I just updated one of my WordPress blogs to the latest version available, directly from the WP admin panel. After hitting the “please update now” link, I was quickly presented this message: “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

For the first minute or so I thought WordPress was working in the background and that my site would be back up in a couple minutes. But 5 minutes later, it was still displaying this message. I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t worrying…

After doing a little bit of research, I found this post on WP forums that explained how to get rid of this issue. Basically, all you have to do is get root access to your domain and simply delete the .maintenance file that was created.

This .maintenance file might be hidden, depending on what FTP client you’re using. Just make sure you choose to show hidden files, somewhere in your client’s settings.

As soon as I deleted the .maintenance file, my WP blog was back on track, and had been updated to the latest version of WordPress.

Hope this little trick will help some of you.

This article is going to show you how to set up a WordPress blog. Before setting up WordPress and starting blogging, you will need to register a domain name and find a hosting plan. That might sound obvious to most of you but I want to make sure to be as clear as possible for beginners.

In my last article, I suggested you use DreamHost for several reasons. I use this hosting company and have been very satisfied with them. For the purpose of this article, I will assume that your domain name is registered with GoDaddy and that your host is DreamHost. If you have a different domain registrar and host, steps would be somewhat similar.

Adding A Domain Name to Your Hosting Account

First things first, we have to add your domain name to your hosting account. We are going to tell your hosting company that we want to host your domain name on their servers. By doing so, we are going to create some space on your server so you can install WordPress (or whatever you want for that matter).

1. Log in to your DreamHost panel.
2. Go to Manage Domains.
3. Click Add New Domain / Sub-Domain.
4. Under Domain to Host, enter your domain name.
5. Don’t touch any other settings.
6. Click Fully host this domain to finish the set up.

If successful, you should see the following message:

See the note about nameservers on this image? That’s the next step in setting up your WordPress blog.

Changing the Name Servers

Every time you use a domain name, you use the internet’s Domain Name Servers (also known as DNS) to translate the human-readable domain name into the machine-readable address. In other words, a DNS is the location of your domain name on the web.

Consider your DNS as your internet address. You have to give this address to your domain registrar so it knows where to send people when they access the domain. I don’t want to be too confusing here so check out this great explanation of what DNS are.

1. Log in to your GoDaddy account (or whererver your domain is registered).
2. Select Domain Manager.
3. You should see a list of your domains. Select the domain for which you want to change the DNS information.
4. Look for DNS or Nameservers in the menu.
5. Select I host my domains with another provider.
6. Then enter the information for nameservers 1, 2, and 3 (NS1.DREAMHOST.COM, NS2.DREAMHOST.COM, NS3.DREAMHOST.COM)
7. Done!

How to Install WordPress

We are almost done. Now we need to install WordPress on your server. This is actually pretty easy because DreamHost offers a “one-click install” service for this.

1. Go back to your DreamHost web panel.
2. In the sidebar, under Goodies, select One-Click Installs.
3. Select Install New Website Software – Advanced Mode.
4. Several options will be offered to you. Click on WordPress (it should be selected by default).
5. Under Install To, select the domain name for which you want to install WordPress. If you have only one domain name, it will be selected by default.
6. Do not touch the other settings.
7. Click Install it for me now!
8. Done!

You should now see this message on your DreamHost panel:

You should also receive an email with instructions to finalize the set up. In this email, click on the very first link. That will take you to the backend of your new blog. From there, simply enter the name of your blog and your email address, then click Install WordPress.

This will create a default Admin username and will generate a random password for you. This information will be emailed to you as well.

Now login using the information that was provided to you. I suggest to change the automatically generated password right away so you can set it to something you will remember.

That’s it! Congratulations, you have successfully set up a WordPress blog. In future articles, I will teach you how to configure your blog efficiently, install themes and plugins.

In the meanwhile, feel free to leave a comment below. Also, if you like this article please make sure to share it on Twitter and to subscribe to my RSS feed.

Instead of replying to him, I thought that would be a good case study about duplicate content and how to create good content for your site.

If you have questions you’d like me to answer, feel free to contact me.

I have an attorney friend who is looking to add a blog to their site. They were wondering if there was a way to add content articles to their blog, to keep it fresh, without them adding unique content each day.

I told him that it is best to try and write something weekly, but he was hoping to have the page update with some other law related articles… Is this possible?

The Rise and Fall of Duplicate Content

The short answer is “yes”. It is possible and fairly easy to do. Simply install FeedWordPress or WP-o-Matic to your WordPress blog and start leeching content left and right via RSS feeds. Is this a good thing to do? Certainly not!

First of all, replicating someone else’s content without their approval is called copyright infringement. While it is widely done everywhere online, it doesn’t necessarily means it is ok and you might get into trouble if you copy articles from other websites.

But now let’s assume you have the consent of the article’s writer to place their article on your site. In most cases, the author will ask you to link back to their site to give them credit, which is a common practice. You might think “great, free legit content populating my site every day/week/month”.

Well let me tell you that’s a big mistake because you are now generating duplicate content. And if there one thing Google doesn’t like, it’s duplicate content. Google sees duplicate content as a waste of space and while it might index both articles in the beginning (the original, and the one syndicated on your site), it will sooner or later realize that the content is coming from the author’s site and will start removing the duplicated articles from its index. Even worth, it might even “ban” your site and remove it completely from its index.

Think of it this way. Imagine that both the author’s site and your site are newspapers. Every time the original author writes something in his newspaper, it shows up in your newspaper the following day. Who would buy your newspaper? Right, no one would because they can have the same news from the original source before getting it from you. That’s exactly how Google sees the duplicate content issue.

You may still be a little skeptical about all this. Well, why not try it for a while. Find someone willing to share his articles with you, or use articles from an article directory such as GoArticles and you’ll see how your site will slowly but surely drop in search engines. Been there, done that!

Blogs Are About Hearing Your Voice

People or companies are always very quick at starting a blog because they read somewhere that it’s good for search engines. Yes, a GOOD blog is good for your search engine rankings. If you’re just blogging to replicate content, what value are you bringing to the table?

See, blogs are good for search engine rankings because if you have a good blog, people will comment on it, they will link back to it, and that is how a blog really helps search engine wise. People go back to a blog because they like what YOU have to say about XYZ topic. It’s all about the way YOU say things. They don’t care about reading rehashed articles from another site. They want to hear what YOU think.

On my iPhone blog for example, most people come back to it because they like how I go straight to the point without beating around the bush. They also know my voice. My voice is basically to complain about how restrictive Apple is with the iPhone. That’s my voice. That’s what I am known for and that’s why people keep coming back.

Blogging is about finding your voice and sharing what you have to say with others. It’s very probable some people will not like your voice. Who cares? You can’t please everyone. I know some people don’t like my voice and they call be a whiner. Fine, I’ll take that. I’m an iPhone whino but you know what? Even among people who don’t like my voice, many of them keep coming back to my site. I know that because they often leave comments (including their names) and after a while, I get to recognize them.

Create Your Own Content

Content is king! The best way to have Google love you and crawl your site on a regular basis is to create your own unique content. Yes, it does require some work from you but this is the best way to bring quality traffic to your site.

There are several ways you can easily create original content:

• Write a mash-up of an article you read: you just read a good article? Simply write a little blurb about it and tell us why you liked/disliked this article.
• Pay someone to write for you: you can find freelancers that can write articles for you for very cheap. The downside is you don’t really control the message or the quality of the writing.
• Create a case study: this is what I’m doing here. I took a real life example to create a blog post.

Perhaps the hardest part about writing good content is to find good topics. Once you have the topic, the writing will come quickly. I have a few tricks to find topics when I don’t know what to blog about:

• Yahoo Answers: look for questions asked about your expertise in Yahoo Answers. If someone asks the question there, it’s probably because they didn’t find the answer else where.
• Forums: just like Yahoo Answers, forums can be a good way to find a topic.
• Twitter: I usually find iPhone-related topics on Twitter in seconds. Just go to the search option and type “yourexpertisekeyword ?” If you have a blog about olive oil, search for “olive oil ?” on Twitter. You’ll be amazed to see what kind of questions people may have.
• Other social networks: do the same as I do with Twitter on other sites such as Delicious, Digg, etc…
• Ask: sometimes you can just simply ask your clients/friends/employees what they want to hear you talk about. I sometimes ask my Twitter followers what I should write about. If a similar topic comes back several times, I will write a post about it.

The Bottomline

The bottomline is, as I said above, if you have good content and you have an original way to deliver it (that’s your voice), people will read you, they will trust you, and they will recommend you. In the end you will gain from it not only in the search rankings of Google, but you might also generate new leads, maybe some consulting jobs, or whatever may apply to your industry.

If you’re not ready to make the effort of blogging and you just want to blog to create yet some more crappy content, just don’t do it. You will waste your time and money and it might hurt you more than you will benefit from it.

SEO

All In One SEO Pack:
As the name says, it’s a full SEO plugin that mostly works on the meta tags (title, keywords, description) of your pages. Very powerful! It’s installed on all my blogs.

Google XML Sitemap:
A must-have plugin that generates and updates your sitemap. It also automatically submits it to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Link Cloaking:
Automatically cloaks outgoing links in your posts and pages. You can also add static cloaked links manually.

DoFollow:
Selectively disable the “nofollow” attribute for comments. I don’t use it anymore on this blog but I do use it on a few other blogs.

Social Media

Digg & Reddit Me:
By simply adding [digg-me] or [reddit-me] to any of your posts, this plugin will insert the icons so people can submit or digg your posts. I have it on my iPhone blog only.

Twitter Tools:
This plugin automatically posts the title and link of your new blog posts to your Twitter account. It can also create a new blog post from all your tweets.

Social Bookmarking Reloaded:
Adds social bookmarks services’s icons to your articles in your blogs so your readers can submit them easily.

flickrRSS:
Allows you to integrate the photos from a Flickr RSS feed into your site.

Reader Experience Improvement

Related Posts:
Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. I install this plugin on all my blogs.

Subscribe To Comments:
This plugin allows commenters to check a box so they are alerted of follow up comments. Great for having people come back to your blog.

Contact Form ][:
It easily inserts a contact form anywhere you want without having to edit codes manually. I have it installed on all my “contact” pages.

Get Recent Comments:
Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.

Random Quotes:
This plugin allows you to embed random quotes into your pages. It also has a spiffy management tool in the administrative console. I only use this pluggin on our yoga blog.

WPtouch:
A plugin which reformats your site with a mobile theme when viewing with an iPhone or iPod Touch. Visit this blog from your iPhone to see it in action!

WordPress Admin

WPhone:
A lightweight admin interface for the iPhone and other mobile devices. Perfect for creating/editing new posts from your iPhone!

Recommended Tags:
This plugin creates a list of recommended and existing tags when you write/edit a post. It helps you avoid duplicate tags. Very helpful if you have a lot of tags.

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu:
For WordPress 2.7 and above. It replaces admin menus with a CSS dropdown menu bar. Saves lots of clicks and page loads!

Akismet:
It is the best spam protection plugin. It now comes automatically with WordPress when you install it. Akismet saved me hours nad hours of spam filtering.

FeedWordPress:
This is the plugin of choice for sploggers. It’s an RSS to Post plugin. It takes an RSS feed and creates blog posts our of it. I use it on my iPhone Blog for automatically posting my own feeds.

Multi Author Comment Notification:
By default, WordPress only emails me comments notifications for posts written by you. This plugin alerts you of new comments on posts written by other authors of your blog.

Different Posts Per Page:
This allows you to set the number of posts you want for individual pages. For example, I have it set to show 50 posts on my Archive page on this blog.

Front Page Excluded Categories:
It lets you exclude categories from showing up on the home page. I also use it on the iPhone Blog for excluding the new apps and apps on sale posts from the front page.

Ozh’ Better Feed:
Your feeds on steroids! It adds a feed footer with a copyright, “Add to delicious”, the number of comments, or anything you want to your feeds.

WP Super Cache:
Very fast caching module for WordPress. I highly recommend it if you have a large blog!

AntiLeech:
This plugin helps you protects your feed from sploggers using them. If set correctly, AntiLeech will generate fake content for blogs trying to reproduce your posts from your feeds.

These are all the plugins I use. If you use plugins that are not on this list, please let us know in the comments what they are and why you use them. I’m always looking to add new plugins to my list.

Setting up the theme was not as easy as I thought. At first glance, everything was looking great but then I realized that there was a conflict with my All In One SEO plugin: all pages were showing the same meta title: Sebastien Page, which is the blog name. Other meta information (keywords and description) were working fine though. I looked around on the web for hours in search of a possible solution to my problem without finding anything.

So in order to keep my blog as SEO optimized as possible, I had to tweak the <meta> </meta> tags in the header.php file. My meta title nows looks like this:

<title><php if(is_home()): ?>Sebastien Page<php endif; ?> <php if ( is_single() ); ?><php trim(wp_title(“”)); ?></title>

This function basically tells the browser to use “Sebastien Page” as meta title if it is the home page, or else, it will use the post title, tag, category, or archive as the meta title.

I emailed the folks over at FTL to see if they know what my problem with All In One SEO may be and I hope they will get back to me, although I doubt it.

I also had issues with the javascript tags in the sidebar and I had to disable them.

I have to admit that ColorPaper is a great theme but the documentation that came with it was inexistent.

Leave a comment to tell me what you think of this new theme :)

This post was inspired by a tweet from Lorelle, my favorite WordPress expert. Lorelle’s tweet was saying “Make WordPress’ search function suck Less” with a link to this post. I had WordPress search issues in the past and found a few solutions and I thought I would learn a little bit more from this post, but I didn’t.

Basically this post was about manually tweaking your search.php file, which improves the WordPress search feature but it still doesn’t make it a good search feature. The main problem with the WordPress search feature, besides the irrelevancy, is that if you have a large blog of a few hundreds posts, then there is not much you can do to speed up the search.

I don’t pretend to be an expert about WordPress (I’m actually far from that!) but I do think both solutions I will talk about in this post are much better at delivering very good search results for your WordPress blog. By “good search results”, I mean results that are delivered quickly, that are relevant to your search query, and sorted by relevance.

wpSearch Plugin

The wpSearch plugin is like having your own custom search engine on your blog. wpSearch is based on “Lucene“, a full-featured open source text search engine. wpSearch is fast, and relevant, which is pretty much everything I need from a search engine on my blog.

To set up wpSearch on your blog, simply download the plugin from here, then upload it, set permission to 777 (very important), and activate the plugin from your admin panel. After activating it, you will have to build the search index database, which may take a while (about 5 posts/second) if you have many posts on your blog. That’s all there is to it. Now check your search feature and you will see a huge difference in the results you will get. The relevancy will be so much better that like me, you’ll want to blog about it ;-)

Adsense For Search

Adsense for Search (AFS) is now my favorite search feature for my blogs for 2 reasons: for one it is the best search engine you can get; and two, you can actually make money from it. Even though I hate Google as a company, I can’t deny that their search algorithm delivers the best you can get from a seach engine thus far.

Now the main concern about Adsense For Search is that you have to rely on Google to crawl your website to index your new posts. Some people won’t use Adsense For Search for this one reason. Yes, you have to wait for Google to crawl your site and index your pages but how much does that really matter in your case? I mean, is it that important to you that your post must be foundable immediately after being published?

Besides, one benefit of Adsense For Search that I have been able to verify on all my blogs is that when AFS is implemented on your site, Google will come visit you quickly and more often. I haven’t done scientific tests on this, but I was able to notice it on many occasions. Most of the time, when I publish something on my blogs, the post is picked up by Google within hours, sometimes within minutes.

To set up, AFS, you will need a Google Adsense account.

WordPress just released version 2.7 of their software and I have to say that it is one big update! Although there is not much change in the overall functionalities, something that changes is the overall layout of the admin panel. The WP team has spent a lot of time and put quite a bit in the way of resources towards making things both look and work nicer. This release doesn’t contain any security fixes that I am aware of, but it definitely feels quite a bit faster. Well, at least in my rather unscientific tests, it does. Your mileage may vary, of course…

As usual when you update, there is a risk of screwing something up. What I always do before updating is exporting all my post. This way, I know that if there is a problem during the process, all my posts will be safe somewhere on my PC.

If you’ve updated to a previous version before, you may have encountered issues such as not being able to login for example. As I was able to verify before, the most common problem comes from the plugins.

The best way to avoid any problem with you plugins is to access your server and rename your plugin folder, right before updating WordPress. For example, I rename my plugins folder to “plugins-old”. Then I update WordPress, update my database and when this is done, I go back to my plugins folder that I previously renamed “plugins-old” and rename it “plugins” again.

My hosting company, DreamHost, automatically creates a new “plugins” folder when I update to a newer version so I always have to delete this one first before renaming my folder to “plugins”.

Doing so avoid losing all your plugins or having to reactivate all of them individually. Hope that will help some of you.

So I tried to go back to my blog admin panel but it would not let me in. Every time I entered my login and password, it would just go back to the login page. I tried typing wrong password and it would give me an errror message. Going back to the homepage of the blog, I realized it was showing me as logged in. Strange.

That’s when I decided to use my secret troubleshooting weapon…. Google (I know, it’s no secret weapon). I googled “can’t login to wordpress after upgrade” and I the first result thta popped up was a page on WordPress forum.

This is the solution I used:

I have 3 different blogs (1, 2, 3) that are powered by WordPress, which is without a doubt the best blogging platform out there. The good thing with WordPress is that it is open source, which means anyone can create plugins to improve WordPress’ backend to fit one’s needs.

There are 12 plugins that I find extremely useful and I would like to share them with you.

Admin

Akismet

Akismet used to be a plugin you had to install once WordPress was set up. It now automatically comes with WordPress. Unless you have an old version of WP (2.1 and older), this plugin is already installed.

Akismet is a smart spam filter. Every time someone comments on one of your posts, Akismet checks its database to see if the commentor might be spam. How does it know it’s spam? Simply because WP users make it smarter by telling Akismet what is spam and what is not. Let’s say I receive a comment from someone and I realize it is spam. I will click “spam” and Akismet will put it in its database of spam. Now next time this spammer comments on someone else’s WP blog, Akismet will check its database and block the comment automatically.

One thing I am not sure of is how many times a commentor has to be checked as “spam” before Akismet adds it to its database. If you know, please let me know.

Contact Form ][

One thing WP lacks is a contact form, should someone want to be in touch with you. This plugin is a simple way to add a contact form to any page or post by simply dropping [contact-form] anywhere in the post or page.

The form is highly customizable and usually integrates perfectly with your CSS. You can choose what email address you want to send the form to, customize the messages, and much more.

Related Posts

This plugin will display related posts at the bottom of each post to give more exposure to you other posts. For example, if someone is reading a post on your blog about the new iPhone 3G, you can set the plugin to show any number of related posts. The reader may then see another posts about the subject and go read it.

You can choose how many posts you want to display, add basic HTML code before and after the post title.

Different Posts Per Page

WP lets you choose how many posts you want to display per page. The problem is you can only choose a number that is reflected on all pages. In my case, I want certain pages to show 100 posts (ie. my archives pages that are just links to the posts, without any excerpt), and I want other to show only 10. DiffPostsPerPage will do just that in a very easy way.

Subscribe To Comments

This plugin adds a checkbox to your comment form so that reader can opt in receiving follow up comments. Easy set-up and provides additional incentives to read your blog to your visitors.

SEO

All In One SEO Pack

This is the one plugin you want to use to improve your blog’s SEO. WP is pretty flexible but doesn’t allow you to give unique meta descriptions for individual categories, pages, and posts. All In One SEO does all this and more.

Among others, it will let you choose your pages, categories, posts’ title, description, and keywords. It also autogenerates meta descriptions by using the first few words of your post or page. Lastly, you can have “noindex” and the like generated for archives, categories, and tag pages if you seem to have trouble with duplicate content.

XML-Sitemap

If you’re a little into SEO, you know that providing Google with a good and updated XML sitemap is very important. Problem is you can’t manually keep track of all these posts you’re creating and update your sitemap regularly.

First, XML-Sitemap will build the sitemap in a normal XML file and in a gzipped file should you want to. It will upload the sitemap to your server. If set properly, the plugin will also ping Yahoo, Google, and MSN automatically to let them know your sitemap has been updated.

XML-Sitemap lets you choose what pages you want to include in the sitemap, set your changes frequencies and pages priorities.

It is a powerful tool that will considerably help you. Thanks to this plugin, Google crawls my iPhone site several times a day and indexes pages sometimes within minutes of being posted!

DoFollow

By default, when someone leaves a comment on your blog and gives his URL, WP adds a “no-follow” tag to this URL. This means that when GoogleBot comes crawl your page, it’s going to see this link but it will not follow it, thus not giving SEO juice to the website.

Why am I using a “do-follow” tag? For one big reason… By being a “do-follow blog”, my blog is added on a bunch of websites and blogs. This brings many back links to my site. The downside is that every once in a while I have a spam comment. In most cases, those are caught by Akismet but I sometimes have to delete them manually. All in all, this plugin is very beneficial to my blog.

Mobile

iWPhone

This plugin creates a new theme for your blog that is specifically designed to fit the iPhone screen. Now every time someone accesses your blog from an iPhone, the plugin will switch your current theme to this iPhone theme, making it easy for your reader to navigate your blog without having to zoom in and out all the time.

WPhone

WP recently released its own native iPhone application but I find it very limited in what you can do with it. WPhone will create an iPhone-friendly version of your admin panel and offer you all the features of WP. It is a great tool to update, edit or delete posts on the go.

Social

Twitter Updater

The name says it all…. Twitter Updater will automatically update your Twitter status every time a post is created, edited, or published. You are able to customize what you want to send and how you want to send it. I set mine to only update Twitter when I add a new post and to Tweet the title of the post as well as a link to it. If too longs, links will automatically be shortened by tinyURL.

flickRSS

This plugin is great to display your Flickr images on your site. You can set it to display your full photostream, a group, a set, or tags.

You can display up to 20 images. Just add <?php get_flickrRSS(); ?>anywhere in your template to instantly display your Flick feed.