I have a bone to pick with you. Yes, you with the wordpress.com blog (or blogger.com or squarespace, take your pick). You see I have no problem with your personal blog being on one of those subdomains. In fact I have no problem with any those services or your personal blogs on them. The problem I have is when you put your professional, corporate blogs up like: companyname.wordpress.com. You see that makes me think a few things about you:

• you’re too cheap or broke to pay for a real domain name
• you’ve got no clue when it comes to the internet
• is this a legitimate blog? (Its free, anyone can claim any name)

But beyond the first impression problems there are some other issues you should consider. The first issue at hand is how search engines see you and your ability to impact them. The second problem comes with the blogging software that you’re using. A third issue is the control that you have to give up over your brand. These are certainly not the only problems that stem from using a service and not having your own domain name but these are at the forefront. Let us know what you think other issues are in the comments

Search Engines

A couple of different things happen when you blog under a sub-domain. First your blog gets less weight and becomes more lumped in with the other blogs residing under the same domain name. Because anyone can start a free blog and the massive amounts of spam blogs on most popular free blogging services, search engines are going to devalue your content to start out with. You’re starting out with a handicap. Not a big deal when it’s a personal blog and your intent is to reach friends and family—a much bigger deal when you wish to appear professional. Beyond the initial impression that search engines have of your site, you have very little control over moving or redirecting search engines, should you change the structure of your blog or move a blog post etc. Using a free blogging service often limits the level of access  you have to optimize on page elements that impact your search engine ranking too.

Blogging Software

By going with a free blogging platform (and not purchasing a domain name upgrade) you place yourself in the hands of the company running that service. If you’re running your own version of that software, you have much more control over it and nothing will happen to your site if the company putting out the software goes out of business or is acquired by another company etc. Blogger was originally it’s own company and while it’s still doing well, it was bought by Google. If you were too tied to that platform and they made changes you didn’t like, you wouldn’t have any options (like running an older version of the software). With blogging software like WordPress there are a great deal of powerful plugins and customizations that you can make but only if you’re running your own version of the software. If you’re running a professional business these limitations are a big problem.

Brand Control

Putting your website on a sub-domain gives up control of your brand. Operating your website there places you under terms of service that you probably didn’t read and that could change at any time. Often blogging platforms like these have terms that are restrictive about the way that you can promote products and services. You could be placing yourself in a difficult situation if you haven’t carefully reviewed these terms. By using a sub-domain you’re also giving away control over your brand name. People visiting your blog will always see the main domain name and your name instead of just your name.

Conclusion

Hopefully these thoughts make you pause before you go off and signup for a free blogging service somewhere. If that’s what you do, at least make sure that you choose one that offers a data export so that you can move your posts somewhere else without too much difficulty. Please note that I have no problem with using services like wordpress.com to handle your company blog if that’s what you feel best meets your needs. Just make sure at the very least that you purchase a real domain name and the service upgrade that lets you use it with wordpress.com. That will mitigate all of the issues here except for being able to install plugins and add-ons other than the ones that they offer.

What are your thoughts? Do you trust company blogs that are run from wordpress.com or some other sub-domain?

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Ditch the subdomain—stand out from the crowd

How long as it been since you updated the copyright date on your website? I don’t know about you but I see this as one of those little things that is important. Same as a company blog that hasn’t been updated in months. Did you know that you can keep the copyright date on your site up-to-date with just one simple line of code?

Yep, all you have to do is use the following code:
<?php print date('Y'); ?>

That’s all it takes for your site to display an up-to-date copyright date. Blogging isn’t quite so easy but you should really get rid of the blog if you’re not going to post anything to it. You’re probably losing sales because people wonder if you’re still around. Neglected blogs make me wonder what else you neglect.

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

It’s the Little Things

Want a quick hack to boost speed of your pages? There are two ways to accomplish this.

• Login to your server as root or normal with sudo privileges.
  • open your php.ini with vi (command may vary depending on where your php.ini file is located)

  vi /etc/php.ini

  • Find and uncomment (default is disabled), or add the following line:

  zlib.output_compression = On

• This method enhances every site/page using php on the server by sending compressed files to clients that support it.
• The second method will affect only a single site and requires only access to your .htacess file.
  • open your .htacces file
  • add the following line

  php_flag zlib.output_compression On

Update: I plan to do some testing on performance to see if this really does help. Just simple visual and file download tests show that it does to me but more data is needed, coming soon!
image credit

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Enhancing PHP speeds (Drupal and WordPress too)

So I really dig Alex King’s Popularity plugin but I’m disappointed that he’s not updated it for WP 2.5 yet. So since it took me forever to find the information on fixing it I’ll post it here. WARNING if you break it, its not my fault! Also FYI this is a temporary fix until the actual plugin is upgraded, this just gets things working, its not perfect.

Open popularity-contest.php and scroll down to line 59. Replace require(’../../wp-blog-header.php’); with require(’../wp-blog-header.php’);

If you get an error (most likely with a new installation) about a Table not existing, the following code should be run in phpmyadmin or any other SQL database access program (usually the wordpress table prefix is wp_ make sure you change this to reflect your local settings):

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS <wordpresstableprefixhere>ak_popularity (
post_id int(11) NOT NULL,
total int(11) NOT NULL,
feed_views int(11) NOT NULL,
home_views int(11) NOT NULL,
archive_views int(11) NOT NULL,
category_views int(11) NOT NULL,
single_views int(11) NOT NULL,
comments int(11) NOT NULL,
pingbacks int(11) NOT NULL,
trackbacks int(11) NOT NULL,
last_modified datetime,
KEY post_id (post_id)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS <wordpresstableprefixhere>ak_popularity_options (
option_name varchar(50) NOT NULL,
option_value varchar(50) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

Alex’s post regarding his plugins Wp 2.5 issues.

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

How to Fix Alex King’s Popularity Plugin

I’m not really happy with my theme but after spending several hours poking around in the CSS I decided that I’ve got more important things to work on As for everything else, all the posts appear to be showing up from Google with redirects so there shouldn’t be any broken links. Now to migrate the project pages over! Suggestions on the theme would be greatly welcomed. Comment here or drop me a line on IM/email.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get around to making the changes I really want to see before too long here. Did I mention that Buckcherry is awesome? Well now you know!

P.S. For all of you that read this in your Feed Reader, please take an extra few seconds to drop by and let me know what you think in the comments!

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Upgrade Complete! (for now)