WordCamp 2008 live coverage
WordCamp 2008 is underway right now and Matt Mullenweg recommends ZDNet’s live coverage straight from University of California San Francisco.
Here’s the schedule:
9:00 a.m. The Future of Education and Wordpress -
9:30 a.m. SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make - Stephan Spencer
10:00 a.m. Open Source Business Models - Stephen O’Grady
10:50 a.m. Andy Skelton - A musical performance
11:00 a.m. LOLcats and the Secret of Virality
11:30 a.m. Wordpress & Microformats
12:00 p.m. Lunch
1:00 p.m. Switching to Wordpress Painlessly - Lloyd Budd
1:20 p.m. 450 Wordpress Power User Tips - Lorelle VanFossen
1:40 p.m. Hassle-free Upgrades - Sam Bauers
2:00 p.m. State of the Word - Matt Mullenweg
3:00 p.m. Get Friendly with BuddyPress - Andy Peatling
3:20 p.m. Democratizing the Web through Global Voices - Jeremy Clarke
3:40 p.m. An interview with Om Malik
4:00 p.m. Riding the Crazyhorse - Liz Danzico and Jane Wells
5:00 p.m. A musical performance by Chuck Lewis aka SEO Rapper
5:10 p.m. Kicking Ass and Creating Passionate Users - Kathy Sierra
Visit the blog post for a glimpse of what’s to come for our very own WordCamp Philippines. It’s a good read not only for WordPress fans but also for bloggers and technology enthusiasts in general.
See also the live Twitter updates coming in via its search interface.
More WordPress blogs being hacked
Last time, it was a WordPress vulnerability that was resolved by upgrading to the latest version. This time, it’s a non-WordPress issue, specifically a redirect technique, that’s affecting a lot of WordPress-powered blogs.
The recent security issues concern hackers who work with Google and other search engine results and redirects traffic from your blog or website. The searchers clicks on the link and is redirected to the hacker’s site with the same search string used to search in the search engine. Most bloggers notice a problem when their site traffic drops inexplicably and/or their ad income drops.
Read Lorelle’s post for more information on detecting and eliminating this security issue.
WordPress Canonical URLs: Redirect WWW to Non-WWW Blog URLs and Vice Versa
Perhaps one of the number one tips expert bloggers will give newbies, particularly in the realm of search engine optimization, is to use consistent URL formats. Usually a website address can be accessed with or without the WWW. For example, http://www.wordpressphilippines.org/ and http://wordpressphilippines.org/ are valid URLs for this website but you don’t see a WWW in the address bar, right? That’s because we’ve redirected the WWW URL to the non-WWW URL.
The problem with having both a WWW and a non-WWW URL for your website is that Google and other search engines will assume . In the past, you could only fix this by adding a few lines of code in the your .htaccess file, or by telling Google they point to the same website. But if you’re running the latest version of WordPress (2.3), it automatically does that for you! Yes, just specify in the General Options page of the administration panel what your blog URL should look like. If you add a WWW, it will redirect all non-WWW URLs, and vice versa.
The truth is, there is more to URL canonicalization than I’ve mentioned here, but this is another proof of how WordPress has grown and incorporated these neat little features. It’s also a pretty good introduction to how the world of Search Engine Optimization works.
So now the question is if you prefer having WWW in your URLs or not! I personally prefer removing the WWW because it’s shorter and neater that way. How about you? What does your blog URL look like?
WordPress Plugin: Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports plugin
Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports plugin for WordPress is brought to us by TantanNoodles.com
This plugin allows you to easily view your Google Analytics and Feedburner reports in your WordPress administration area. It adds a top-level Reports tab and when you click on it, you’ll get a quick 7 day overview of what’s going on with your site (pageviews, visits, referrers, etc). You’ll have to login to Google Analytics or Feedburner directly if you want more detailed stats.
Installation:
1. Download and unzip the plugin.
2. Upload the entire “tantan” directory to the WordPress wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Login to your WordPress admin, click “Plugins”, and then activate the “WordPress Reports” plugin.
4. Click on the new “Reports” tab, and click “Setup” subtab.
5. Follow the on screen instructions and enter the proper details for each service.
6. You’re done! Click the “Reports” tab again to view the traffic summary for your site. Sweet!
Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports plugin for WordPress is from TantanNoodles.com. Download and support can be found here.
WordPress Plugin: All in One SEO Pack
The All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress makes optimizing your blog for search engines easier, by automating a few steps that will enhance visibility with Google, Yahoo! and other search engines.
The plugin will automatically fix your WordPress blog’s title and meta tags for you, such that the titles is formatted properly (which would make it appear more friendly both to Google and to your readers’ eyes), and that the keywords are included in the header meta tags.
Search results also appear better in the Google results pages because the plugin will define your page descriptions to be the snippets of the actual blog posting, instead of some random words on your site, which can be very unhelpful to potential readers.
The All in one SEO Pack is from uberdose.com. Download and support can be found here.
