Philoking.com

We talk about a lot of blog topics around here. How to write great posts, how to write compelling titles and how to deal with Search Engine Optimization issues. There is one thing that is often overlooked, old blog posts.

Search engines never forget. If your blog post already has a good bit of traction you could stay highly ranked for a topic for ages. Take a look at my traffic example:

Top Blog Posts 10/19/2009 – 10/26/2009

• 2/19/08 Holy World of Warcraft Batman, 64-bit WoW 596 views
• 1/11/09 Is Windows 7’s Aero Peek a copy of Apple’s Expose 519 views
• 6/25/07 TVersity, PS3 Perfect Streaming Media Player 427 views
• 1/28/07 World of Warcraft, Poor Frame Rates on Vista 294 views
• 5/18/09 How to make a bootable Windows 7 Install Flash Drive 202 views

That is pretty interesting. For the last week, 3 out of the 5 most popular posts on my blogs were written before 2009, a year that is nearly over. Several are a few years old and still getting hundreds of page views a week.

What Does This Mean?

It actually means a few things. Without pandering, these are probably topics you should be writing about more, and linking to through updates to these posts. They obviously have the “Google Juice” so to speak, so why not take advantage of it.

Second is the less obvious, update these posts! Information changes, blogs are live and dynamic, do not write and forget. These posts have the potential to hurt your blog if you do not keep them current. Google and Bing are telling these people that you are an authority on this subject. Several years is a very long time to let technology information sit still. If the user reads your posts and finds the information to be irrelevant or even worse inaccurate, that hurts your reputation.

Use Them or Lose Them

Obviously my first advice is to update these posts and get the maximum value out of them. The last advice is that if you can’t or don’t want to, get rid of them. Make sure you have a compelling 404 page, preferably one that searches your blog for articles related to the query term, and try to convert that user to a reader.

As a blogger, your credibility is the only thing you have. Bad articles and inaccurate information will turn that 30 second page view away. Good information and quality content will turn that same fly by into a subscriber. Don’t let these old posts kill you. Use Google Analytics, keep track of which old posts are being regularly visited, visit them yourself, and make sure they still stand up several years later.

Alex King’s Twitter Tools Plugin is a must if you are a WordPress Blogger and Twitter user. It’s most compelling feature is that it can automatically post a Tweet when you post a new blog post. This also works for time delayed posts, it Tweets when the post is published. One of the things I didn’t like about it was that it prefixed every blog post with “New Blog Post: “ which is a sure fire way to make sure more than half your followers don’t click it.

The thing is, you have already said what you want to say in your title hopefully, so how about we just Tweet the title and a link? Changing this code comes with one dire warning, you have to keep something in the prefix, that’s how the plugin finds Tweets to create the digest post, so instead of “New Blog Post: “, I am going to change mine to just “BP “.

Editing The Code

There is one class in the source code that defines the settings you can’t change in the UI, that class is called “twitter_tools.” Lines 18-27 define UI items, and 29-36 are supposed to not be end user editable, but we aren’t going to let that stop us.

   1:  class twitter_tools {

   2:      function twitter_tools() {

   3:          $this->options = array(

   4:              'twitter_username'

   5:              , 'twitter_password'

   6:              , 'create_blog_posts'

   7:              , 'create_digest'

   8:              , 'digest_title'

   9:              , 'blog_post_category'

  10:              , 'notify_twitter'

  11:              , 'sidebar_tweet_count'

  12:              , 'tweet_from_sidebar'

  13:              , 'give_tt_credit'

  14:              , 'last_tweet_download'

  15:              , 'doing_tweet_download'

  16:              , 'doing_digest_post'

  17:          );

  18:          $this->twitter_username = '';

  19:          $this->twitter_password = '';

  20:          $this->create_blog_posts = '0';

  21:          $this->create_digest = '0';

  22:          $this->digest_title = __("Twitter Updates for %s", 'twitter-tools');

  23:          $this->blog_post_category = '1';

  24:          $this->notify_twitter = '0';

  25:          $this->sidebar_tweet_count = '3';

  26:          $this->tweet_from_sidebar = '1';

  27:          $this->give_tt_credit = '1';

  28:          // not included in options

  29:          $this->update_hash = '';

  30:          $this->tweet_prefix = 'New blog post';

  31:          $this->tweet_format = $this->tweet_prefix.': %s %s';

  32:          $this->last_digest_post = '';

  33:          $this->last_tweet_download = '';

  34:          $this->doing_tweet_download = '0';

  35:          $this->doing_digest_post = '0';

  36:          $this->version = '1.0';

  37:      }

Lines 30 and 31 are what we are concerned with. Line 30 defines the Tweet Prefix. On my blog I changed this to just ‘BP’ to shorten it and get me back some characters. Line 31 defines the format string for the post, I also wanted to get rid of the colon, so I changed it to read:

$this->tweet_format = $this->tweet_prefix.' %s %s';

That’s it, now when your blog publishes, it will post a Tweet that’s a bit more concise and looks more like you wrote it rather than an automation.

One of the problems with using a news style theme is that you constantly have to upload files for lead stories, etc. If you aren’t always on a machine with a full fledged blog client or possibly suffer from firewall restrictions like I do, you need to be able to upload your images through the web.

After a failed attempt at writing a quick and dirty script to accomplish this task, I decided to browse the WordPress Plug-in library and I came across WP Easy Uploader. It installed in seconds and worked flawlessly on the first try.

It’s a simple tool. Once installed, on your dashboard go to Tools > Upload Files.

From here you can upload files from either a web reference or directly from your file system. You can upload to the default WordPress upload folder, directly to your plug-in folder or into a theme folder. These two also benefit from automatic extraction of zip files. You can also use a manual path, which is what I used to solve my problem. Remember to point your slashes / or you will get some weird folders in your WP root with \\ and \\\ between the elements. Other than that you can have it automatically overwrite files, rename if it already exists, remove the archive after an extraction or force files not in a folder to be extracted into a folder.

Pretty complete feature set and a plug-in that I would say is a must have for any WordPress site operator. You can find the plug-in in the auto install tool or visit the author’s site.

Enjoy!

I decided to take the plunge and give the beta a try on my main blog so here you have it. Philoking.com is running the WordPress 2.7 beta1 in production. From the viewer perspective it should be transparent. For, it’s already a dream. The back end UI has had a total facelift and some of my favorite plugins are now built right in. Less plugins is always better if you ask me.

I am also writing this post in the browser instead of using Windows Live Writer. Mostly because I am on my Macbook Pro, but also because it’s a quite improved experience, especially when you add Google Gears to the mix to speed up the UI.

So far the UI doesn’t seem that much faster with Google Gears installed, but I think I can possibly tell some difference. The next thing I am going to attempt is bulk edit to clean up some of my categories, things have gotten a little out of control at Philoking.com when it comes to categories and tags.

The new UI is gorgeous. There are too many new features to list so I will mention a few that I find really interesting. The ability to insert, upload and well format images is very welcome. One of the reasons I avoided posting through the back end UI was that it just wasn’t a good experience. It’s very much improved.

Bulk edit to posts is extremely welcome, when you get where I am with thousands of posts, making changes is a huge problem. Instant install for plugins is also very nice, but that was in 2.6 also. The last feature I want to call out is the ability to reply to comments being built into the comment moderation. I have used a plugin for this for a long time. It’s a very welcome addition.

I am not sure if I would suggest running it on a production site, even though I have not seen any errors so far, but if you have a local test setup or want to check it out, it’s well worth your time, the new admin alone is fantastic.

Do you believe it? Posting to my blog from my iPod Touch! If you speak iblogging, hit the app store now.