The Real Lance Brown

Confused about WordPress, and don’t understand what’s up with its dot-com and dot-org variants? That’s about to end!

What is WordPress?

Basically, WordPress is a piece of software made up (primarily) of many PHP files, which work together, in conjunction with a database, to serve up pages and blog posts. (The way they display is controlled mainly by a Theme, which is made up (primarily) of PHP template files.)

WordPress runs on a web server. You access and use it via the Web. If you install it, you install it on your web site/host – - not on your own computer.

What is WordPress.org?

That software described above is available for free download at WordPress.org (and via various “one-click”-style installers at many/most web hosts). To use that, you need to own a website domain that is already hosted somewhere. (Thus, this version is sometimes called “self-hosted”.)

If you install “dot org WordPress” at your own web site, you can use it for free and do whatever you want with it. But just as you have full power, you also have full responsibility for operating and maintaining that WordPress installation. You might need to do some online learning to really get underway, and while there are lots of WP support resources on the web, no one would be around to hold your hand. (Your host will almost certainly offer little to no help with WordPress, beyond maybe helping you get it installed.) A lot of business owners in this situation will look to a WP professional like myself to help them get squared away, or get their theme tweaked, etc.

WordPress.org is backed by the WordPress Foundation, and its mission basically is to spread WordPress across the globe, and to keep making it better while making sure it remains free and open source forever.

What is WordPress.com?

WordPress.com is a free blogging service as well as a for-pay WordPress host. It uses basically the same software as above, but it’s hosted by the WordPress.com people. (Which makes this the “hosted” version of WordPress, vs. the “self-hosted” dot org version.)

With the free account, you get a blog at something like yourname.wordpress.com. It’s not as pimped-out as it could be if you had it hosted on your own site, but you can definitely get off and running with it.

If you pay for their hosting, you can use your own proper domain name–basically getting you to the state that a “dot org” version user is in, except you have the creators of WordPress as your hand-holding guides and hosts. But you also get less control over your actual WordPress installation. (You can’t add plugins, for one thing…you’re stuck with their handful of widgets.) Those WordPress.com people have to manage a gazillion blogs and sites, so they have some limitations in place on their WordPress installations. And they are a for-profit enterprise, so they will definitely hit your wallet a bit, especially if you want to get more features or control.

WordPress.com is run by Automattic, a for-profit company started by WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg.

Which one to use

Which one you should use really depends on your situation and your priorities, as well as your access to tech help and/or your willingness to learn new things and get your hands dirty.

“Self-hosted” WordPress.org is infinitely more powerful than its commercial cousin, due to having full access to all features, plus the ability to use plugins. (And I don’t mean it’s a lot more powerful–I mean it is literally infinitely more powerful.) But it might be scary or confusing to dive into; you could end up daunted just trying to get it installed, and you will probably have lots of questions early on. Push through that, and you could end up with an awesome slick site with hundreds of pages and tons of neat features for essentially free.

“Hosted” WordPress.com is convenient and turnkey, and you get “24/7 support” from the people who know WordPress better than anyone else. Of course, since their WordPress installations are relatively limited, most support probably deals with basic issues involving their limited set of tools and features. But if you’ve seen (and been freaked out by) the full WordPress menu set, you might prefer a more scaled-down version. And your ambitions for your web presence may be such that a WordPress.com might be the perfect simple solution for you.

I’m such a huge fan of what the WordPress folks have brought into the world that I’m more than happy to see people spend money on their dot-com services, even though it’s a limited version of WP, and even though I generally make my bacon from business owners who are forging into the denser forest of dot-org WP. ;-)

If you want some advice on which way you should go, you can always tweet me at @freeWPadvice–I’d be happy to help you figure it out (and as the username suggests, I’ll do it for free). If you’re not on Twitter, hit me up some other way and I’ll talk to you there.

Every now and then I come upon a stylesheet that someone created which is hard to read–sometimes, even hard to look at. (Like when everything is all jammed together with barely any line breaks.)

Call me spoiled, but I like to see my CSS styled like this:

.prev {
width: 225px;
padding:7px;
float: left;
}

.next {
width: 225px;
padding:7px;
float:right;
}

#headerimage {
position:absolute;
left: 425px;
top:4px;
width:270px;
}

not like this:

html,body,div,span,object,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,p,blockquote,pre,a,abbr,acronym,address,big,cite,code,del,dfn,em,img,ins,kbd,q,samp,small,strong,sub,sup,tt,var,dl,dt,dd,ol,ul,li,fieldset,form,label,legend,table,caption,tbody,tfoot,thead,tr,th,td{margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;outline:none;font-size:100%;background:transparent;border:none;text-decoration:none}b,i,hr,u,center,menu,layer,s,strike,font,xmp{margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;outline:none;font-size:100%;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;background:transparent;border:none;text-decoration:none}font{color:#333}center{text-align:left}body{line-height:24px;font-family:Georgia,Times,”Times New Roman”,serif;color:#333;background:#fff}h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;margin:0 0 21px 0}h1{font-size:1.8em}h2{font-size:1.7em}h3{font-size:1.55em}

Luckily there is a sweet-ass tool on the web that will take something like the messy block above and pretty it up, a la the pretty bit above that. This CSS Formatter/Optimizer has all sorts of settings so you can fine-tune your results, and it can go both ways…if you want to condense your pretty, spaced-out CSS into the solid-block format (for a smaller file size and quicker load time), you can do that too. There are a lot of neat specific options, so you can auto-modify your stylesheet to suit your taste.

I’ll be using this any time I run into a stylesheet that someone else created in their own wack way–which happens a fair amount. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from ~10 years of PHP/CSS template-based work, it’s that every template/theme creator does things his or her own way. This CSS Optimizer tool will go a long way toward bringing things to my standard–or yours.

It’s not 100% clear who made the web tool, but I had to guess, I’d say credit goes to Florian Schmitz, the creator of CSS Tidy (the desktop software that the web tool is based on). Thanks Florian – great tool!

You remember my post about how I love WordPress plugin people? In it, I mentioned the very cool phenomenon where one would randomly stumble upon some humble plugin author, and discover that said author has a whole page filled with eyebrow-raising plugins of every type. Stumbling onto such people with such pages, I said, was one of the experiences that helps open your eyes to the real vastness and variety of the WP plugin universe.

Witness: Christopher Ross, and his eyebrow-raising page of plugins.

I found Christopher when I found his External Link to New Window plugin, which makes all your links to external sites automatically open in a new window, so people also stay at your site when they visit links to other sites that you post. I’m glad I clicked through from the plugin search results and ended up at his actual site, or I wouldn’t have found the other 25 plugins he has created. And they are cool plugins. Check them out on his site where they have full descriptions and download links, or on his user page at WordPress.org, where you can see how (appropriately) popular his plugins are, and go right to their pages at that site. Then, if you install the WordPress.org One-Click Install Plugin ahead of time, you could install every one of Christopher’s plugins in probably 52 or 78 clicks. That might sound like a lot of clicks, but if you consider all the neato new tools and functions you’d be getting, and the fact that the total financial outlay would be $0.00, it’s a pretty amazing deal.

In fact it’s so amazing, that you should actually give Christopher some money, if you dig his plugins and have some money to spare for appreciation of them. (You can donate via PayPal right on his plugin page.) But even if you don’t/can’t, go check ‘em out, and install 1 or 2 or 26 of them. If all goes well, you should feel a cool little rush, from the realization of all the possibilities that must be available in the world when things like Christopher’s huge page of free WordPress plugins exists.

Thank you, Christopher Ross! I love you and what you do, and have ordered my readers to love you as well.

Here are a couple other great plugins from Christopher’s big page:

Auto-Copyright – adds a copyright message to your footer that (here’s the brilliant part) automatically sets the date range based the dates of your earliest and most recent posts.

WordPress Admin Quick Menu – Add your own menu cluster on the side in the WP Dashboard area, with whatever links you want, including external sites (like Google Analytics maybe, or your other WP dashboards, or help pages for your clients…you get the idea.)

How about a fundraising thermometer? A frame blocker? A login redirect plugin? Those, and 20-odd more. All from one person.

This is why I love plugin people.

Thanks again, Christopher!

WPSnipp.com has provided a little snippet of code that will add a “horizontal rule” (or <hr />) button to the default editor in WordPress.

What’s a horizontal rule? It’s one of these lines:

In my opinion, that should definitely be a default button in the WP editor, but since it isn’t, you can use WPSnipp’s little snippet and add it to your installation. Cool!

WordPress – Add horizontal rule button to editor – wpsnipp.com

Matt Ryan at The Frugal Geek has a guide to the best ways to easily capture a web page as an image for saving, editing, etc. I installed one of the recommended Firefox addons, as part of my “Make things easier so you’ll actually do them instead of putting them off, Lance!” campaign.

How to Capture a Web Page as an Image « The Frugal Geek

Light Stalking has featured a bunch of online image editors that sound really promising: 5 Of The Best Free Online Tools for Quick Photo Editing.

Do you have a preferred online image editor that you use?

Open Site Explorer is a “Link Popularity & Backlink Analysis Tool”, which means it tells you what sites link back to you, and how valuable or popular those sites are. You have to get a pro account to get full data on the value of all your backlinks, but they will show you the links themselves for free.

While you can see who has sent you traffic recently via your referrer logs/site stats/analytics tool, that won’t necessarily show you all the sites that link to you overall. I have a few sites that are older (read:out-of-date) and a lot of the sites that link to them may be a bit dormant, which means they probably won’t all turn up in a given month’s site stats. But Open Site Explorer seems to be keeping track of the big picture.

For example, it shows PNAC.info having 4,825 links to it, which includes all the various pages on all the various sites that have linked to it over the 8 years it’s been up (I’m assuming). By comparison, my relatively-unknown and newer lancebrown.org (this site) shows 605 links altogether (which sounds better than it is; they’re only from 47 “root domains”).

Open Site Explorer seems like a pretty good tool for checking out your site’s overall connectedness on the Web. Do you have other similar tools you can recommend?

WordPress plugins. You gotta love ‘em.

No, I mean it–you have to love them. I’m not going to let you leave until you do. Sorry, I know it sounds strict, but this how we learn. Now go sit in the corner until you love WordPress plugins.

I’m just joking–of course I know you love WP plugins as much as I do. You’re frickin’ plugin crazy! Why else would you be reading this blog post, right?

You and I are going to be revelling in our mutual adoration for plugins a lot here this year. And we’re also going to be checking out a lot of them…and a lot of compilations of them.

While I will talk about individual plugins in time, there’s nothing quite as juicy (and deliciously distracting) as a nice fat compilation that’s been put together by someone with real knowledge and love for the plugins he or she is highlighting. The 7 sweet compilations featured here are just a glancing swipe at the vast universe of plugin compilations that I spoke of in my ode to plugin people–but they are a glancing swipe that could easily take over your month, or wildly advance your site, or both. Hopefully both.

10 Un-Usual WordPress Plugins that Improved my Blog by Stefan Vervoort at Divito Design
A nice little mix of plugins; introduced me to Feed Pauser and RSS Footer.

30 WordPress Plugins To Help You Improve Your Sidebar by Cosmin Lupsan from 1stWebDesigner
A really great assortment of widgets and other sidebar-related WordPress tools.

33 WordPress Plugins To Power Up Your Comment Section by Dainis Graveris at 1stWebDesigner
The title speaks for itself; I’m just writing this blurb for proper article feng shui. (Your chi will thank me. With money, preferably.)

15 helpful WordPress plugins for the savvy user by Jacob Gube at Six Revisions
Advanced plugins for coder-bloggers and geekier WP users, and a few key plugins for WP webmasters (Maintenance Mode, WP-DB Backup, etc.).

WordPress Web Optimization: 15 Tips And Plugins To Monitor, Speed Up And Optimize Your WordPress Blog by Dicky at WebDesignBooth
Even more advanced plugins for tuning the engine of your WordPress site – plus 7 tips for optimizing your WP installation.

40+ Quite Useful WordPress Plugins using jQuery by Lars of tripwire magazine
Ooh, jQuery! Stuff reloading on the page without the whole page reloading! Lightbox, slimbox, sliders, carousels! Slick! Snazzy!

Some Powerful WordPress Plugins by Shefeek Jinnah from 4TechInfo
This has 60 plugins arranged in different sections – a wide array of, as Shefeek says, powerful plugins. (The article is getting a little old, so a few of those plugin links might not pan out.)

If that’s not enough WP plugin compilations for you, you may want to talk to someone about your plugin compilation addiction. Assuming you both decide that you can control yourself, then Ari Herzog’s got a few dozen more compilations listed here.

Got your own favorite WP plugin compilations? Share them in the comments, and I’ll share them with folks in a future blog post!

Plugins are what make WordPress the undisputed king of blogging platforms.

Not to get too weird, but I feel like trying to really explain what’s so amazing about the universe of WordPress plugins is like a believer trying to explain what God is, or a parent trying to explain what it feels like to have children…or, to balance things out (and to use an example I can personally identify with), it’s like trying to explain what it’s like to be at Burning Man.

You can describe various aspects of the amazing thing, you can give examples of the amazing thing, you can try and illustrate the amazing thing…but until the person actually experiences the amazing thing for his or herself, they just aren’t going to truly understand. To really understand it, you have to feel it happening to you.

That’s what it’s like with WordPress plugins. It’s like giving birth to God at Burning Man.

OK, fine, I said I wasn’t going to get too weird, so I’ll step back from that claim, but still…the universe of WP plugins is truly mind-boggling and awe-inspiring.

Like I said, I could give examples, but examples alone wouldn’t give you the whole picture. Even the official WordPress Plugins repository is but a slice of the full pie.

In fact, I would submit that there is no way to even get the full big picture with WP plugins, which is one of the things that makes the topic so hard to truly cover. Just the sheer quantity of compilations of WordPress plugins is hard to get a handle on. Those are your “25 Best Plugins for Photoblogging [etc.]“-type collections, which can be found on Google by searching for “best wordpress plugins”, optionally adding a specific function or a niche (i.e., “real estate”, “restaurant”, “video”, “newsletter”, etc.)

Any search for WP plugins is bound to turn up unexpected (and usually pleasant) surprises. I have found some really brilliant plugins accidentally while searching for some other type of plugin, either right in the Google results, or in a compilation like I mentioned…or in the secret plugin goldmines–a.k.a., plugin authors’ home pages.

Fairly often when looking for WP plugins you will stumble onto the website of one of the independent developers of a given plugin. Then when you get there, lo and behold, that guy has a list of like 6 or maybe 20 different small and large plugins he has created, mostly to solve little problems he has wanted to solve for his own blog. His plugins may or may not be at the WP Plugins site–there are so many there, it can be a journey through the jungle finding things sometimes, so even if they are there, you might not have found your way to them there.

I get the feeling that WordPress has been requiring a little more diligence and standardization from folks who list their stuff in the official repository, and I can think of a handful of other reasons why someone might want to just keep their stuff at their own site. So some people do. And the result is that, like I said, there are these little mines of barely-discovered plugin gold just laying around the Internet, waiting for lucky prospectors to come along and yell “Eureka!”

The other result is that there really is no way to know about all the plugins that are out there. And that’s not even getting into the fact that new plugins come out literally every single day.

If I sound a little frustrated amidst my awe, it’s because I definitely can be sometimes. I’ve been wading through the sea of WP plugins since they first existed–back when you probably could have actually identified all the WordPress plugins in existence. And it’s one of those things that does not necessarily get easier from year to year. The ever-increasing vastness of the plugin pool means that for one person to cover the whole thing requires a lot of swimming around. And ironically, having more plugins in every category has not really made things easier, simply because there are more to sort through  in order to find out which one’s specific features are the right fit for your situation.

But despite the difficulty of obtaining full knowledge of (and thus, truly full usage of) the ridiculously vast universe of WP plugins, I love, love, love, love, love LOVE WordPress plugin developers.

It’s because of them I can sit in a meeting with a client in almost any industry and when they say, “We need the site to …[WHATEVER]“, I can be like, “Yeah, there’s a way to do that. I know of a couple plugins, and there are probably a few more if those don’t quite fit.” And on to the next feature. “Yup, there’s a really good plugin for that.” Next feature. “Oh yeah, we actually include that in all the sites. It’s one of the core plugins we use.”

You need a newsletter? Check. A photo gallery? Check. Image slideshow? Check. Stock ticker? Check. Reverse the post order? Check. Event calendar? Check. Social media thingy? Yup. Invoicing tool? Yes. Business directory? Sure. Online community? Yes. Web analytics? SEO? Popular Posts? Polls? Check, check, and check. And yes.

And on and on…and again, that tiny list really misses the point, because the real moments of plugin magic come not when a client says “we need this” and you go “sure”; the best plugin joy comes when you stumble onto a plugin that fits into what the client wants to do in a way neither of you had thought of.

That’s when you get the “plugin tingle”. When someone else’s brilliant little tool, that they just left lying there for you, brings you a new feature that you didn’t even realize you could have–making your site into something you didn’t realize it could be.

When that happens to you (if it hasn’t already) you’ll probably have a strangely uncomfortable feeling of unrequited gratitude. You’ll want to bow and give thanks, not just to the one developer who happened to be your benefactor then, but to the whole amazing ecosystem that allowed him or her to grow, and to all the living things that grow in there.

And by living things, I mean of course the plugin people, to whom this post is dedicated.

I love you, Plugin People. Thank you so much!

Who are some of your favorite plugin people? Give props (and links) in the comments!

From Makeuseof.com, a sweet overview of (drumroll…super-buzzword coming up!) SEO keyword tools:

6 FREE Tools To Get The Best Keywords For Your Site

Thanks to EyeCreate for providing this cool tool to create redirects and most of the other main things you might want to put in an .htaccess file.

Though circumstance has often forced me to be a straight-up geek to get something done, I still appreciate tools that help me spend as much time as I can on the non-codey side of things.

EyeCreate Net Solutions :: htaccess Generator

CaptionTube is a free service (powered by Google App Engine) that lets you add captions to your existing YouTube videos. I haven’t tried it (all my YouTube videos are nature vids so far), but it sounds wicked cool.

Thanks to Chris Pirillo for bringing this to my attention.

Shefeek at For Technical Information has compiled a big list with a wide array of cool WordPress plugins, with nice succinct descriptions of what each does. It makes for a great overview of some of the possibilities that can be had for your site via WordPress plugins.

I continue to be overwhelmed by the variety and sheer power of the plugins that are coming out these days. But still no Zen Cart integration plugin somehow! Plugin Gods, hear my prayer…

Dynamic Drive DHTML(dynamic html) & JavaScript code library

Welcome to Dynamic Drive, the #1 place on the net to obtain free, original DHTML & Javascripts to enhance your web site!

Gazette Theme

I may start using this 5-column theme for a new project I have in mind. (It’s very hush-hush, or I’d say more.)

The Strong Cross » My Amazon Wishlist plugin for WordPress

Lots of links to free site icons, backgrounds, etc.

Christian Montoya » 14 Resources for the Artistically Challenged

Format Text tool

Web tool to help format the line (wrap) length on text documents.

Free “glassy” button generator

Web Browser Compatibility Checklist