Implementing external DNS for small sites

Just as you can drive a car without being a mechanic, you can also set up a website without understanding how all of the components under the hood work. While moving my sites to a new server (moved to a Hybrid server with WiredTree to reduce my costs), I was testing its performance and looked to optimize its speed. One place that popped out as an area that could be improved was the initial DNS lookup. Would it be a worthwhile investment even for a small site like mine?

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How to synchronize your WordPress comment count

A year ago today, I wrote about fighting trackback spam on a self-hosted WordPress site. It involved running a SQL query directly on the database to speed up the clean up process and make it more efficient. Since I was dealing with over 100 spam-linking comments on each post, I could use all the help in that regard I could get. Fortunately, the solution written up there worked out quite well.

Unfortunately, I glossed over a side-effect of the manual clean-up effort. Since I deleted the trackback comments directly from the database, the process did not kick off WordPress’s other functions like updating the comment count on an article. This slight annoyance meant the comment count in an article byline would be extremely inflated over the actual number of comments. I dealt with it for 365 days, through no planning of mine, today I cleaned up the mess with one easy to use query to synchronize the comment count with the actual number of comments received per article. While my problem stemmed from previous modifications taken in the database there are plenty of plugins or other ways for this value to become inaccurate.

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A timeline of the unconstitutional “Amazon Tax” in Illinois

Today marks one year since Illinois Circuit Court Judge Robert Lopez Cepero ruled that HB 3659, Public Act 96-1544, was unconstitutional. Affiliates within the State of Illinois were cut off by most companies such as Amazon and eBay after the bill was signed into law. As a result, Illinois entered a lose-lose-lose situation by reducing taxable income of its citizens, forcing businesses like FatWallet to leave the state, and gaining no further sales tax revenue. From many conversations that I have had, confusion and denial of the Use Tax (Line 23 currently) on the IL-1040 has also led to many people continuing to pay no sales tax on Internet purchases in their annual income tax filing.

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Adding two-factor authentication to your website

Last week, WordPress.com introduced two-step authentication as an optional feature for WordPress.com blogs. It utilizes the Google Authenticator app for iPhone, Android, or Blackberry smartphones. If you don’t have a smartphone the secondary password can be sent to you in a text message, your phone being the “something you have”. For self-hosted WordPress sites, it was mentioned in the comments that the feature might come to WordPress.org blogs through the Jetpack bundled plugin. However, there are a few solutions already available to self-hosted WordPress sites and Drupal.

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Using different fonts in WordPress

The Web has a sordid history with fonts. If you have been around the web world for long enough, you probably recall some of the pains from clients wanting to use particularly weird fonts who then get upset when it doesn’t appear correct on a random computer they used. Previously, to show a font in HTML 4, it required having the font installed on the computers visiting your website or using an image. Now, with CSS3 that is no longer the case.

As explained by the W3C use of @font-face:

The @font-face rule allows for linking to fonts that are automatically activated when needed. This allows authors to select a font that closely matches the design goals for a given page rather than limiting the font choice to a set of fonts available on all platforms. A set of font descriptors define the location of a font resource, either locally or externally, along with the style characteristics of an individual face. Multiple @font-face rules can be used to construct font families with a variety of faces. Using CSS font matching rules, a user agent can selectively download only those faces that are needed for a given piece of text.

To make it even easier for WordPress users, there are plugins that make including a large variety of fonts pretty easy with help from Google..

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Google Analytics Ads bring the web to real life

For webmasters, Google Analytics or another means of getting information about your visitors is probably one of the first things that gets installed on a site. The data collected can help you understand if your site is organized in a way that makes for smooth transactions for your visitors. If they come to your page but don’t find what they are looking for, you have unsatisfied customers. With data collected, you can better understand their experience and make improvements to your site.

To emphasize the point, Google Analytics has created a few ads that bring some of those pain points in browsing an e-commerce site to the real-life grocery store. Things seem so easy when they are physical, tangible goods but so many websites seem to get it wrong. Check out the videos embedded after the jump.

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Including an image in your WordPress excerpt RSS feed

WordPress RSS feeds have two built-in options: full content or an excerpt. You can custom write the excerpt of each article or let it be automatically created out of the first 200 words or so. Unfortunately, I was finding with the full content feed that blog scrapers would just plug your feed, amongst others, into their site and have your content populate their site. This was beyond just aggregation and they tried to pass it off as their own and surround it with ads for profit. Duplicate content on the web results in penalties from Google and other search engine rankings.

I have been content using the excerpt but I have wanted to be able to include the WordPress Featured Image along with the RSS to make the teaser more eye-catching. Especially now that I am using Dlvr.it to auto-post updates to Facebook and Twitter, the thumbnail makes the Facebook post and RSS feed entry more informative and hopefully more likely to be clicked.

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New WordPress plugins for a new year

Did you make a New Year’s resolution to finally fix something on your WordPress site or to add a cool feature that you have seen on other sites? Perhaps this has nothing to do with the new year but you’re interested in adding new features to your WordPress site.

Here is a list of plugins that are not exactly brand new but they could be new to your site. The added functionality could solve a problem or breathe new life into your site. These are all free and from the WordPress.org plugin repository. Check out the list after the jump and feel free to make your own recommendations in the comments.

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