Build­ing foun­da­tions — the hard way!

When I started this blog, the web was alight with talk of Word­Press, Blog­ger, and other “blog­ging plat­forms”. I even­tu­ally chose Word­Press as I was blown away by all the var­ied and artis­tic themes that were avail­able for it. Also Word­Press is extremely extend­able through plu­g­ins for embed­ding YouTube movies, photo’s from Flickr and a host of other things. Before you even start blog­ging, it is impor­tant to build a solid foun­da­tion for your Word­Press Blog. Here are 11 plu­g­ins to help with that…

Secu­rity

Above all else, you need to ensure the secu­rity of your blog. While you may think that it will never hap­pen to you, or that you have lit­tle to lose by blog spam, theft, or deface­ment, it is best not to test those assump­tions. Espe­cially when it is so easy with these two plugins:

• Word­Press Auto­matic Upgrade — All soft­ware has bugs which can result in major secu­rity vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties. Word­Press is no excep­tion. As bugs are dis­cov­ered and fixed, new ver­sions are released which include these fixes. This plu­gin greatly sim­pli­fies the process of back­ing up your data­base and Word­Press files, down­load­ing the lat­est soft­ware and installing it and reac­ti­vat­ing every­thing. Plus, updat­ing fre­quently is eas­ier and saves a lot of heartache over less fre­quent major upgrade jumps.
• WP Secu­rity Scan — For many peo­ple, buy­ing host­ing and installing Word­Press is one of their first encoun­ters with Unix, and Unix secu­rity. I am in the lucky posi­tion of know­ing a lit­tle about UNIX, but even for me this plu­gin is very help­ful. It runs a series of checks to ensure that your copy of Word­Press, and sup­port­ing soft­ware (PHP, MySQL) are up2date, and that the per­mis­sions on your web­site direc­tory are appropriate.
• Akismet — This plu­gin is so pop­u­lar, and com­mon­place, it should nearly be part of Word­Press at this stage. It’s job is to inter­cept blog spam. While it may not be as crit­i­cal as the other two plu­g­ins men­tioned, it is still in my opin­ion, an impor­tant secu­rity func­tion to pre­vent deface­ment of your blog with spam.

Backup

Pos­si­bly tied in first place for impor­tance is back­ing up your data. Time after time I have read about peo­ple los­ing their blog con­tent (pri­mar­ily through dis­putes / dis­agree­ment with their host­ing com­pa­nies, it must be said). The best back­ups are inclu­sive (i.e. backup every­thing, exclud­ing what you don’t need rather than exclude every­thing, back­ing up what you need), auto­mated, and off site. As most Word­Press con­tent is stored in MySQL data­base, back­ing that up is most impor­tant, though a monthly full backup of your site direc­to­ries etc. is not a bad idea either.

• WP-DBManager — There are sev­eral plu­g­ins deal­ing with data­base backup. I like this one as it has the abil­ity to email you the data­base backup on a sched­ule (as I use Google Apps for my domain, I have a sep­a­rate email account set up to receive all back­ups). And it also adds data­base tuning!

Sta­tis­tics

So you are up in run­ning, your blog is secure, and if a dis­as­ter were to hap­pen, you have back­ups to get you back up and run­ning. Now before you open the flood­gates to the masses, you might want to know who your vis­i­tors are, where they came from, and what they are read­ing on your blog:

• Google Ana­lyt­ics for Word­Press — Google Ana­lyt­ics has become the big daddy of the web­site sta­tis­tics world. It’s free, sim­ple to use, and extremely com­pre­hen­sive in the infor­ma­tion it cap­tures. You need a Google Account (NOTE: this is dif­fer­ent to a Gmail or a Google Apps account, but you can use your login details from those to set one up. As an added bonus, it also works for Google AdSense), and once it is set up, you are given a piece of JavaScript code to include in all your blog post­ings, pages, etc. This plu­gin sim­pli­fies this last piece if the puzzle.
• WordPress.com Stats — Some­times, you just want a sim­ple “sum­mary” of your blog sta­tis­tics. Well, this is the plu­gin for you. It places a num­ber of attrac­tive graphs, and stats in your Word­Press dashboard.

Search Engine Optimization

Not get­ting many hits? Let’s be hon­est with our­selves, it is highly likely we will never make our liv­ing as blog­gers, but it would be nice to get a lit­tle more traf­fic. Wel­come to the sci­ence of Search Engine Opti­mi­sa­tion or SEO, which has only 258 mil­lion hits on Google! I wasn’t even aware of it until I started this blog. Wikipedia defines SEO as:

…is the process of improv­ing the vol­ume and qual­ity of traf­fic to a web­site from search engines via “nat­ural” (“organic” or “algo­rith­mic”) search results for tar­geted key­words.

Basi­cally, it is the process of form­ing your blog URLs, nam­ing and describ­ing your posts, adding tags, and struc­tur­ing your site to max­imise the chances of good search results. I know peo­ple work for years to get to the top in Google, and while I am not there yet with my blog, I am get­ting closer…

• All in One SEO Pack — This plu­gin adds some form ele­ments to the “write post” page, allow­ing you to eas­ily enter search engine friendly descrip­tions, tags and sum­maries to your heart’s content!
• Google XML Sitemaps — When Google and other search engines come c®a(w)lling, if you have a prop­erly for­mat­ted map of your posts and blog in XML, they will be all the hap­pier. This plu­gin auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ates this file for you.
• ShareThis — This plu­gin isn’t strictly an SEO plu­gin, but it does help bring traf­fic to your site. The only plu­gin here which visu­ally alters your post, it allows vis­i­tors to eas­ily sub­mit con­tent they like to Digg.com, Reddit.com, or other social link­ing sites.

Adver­tis­ing

Now that you are get­ting the odd vis­i­tor, time to make the site pay. As I men­tioned already, I doubt I will retire on the tak­ings, but even if you cover your host­ing costs, it all helps!

• AdSense Man­ager — A lot of peo­ple are still very hos­tile to adver­tis­ing, find­ing them intru­sive. With much of the web now financed by adver­tis­ing as long as it is taste­fully done, I have no major issue with it. And some times I actu­ally see things which inter­est me. Google AdSense opened up web adver­tis­ing to the masses, and the ads they serve up are typ­i­cally rel­e­vant and not too intru­sive. This plu­gin allows you to place ads in a Word­Press wid­get, and in posts. If I had one com­plaint about this plu­gin, it is that the drop down box for plac­ing ads in posts is only avail­able in the HTML view.

Caching

Unlike tra­di­tional html based web­sites, Word­Press is not just a bunch of sta­tic files. Rather it is an appli­ca­tion, employ­ing PHP to gen­er­ate dynamic web pages from data in a MySQL data­base. This allows a very rich and dynamic web site, but each page does take a lit­tle time to gen­er­ate. Under nor­mal load, this is not an issue, but if you get a flood of vis­i­tors it could wipe you out. That is where caching comes in…

• WP Super Cache — There are a num­ber of Word­Press caching plu­g­ins, but some require load­ing the PHP engine to serve the sta­tic con­tent. This plu­gin gets around this. Added bonus — devel­oped in Ireland!!