Tag Archives: WordPress

Upgraded to WordPress no ads option

Today I paid US$30 to stop WordPress showing random ads on my site. They didn’t show up often and the ads WordPress displays – to my knowledge – were never offensive.

However some were inappropriate to my content. They added nothing for readers. Getting rid of them makes the site cleaner – which is a good thing. It was something I intended to do for some time now, but Ed Bott’s No more ads, no more trackers reminded me.

Another reason WordPress.com beats WordPress.org

Last week I wrote Why I use WordPress.com not WordPress.org.

There are a few reasons, but it comes down to making life simpler. One aspect I forgot to mention was the free WordPress.com service gives me 3GB of storage. In effect that means an unlimited number of posts and an unlimited number of images.

When I used a paid hosting service and WordPress.Org I twice had to upgrade my account with extra storage to cope with the number of posts – there are nearly 1000 – and images. And when the space began to run out, the site would slow down.

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How I moved back from self-hosted to WordPress.com

Vittore Carpaccio - The Ordination of St Stephen as DeaconA year ago I moved my site from a local New Zealand host back to the WordPress mothership. The goal was to make life simpler. That worked: at least for now.

The move wasn’t technically difficult, there are things to watch:

1. Permalinks. These are not customisable with wp.com. You’re stuck with the WordPress format. I’ve no idea if this is good or bad for search engine optimisation. I don’t care.

2. If you worry about search, the trick is to switch format a couple of weeks before making the move, otherwise Google gets confused. I started on this path, but the rest of my preparations went so quickly the new format was only in place about five days before the switch.

A year later Google Webmaster Tools tells me traffic is still looking for those old format links. The lesson here is if you think you may switch to WordPress’s host in the future, start using the permalink format now.

3. I moved the domain name. There was no control over the time this happened, it happened at 11pm so I was effectively offline for about nine hours – this may not bother you. I don’t know how many people saw a dead site, in those days it would have been around 100 visitors. Any damage is fixed now. Another time I’d need to rethink how I’d do this.

4. I paid extra for WordPress.Com’s custom design and used my own twenty ten child template. It didn’t look great, so I had to switch to a new template – this was the trickiest part of the process and I still don’t have it perfect. A year later I’ve shut all the custom stuff down and have a stock WordPress theme. Dammit, this is THE stock theme. People come to my site for words – I can use pictures to make it look better.

5. Originally there was zero flexibility over the iPad and smartphone templates – this was almost a deal breaker for me. A year on and the problems are largely solved thanks to a responsive theme.

6. There are a few minor irritations. Mainly lack of design flexibility. I wanted a simpler life, so I’ll just have to put up with them.

7. On the plus side, the .com site is seven times faster than my hosted site, requires almost zero maintenance, has barely gone offline in a year, gets more accidental traffic and is free. The downside is I’m less in touch with WordPress coding – something I think journalists ought to get used to. To get around this I’ve built a couple of other sites.

Integrate WordPress.com and Google+?

Here’s what I’d like to do with Google+.

When I write a post on my site, I’d like to post the entire text to Google+. OK maybe not the entire text of longer posts, but a sizable grab.

Then, I want to integrate the comments that appear on Google+ with the comments on my WordPress.com site – so both sets of comments appear in both places.

Is this possible?

Reputation management, online advertising: not a good mix

Tweets began appearing within minutes of yesterday’s yarn about the launch of a New Zealand book on managing reputation risks. At the bottom of the page was an advertisement for Nickelback’s Auckland gigs. For those who don’t know, Nickelback is a Canadian faux rock band that most rock fans regard as, well, let’s just say ‘dubious’ .

The advertisement damaged my reputation as a cool dude around town. There’s a lesson in that.

I’ve experimented with WordPress’ WordAds programme. WordAds is like Google Ads, serving up advertisements to readers based on words found in the posts.

Google Ads gives users a little control over the ads it displays, WordAds gives you no control at all.  Given the choice I’d prefer not to promote Nickelback on my site, after all I’ve a reputation to protect.

I fail to see how the WordAds algorithms made a link between reputation management and Nickelback. Ah, hang on, no perhaps it isn’t.

Either way, the important point is advertising is yet another avenue of reputation risk for online publishers to worry about. It was easy in the old days when publishers sold their advertising directly, but there’s less scope to reduce risk when using an automated service like WordAds.

Jokes about Nickelback aside, WordAds hasn’t shown anything really flaky so far. I’ve used Google Ads on other sites and some advertisements have been extremely embarrassing. So, if you’re really worried about your online reputation, you may need to accept you can’t afford to display advertising.

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