I used to use a great Wordpress plugin called Wordpress Automatic Upgrade, or WPAU to its, many, fans. A plugin whiich used to be recommened by the Wordpress site itself becuase it did what it did so well.
It really was a great plugin and meant you could upgrade your Wordpress blogging platform in about 10 minutes flat, with minimal site downtime. This plugin also backed up your database and all WP installation files and encoouraged you to download them, just in case something went wrong.
I upgraded to WP 2.7 in a flash via WPAU, and with no hiccups. Great.
Enter little message on the WP dashboard telling me to upgrade to 2.7.1. OK I thought, let's see if WPAU can do it. Alas no. Aah.
What followed was a mornings downloading of all my site files for backup purposes. That done, and remember all if this used to take 10 minutes, I tried the new built in upgrade feature. No dice. Apparently I needed to 'chown' some folders via a quaint little command line program called 'putty'. I'm good at chmod, but no chown.
So I did not bother with the chown thing and decided to do it the old way via an FTP system, deleting and upgrading everything after having to manually disable all the plugins individually because the mass deactivation didn't want to play ball, and the caching system did not really want to be deactivated, so I downloaded it to my hard drive and deleted it from my server. It worked fine after I re-uploaded the plugin to my newly upgraded WP installation, thankfully.
After around a morning's work, my updated Wordpress installation was running. But what a fuss, from ten minutes to around 3 to 4 hours. I've only got two more sites to do luckily, but I feel sorry for those who have 10+ sites to deal with.
Still, some people should be OK with the built in upgrade, although others have been having problems.
So, Matt Mullenweg and all the WP development team - please provide built in upgrading functionality to Wordpress, including the possibility to back up all files and the database from within Wordpress. After all, if WPAU could do it, I'm sure you can find a way to do it too!
By the way: Wordpress rocks awesomely! I love it. Shame the shiny new WP 2.7 is, in some respects, a step back into the past.
domenica 15 febbraio 2009
venerdì 6 febbraio 2009
Google Analytics
I've been using Google Analytics for quite some time now, and it provides some very interesting data.
The trouble is, I'm not too happy with the results I'm seeing. The bounce rate for my Blog from Italy site is generally too high. I suspect this is partially down to my attempts at SEO, in that Blog from Italy appears quite high in search engine results for certain Italy related subjects - especially regarding speeding fines and iPhones!
While this is good, it is one thing getting people to your site, but it is another keeping them there. Part of the problem might be that people see the word 'Blog' and decide that they've landed on the wrong runway. This means they take off pretty quickly - hence he bounce rate.
Page view numbers are not that high either - and this surprises me a little becuase I've got all that 'related posts' stuff everywhere, so I would hope that people might become more curious. At times this does happen, but not as often as is necessary to gain regular visitors.
Drilling the analytics data down is interesting too. I can see what people like, and what they do not. This gives me the odd idea or two for subject matter. Still, wrting content which keeps people coming back for more is not all that easy, and the fact that I write about what catches my eye probably means that much of the appeal of the site is limited to people like me. This is good on paper, only I don't think there are many people like me around.
Sometimes I think I write about too many subjects, and this too may mean that people do not come back, or rather, they do not come back until they see something of interest.
The experimentation and observation will continue, and Google's cool analytics system will certainly help from a content point of view.
It's a lot of work, and the results are not always immediate. Still, this is all part of the challenge behind building a successful website!
The trouble is, I'm not too happy with the results I'm seeing. The bounce rate for my Blog from Italy site is generally too high. I suspect this is partially down to my attempts at SEO, in that Blog from Italy appears quite high in search engine results for certain Italy related subjects - especially regarding speeding fines and iPhones!
While this is good, it is one thing getting people to your site, but it is another keeping them there. Part of the problem might be that people see the word 'Blog' and decide that they've landed on the wrong runway. This means they take off pretty quickly - hence he bounce rate.
Page view numbers are not that high either - and this surprises me a little becuase I've got all that 'related posts' stuff everywhere, so I would hope that people might become more curious. At times this does happen, but not as often as is necessary to gain regular visitors.
Drilling the analytics data down is interesting too. I can see what people like, and what they do not. This gives me the odd idea or two for subject matter. Still, wrting content which keeps people coming back for more is not all that easy, and the fact that I write about what catches my eye probably means that much of the appeal of the site is limited to people like me. This is good on paper, only I don't think there are many people like me around.
Sometimes I think I write about too many subjects, and this too may mean that people do not come back, or rather, they do not come back until they see something of interest.
The experimentation and observation will continue, and Google's cool analytics system will certainly help from a content point of view.
It's a lot of work, and the results are not always immediate. Still, this is all part of the challenge behind building a successful website!
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