWYG editor which tries to help too much.  I’ve found it best to turn off the editor when correcting these problems.  This can be done from the Users menu with a check box at the bottom.

The tough thing is finding all the effected posts.  If you’re comfortable with MySQL you could query the database to find all posts with the PRE tag.  It still requires a manual fix, but at least you know which posts to target.

I’ve also worked my way back to add categories.  Any posts I’ve been fixing I’ve been adding categories to.  Also, I’ve looked forward those popular posts (like interviews) and made sure that those were categorized as well.  Now I won’t categorize all 1000 posts, but I did do about 100 of them.

As for performance (visits, page views, revenue), it was tough to judge the impact because of strange traffic levels due to the holidays.  It’s something I’ll probably address in a month or so.

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written by Bill Ferris

I successfully upgraded this site to Wordpress 2.0 last night.  It took me about 15 minutes, but most of that time was for doing back-ups.  Following the instructions in the Readme that accompanied the download was a breeze.  I don’t have many plug-ins installed, and all had been verified to work with 2.0.  I simply deleted everything in the root (except for .htaccess), wp-admin, and wp-includes, and uploaded the new files.  After running wp-admin/upgrade.php everything was set.

I was going to post the things that I noticed immediately, but someone else already reached the same conclusions.

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written by Bill Ferris

Earlier I posted about my reasons for moving from Blogger to Wordpress. Now I’ll discuss some of the steps I took to make the transition. I planned to go into considerable detail, but seeing as how Wordpress 2.0 offers additional support for importing from various platforms, I’ll keep it brief.
Wordpress ships with a script that will import from Blogger. What the script didn’t do was insure that permalinks would remain the same. It also didn’t import comments. Fortunately, people way more talented than myself took the initiative to fix both the former and the latter.

The first step I took was to setup a subdomain to install Wordpress to. I didn’t want to be working in the same directory as my live site. If you’re using Blogspot to host your blog, you wouldn’t need this step. You would however need to secure web hosting in the first place. After setting up the subdomain, and installing Wordpress it was time to configure Blogger. This involved changing the template (backing up the old one first of course), and changing publishing and date formatting options. Once the options were configured correctly, I published the blog to my new subdomain (test.detroittigersweblog.com). Immediately after the publish was complete I restored Blogger to my original settings. This isn’t completely necessary, it was just my own paranoia about forgetting what my previous settings were.

Fortunately, it appears that in 2.0 the import script handles the Blogger configuration for you. I haven’t tried it yet, but it appears that you simply provide Wordpress with your Blogger login information and it does the rest.

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written by Bill Ferris

I started blogging with Blogger almost 5 years ago. Sure, Blogger frustrated me at times but I had developed a certain loyalty. Back in the day, it was one of the most accessible, easy to use, and free offerings available. However, the competition has caught up with Blogger and in many cases surpassed it. When I launched this blog, I chose to try Wordpress, and I couldn’t be happier. While there was a slight learning curve for working with the templates, the features, functionality, and ease of installation overwhelmed me. Finally, this week I transferred 4.5 years of my Tiger blog from Blogger to Wordpress.

I know many sports bloggers started off using Blogger. Many are still using it. Some have probably considered switching platforms, while for others it may have never crossed their minds. I’m going to do a two part post about my migration from Blogger to Wordpress. The first part (this one) will focus on my reasons for switching. Many of the reasons aren’t specific to Wordpress, and many of the same principles apply to a variety of blogging software. Wordpress just happens to be the one I picked. Part two will cover the steps I took to do it, and will be more specific to Wordpress.

Republishing Hell
One of the biggest fundamental differences between Blogger and many other solutions is static versus dynamic pages. Blogger uses static pages. To achieve this they republish pages whenever you post or change your template. Many other services use dynamic pages, where they typically use a programming language (like PHP) to query a database (typically MySQL) to generate the page when it is requested.

In my case I had nearly 1000 pages of content. Every tweak to the template, like changing links in the sidebar or changing Chitika keywords, resulted in the republishing of every one of those pages. For me this meant making all changes off hours. If I tried to republish while the east coast was awake, it would frequently timeout in the process. With dynamicaly created Wordpress pages, all I do is save changes to the template. There is no republishing because the next person to request a page will see the changes.

I don’t know if this was the biggest reason for me switching, but it was definitely the one that pushed me over.
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written by Bill Ferris

If you’re a Wordpress user, you’ve probably heard that Wordpress 2.0 is being released tomorrow (December 26th).  Problogger has a list of  10 Things You Should Know about WordPress 2.0.  The items that jumped out at me were

• Importing from Other Blogging Platforms:  This is of particular interest to me considering I just converted my Tiger site (more on this in the coming days) to Wordpress from Blogger.
• Built In Caching:  Essentially, once somebody has requested a page, a cache of the page is stored on the server.  This will make subsequent requests for the page load faster.
• Spam Handling:  The new version will come with Akismet spam filtering installed.

This site is powered by Wordpress, and I plan to upgrade this week.  I’ll be sure to let you know how it went.

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written by Bill Ferris