I have the basic template migrated across my little mini blog network. I still need to tweak the CSS to get the colors distinct on each blog but I’m going to ignore that for a few days and work on getting my plugins back in check.
Since each of the blogs was created at a different time, I have a lot of shared plugins but sometimes different versions. And I have never cleaned out the plugins that I know longer use.
First step is to identify what I am using. These are the plugins that I am using on at least one of the blogs that I intend to make sure each blog ends up using. Please note that the link is what I pulled from the Plugin page of my WordPress admin screen. Newer versions of the plugins might use different links. As I grab the newest versions over the next few days, I will update any links that are no longer the right one.
WordPress Plugins
- Akismet - Bye bye spam
- Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - Nice pretty easy to implement sitemap that blends right into your template
- Democracy - For when you really care about your readers opinions
- Full Text Feed - I hate partial feeds. The WordPress 2.1.2 upgrade made partial feeds the default with no way to turn them off. This plugin fixes that and I will be a happy man when all my blogs use this.
- Google Sitemaps - Makes the sitemap that Google Webmaster Tools likes
- Next to Last - Let’s readers scroll through a lot of posts easily by click the next link at the bottom of pages
- Optimal Title - Makes it easy to switch your title from the default of Blog Name - Category - Post name to something more search engine friendly.
- Permalink Redirect - Handles the FeedBurner redirect (which I couldn’t get the FeedBurner redirect to do for some reason and also handles redirects for all your blogs URLs to make them all the same format.
- Related Posts - Adds a block of links to your own similar posts at the end of every post.
- Subscribe to Comments - Let’s readers get email updates when new comments are added to a post they want to keep track of.
- Text Link Ads v2 - Handles the Text Link Ads program. It is only on the two blogs accepted into the program at this point,.
- WordPress Database Backup - Backups are good. I need to do them more frequently.
- WP-ContactForm - Provides easy to implement contact form that blends into the design of your blog.
I also have installed WP-Cache to handle the few times when my sites got bogged down. I don’t regularly use it though because I seem to get a lot of 500 errors when it is activated and I haven’t had a chance to try and figure out why.
Those are my plugins. Over the next few days, I am going to find the most recent version of each, migrate that up to each blog, and then remove all of the other programs from the plugins directory.
Any other plugins that you think I should look into? Make a case and I will check it out.
I have one blog that gets reasonable traffic and reasonable revenue through a growing variety of sources. Then I have the other 4 (including this one). About the only real opportunity that fits with my desire or lack thereof to micromanage the advertising streams is Google’s AdSense at this time.
To get into some of the programs and to make money with any of them, I need to increase the pageviews which means posting more often, submitting to blog carnivals and commenting on other related blogs to hopefully get some links and wait for the next PR update.
More posts, more links, more readers. I know how to do it but it is frustratingly slow to go through it from scratch again. At least this time I have the advantage of knowing what kind of financial payoff is available.
I signed up all 5 of my blogs with MyBlogLog over the last couple weeks figuring I would find out what all the buzz was about.
I haven’t really figured out the “social” aspect of it yet.
I do really dig their stats, though. I like the main page where it lists all my blogs together with the pageview stats for each. That is a great way to get a quick overview of the sites. I also like how they not only report the AdSense clicks but tell you which posts the ads were clicked from and how many clicks came from that page. When I was in the pro trial period, I loved seeing that stuff in pretty close to real time.
I do have one little complaint with MyBlogLog. I sent them an email about a week ago asking a question about upgrading to the Pro service. I was wondering if the fee was per blog or per account (in my case all 5 of my blogs are under one MyBlogLog account). I never heard back from them. It is always kind of disappointing to be interested in buying something, ask a question, and then have to follow up just to get the information. I’m just not interested enough to bother right now.
Does anybody know the answer?
I have 5 different blogs that I maintain with quite a variety of consistency. I have completed upgrading all of them to WordPress 2.1.2 instead of being split between 2.03 to 2.1.
Now, I am working on standardizing the templates. The goal is to have the same layout with different banners and different color schemes defined in their CSS files.
Once I have all of that taken care of, I will look into pulling all of the custom information into seperate files that I can generically include into the theme and when I create a new blog, I can copy the template and only have to modify those separate files.
I have 2 of the blogs on the new template and will be working on moving the other 3 over the next week. If I get the time, this blog is next on the list so look for the new layout sometime between this afternoon and Monday morning.
I decided to start overhauling this blog by fixing the Ultimate Tag Warrior problem caused by a bad version. I could probably use a newer version and have it clean up the mess but I don’t plan on tagging my posts anymore.
I would backup the DB first, but the bug caused tons of extra records to get loaded into the WordPress tables making backups virtually impossible.
It looks like this is going to talk longer than it should. GoDaddy (my hosting provider) is running extremely slowly and I’m getting a fair amount of timeout errors.
My wp_postmeta table had over 300,000 records. Almost all of them are bad UTW records.
To clean up the records, I used this SQL command:
DELETE FROM `wp_postmeta` WHERE meta_key like ‘%utw%’
If you decide to try something similar, make sure you know how your database works. Not all of them use the same syntax.
Here are the results:
Deleted rows: 301693 (Query took 20.7045 sec)
Afterward, there is only 1 record. And everything is loading much more quickly (although GoDaddy admin page loads are still pretty slow).
That takes care of the first phase of cleaning up this blog. I’m going to be cleaning up a few other blogs at the same time. After I take care of this problem with the other blogs, I’ll be upgrading to WordPress 2.1.2.