Wayne Liew Dot Com

Wayne Liew Dot Com is all about simple blogging tips, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed to get yourself free blogging tips updates.

Wordpress released version 2.3.3 after releasing version 2.3.2 just two months ago. Wayne Liew Dot Com is now running on Wordpress 2.3.3 as I always upgrade the plugins, softwares and blogging tools once there is an upgrade available.

Discussion on Wordpress "Frequent" Upgrades

I surfed through a few forums and blogs discussing this new Wordpress upgrade. I find that some of the Wordpress users are complaining about the frequency of Wordpress upgrades.

Wordpress is the best recommended blogging software around but still, the development pace and the release of upgrades left many of their users stay put at a few versions back, after being tired of all the upgrades.

Be honest with me. What version of Wordpress are you currently using to run your blog?

Upgrade and Don’t Blame Wordpress Development Team

I am on the "upgrade as it comes out" side and what will you be reading in this post is on why you should upgrade your Wordpress blog to the latest version.

Continue reading Wordpress Upgrades - Fuss or Must?

For those who are blogging on a self-hosted blog, we normally host our blog on our own server as well so when the images are inaccessible, it also means that our blog might be inaccessible as well.

However, some bloggers do host their blogs on image hosting sites like Flickr, Photobucket and ImageShack or on any other external sites which are very prone to having broken images published on their blogs. Also, we might have mistyped the URL for our images sometimes.

A few weeks back, I introduced the Broken Link Checker plugin, which is capable of notifying bloggers blogging on a self-hosted Wordpress platform about the existence of any broken images found on the blog as well.

The Problems With Broken Images

A broken image is much more troublesome than a broken link as a broken image will have the following effects:

• Bad first impression for readers
• Fail your attempt to convey your information such as in a how-to article
• Ugly red X will be shown if your readers are using Internet Explorer

We are not monitoring and scanning through our articles 24 hours a day and we will not know that when our images will be missing from our blog.

Continue reading Wordpress Plugin: Clean Up Broken Images

If you have followed my contents since I started blogging or you have read About Wayne Liew, you should know that I started blogging on Blogger, the free blogging platform owned by Google.

I am lucky because my aim is to start a brand new blog without having any transfer fuss. Of course, losing all the backlinks that my old PR5 Blogger blog is a huge sacrifice but life goes on and this blog is actually on a Google PR4 now. However, things might be easier if the value of the links from my old Blogger blog can be passed on to Wayne Liew Dot Com.

When a blogger is more devoted to a blog, there is a high chance that he/she will consider to host his/her blog on self-hosted Wordpress. Transferring your blog posts and comments are taught to you in the Wordpress codex but what if you want to redirect every permalinks of your blog posts on your old Blogger blog to this the posts on your new blog which are just transferred?

Continue reading Blogger To Wordpress: Keep Your Link Juice

Google, the superior search engine sees an outgoing link from a page as a vote to the landing page of the link. We can give our votes to every page we want but we are having our blogs on the Internet close to being owned by Google. This means, even if we wanted to link to others, we have Google’s rule to follow.

Google, in their webmaster guidelines, under the heading Design and content guidelines, point 7, states that bloggers and webmasters must check out and prune broken links from our sites.

Photo by: laffy4k

As a blogger, we always focus on our new contents like what I have mentioned in Vital Sections for a Blog Clean Up, it is important to revisit our old posts to keep them updated and of course, to remove or update broken links!

Dig Out Broken Links With Just A Click

Sites that we link to might have been removed, deleted or taken offline. Scanning through a huge pile of old posts to find for broken links is a tiring chore but it will be as easy as surfing the Net if you know the right plugin for this problem!

Continue reading Search and Destroy Broken Links With A Plugin

You might have noticed that in my previous post, Blogosphere Summary - Week #1, I have make a slight revert to the style I used to write my articles here, which is using the <!–more–> tags. RSS feed readers, don’t be shocked since you will still be offered a full RSS feed.

Drawbacks of promoting full article on home page

My intention to offer a full RSS feed urged me to stop using the <!–more–> tags in my blog posts. However, I found a few drawbacks which are listed below:

• Long home page. I am always not the fan of long scrolling home page. When I read blogs which are in chronological order, I sometimes don’t force myself to scroll down to the blog footer because it is just too tiring for my finger.
• Massive link giveaways. Links can be given in articles but having a full article on a blog’s home page is making the homepage giving away too much links and this will not only make my blog surpass the Google Webmaster Guidelines on the amount of outgoing links as I am a frequent link giver, it will also devalue the links I am giving out on my homepage, including the link juice I passed on to my top commentators.
• More showcase of work. Previously, I have too long articles on my home page before showcasing 6 titles of my other articles at the bottom of the page. The long scroll to the bottom has made these articles invisible to my periodical readers.

Continue reading Full Text Feed Plugin - No More RSS Feed Cut Off

Have you been interlinking or internal permalinking your own posts when writing a blog post? If you have not, you should start doing it now because you can control what are the words that describe your pages with the anchor text used for the links. Also, it allows readers to get deeper into your blog, indirectly extending the time they stay on your blog.

The Fuss About Self Pinging Trackbacks (Internal Permalinking)

When we have a link in our new posts to our old posts, the new posts will always ping the old posts, giving extra trackbacks on the old posts. Some reasons why bloggers don’t want this to happen because of the following reasons:

• It clogs up the comment section (Trackbacks tend to have long "names").
• It serves no interaction in a comment section discussion.
• It can be seen as a cheat to boost comment count.

For various reasons, bloggers delete such pingbacks from the comment moderation section. Some bloggers might act smart by marking internal pingbacks as SPAM which is a TERRIBLY WRONG MOVE!

A trackback on posts by other blogs can help to get attention from the blogger and might also nick some traffic over to your blog if the excerpts shown is relevant to the blog posts.

Marking your own pings as spams will send your trackbacks right into Akismet section on administration panels of other blogs! Thus, don’t mark internal as "Spams"!

Solution to Stop Self Pinging Trackbacks

Photo by michale

Posts such as Wayne Liew Dot Com - Looking Back on Year 2007 have tonnes of internal links and you can imagine the number of internal trackbacks that it has caused onto my older posts. Deleting the trackbacks might cost some precious time and it will not be the case any more.

No Self Ping Plugin by MDA will stop this from happening to your blog. This plugin might seem to be a simple plugin created by a person with a simple blog but its function can save lots of your time if you frequently linkback to your old post. It also won’t require any settings or a Options page for you to work through. Simply activate after uploading it will stop the internal trackbacks from showing again.

Feedback On No Self Ping Plugin and Internal Pinging

Do you frequently link to your old posts? If you do, how do you treat your internal trackbacks? After having it installed on your blog, does it work as promised?

Subscribe to Wayne Liew Dot Com RSS Feed to get more updates on Wordpress plugins and themes.

Today I am going to write about a popular plugin which most of us might be using, the Show Top Commentator plugin by Nate Sanden. I will not be reviewing about it since it is a known fact that the plugin is great. What I am going to write about is how you can fully utilize its functions and fit it into your blog.

We will look at 5 things on how you can optimize the plugin for your blog’s use.

Placement
It is indeed a good plugin to encourage your visitors to comment but what if you place it at the bottom of your blog? I place mine at a prominent and visible space in Wayne Liew Dot Com and it has been even rated higher than my popular posts by me.

Your visitors might be comment to get a linkback to boost their Page Rank or backlinks because appearing on a blog’s homepage will mean a link in each and every one of your blog page but what some visitors really want is a share of your traffic. One common sense thing about the placement of this widget is that if you place it too low, your visitors might not even know you offer a reward of people who comment!

Number of Links Allowed
This is not easy as it seems. If you allow too many links to appear and your blog have less commentators, all the number 1 inside the brackets will show it to every readers of yours that no people is commenting. Also, if you allow too little links but if you have commentators with high frequency of commenting like kljs, semi-active commentators that are still not in the list will easily give up when they are tired of getting into the list.

You might say that the best is to hide the numbers by tweaking the plugin editor but I think people will not even try to challenge those who are on the list because they don’t know to which extent that they need to comment.

You can actually change the number of links that you want to show by modifying the number shown below in your Top Commentators plugin editor page.

Frequency of Reset
Some bloggers reset their comments count for this plugin once a week but some like me, make it once a month. This depends on the level of freshness you want. Resetting the plugin frequently will give chances to some featherweight commentators but it will always show a low comment count in the brackets. If you reset once a month like me, I guess you will still see people like Sean and Kitkat on my charts for at least 20 days more.

Linking to Your Comentators
Some people just love Google so much and they are experts in adding nofollow tags onto their links, even when they seems to be rewarding commentators with this plugin (I have seen these kind of bloggers before). I don’t know why they are so obedient towards Google and they think that their blog can live on with Google but without visitors. Don’t do this, doing this will break the aim of this plugin completely! I don’t think Google is that evil (is it?) to ban you for rewarding your commentators!

Also, this plugin does allow you not to link to your commentators but I don’t see why you should disable the linking unless you are giving away monthly prizes to those who got to the top every month or every week!

Don’t Win Your Own Competition
Sorry if I offended you but I admit that I laughed when I see a blogger is the winner on their own top commentators list. Don’t do that because you might be perceived as little Ashwin Khanna! Of course you will be on top as you will be commenting in each and everyone of your post because you are replying to your readers. Remove your name by adding in text like admin, xxx and Wayne Liew (example) to the plugin editor as shown below.

Conclusion
Show Top Commentator plugin is one of the best plugin that I will be recommending to every Wordpress bloggers. It gives your readers reason to comment. The negative side of it is that you will be inviting spasm but I guess Akismet will always be there to do the cleaning job for you. Know your commentators and suit the plugin to your blog.

Do you use this plugin? Do you find it useful in helping you to increase the number of comments? Maybe one of the reasons that I forgot to add into 10 Reasons You Are Not Getting Comments is that you don’t reward your commentators. Tell me what you think about the tips I have provided above. Did I miss out any usable tweaks to the plugin?

Subscribe to Wayne Liew Dot Com RSS Feed if you want to get free updates on how you can optimize the usage of a plugin.

I just upgraded my Wordpress platform to the brand new 2.3 version. My work was quite easily done in less than 10 minutes time with the help of the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin which I recommended in “Wordpress 2.2.3 Upgrade”. It helps from the start until the end without any flaws but pelf from pelf-ism is contagious claimed that the plugin does not work for her blog so I guess there is still some problems with it but it works well with me!

I broke my promise for not being the first few testers as I have to study but at least I have done it now! Sorry… I scrolled around after the upgrade and found nothing special with it other than the new tagging system which helps yo define your posts in a more informal way than the previous “Categories” available. I won’t use it because if I wanted to, I will need to modify my theme to get a place for those tags. I am not that good with this and I don’t want to risk spoiling my theme.

It also offers a new row of tools in your WYSIWYG editor toolbar. You can have access to it by clicking the button on the right of the “Help” button. You can now format the text easier and change the colours or your text. For those who pre-write their post with Microsoft Word, you can now copy your words from their and paste it in your editor with or without formatting! Messy codes can be cleaned up, and special symbols from now on can be inserted! What I like most is that I can “Undo” and “Redo” the things I typed!

More comments on Wordpress 2.3 after the jump!

Continue reading Wayne Liew Dot Com On Wordpress 2.3

The Wordpress blog released an article, “Preparing For 2.3″, which listed out all the stuffs that you can do prior to the 2.3 release tomorrow. I am very anxious for this as this will be the first time I am doing this but I think I am prepared for both these and my Progress Test, which will be on Monday to Thursday, starting from tomorrow as well. I will for sure try my best to upgrade Wayne Liew Dot Com tomorrow as early as possible.

I am focusing on plugins issue in this post as it will matters the most in every upgrades due to compatibility issues. Theme modification is expected to be done by me as well if I’ve decided to use the new tagging function offered in the 2.3 version. Please pray for me tomorrow if you see “Wayne Liew Dot Com is upgrading” when you are trying to visit me.

Plugins Issue
I don’t know whether you have noticed about a few changes, additions and removals done on my blog which is the effect of changes in my Wordpress plugins. My post “Prepare Your Plugins For 2.3 Upgrade” will direct you to the list of plugins compatibility (increased plugins) and clearly shown that plugins compatibility is extremely important in this big upgrade.

My plugins compatibility after the jump.

Continue reading Anxious Over 2.3 Upgrade

The release of Wordpress 2.3 is scheduled on 24th of September 2007, which is next Monday. Wordpress released “Plugin/Plugins Compatibility/2.3″ which will tell you which plugins you are using require an upgrade as well and what are those which you can continue to use.

When I go through the list, I noticed that most of my plugins is not in the compatible list and two of them required an upgrade themselves. I will make them all compatible and this is a task that I must complete before 24th of September so that I can upgrade my version of Wordpress.

This update will be my first major update after I joined the Wordpress bandwagon. I’ve done my previous minor update from Wordpress 2.2 to Wordpress 2.2.3 which I am using now.

A major Wordpress is an important for us Wordpress users although it is a difficult task. We will risk losing our data, all our posts and pages, including all the modifications we have done previously with our blogs.

My recommendations on updating or not after the jump.

Continue reading Prepare Your Plugins For 2.3 Upgrade