What is Content Delivery Network & how to use it with WordPress?

1 Feb, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Wordpress Customization

What is Content Delivery Network?

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as to maximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server, so as to avoid bottleneck near that server. Content types include web objects, downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications, real time media streams, and other components of internet delivery (DNS, routes, and database queries). [via Wikipedia]

Well, I’m sure it sounds alien to some of you. However, I can try and simplify this for you. Let’s take an example – You upload a 2 Mb file on a server that is located in United States, one of your visitor comes to the website from UK and at the same time another from US only. Who’ll get the faster download speed of that file? Of course, it’ll be the US guy. That is how a normal scenario runs. In CDN, a normal file is replicated on multiple servers (shown as middle servers in the image below) placed across the world. So, if a UK guy will be trying to access the same MP3 file, then he’ll get it delivery through UK server only and that will considerably reduce the page load speed.
cdnetwork.jpg

[Image credit - netdna]

Should we use CDN for a blog?

As we found out that CDN helps in reducing the speed. However, the question is that is the speed difference considerable enough? There have been many bloggers who have done their tests and found huge difference in the speed. Joost de Valk found out that his blog pages started loading in 2 sec. as compared to 7 seconds prior CDN’s application.

Well, that certainly sounds effective! Other than that, Dave Ward gives us a tip where we should use Google’s CDN based hosted javascript libraries to improve the blog page load speed. Other than that, Yahoo also suggests website owners to use CDN to improve the page load speed. Well, this only means that it makes sense to use CDN. Now, the big question arises -

How to use CDN with WordPress?

Of course, if you just want use the Google’s CDN based Javascript library then Dave Ward’s link will be more than enough for your help. However, if you want to make proper use of CDN, you’ll have to shell out some money from your pocket. Thankfully established companies like Amazon, MaxCDN, RackSpace and various others offer CDN services, you can always choose the one that suits your pocket.

Once you’ve decided the CDN provider, then you can use its power with the help of W3 Total Cache -

W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

[Click the image for bigger version]

So, as you can see with the help of W3 Total Cache you can easily make use of power of CDN’s and it should certainly help in improving the page load speed. Are you going to apply CDN on your WordPress blog?

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Best plugins to fight comment spam for WordPress!

25 Jan, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Wordpress Plugins

Spam In Blogs

I am sure, I don’t need to explain anything about Spam over here. Blog spam is nothing new and there have been already many articles written about it. However, I still get questions like “What is the best strategy to avoid spam comments?” Just to kick start things, I would like to mention the definition that has been given in everybody’s favorite website i.e. WikiPedia -

Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target.

How to fight comment spam

There are various plugins although in my four years of experience as professional blogger, I’ve come across only handful of plugins that have done wonderful job for me. They have been shared by lots of experienced bloggers over and over again and here I am, who would like to share it with you one more time!

akismet.jpg

1. Akismet – This wonderful service from Automattic has been consistently helping thousands of bloggers in fighting blog spam. Not only it is available for WordPress, it has been extended for various other platforms like Movable Type, Drupal etc. There is no reason, why I would not suggest this plugin to any person who is using WordPress.

WP-SpamFree.jpg

2. WP-Spam Free – Scott Allen has rightly described it as an Extremely Powerful Anti-Spam Plugin! Its so powerful that it literally makes your blog secure from all the comment spam. Although, this plugin is infamous for using extra resources from server. If you have a high traffic blog and get lots of spam comments, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t be using this plugin. Personally, its my favorite among all the plugins that I’m listing over here.

3. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam – Another wonderful plugin for fighting spam on blogs. It not only helps to fight blog comment spam. It also can be extended to fight automated registrations and automated contact form submissions. This plugin uses a familiar trick of fighting comment spam i.e. CAPTCHA verification. It has lots of configuration options and if you don’t want to rely on automatic anti-spam plugins like Akismet & WP-Spam Free then this plugin will easily serve the purpose for you. [Plugin Homepage]

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[Photo Credit - ScoopDog]
4. Bad Behavior – This wonderful script has been developed to fight against spam bots. It’s not specific to WordPress and is available for other content management systems. Its pretty light on servers and has been made available on plethora of CMSes. It has done a wonderful job in keeping this blog spam free from long time and will continue to do so!

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5. reCAPTCHA – reCAPTCHA is a service that is used by thousands of popular websites to fight spam bots. The service can be easily integrated in a WordPress blog with the help of this plugin. I like this service/plugin because it definitely has proven its effectiveness to fight the spam bots and also because it helps in digitizing various books. Here’s what they have to say about digitizing the books part -

While the world is in the process of digitizing books, sometimes certain words cannot be read. reCAPTCHA uses a combination of these words, further distorts them, and then constructs a CAPTCHA image. After a ceratin percentage of users solve the ‘uknown’ word the same way it is assumed that it is the correct spelling of the word. This helps digitize books, giving users a reason to solve reCAPTCHA forms.

I hope that you’ll find these plugins useful enough (just the way I have) to keep you blog spam free!

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bbPress should be a plugin for sure!

22 Jan, 2010 | mayank
Topics: bbPress

bbpress-logo.jpg

Looks like most of the Automattic team is busy playing around with WordPress and of course, thats good for the future of WordPress. However, as WordPress has started to become popular as CMS, its limitations as compared to other enterprise level CMSes are coming up. Although, most of limitations are easily countered with the huge list of Plugins it has!

Forums are important part of any website and bbPress fills the gap that has been left in WordPress CMS. bbPress is one of the decent projects from Automattic team, however its future looked pretty gloomy as there was hardly any development on it. Lesser development on bbPress doesn’t make it the favorite choice for all the clients. As a design agency, we prefer to use WordPress and would love to stick to solutions provided by Automattic team. Good news is that from last few months, talks have been going on to ensure that bbPress project lives and that talks have been going on where Matt himself thought of converting it in a Core Plugin.

Reasons for making bbPress as Core Plugin

  1. Why make more plugins for bbPress – Making bbPress as a plugin for WordPress will ensure that in the forums (plugin one), webmasters will be able to make use of the existing plugins of WordPress. For e.g. if I want to show blog’s popular posts in the forums, then I won’t have to worry as there are plugins that show popular posts on WordPress and they can be easily used in the forum too. However, it’ll be a pain to achieve the same result when it will be stand-alone bbPress.
  2. Easier Theme interoperability – Of course, when we’ll have one theme developed for WordPress, it’ll work with bbPress (plugin one) too. In short, this all will result in lesser development time.
  3. Use of powerful features of WordPress – There are many features of WordPress that are not part of bbPress and all of that will become simpler if bbPress can be converted as plugin. It’ll be easier to upgrade bbPress with WordPress automatic plugin upgrade feature. Media library is also a powerful feature of WordPress, that can be utilized in bbPress (plugin one).
  4. Integration will be easier – bbPress as plugin will integrate pretty easily with WordPress and there will be no extra configurations required. Same users will be able to post in the forums and will be able to post on blog as well. This will surely help in creating better communities.
  5. Better role management – Role management system will also improve tremendously. All the user management features required for the plugin will eventually make WordPress more powerful as CMS too. This will certainly help in establishing WordPress as the top choice for small to medium businesses.
  6. Solid foundation for TalkPress – TalkPress, a hosted service for online forums (powered by bbPress). If bbPress as core plugin becomes success then embracing TalkPress for the world will be far more easier. It surely will act as stepping stone for TalkPress’ success.

What are you thoughts about bbPress and what it should really come out as. Will you like to see bbPress as stand-alone software or would you like to see it as a core-plugin for WordPress? Please share your views with us.

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WordPress Security Service for free!

18 Jan, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Wordpress Customization

secure-wordpress.jpg
(Image Credit – ClickonF5)

Since few months, I’ve been hearing lot of horror stories regarding the security compromises that bloggers have to deal with. It’s open source nature, what has been the boon for WordPress, is now standing against it (For Hardcore Open-source lovers – I am in favor of Open-source all the way and that statement of mine should not be taken as personal attack). There have been many blogs that weren’t using the latest version of WordPress are now infected with some sort of worm or some hacker gets access to the web server and misuses your precious resources. There are cases where they even harm the website by effecting its search engine rankings.

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Why I ditched WordPress for Blogger!

15 Jan, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Blogging Resources

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Image Credit - AyudaWordPress

I’m completely sane and I haven’t ditched WordPress for Blogger at the moment. I’m talking about the time when WordPress was pretty young and like the infamous “browser wars”, blogging world was buzzing about “Clash of Blogging platforms!” It was nearly 4 yrs. ago when I started jumping in Blogging and at that moment, WordPress was already giving good fight to Google’s Blogger. Questions can be asked that why am I writing about this after so many years, the answer is that Keith has asked this question from everyone. Don’t forget to post your response too!

So, coming back to the question – during that time, I was super excited about every product from Google and Blogger was no exception. My technical knowledge was limited to fixing up Windows and I was just trying to take dip in the world of being a true webmaster.

So Why Did I Ditch WordPress?

  1. Ease of Use – Blogger has always been a wonderful platform for those who are technically challenged. At that time, WordPress was considered to be choice of techies and surely wasn’t as easy as Blogger.
  2. Not extensible – WordPress at that time didn’t have as many powerful plugins as we have now. However, there were already lots of hacks, tutorials available for Blogger. I’ve learned almost everything with the help of mighty Google. It didn’t take me any time to play around with Blogger that much.
  3. Fear of screwing up things – Even though techie by nature, the initial hitch of trying something more techie gave me chills. I always had the question “what if” haunting me. However, there was hardly anything in Blogger that scared me. There were times, when I wanted to put Flash widgets in my blog and found it super difficult in WordPress where as Blogger made me feel as if I’m home!
  4. Google’s branding – When you know that such big name is behind a service then you feel comfortable. You know that nothing will happen to your blog if you don’t do dirty things. However, WordPress was only developing at that moment. So, my inclination was more towards Blogger.
  5. Not many beautiful designs – Blogger’s template engine has always been pretty similar to the normal HTML, so it was very easy for designers to create templates for it. For this very reason, there were ample amount of beautiful templates for blogger as compared to WordPress.

Keeping those points in mind, I decided to ditch WordPress against Blogger, however after few months of Blogging, I realized that if I have to become professional blogger, I would have to shift my Blog to WordPress and face my fears. The moment, I got the feeling of having no other option, I decided to take the step and since then I’ve been using WordPress. I was actually surprised to see that, things were tremendously easy in WordPress and with in no time, I was playing around with it pretty comfortably.

Now I can’t imagine my life without WordPress, not only it helps me keep our blog running smoothly, it helps me in earning my bread and butter too. Moreover, there are far too many resources available that ensure that you are never stuck even if you have any problem.

What was your reaction when you first used WordPress? Were you scared like me or was your reaction like that of Keith’s? Do share your experience with us or write a blog post as I did.

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MySQL database tricks/tutorial through phpMyAdmin for WordPress that you must know!

11 Jan, 2010 | mayank
Topics: Wordpress Tutorials

phpmyadmin.jpg

As we all know that WordPress is powered through PHP & MySql and by far phpMyAdmin is considered to be most adopted way of managing the MySQL databases. Most of the web hosting companies have it installed for their users and most of the users find it pretty intuitive. Same goes with WordPress these days. At times, it looks like a perfect marriage between the two!

When it comes to WordPress, there are various obnoxious situations that we can avoid with the help of phpMyAdmin and its neat little tricks. Thankfully, Many tech savvy and generous bloggers have shared those neat tricks with the world and in this post, I would like to accentuate them.

Tricks related to WordPress Users

1. Reset WordPress user password using phpMyAdmin – by WPBeginner.
2. Change WordPress admin username – by Mahesh Kukreja
3. Disable New User Registration – by Rajesh Patel [I don't see any reason for taking this step as it can be easily done through options under settings, but still you never know when these things can come handy].
4. Change post attribution from one author to another – WpRecepies.

Tricks related to WordPress Posts & Comments

1. Delete all spam comments using phpMyAdmin – by Technofriends
2. Batch delete posts revisions – by WPRecepies
3. Restore commenting back using repair feature of WordPress – by Speed of Creativity [of course, this is more of a troubleshooting trick, but one handy trick that may help you at certain time]

Troubleshooting WordPress using phpMyAdmin when nothing works

There are times, when you might be playing with some broken plugin/theme or not an updated plugin/theme that can cause WordPress to break then it gets little hard to Troubleshoot things if you don’t have the database backup already. However, you can save yourself by ensuring that you can create the database backup or restoring it with the help of phpMyAdmin -

1. Create WordPress database backup using phpMyAdmin.
2. Restore WordPress database backup using phpMyadmin.

Various other useful tricks

1. Move WordPress blog from one domain to another.
2. 12 quick and easy MySql tricks. [This is not through phpMyAdmin, however can come in handy through SSH]
3. Running multiple WordPress blog on single database. [not recommended, however if you are running out of number of database then this is the only solution - else change your hosting provider - Here's the guide to do so]

If you know more tricks, feel free to share it with us as we’ll keep this page up to date with all those wonderful tricks!

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Widgetizing Your Non-Widget WordPress Theme

8 Jan, 2010 | Igor
Topics: Wordpress Customization

wordpress-widgets.jpg
(Image credit - Clockless)

Many of the WordPress themes promoted are described as being widget-ready. Widget-ready WordPress theme is a theme that has widgetized areas which allows you to dynamically manipulate these areas in a simple drag-and-drop fashion. Widgetized sidebar is another way to describe the same thing because most of the widgets are used in the sidebars of the themes. However, sometimes you find a WordPress theme that you really like, but discover that it’s not widgets ready. Don’t give up just yet, making themes widget-ready really isn’t as difficult as you might think. Follow the steps in this article and we will teach you how to Widgetize a WordPress theme making it a drag-drop widget theme.

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