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506 CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG Summary This chapter covered how to back up and restore your blog. I ve given you tips on how to keep your blog healthy and functioning. I ve also given you some ideas on how to feed your blog how to keep it fresh and interesting for your readers. My intention in these six chapters about WordPress was to show you how you can use it to build an active and lively community centered on your interests. WordPress is a great tool for self-publishing. It s easy to shape to suit you and your readers. If you aren t already up and running with WordPress, your next step should be to find a hosting service and go for it! Pick a subject you are passionate about, install WordPress, and start blogging!
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CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG 505 summarize what your site is about. If you have a policy page, does it still state your site policy? If you do update any of these pages, make a post about that update, inviting feedback. Seeking New Readers Submit your site to related directories and special-interest sites. Politely invite people to your site. Don t spam those other sites; show respect for their owners, who are likely trying to build their own readership. Always consider reciprocal links to sites that contain links to your site. Keep abreast of new sites in your subject area. If new ones appear, visit them regularly to see if they offer potential to gain you new visitors. Comment on their stories, and post your own stories about the things they are discussing. Don t forget to use WordPress s Pingback and TrackBack capabilities to create an automatic relationship between the stories. Visitors from the other sites will come to read the stories on your site. Keeping Your Site Interesting Track your subject matter around the Web. Keep up-to-date with the changes in the field. It may be that over time, the slant of your blog will change as people s interests change or as your chosen field develops. Be sure to update old articles as appropriate. For instance, maybe you wrote a speculative piece last year and now some of the things you speculated about have come to fruition. Write a new piece referencing the old article and either blow your own trumpet about how you guessed right, or comment on how things turned out if you got it wrong. It doesn t actually matter whether you were right or wrong; if you write interestingly about your subject, people will still read your post and comment on it. Encouraging Contributors If you can encourage some of your readers to contribute stories or articles, that is a great way to get more content for your blog. If you do have guest authors, make sure you come to an agreement over copyright and publishing rights. If they are writing explicitly for you, make sure to allow them to quote or reproduce their articles on their own sites. It can also be worth investigating republishing third-party articles (with appropriate permissions, of course) as another source of new content. Many authors out there will be glad to have a platform for their writings. Maintaining Security The best way to maintain your blog s security is to keep up-to-date with WordPress releases. You can check the postings listed in the Dashboard on your administration pages. Any new releases, especially security fixes, will be noted there. If there are any new releases, the announcement usually details the steps you need to take to update your blog. Invariably with WordPress, the process is very simple. It is also a good idea to check the home sites of any plug-ins and themes you have installed. Perhaps once a month is often enough. Again, any new releases or security fixes will be noted there.
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504 CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG Figure 18-13. The LinkChecker in progress Keeping Your Content Fresh Along with search engines such as Google ranking fresh content highly, your readers will come to expect that every time they come back to visit, they will have something new to read. You can take several steps to help keep your content fresh. Adding New Posts Regularly One of the important things you can do to keep your community active is to add new posts regularly. Try to get into the habit of posting regularly. It often doesn t matter how often you post, as long as it is on a regular basis. If you can update once a week, or perhaps every four days, that sets a good pace. Resist the temptation to post as often as possible. At first, you will probably be able to sustain that pace, but as soon as it becomes too much work and it will unless it is your full- time job you will start skipping days. As soon as you do that, you start to disappoint your readers, who will have come to expect very frequent new posts. If you think of a lot of things to say ahead of schedule, save them in draft form for the time when you don t have anything new to say. If you are stuck for something new to say, it is worth checking that your static pages are still up-to-date. For example, does the About page still
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CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG 503 can install the LinkChecker extension (http://www.kevinfreitas.net/extensions/linkchecker/), by Kevin A. Freitas. This extension allows you to check the links on any page you are viewing. After you install the extension into Firefox from Kevin s site, you will have a new command in the Tools menu: Check Page Links, as shown in Figure 18-12. Click this command, and the extension will check the links in the page one at a time. As it checks each link, it will highlight it to indicate its status. The colors used are green for a good link, red for broken links, yellow for redirected or forbidden links, and gray for skipped links. Figure 18-12. Starting the LinkChecker Firefox extension The extension also shows its progress in the Firefox status bar. Figure 18-13 shows this in action. Notice that even the image header of the blog is highlighted, as it is a link to the main page. An advantage of the LinkChecker Firefox extension is that it is cross-platform. It will run on any computer that Firefox runs on. The disadvantage of it is that, like the simple online services, it checks only one page at a time. For a more sophisticated solution, you need to look at stand-alone programs for your desktop. A number are available, of varying functionality and quality. A good place to start looking is in Google s directory, at http://directory.google.com/ Top/Computers/Software/Internet/Site_Management/Link_Management/.
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502 CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG Figure 18-11. Link Valet report page As you can see, the report lists each link on the submitted page, along with a status indicating the link s health: status 200 is OK, status 302 is also OK, and status 404 means that the page you linked is reported as not found. Link Valet highlights these in red as an indicator for you to do something about it: either to correct the inaccurate link or generate the page it s attempting to link to. Another similar service is Link Checker from SiteOwner.com (http://siteowner.bcentral.com/ system/linkcheck.asp). This service reports only links with errors. You don t need to wade through screens full of good links to find the broken ones. The problem with services like these is that you need to submit every single page on your site to check for bad links. As you start to accumulate more and more posts on your site, this quickly becomes an unworkable solution. Recognizing this, most of the online services offer a more sophisticated service, whereby their software automatically loads the pages on your own site (by following links), and checks the links on each of those pages. Although this is a much better way of doing things, even automated checking of the links on every page of a large site can take a considerable time as much as a few hours. These services generally e-mail you the results or a link to the results in a private area on their server. Not surprisingly, all the services I have seen charge a fee for this more sophisticated checking. They often offer other services, too, like checking your HTML for validity, checking your site for accessibility, and so on. Shop around to find the deal that suits you best. Using Desktop Link Checking Tools An alternative to online link checking services is desktop link checking tools. One such tool I came across is an extension for the Firefox web browser. If you are using this browser, you
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CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG 501 One way to reduce your bandwidth usage is to reduce the size of your pages. A properly constructed, valid, XHTML web page will be smaller in size than one written in the old-school style using font tags, tables, and spacer images for layout. Using CSS for styling and layout reduces the size of your web page so that it downloads quicker and reduces your bandwidth usage. It will most likely render more quickly in your readers browsers, too, which is an added bonus. WordPress strives to conform to the XHTML standard, but even though the code delivered by WordPress may be minimal, it still doesn t prevent you from writing pages and posts using the old-school style of web page writing, though it does encourage you to separate presentation and content by the appropriate use of CSS. In the previous chapter, I illustrated how to remove the sidebar of calendars, del.icio.us links, and login/register controls. Doing so not only makes the page cleaner for a single-post-entry context, but also reduces the page weight considerably, if your sidebars contain a lot of information, such as a long list of pages, posts, categories, and so on. The example in Chapter 17 would work well if your most weighty pages are individual posts, like two of the top three URLs in Figure 18-10. Checking Your Links Another regular routine task you should undertake is to check the links on your site. Nothing is quite so frustrating to a user than to click a link referenced in a blog post, only to find the page has disappeared. Inevitably, people do move their web sites to new URLs, or they rearrange their site so that old links to pages no longer work. Sometimes, they abandon their sites altogether. You cannot control what other people do with the pages you link to, but you can at least make sure your readers are not disappointed too often. What you can control is your own links. You should make sure that your own links you make to, for example, past stories still work. Another source of broken links is the list of links you have in your blogroll, resources list, and so on, managed by WordPress s Link Manager (described in Chapter 17). Finally, readers sometimes leave links in their comments, which can go out-of-date. You could check each of those links by hand: clicking each in your browser and checking that the link still works. Unfortunately, that gets tedious after about the first five! Luckily, a number of solutions to this problem are available, in the form of both online services and desktop tools. Using Online Link Checking Services A number of web sites provide online link checking services. They work by reading your web page after you provide the URL, and checking each of the links they find on your page. One such tool is Link Valet from the Web Design Group (http://valet.htmlhelp.com/link/). Figure 18-11 shows a portion of a typical report page.
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CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG 500 Figure 18-9. Webalizer monthly summary Figure 18-10. Another view of Webalizer statistics
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CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG 499 Monitoring Bandwidth Bandwidth usage is another limit your hosting service will specify. Strictly speaking, bandwidth is the wrong term to use. Hosting companies usually restrict your monthly data transfer allowance; that is, they monitor how much data is transferred from your account each month. Unfortunately, the term bandwidth is so commonly used for this allowance that it has become the way to describe it. If you exceed the allowed bandwidth, several things may happen: The hosting company may shut down your site until the end of the month. The hosting company may allow your site to go over the limit but charge you for the excess (often an excessive amount). The hosting company may force you to upgrade your account to one with more bandwidth allowance. Most control panels provided by your hosting company have some way to monitor your bandwidth usage. Figure 18-8 shows one such example from the Plesk control panel (http:// www.sw-soft.com/en/products/plesk/). Figure 18-8. Plesk traffic report If your hosting service provides traffic statistics derived from your web server logs, those can be another way to monitor your traffic. Figure 18-9 shows a typical monthly chart from the Webalizer package (http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/). From a chart like this, you can get a good idea of the growth of your traffic and look for trends that look like you might be exceeding your bandwidth allowance. Figure 18-10 shows another statistics report from the Webalizer package. This particular report shows the URLs that use the most bandwidth. In this example, you see that the third page in the list has managed to generate almost 1.3% of the traffic, despite having only 791 hits. Compare that to the first page in the list, which has of 22,000 hits for 7.4% of the traffic. In other words, that third file is using a disproportionate amount of bandwidth allowance. I investigated that post on my blog and saw that it has more than 530 comments, making it a huge, 400KB page. I can choose to address this issue in some way, perhaps by trimming the comments that are over a year old. Many statistics package provide reports like this that allow you to delve into the aggregated data from your server s web logs.
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498 CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG Download the Spam Nuker plug-in from http://www.chrisjdavis.org/2005/03/05/ spam-nuker-151/. Install this as a plug-in on your blog and activate it. Go to WordPress s Manage page, and you will see an extra tab labeled Spam. Click the Spam tab, and you will be presented with a page like the one shown in Figure 18-7. The tab includes the number of spam comments in its title. In the example, a rather excessive 39,000 spam comments were found. Note that the e-mail and URI in the figure have been intentionally blurred. Figure 18-7. Spam Nuker management page The plug-in has two functions: Mass Spam Nuke: This allows you to remove all the comments marked as spam with a single click. Simply click the Nuke em, nuke em all! button. However, as the page cautions, this step is irreversible (database backup not withstanding). You might want to look at the other function first. Unspammer: This allows you to change the status of a comment marked as spam. Depending on how you detect and mark comments as spam, you may end up with some false positives some comments marked as spam that should not be. This function allows you to correct that and rescue those comments. Look down the list of comments. The name, e-mail, URI, IP address, and a count of duplicates are provided to help you decide the status of a comment. If you find any comments that should not be marked as spam, click the check box to the left of the comment. When you have finished with the list, click the Unspam me! button at the bottom of the page. The comments you marked will be changed to be ordinary comments, disappear from the spam list, and appear on your site as normal comments. When you are sure you have rescued all the legitimate comments, go ahead and click the Nuke em button. All of your spam comments will be removed from the database, saving you valuable space.
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CHAPTER 18 MAINTAINING YOUR BLOG 497 The storage space used by WordPress, your images, your download files, and so on The space taken by your database holding your posts, comments, links, and so on (this is sometimes counted separately from your main storage) The bandwidth used each month by your visitors accessing your pages Monitoring Your Storage Space The storage space used by your files is usually more than adequate in current hosting packages, unless you have an exceptionally large number of images or files. Many hosting companies cheapest packages allow from 500MB of storage to as much as 4GB. Some offer considerably less. I would steer clear of those. As a rough guide to how much space you might need, WordPress itself, including the built-in themes and perhaps a couple more themes, is unlikely to be more than 2MB. But if you have a lot of images, photographs, product images, maps, charts, and so on, this amount can soon increase. My main web site uses just over 150MB for around 1,800 images, 70% of which are high-resolution photographs. If you were to store high-quality MP3 music files, then 350 such files might use up 1GB. If you stored lower-quality speech files, 350 of them might take only 400MB. The space taken by your database is significantly less. For example, my main blog with 1,100 posts and 58,000 comments uses just 21MB of storage space. You will need to monitor your storage space usage regularly. The way you check exactly how much space you are using is different from one hosting company to another. Generally, you can expect your administration pages, or control panel, to have an option to calculate the space you have used. How often you should check depends on how quickly your blog grows. That growth rate is something you will need to judge for yourself. Start by checking once a week and make a judgment after a month or two. If you are allocated, say, 1GB, and after a month, you ve used 10MB, then you don t really need to check too often. A monthly check should be enough to give you plenty of warning before you start to run out. If, after a couple of months, you ve used 400MB, you will need to monitor it more closely, perhaps on a weekly basis. If you do find yourself running low on space, or at least heading that way, you have several options. If you have a lot of high-resolution images, you should consider replacing the older ones with lower-resolution versions, if that won t detract from the value of your old posts. Similarly, if your community blog is a support site for your software and you offer downloads, you could consider removing the older versions. But make sure any old posts that link to them are updated. You don t want to leave bad links in your old posts. I ll show you how to check for bad links later in this chapter, in the Checking Your Links section. With regard to your database, there isn t really a lot you can do to reduce its size. The bulk of your database is your content: your posts and pages, your visitors comments, and your links. You don t want to get rid of any of that because it is the lifeblood of your blog. However, the spam comments can go, as described next. Cleaning Comment Spam If you recall from Chapter 15, I mentioned that WordPress doesn t give you any way to access comments marked as spam. For that, you need a third-party plug-in. Chris J. Davis s Spam Nuker is one such plug-in.
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