Personal blog of Prasad Ajinkya
This blog is a modest small-tier blog. It does not get too much traffic (much to my chagrin) and therefore expecting the blog to monetize is too much. However, I have steadily written my thoughts and opinions on this … for the past 7-8 years now.
Looking at such a long time range allows me to study how blogging and blog monhersetization has changed over the years. Especially now with mobile form factors being the main devices that users tend to consume content with.
If you have been playing with WordPress themes or providing WordPress based web builds as part of your business, then you would have installed a nulled theme in your life.
A nulled theme is a premium theme that’s released by someone in the wild. There are multiple such sites.
I consider it so. But this is where two different ideals are conflicting. That’s space for another post.
So what happens when you do install a nulled theme … chances are it might contain a malware.
This is a nightmare to handle. The worry is not at the technical front, the worry is the grief the publishing team feels … as someone who regularly writes – I would feel bad if my blog were to get compromised.
Here’s a methodical way to sort yourself out.
https://videopress.com/embed/4vjvbhOr?hd=0
Immensely passionate about technology, Owen has built his career on his innate ability to understand and dissect organisational challenges and apply timely and effective solutions, typically focusing on emerging techniques and systems. Owen has been using WordPress since version 2 and runs a number of sites for himself and his clients. He is a Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) and tries to learn everything about the WordPress security scene. His talk is on ‘Keeping WordPress secure, how sites get infected and how to clean them when they do.’ He decided to talk about malware in WordPress, because it’s a problem that effects a lot of people. he explained malware is just code, code in the same type of code that WordPress is, if you understand what it does and how it does it then there are steps you can take to avoid it.
via Owen Cutajar: How WordPress Malware Works and How to Clean an Infected Site — WordPress.tv
Let me state upfront that I love Google Analytics. I use it at work in 13 Llama Interactive to measure the effectiveness of the campaigns that my team runs.
That being said, I will try and not be too biased about comparing Jetpack Stats to Google Analytics. As a marketer, the way I look at an analytics package is from an ability to extract a fair amount of data.
However, Jetpack Stats is on top of WordPress and available to all WordPress based sites which are connected to the WordPress.com site. This makes Jetpack Stats primary user base as bloggers.
Let’s see what Jetpack Stats has to offer.
Jetpack Stats puts a nice pretty looking graph on the wp-admin Dashboard. This is how it looks like for my site –
Now, this is fairly similar to the Audience Overview you get when you check out Google Analytics.
Straight off the bat, I prefer Jetpack Stats overview as opposed to the one given by Google Analytics. Jetpack Stats also provides me with how my posts have performed this day, this report would be available in GA witin the Behavior section, the Site Content report.
The Top Searches that you see in the screenshot would have been helpful had it been accurate. Unfortunately, Google accounts for the majority of organic traffic on my site, and most of that traffic is encrypted. Thus, these keywords that you see (really, I rank for ‘big ass girl dunes’) are not a complete set!
Jetpack Stats does not talk to Google Webmaster Tools, which now is the only source of this keyword data.
One awesome feature about Jetpack Stats is the posting activity screen –
This data is shown with a correlation of average traffic per day as well as traffic per month. You could always get this data in Google Analytics (here is a useful post I had written some time back – Google Analytics for Content Marketers).
It’s just this kind of insights that makes me keep Jetpack around for my measurement requirements.
Jetpack Stats is a very lightweight tool and it would be useful for a simple blog. However the minute we enter the realm of finding user engagement and performance marketing, Jetpack simply does not have those features yet.
This is where Google Analytics shines through with its Event tracking.
Having said that, Jetpack Stats is an apt solution for a user who is more focused on the publishing process.
I do most of my experiments on this blog. Whereas most of the experiments are on content and digital marketing, some tend to be technical.
Yesterday, I was trying out the exceptional Pods framework on my blog. In my haste to try out Pods, I skipped setting up a locally hosted WordPress stack and opted to install it on this blog instead.
Continue reading “Why you should not play with a live WP site”
As a blogger who has been writing for the past 5 years or so, I was always confused about the Read More tag. This is a tag that you will find in your WordPress editor besides the Toolbar Toggle button.
Why would one want to insert their content with this tag? Wouldn’t it fill up your blog content with such intermediate tags and break the reader’s flow? Let’s go find out how to correctly use the Read More tag.
Having your own website and maintaining it has its own set of wins and losses. If your site is not popular enough, that’s a heartburn.
Then one fine day, you get TechCrunched or Mashabled or Redditted – and boom, comes a spike. Or even better, you start doing well on your own and the traffic grows. Soon, this traffic becomes so big, that your existing hosting plan starts creaking and squawking under this load.
This post is for those of you who have a site which has loads of traffic, so much so that the site performance is under impact due to it. Like quite a few of our clients. *Touchwood*
In a prior post we saw 5 wordpress plugins which you should always install. If you have missed that article then you can read it here.
In a follow-up post we will discuss some more WordPress plugins. Today’s plugin will be those which I and many other WordPress authors use to enhance the visibility and performance of our site.
I am in love with this particular plugin as it has helped me a lot in my WordPress development.
All webmasters know that the site response time is an essential part of your Website SEO as well as site statistics. Studies say that most visitors don’t like to wait for more than 10 sec while the site keeps loading. This is one of the main reason behind scrapped articles which results in higher Bounce rates.
WP Super Cache helps you reduce the site load time by serving your site from cache to the visitor. This plugin serves your dynamic site as a static HTML website to the visitor. Thereby reducing the load time significantly. It also has an compress pages option which compresses your JS, Images and other scripts and html adding to the site reduction.
Following are recommended settings in the plugin
This plugin helped me achieve a Pagespeed of 87 from 81 which is at significantly higher side of the marking being a WordPress news/articles website.
Wassup is my personal favorite Analysis plugin and I’ve been using this plugin for the past 2 years. Wassup provides almost realtime analysis of the visitors. This plugin comes with a dashboard widget giving an idea of the traffic and online visitors.
When we visit the plugin settings page it provides much more in-depth details of the visits. It provides
My personal experience shows that the plugin provides almost same statistics as the Google analytics just this is a compact version and worth a try.
This particular plugin is most helpful when there are more than one contributors to the site or you are developing a website in which you required to display only certain menus to the user as they may not require most of the menu.
Now WordPress does offer some default role based accesses, however, I have noticed that more often than not these roles are not completely usable.
Above image is sufficient to give you a hint at what this plugin is capable in doing.
This is a real helpful plugin. Most developers have a habit of uploading new content on the site when any wrong media files are uploaded. But mostly they forget to delete old incorrect files. Enable media replace helps in such situation.
When installed and activated this plugin puts a Upload new File button in the media file .
This can be found in Media →Media File Name
In this it allows to replace the media file with the new one and also it replaces all the references of the old file in complete site with the newer file.
SNAP is a very helpful plugin for connecting all the social media to the wordpress blog. All the SMO’s out there love such plugins as these reduce their efforts.
WebMaster have to just write the article. SNAP will automatically post the said article to all the connected and configured social media accounts.
Following is the networks supported by the plugin
| Blogger/Blogspot | Delicious. |
| Diigo | |
| FriendFeed | Instapaper |
| Google+ (with third party API library) | |
| LiveJournal | Pinterest (with third party API library) |
| Stumbleupon | Tumblr |
| Plurk | |
| vBulletin | vKontakte(VK.com) |
| WordPress | YouTube |
Free version of the site allows adding only a single account of all above mentioned social sites.