Virtual MultiBlog for WordPress

Have too many blogs? Do you spend too much time upgrading WordPress installs, updating plugins, and changing themes? Your hosting provider may not be happy with you installing WordPressMU, but Stephen Rider has released a modification for WordPress that allows you to run multiple blogs off of a single WordPress installation.

How Does Virtual MultiBlog for WordPress work?

Stephen made some improvements on a system originally created by Allan Mertner. Per Nerdaphernalia:

WordPress holds all of its data in a MySQL database, and there is a single file called wp-config.php that holds the database login information. Allen looked at this and realized that if you can change that one file, you can completely replace the blog. With this key realization he came up with a cunningly straightforward multi-blog system:

1. Replace the standard wp-config.php file with a new version that calls a different configuration set depending on what directory it’s in.
2. Set up symbolic links that serve as “virtual directories” that all point to the WordPress directory.

Using the example of this site, I have an install of WordPress in my /blog/ directory, and a symbolic link called “nerdaphernalia” (that’s right, you’re soaking in it!) that points to /blog/. The modified wp-config file points to either the blog or nerdaphernalia config file, depending on which of those two directories it thinks it’s in.

…

So first off, I tucked all the files, except for the one modified wp-config.php, into a folder in a safe place. Next, I greatly streamlined the install process. At a minimum, the user only need edit a single configuration file, autoconfig.php. If desired, the various blogs can each have individual config files, but it’s no longer necessary.

What Are The Benefits?

Instead of uploading and installing a new copy of WordPress, your theme(s) of choice, and all 30 of your favorite plugins every time you get a new blogging idea, you can use Virtual MultiBlog for WordPress and all you need do is update a configuration file, set up a symlink, and you can get started. If you’re running up against a limited number of databases from your provider, you can also use the database prefix scheme and run the blogs out of a single database, too. (Note that this is a WordPress feature that you can already do without Virtual MultiBlog.)

When it’s time to upgrade anything, be it WordPress itself, plugins, or themes, you need only do it once and cover your entire blogging empire. Trust me, move beyond a couple blogs and you will drool over this! It also cuts down on necessary FTP navigation when doing updates, since everything is in a single directory structure.

Securing your WordPress is even easier — you don’t have to remember to go through a list of changes for each new blog, and security is able to be applied for all at once.

Potential Downsides

You’ll have to be careful about using domain-specific changes to your .htaccess files. The default WordPress .htaccess rules pose no problems, however, as they are fairly generic.

If you’re doing site-specific modifications to your themes, then you may need to make multiple copies of your themes and use them in different folders. This is something to be aware of, but wouldn’t be more work and hassle than it would be with them in different WordPress directories, and will require less navigation to get in and out of.

While not a downside, you will need to note that most of your configuration options are in the database itself, so these will still need to be manually updated. You can disable or enable plugins individually on each blog, set different themes for each blog, set up widgets, etc. without conflicts. They will be completely separate WordPress installs with reduced file maintenance requirements.

I’ve started doing some work with Virtual MultiBlog for WordPress and it’s gone well so far. I’m quite happy about the simplicity it brings. Sure, you still have to administer each blog separately, but it saves you all sorts of time with updating files.

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WordPress 2.3.2 Out

WordPress 2.3.2 has been released.  It is an urgent security fix for a bug that can expose your draft posts and also suppresses database error messages that can reveal critical information about your installation.  This release also allows you to define a custom database error page.  See the list of bugs fixed in WordPress 2.3.2 and the changelist from 2.3.1 to 2.3.2 for specific details.

Download WordPress 2.3.2 here. 

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What Is Your Blog Selling – You, or Advertising?

Blogs aren’t good at selling two completely different types of things at once. You may not realize it, but if you’re trying to make money off of your blog, you have to sell something.Social networking is the big thing right now, where people are focused on building communities and throngs of loyal readers. You want to bring readers in, inform them on the topics they’re interested in, and have them clicking throughout your blog and all that wonderful content you’ve got. You’re building an online network of people with similar interests. Now, how do you convert that network to cash? Everyone likes to think they could take their blogging hobby and do it full time, if only…

Do you sell ads? Not very effectively, no. Most of the crowd joining social networks is going to be more experienced online. Many will use Firefox, which comes with ad-blocking software built right into it - they’ll never even see those ads. Internet Explorer is further behind, but catching up. This site focuses on a more technically involved crowd, with 90% Firefox users and only 8% Internet Explorer. However, if we look at a couple of my other sites with a different focus, I see that 70% IE and 20% Firefox might be more average. Sometimes I disable Adblock and have a look at what I’m “missing” and it sure can be a disappointing experience.

Do you sell reviews and paid links? Google is starting to take a harsh stance on these, since people are gaming the system by attempting to pass on page rank. You’re going to see big changes in these in the future, and I’d be careful about these before Google slaps you down for them.

So what do you sell? Yourself, of course. You’re selling your knowledge or name. Ads aren’t going to do it. Take John Chow, for example. What is his number one product? His dignity. If you pay him, he’ll hawk any old product you want. Even better, he’ll sell whatever you want, AND himself at the same time. Well, it’s better for him at least. The vast majority of bloggers will never make it to that level anyway.

If you can’t quite bring yourself to that, you still have options, never fear! If you bring something of value to the table, then people will pay you for that knowledge. You can sell custom themes, web design, consulting, etc. What is it that you do that someone would actually pay for? That’s where you’ll make your money. It will still take time. You won’t see success here until you’ve got a body of work that people want and need.

I don’t know if this blog will lead to any kind of commercial success, but I feel good about how I plan to get there. I won’t lie to you, I won’t distract you, and I won’t beg for donations. I know that if I bombard you with ads and hawk the “get rich quick” method of the month, you won’t stick around. Beyond that, well, we’ll see how it shakes out, won’t we?

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Pay-Per-Play: What’s Their Agenda?

This new marketing scheme is really burnin’ up the net these days. People are falling over themselves to promote it, but will it last?

What Is Pay-Per-Play?

In a nutshell, when a visitor arrives at your website, a 5 second audio clip will start playing automatically. You get paid on 100% of the page views that have the NetAudioAds javascript loaded. Their search engine will crawl your site and make sure that you are only getting contextually-relevant ads.

What’s the Catch?

First off, it’s self playing audio. Audio that starts playing automatically when you enter a site can be startling if you don’t expect it. It’s annoying to the users in most cases, just like popups and blinking banner ads. Speaking of that, per their FAQ: (http://www.sellingppp.com/faq.html)

QUESTION: Since website owners are PAID PER PLAY, will there ever come a time (like pop-ups or spam) that this too will be overwhelmed and overexposed and end up having more than one play per page (since more plays = more $)?

ANSWER: Only one audio ad can be played per page, per visitor, If someone wants to display a pop-up that plays another audio ad then they will need to understand that annoying their visitors will drive them away.

I agree 100%. When I get to a site that’s going to play it’s own audio or music, I close that tab / browser window. I am suddenly not interested in what that site has to offer.

The major issue I see with the whole program is that it’s designed to irritate and intrude into the user’s web experience. I’m not sure how you turn that into a strength. To quote the sellingppp.com website itself: “The truth is, people hate commercials.”

Another issue I have is the whole “selling technique”, not to mention the necessity of having one. The sellingppp.com website is a simple 1-column sales pitch that reminds me of a bad “get rich quick” scheme, using all the same techniques. They claim “no hype intended or implied!” but that’s EXACTLY what they’re doing:

• money to be paid to you!
• “backed by one of the top 5 major search engines” But who exactly, well, that’s still secret. Are there search engines other than Google? I don’t know.
  

  “Due to a “strategic” confidentiality agreement we cannot reveal who the search engine partner is yet. It doesn’t matter anyways, what matters is the fact that this partnership will allow NetAudioAds™ to increase their audio ad impressions from mere millions to billions on a monthly basis.”

  So, it’s both a big deal worthy of promotion, AND at the same time irrelevant. That’s interesting.

• “no clicks necessary!” and other sales phrases bolded so you can see just how easy it is.

The NetAudioAds PPP network has supposedly been running already for 2 1/2 years with 66,000 advertisers and over 550,000 websites serving their ads. This leads, according to the website, to up to 43 million ad impressions per month.

They have gone with a tiered system of affiliates to help expand. You can get paid 25% of ad income generated by your site, 5% of what the advertisor spent to have the ad played on your referrals’ websites, and 5% off the people signed up under them. Now I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear about these tiered arrangements, I think MLM scam. Call me skeptical by nature.

The sales technique continues, telling you it’s such a limited opportunity and you need to do this NOW NOW NOW before they close the doors. The whole technique to me is such a turn off, as they wind up sounding like the same old snake-oil salesmen and AMWAY marketers we’ve all heard before.

The Agenda?

I think the new hosting offer for affiliates they came out with just underlines my low opinion of this operation. For $59.95 they’ll register a domain, and create pages for you to hide your affiliate links with, so you can promote your “business”. Tsk tsk…you’re not in business with them, you ARE their business. They’re making money off of your desire to make money, offering hosting for those who don’t understand it at rates easily beatable, while still retaining control. It’s an old story. I’m not going to link it, but the page is here: http://www.sellingppp.com/hosting.html

I notice also that their blog has a link where you can go sign up for training. Any bets that there’s a free package and an upgraded package of training that will help you be more successful, for just a few dollars more?

Well, it’s not just me that’s unimpressed or concerned — take a look at some other links from folks:

I Won’t Be PaidPerPlay by Ben Cook over at The Blogging Experiment

Pay-Per-Play Advertising for Affiliates By Shawn Collins

Net Audio Ads - PayPerPlay by Kevin Lam

PayPerPlay: The Next Generation of Intrusive Internet Marketing on IMScamAlert.com

These next two sites may be this same gentleman as above, who may be a bit disgruntled. I’m always the skeptic, and always looking for the angle, but the information seems sound.

NetAudioAds Voice2Page and Pay Per Play Affiliate Abuses and Pay Per Play a Spammers Delight

What are your thoughts? Does it seem on the level to you? Have you signed up, with or without doubts?

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Akismet False Positive Problem Resolved

You may be aware of the issue I was having with Akismet generating a false positive for spam on my comments, as detailed in my post HowTo Deal With Akismet False Positives. As detailed in the post, I got in touch with a blogger or two who agreed I was not in fact a spammer and marked my post accordingly, submitted Akismet’s contact form and of course made a post detailing the whole thing. I did also post a comment on the Akismet blog using my other domain as the submitted URL. Later I found Matt Mullenweg’s contact form on his site and bugged him about it, too.

I always expected the problem to be resolved, but it came even quicker than I figured. It’s Christmas time so you’d figure it’s going to take a few extra days. That’d be no surprise. What was a surprise is that just a few hours later, The Matt himself fixed it. A couple hours later, Mark from WordPress.com support sent me an email asking me to do a test post, as he’d seen my posting on the Akismet blog. 2 good quick responses — that’s pretty hard to beat!

Thanks again to Matt and the WordPress / Akismet team! While I find it super difficult to actually type the name correctly (starts off Akist, then I correct to Akisment, then I get it right…EVERY time!) even though I can spell it just fine, it is easy to use and the support certainly has been helpful.

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HowTo Deal With Akismet False Positives

In WordPress.com APIs: HowTo Use Akismet and WordPress.com Stats I talked about Akismet, which is Automattic’s spam-fighting plugin / service. I’ve been quite happy with how well it worked. In a year or so of use over at my other site, only 1 or 2 spam comments ever made it through. I didn’t have a huge volume and read all comments, so they stood out and were easily marked spam and got rid of. Akismet made things easy and to date stopped almost 1300 spams with virtually no effort on my part. Go team!

So there was no doubt in my mind that Akismet would be a vital part of this site. Little did I know that it could also be a big problem, too.

I noticed that none of my comments on other sites were showing up. I figured that maybe they were set to moderate all first posts by a user name and email combo, and no one had gotten around to approving them yet. It went on longer, and I wondered if maybe my sometimes flaky connection was causing me problems. I checked with Michael Martine over at Remarkablogger who had a disclaimer message about moderated comments. He told me that he found my comment in the spam queue instead. Whaaaa?

He very kindly marked me “Not Spam” but as of yet, I’m still on the bad boy list. I did some testing, and it looks like using my name and email with my older domain goes right through as a normal comment, but if I list webmarketinghowto.com as my URL then Akismet will mark it spam. I’ve done this from the same IP, so that’s not it. Maybe someone who previously owned this domain was A Bad Guy?

What Does It Mean To Be Marked A Spammer By Akismet?

While Akismet is great at protecting blogs from spam comments, it’s very success can cause you huge problems if you wind up on the spammer list, because you will now be prevented from commenting at 99% of the blogs running WordPress out there (I just made that figure up, by the way ) or any other platform that Akismet has developed a plugin for. Since WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms out there, you can see how this can hurt you pretty badly. Blogs are all about presenting information and discussion, so you will be locked out of that aspect. Now I could not use my URL, but that won’t help the community aspect much. If I post something interesting (hey, it’s a possibility!) it would be more difficult for people to find other content from me that could be useful or informative.

Not only that, but if I do comment somewhere and the blog admin doesn’t examine his Akismet queue looking for mistakenly-marked legitimate comments, then that will confirm the mistaken judgment, further exacerbating and extending the problem. Spammers certainly are getting more and more creative all the time, and some of their comments are relatively subtle, though I don’t think I’ve posted anything that would be confused for one of these new tricky comments a la “Hello…Man i love reading your blog, interesting posts ! it was a great Sunday” with a link to a celebrity blog or something like that. This was an actual example of a spam currently in my queue over at my other site.

This will also mark your trackbacks and pingbacks as spam, too, so there will be little way to interact with the community outside of forums and email.

HowTo Resolve The Akismet False Positive Problem?

There a couple of things you can do, and hopefully it will not take too long.

First, contact blog owners where you’ve posted and have them check their Akismet queues. They can find your post, look at it, and check the “Not Spam” box. From there, hitting the “De-spam marked comments” will submit this to Akismet so it can learn from it’s mistakes. So far, it’s been a couple-three days with no change. I have no idea how long it takes or how many examples, but I hope it isn’t too many or too long.

Another option is to use Akismet’s contact form in order to ask them to look into the situation. This page uses a basic math question instead of Akismet just for this very reason:

* Note about this question. You might wonder, if these guys are so good at spam blocking why would they put a stupid question like this on their contact form to keep spam out? Well, Akismet is great at protecting contact forms, we use it on all our other sites, but on Akismet.com sometimes people use the contact form to tell us they’re being blocked by Akismet.

If you think about that, blocking people when they’re trying to tell us they’re wrongly blocked would probably frustrate them, hence the math question.

There is yet a third option that may help. You might create a post dealing with that very problem, and hoping that they might see it somehow, come to your rescue, thus enabling you to write a fawning “thank you!” post later. I’ll let you know either way.

Has anyone else run into this problem? Did you find other avenues of support?

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HowTo Increase Your Traffic

Increasing traffic can have some pretty different meanings. On the road, it’s another sign of frustration to follow. On the web, it’s more people coming to visit your site and see if you’ve got anything useful to say. One good way to increase your traffic can come from your fellow bloggers. Michael Martine decided to experiment in boosting blog traffic. Think about it — this can provide multiple benefits.

1. It drives traffic to his site. While you’re there, you might find other Related Posts of interest, and decide to check them out, too. I did. I am a voracious reader.
2. You can drive traffic to your site by commenting and have other people checking out your website in return. How much traffic will that end up being? Who knows, but it’s all worth a shot and creates back links. It all depends on the participants, amount of traffic on the various sites, etc.
3. It can expose you to other blogs worth reading. Of the 4 people who first commented, I had an outside interest in several of them. One specializes in Loss Prevention and I passed that link along to my dad, who is also in the security field. We’re also using the same theme. Maybe he would like to read it, though it is not a subject I am directly interested in. Another specializes in real estate in Tampa, Florida. This interests me because I’m thinking idly about where we should live next, and I see information on diving too, which is another interest. I also have another friend who is in real estate in Tampa, so he should be aware of the competition and I’m going to pass it on. The Common Culinarian was interesting, but I had to leave the site before I got too hungry!
4. And before you know it, you’ve bashed out a quick but useful post illustrated with examples. How cool is that? It’s not even like work!

Just further proof that there’s all sorts of good information out there on the net, and you can find it in the most interesting and unusual ways. What ways have you used to drive traffic to your site?

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HowTo Use Permalinks With WordPress

What’s a Permalink?

A permalink is nothing more than the URL to your posts and pages. It’s called a permalink because it’s something that shouldn’t change, otherwise you’ll break other people’s links to you. I’ll break them down into 2 different types:

Not Useful, AKA default:

http://domain.com/?p=123

It works for any server environment, but offers you nothing by which to identify the post, unless you’re a savant who just remembers those sorts of things. It’s not useful, despite it’s relative simplicity. It doesn’t tell a human or a search anything about the contents of the URL.

Useful, AKA mod_rewrite / PATHINFO:

http://domain.com/year/month/day/post-name
http://domain.com/category/post-name

See how much better it looks and how more useful it is? There are a variety of ways to build the structure beyond the name. The /year/month/day/post-name is default, but you can use a variety of other descriptors, such as author and category as well. You can even use hours, minutes, and seconds, but I think it’s easy to agree that it’s too granular and would be distracting in most conceivable uses.

The only difference between the mod_rewrite and PATHINFO variants is that mod_rewrite requires use of the Apache webserver with the mod_rewrite module activated and small changes to the .htaccess file. PATHINFO permalinks will look the same, but require the element index.php between your domain name and the rest of the permalink.

Your Options | Permalinks page will allow you to choose which method you prefer:

The debate rages over whether you should or should not include dates in your permalink structure. I’m not going to re-hash that here, but I use them as it’s an easy way to distinguish posts from each other and let you know when it was made. It works for me but opinions differ, and you are free to choose your own structure.

I Want To Change My Permalink Structure, What Do I Do?

If you’ve already set up your permalinks, or accepted the default style, but would now like to change to a different format, all is not lost. Plugins exists to issue a “301 Redirect” so that browsers and search engines are redirected to the correct permalink so that you will not lose search engine rankings and traffic.

Scott Yang’s Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin and Dean Lee’s Permalinks Migration Plugin will assist you with updating your permalink structure while still retaining your readership, existing links, and search engine position. The Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin also will prevent you from having duplicate links for the same content. It can redirect your domain.com to www.domain.com (and vice versa) and prevent duplicate entries from traffic coming to your directories with or without the trailing slash at the end, so it has additional value that you may find useful.

So which permalink structure do you use, and why? Do you prefer dates or no dates?

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WordPress.com APIs: HowTo Use Akismet and WordPress.com Stats

WordPress.com API Keys

WordPress.com has an additional offering of their “API keys” that enable you to leverage features of the WordPress.com platform. Free for personal use, and cheap for businesses, this is a simple, no brainer investment in your WordPress blog. You needn’t have a blog hosted at WordPress.com, since you can just sign up and create a login without creating a blog there. Instead of the default choice “Gimme a blog!”, just select “Just a username, please” instead.

You will get an email shortly thereafter with your username and login information, but the main item we are looking for here is your WordPress.com API key. You will need this to activate Akismet and WordPress.com stats.

Akismet

Akismet is the anti-spam service created by Automattic, WordPress’ parent company. According to the blurb at the top of their website, 92% of all comments are spam. Instead of spending all your timing pruning spam, Akismet makes the process easy for you.

After you download Akismet, upload it to your site, and activate the plugin, on the Plugins / Akismet Configuration page you simply paste in your WordPress.com API key and you’re done! I find the option to automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month is also a good option to check, since spammers like to dig deep and hope to escape your notice. This way you don’t have to bother with approving / disapproving any old comments, since they are doubly likely to be spam. Your Akismet Spam admin page is linked right off of the main dashboard page for your blog. From there it’s simple to delete them all at once and mark the rare miscategorized comment as “Not Spam”. I don’t think I’ve ever actually run into one mistakenly marked as spam yet, for what it’s worth. I usually give a quick glance over and hit my friend, the “Delete All” button.

WordPress.com Stats

There are many ways to get stats on your blog but WordPress.com Stats provides an easily integrated, simple overview that’s easy to understand. Since you’re going to want to get an API key you may as well give the stats a shot at the same time, since it also needs the API key entered into its configuration. I recommend using these in conjunction with a full featured stats solution like Google Analytics, but using the WordPress.com Stats to examine the ordinary traffic while using Analytics to delve more deeply into a much wider breadth of information.

What stats to you get out of WordPress.com?

• Total views on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis
• Referrers for today and yesterday, with number of views
• Search Engine Terms used to find your blog — this can be quite entertaining, actually. The things people search for!
• Top Posts and Pages for today and yesterday, with number of views
• Clicks on links in your blog for today and yesterday
• Blog Stats - Total Views, Best Day Ever, and Views Today

While your at a glance view only gives you two days of information, it gives you a good idea what’s happening with your blog and is easy to use and read. You can click on each section heading for a 7 day summary of that particular statistic, and for specific pages get a viewcount graph going back even further. Incidentally, if you have multiple blogs tracking stats on the same API key, you can switch back and forth between them without having to open up the other blog’s Dashboard first.

Simple, quick, easy, and well integrated — that’s what I call a pretty good deal!

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Web Marketing for Dummies: I Got Scammed 37 Times!

Or, more properly Web Marketing By Dummies!

You may have seen the Google Adsense ads:

I Was Scammed 37 Times!
These sites are absolute scams! I will show
the ones that work!

I Got Scammed 27 Times
Avoid Work at Home Online Scames! I will show
You the Ones That Work.

Stop Getting Scammed
Do you want a real business. OK. I was amazed.
Testimonials

Now, I’m no genius, but I have to figure someone who’s been scammed an awful lot of times IS NOT the person to warn you about them. I’m more of the old “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” school. That scale doesn’t even go up to 37. It only establishes the credibility of the fool, however there are still an awful lot of people who fall for these kinds of things, because they are desperate for the easy way out.

These types of scam review sites have sprung up everywhere, typically clones of each with minor differences, if at all. They have their sad sack story about how they hit a rough spot in life (just like you could, brother!), tried several different money making programs (haven’t you too, friend?), and got scammed almost all the time (woe is me!). But at the end, they discovered a light at the end of the tunnel (and there is hope for you, too!) and now just want to share it with the world.

What you are seeing then is a website designed to market and pimp out affiliate programs, or get rich quick schemes that primarily involve you marketing to other people with an affiliate link that pays them a percentage off of the “programs” that you order. There is no shortage of these types of affiliate programs out there on the net, and some of them are even legitimate. How do you spot the fakes?

• Unrealistic income claims - They tell you that you’ll make an unbelievable amount of money, knowing that the dollar signs will flash before your eyes and reduce your IQ sharply.
• Short time frames - You’ll be making money immediately! Yeah, right.
• Little or no effort involved - As much as we’d all like that to be true, it simply doesn’t work that way.
• Products you have to buy - That makes someone else money. It costs you money. Not a good sign.
• Hype hype hype - There’s lots of information on how great the product is, but nothing on what it is. Hype is the thing that they are selling you. What can you do with that?
• Testimonials - A paid actor standing next to a day-rented sports car in front of someone else’s mansion doesn’t take long to photograph. If they don’t give full names and contact info, that person probably doesn’t exist. If they do, they’re in on it.
• Limited time offers - Hurry! Buy now before you think about it too long and realize it’s a scam!
• Limited memberships - The program is only open to xx number of members, join now before it’s too late!

There are certainly legitimate programs out there. They’ll tell you it takes work and time. Any program that goes on and on about how simple and easy it is will just be preying on you. They’re making money on you in a way that you haven’t picked up on yet, either by you buying a useless product from them designed simply to sell you another product and so on, by affiliate links such that the scammer makes money by selling you web hosting so you can be an affiliate pushing the product that he sold you, using software you buy from them, etc. Ever seen an offer that includes a web site “that only works with SoandSo Hosting”? Think about it.

Want to make money online? Come up with something people want - a widget (fictional or WordPress!), a book, hula doll bobbleheads from Hawaii, consulting on some some subject you’re an expert it, etc. and put the work into it same as you would for any other real world business, but with a larger potential customer base.

* Disclaimer - I’ve got an affiliate link to my long-time hosting provider, but I’m not trying to sell you anything nor convince you to do anything, so it’s ok.

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