Thursday, July 16th, 2009
Installing Wordpress to Cartika hosting is no different than installing it on any other web host. The focus of this article is in showing the specific sequence of steps which needs to be done in order to install Wordpress in Cartica's Control panel.
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First login into your Control Panel. Use the login information you received when you account was created.
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Create a database for your Wordpress installation. Click the MySQL Server icon in your Control Panel home screen. Scroll down a little to see it, it's in Databases section.
How to access MySQL Server settings
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Write down or copy the MySQL Server Host Name. You will need it to configure your Wordpress installation.
MySQL Server information
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Click Add database at the bottom of the MySQL Databases list.
Add new database
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Then enter the name of the database and write it down.
New database properties
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On the next screen enter the database User name, Password and set User role to dba. You can use some password generator to make a secure password. Write all of this down.
Add MySQL user to database
Now your database is ready to be used by Wordpress.
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Next steps are about putting Wordpress on your site and configuring it.
Get the latest Wordpress here and unpack in your computer.
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Use the FTP login information you received when you account was created to login to your FTP and see a list of domains you have. Copy the unpacked Wordpress installation into the desired site directory. In our screenshot it's the test.*****.com directory representing the domain of same name. We like to use FileZilla as an FTP client.
Copy your Wordpress installation to your site's FTP folder
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After it's uploaded, you can rename it to for example wp, so it's not so obvious where all of your Wordpress files are located.
Renaming the folder
That's why we are putting it into subdirectory too. We like our Wordpress in /wp and our images in /images, so the site's root directory is clear.
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You need to create index.php with following content and copy it into your site root directory in order to have the Wordpress installed is the subdirectory and accessible just with the domain name.
<?php
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require('./wp/wp-blog-header.php');
?>
Copy index.php to your site root folder
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Now you can open the site via http://yourdomainname.com/wordpress-subdirectory to start the installation. It's http://test.******.com/wp in our case.
Wordpress Installation
Prepare your paper with database host, database name, database user name and database user password. You will need it as you go through the installation.
- Enter your database information, press Submit and copy or write down your admin user account information. You will change it anyway, but you need it to get into your freshly installed Wordpress.
installing wp016
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That's it, your Wordpress is running. Now go to
http://yourdomainname.com/wordpress-subdirectory/wp-admin
to login into your Wordpress administration interface.
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Click Settings -> General in left-hand menu to change the Wordpress URL.
Wordpress administration menu
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Set Blog address (URL) to your domain name. That means you remove the /wp from there. This way, your site will be accessible via your domain name, the permalink structure is using your domain name as the base address, yet all the files are stored in some subfolder.
Wordpress General Settings
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Click Miscellanious to adjust where your images are stored.
Store uploads in this folder:
../images
Full URL path to files:
/images
Make sure this directory exists in your site root folder.
Wordpress Miscellaneous Settings
Note that this step applies only if you are not planing to use our advanced post editor Foliopress WYSIWYG.
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That's it, Wordpress Installation is done.
Your Wordpress login URL:
http://yourdomainname.com/wordpress-subdirectory/wp-admin
(you can create a redirection to this URL from something more simple like /admin with Redirection plugin)
Wordpress URL:
http://yourdomainname.com/
Images will be stored in:
http://yourdomainname.com/images
(instead of ugly default http://yourdomainname.com/wp-content/uploads)
Further reading:
Foliopress WYSIWYG installation
Installing Wordpress on wordpress.org
By Martin
WordPress |
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
One of our Typepad to Wordpress clients would really like to rank higher with her nice new Wordpress weblog. She is hosted at Bluehost.com. Her IP number is 66.147.242.185. I ran a quick check to find out what other websites are on that IP.
Here is just a partial list of her neighbours:
consumersadvicemonthly.com
inkerstattoo.com
marksartori.com
mckennalaw.org
starbrighttravel.com
www.agap3.com
ww.ciafrica.com
ww.ed4wb.org
www.hittherack.com
www.juniormemorychampionship.com
www.morganjameschadwick.com
www.rentatelemarketer.net
www.rockymountaincoe.org
www.trinityschoolokc.org
www.turkishtravel.com
www.oldfortestates.com
www.hambastegi.org
www.agimaklake.com
www.tlca.org
www.turkishtravel.com
www.le-friseur.de
www.state4.com
www.calvarycampground.org
theoldfort.com
saltshakers.org.au
www.cspn.cl
www.lgmpharma.com
www.nawr.com
www.endlessblue.com
www.anternasional.com
www.haftegi.com
runebearer.com
www.developafrica.org
www.lindaq.com
www.rockwoodgarden.com
www.trinityschoolokc.org
tlca.org
www.hainsworth.com
www.spokanerecycling.com
oldfortestates.com
skymanor.com
www.piloterror.net
www.oldfortbequia.com
tw-volvo.com
www.ciafrica.com
www.hittherack.com
www.lkrobertson.com
nawr.com
www.equal-rights-now.com
percepolis.com
www.adpi.net
adrealestateinc.com
www.cwa7603.org
lollydaskal.com
aberdeeninvestment.com
www.we-recycle.com
shipnai.com
www.robertwells.com
www.danceconmigo.com
resremcon.com
www.foodini.org
www.uufsm.org
www.patrickhorsley.com
www.naccfi.com
thebeanery.com
www.arcbutte.org
www.ed4wb.org
www.summerplacecasuals.com
www.pasadenavilla.com
www.ilovejupiter.com
donleycomm.com
bequiablog.com
www.harkeytileandstone.com
www.careerdesigncoach.com
thenfi.com
www.cameopublishing.com
topshelf-fishing.com
Some of these sites look okay. Others look like real cruft.
After doing a careful Wordpress SEO tune-up, my next recommendation was that she moves to a clean dedicated IP.
It's possible to rent a dedicated IP from Bluehost for $30/year (at least it was in 2006).
Why is it important to be on a dedicated IP? Google says it doesn't matter. But Google scores everything. Even how long you have paid your domain registration (on your high value domains pay up those 10 years ahead - scammers and spammers don't). A dedicated IP costs money every month. And that means that the site owner is probably a lot more serious about the website.
Why on earth would Google give up on scoring such a great indicator of site quality?
Before anyone goes and complains that there are lots of bad sites on dedicated IP's, I would like to point out the math.
- there are many, many spammy sites on shared IP's from the likes of Dreamhost, Bluehost and far worse (out of inadequate and oversold hosts, Dreamhost and Bluehost at least take a kick at the can with customer service)
- there are proportionately few high quality sites on those shared IP's
- there are some spammy sites on dedicated IP's
- there are many high quality sites on dedicated IP's
The Google corporation is a lot better at math than Foliovision (and we have mathematicians on staff as well) and probably much better than your own company as well (unless you are a brokerage writing your own market timing software). Google have done that math and they do score IP's along with another 2000 related factors. A dedicated IP won't win the race for you, but who wants to head out the gate as the star downhill skier who doesn't handwax his or her skis?
I am always complaining about Typepad (and for good reason: Typepad customer service is terrible, the platform is deteriorating instead of improving and SixApart deliberately cripple Typepad export) - but this is one area where they score high marks. The IP's are shared but you are sharing with other high quality sites as a group. Google does give bonus marks to Typepad IP's. If you move away from Typepad but to really crappy hosting, you may even see your search engine rankings drop until you fix the hosting problem.
There are other issues with crappy oversold hosting besides a fair amount of site downtime per year and the lousy/incompetent/slow support.
One is pingtime and the other are what I like to call hosting brownouts. If you've ever been a client at Dreamhost, you know that they cram your server until it creaks. It's like the old stationwagon with everyone's bike on the roof, all the boxes crammed up to all the windows pushing down the interstate. Sure it still runs - but not very well. The underlying car might be pretty good but it's just overloaded. That's a Dreamhost and as far as I know Bluehost server as well (and the worst part is that these two guys are far from the worst of a bad lot - for a hobby or personal site, that doesn't really need to be up all the time or can occasionally be slow as it doesn't get many visitors, they are probably just fine).
Google will also score your site on speed of the hosting. And once again, fast, responsive hosting is the signal of a quality website. Is Google doing the math? You bet... with more than 200 million websites in the world to keep track of and to rank, they have to.
It's getting to the point, we recommend to almost all our clients that they join us on Foliopress.net with a dedicated IP. We host our clients on clean IP's on one of the top tier hosts. Sites load like lightning, downtime is non-existent (in three years, I haven't managed to put three hours together yet - and I am talking about total downtime including scheduled maintenance fixes). We have optimised our already top-notch hosting to run impeccably with Wordpress both cached and uncached.
I know this works. We have seen some of our clients move to us from Dreamhost for example and double their traffic in less than two months, with no other changes, mainly from being on better quality hosting and clean IPs.
Wordpress SEO Takeaways:
- Get yourself great hosting.
- Get yourself a dedicated IP while you are there.
By Alec
SEO, WordPress |
Friday, July 10th, 2009
Foliopress WYSIWYG is our WYSIWYG editor for Wordpress with custom image management tool. We just released a new version - 0.9.3. It includes some minor improvements, but the most important feature it the Paste Rich Text Mode button. What's that all about?
When you are pasting some text into the editor it will be striped of all the formating - that is called plain text pasting. This kind of pasting is good when you are pasting text from some website and you want to get just the clean text with no ugly <span>, <div> or some other tags which may change the appearance of the text in your article in a bad way and make a mess in your HTML code.
But sometimes you want to paste all the text with original formating and maybe with some images in it. Or you just want to copy some parts of the article you are writing. In that case just press Rich Text Pasting Mode button.
Rich Text Pasting Mode button
It's a new addition to the toolbar. This will bypass the text cleaning mechanism, so be careful when you are pasting from various word processing programs.
Please note that a popup window will appear in Firefox and Safari when pasting in plain text mode as there is no way for these browsers to access the clipboard data. We can't deal with it. Developers of Firefox and Safari have a good reason why not to support cliboard access in their browsers - it's a security risk. Imagine that any site can get your clipboard data without this restriction.
There's no popup in Rich Text Pasting Mode.
More about Foliopress WYSIWYG & download
Foliopress WYSIWYG changelog
By Martin
WordPress |
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
If you are tired of paying for FTP client like CuteFTP or WS_FTP Professional, but haven't been able to find a good replacement, well, you obviously haven't found FileZilla. It's free, it's open source and it's great.
FileZilla is built on wxWidgets, which is my preferable choice for C++ Cross-platform toolkit, allowing it to be compiled on many operating systems. Ready made binaries are available for almost all the major platforms. On Windows, install is very easy, but this may vary on different platforms.
filezilla main
User interface is pretty intuitive. You can traverse the server and your computer without any problems, with mouse and keyboard as well. Site manager manages you FTP, FTPS, SFTP connections with ease.
filezilla settings
filezilla transfers
One of the best and most useful features FileZilla has simultaneous transfer. It allows you to download/upload more files at once and therefore saving you time for other important things. It also gives you a very important summary of file transfer, so you'll see which files failed to transfer, which were transferred successfully. You can also order files that failed to transfer, to download/upload again. This may see as not very important, but when uploading 800 MB of images (15,000 of them, I did it last week), it will be useful.
Of course you could zip them, upload them, unzip them, but it's more hassle than just uploading them in a matter of minutes, depending on you connection.
filezilla settings
There are not many settings, but all the important ones. This makes FileZilla easily configurable for less technically advanced users.
To summarize, FileZilla is a great FTP client, portable, stable, robust and reliable. It is my number one choice - and FTP is a core part of my work.
P.S: There surely are many other very good FTP clients. For instance, one that mentioned on internet a lot is WinSCP (Windows only). But in Foliovision we use FileZilla and are delighted with it.
By Peter
WordPress |
