WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

We’re doing some web design housekeeping here at WebDiggin. Fixing up the layout, broken links, and plugins. Here are some of the things we are doing …

Monthly Archives

We used to have a basic WordPress archive listing, only showing a list of our posts. Then, we noticed how Caroline Middlebrook’s archives page was neatly sorted by month. So, we decided to install idunzo’s SRG Clean Archives plugin on this blog as well.

Disclosure and Privacy Policy

Josh’s post about new and old adsense policies woke us up to the fact that we need to add a cookie policy to our sites that have adsense. (So we clicked on the link in his post to a third-party adsense privacy policy generator.) It’s nice to have, and we just added it to the generated disclosure policy that we use for our sponsored posts.

Fixing up the Dead Links

We haven’t been checking our error logs as much as we should be. (There are whole heaps of php error messages that I don’t even know what to do with. So, I guess we’ll naively ignore them for now.)

We did, however, notice a lot of 404 page errors. (374 page errors for this page: Get $50 credit from Yahoo and $50 from AdWords). It wasn’t so much that we moved our blog over to webdiggin but that we changed the permalink addresses.

We have Janis Elsts’ Broken Link Checker plugin installed. 120+ dead links to fix up in our posts. Now we have to go through each post to edit the links. I wonder if each time we re-publish a post, it will show up in the RSS feed. That would be annoying.

Turning off the leaking pagerank taps by adding a nofollow tag in our links

We learned in March that it’s important to turn off the pagerank taps in our links. So we started to add a rel=”nofollow” to our affiliate links or any links in a post that didn’t need the pagerank (like Wikipedia links. If we learn something from someone else’s blog, we’ll link back to the source with the link juice turned on.)

But our blog started last year, so we cleaned up our older posts and added some nofollow tags.

We use SEOBook’s plugin for Firefox to find which links have a nofollow tag included. A big problem we discovered was that if you are editing a post that has a nofollow link and you have the SEO plugin turned on, then your nofollow link will become red. If you then save that post, WordPress saves the formatting and now your nofollow link is permanently red.

Oops. So we had to go through our posts and manually turn off the red highlight that got accidentally saved in the post. That was a hassle.

Categories and tags

We had a long list of categories and only a few tags here and there. The problem, of course, is that no one can really use the categories to find what they’re looking for. So we followed Butterfly Media’s advice on categories and tags and tried to tidy things up.

We wanted to have less than 10 categories. Armenian Eagle’s Category Converter plugin allows you to group together your existing categories. It looked promising, but unfortunately it hasn’t been updated for the latest versions of WordPress.

In the end, we converted all of our categories to tags to have a fresh start. We tried WordPress’s built in category-to-tag feature, but for some reason, it missed some categories. Eventually, we found this hack that let us convert all of our wordpress categories into tags. (Be careful - you can’t undo the conversion.)

It won’t let you convert categories if the tag already exists. So we used the simple tag plugin to delete all of our existing tags. Then, we used the built-in WordPress category-to-tag converter.

We’ve only just discovered some cool features of the simple tag plugin that we’ve been using since forever. We thought the plugin was only good for suggesting tags when you’re writing that post, but…

• It has an auto tag feature that will go through all of your posts and search for keywords to appear in your tags. You can also run this feature on old posts, so you don’t have to manually go through and tag things.
• You can batch edit tags without having to open up the post.
• The tags for your post show up in the meta keywords header which helps with search engine optimization.
• The extended tag cloud widget is customizable. (I think there’s a way to add a nofollow tag in the options page to save our link juice, but we couldn’t get it to work, so we just modified the plugin directly.)

Fixing Security Issues and Preventing Your WordPress Blog from Getting Hacked

We’re not security experts. But during our travels in the blogosphere we came across some articles that made us nervous. Matt Cutt’s has a post on how to lock down your wp-admin directory to only a few IP addresses. That way if you’re not using your home or work computer to modify your WordPress blog, hackers have a harder time accessing the wp-admin folder.

We have a dynamic IP address where the last number changes xx.xx.xxx.*. I thnk if you drop the last number, it will work (xx.xx.xxx)

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “Example Access Control”
AuthType Basic

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from xx.xx.xx.xx
allow from xx.xx.xxx.xx

Protecting your plugins

Visit any blog that is powered by WordPress. Add /wp-content/plugins/ to the domain name and you should see a list of plugins that the blog is using. (So, for example, http://webdiggin.com/wp-content/plugins/).

Apparently vulnerabilities in your plugins can be used to hack into your WordPress blog. So we followed dailyblogtips advice on how to hide the plugins:

If you visit the folder /wp-content/plugins/ on most blogs, however, you will be able to see all the plugins that are being used. In order to hide that list you just need to create an empty index.html file and drop it there.

Bottom Line: It’s like spring cleaning your home. A chore, but it needs to be done.

Question: How often do you go through your webdesign to spruce things up a bit?

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...