Hello, pleased to meet you!
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Hi everyone, Alex here. It's been a while; two years, specifically, since I last wrote anything vaguely personal on WPShout, so I thought I'd give you a little update about me and how that's going to impact WPShout in the coming future. The good news is that it's all good news!
(read more)First Steps On A Fresh WordPress Install
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As I'm sure most of you do too, I'm now managing a good handful of sites which are running WordPress. I've now got a solid routine going when it comes to getting WordPress up and running and in this post, I thought I'd share it with you.
(read more)Affiliate Marketing For WordPress
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In recent weeks I've been trying to diversify WPShout's income -- you'll notice that Shout now sports some links in the sidebar pointing to WooThemes and WPWebHost, both using affiliate links to do so. There are a couple of ways I'm now handling my affiliate marketing through my WordPress Dashboard and this post will run down the different ways I'm now doing this.
(read more)Why WordPress?
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Nearly two years ago now, I asked a number of members of the WordPress community why they used WordPress. Over those last two years WordPress has changed vastly and thus it's time to update that post with the reasons I still use WordPress in 2011.
(read more)Single Page Portfolios With WordPress
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I'll admit, I wasn't quite sure how I was going to do this. I was tasked with making a single page design easily editable. Obviously, I looked to WordPress so that I had a nice backend. Question was how to do it? Posts were out of the questionso I looked to pages. But you can't display multiple pages on the same page, can you?
(read more)Email Newsletters For WordPress
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As you may have seen in last week's competition post, I recently created an email newsletter for WPShout. You may have also noticed I ended up using MailChimp instead of a built-into-WordPress solution. This post shows the how I did it.
(read more)Integrating Facebook With WordPress
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Despite Facebook being the most successful of all of the social media sites, I've never made WPShout a presence on the site or attempted to integrate Facebook onto WPShout in any way. I tend to view Facebook as more personal and other sites such as Twitter more appropriate for both marketing the site and interacting with the people who read it.
(read more)Plugin-less WordPress e-Commerce
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I recently worked on a typical small e-Commerce site: about twenty products, a couple of buying options, a couple of pages for about and whatnot and a little blog added on the end. Naturally, I looked to WordPress to handle everything -- the products, the blog and the pages. With custom post types, this wasn't a problem; a custom post type for the products and then an individual entry for each of the products, with standard posts being used for the blog and custom page templates for the pages. We're not going to look at those, though, instead we're going to look at how the e-Commerce part of the site worked.
(read more)Stopping WordPress Comment Spam
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I recently set up a blog for my band, Ellipsis. Just using a simple theme which I customised a little so it worked better as a band website. There's also a load of fancy CSS3 goodness, naturally. I ran into a problem, though. The blog was getting a ton and a half of comment spam. All of it was being blocked by Akismet, which is great, but that wasn't stopping it getting there in the first place. This is where we roll out the super-duper-ways-of-stopping-comment-spam.
(read more)Speeding Up WordPress: 2.0
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A couple of weeks ago I ran a series of posts on Shout about making WordPress run faster. We explored concepts like caching, CDNs; the usual. I always felt the series never really got off the ground and wasn't suited to small posts, hence I embarked on writing what I thought would be WPShout's first eBook!
(read more)Optimize WordPress For Heavy Traffic
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Following on from Faster WordPress, which went up on Shout a couple of weeks ago, this post explores how to optimise WordPress for high traffic. We'll take high traffic in a small blog context -- 1,000 or so visits in a day, but exactly the same techniques apply to much larger traffic blogs. The average WordPress theme isn't optimised. Whilst it may claim to be or may in fact be to an extent, the nature of WordPress themes means they have to be able to fit in any situation and so they are never going to be as well optimised as a theme which has been designed specifically for a single purpose. I'm not saying don't use an off-the-shelf theme, just you'll need to customise it in order to get the best performance out of it. This post shows how to make your site faster.
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