Stephan Miller
Building Websites, Traffic, and Income
SEO and Blogging Basics- Why SEO Works
Image by Hobo! via Flickr
Blogging and SEO are inseparable. The blog is perhaps the defining website content, and blogs cover every imaginable subject on Earth. The trouble is that low grade SEO, or non-existent SEO in many cases, is an own goal for blogs. If people can’t find your blog, how do you expect to get read? SEO is a logical approach to a basic online issue, and it’s more of a science than anything else these days.
JD Salinger, Blog Stickiness and How to Disappear from an Active Site
- Image via Wikipedia
And there I go again, writing what I want to call an SEO blog and then putting a title on this post that guarantees nothing. But I am currently a self-supporting SEO (i.e not looking for clients) so who gives a shit if my posts here rank for anything. So I can disappear like J. D. Salinger for periods of time and really not care too much about it. There are just other things to do and I write this blog for shits and grins now. I just linked to fricken Wikipedia, for crying out loud. That’s because I am lazy and don’t want to explain shit. And, damn it, I like cutesy titles and mixing unrelated topics together and seeing what comes out on the other end. It’s called analogy. So I figured I could at least be nice enough to define things a bit. I can do SEO on the other sites that make money and just shoot the shit here.
Friday Links
- Image via CrunchBase
Magento block caching | Inchoo
If you have a Magento site and slow loading configurable products pages, download and use the extension listed here. The same concept of caching applies to any html block in Magento. Setting this up reloads a copy of the block the second time and does not call the database. Blocks can be cached until edited.
This change actually sped up the configurable products page almost 1000%. Our configurable products were based off of over 1000 underlying skus so needless to say, the page loaded slow before this and now loads at a decent speed. But Magento is never really “fast”. It’s just such a change, that comparing it to the one minute load times it was having, it seems fast, below 3 seconds.
But I do plan on going on with it, finding the bottlenecks in the code and applying block caching. The next target is the category products lists. The worst I think is the layered navigation but a default installation of Magento already has caching built in for the layered navigation.
How to Host Your Own Blog in 5 Minutes for $10 a Year
A few weeks ago, I just happened on a really cheap hosting company called NearlyFreeSpeech and nearly free is right. To host the average WordPress blog, it will cost you about 2 cents a day. Beat that GoDaddy. There is no billing. You fill your account up and you get that amount of hosting. $10 may last you longer than a year. I threw $5 in my account just to play around. It should last me until the end of summer and I have 8 domains there I am setting up. As they get traffic, I will move them away to VPS hosting for more power, but for now it works and it is very low cost.
NearlyFreeSpeech has some idiosyncrasies like you can’t set up cron jobs. But you do get SSH access to your accounts and that is about all you get. No Fantastico. No One Click Installs.
I had been doing a lot of SSH work lately installing Magento sites, so I figured I could find out a way to speed up the process for WordPress. I made a video which I will break down here first because it does not have the first three steps:
- Get a NearlyFreeSpeech account
People I Have Worked With in Kansas City
- Image via Wikipedia
Since I have starting working on websites here in Kansas City, I have had the chance to work with a lot of local tech people. And since I was freelancing here for a bit and have not decided to shut that part of my business off at least currently, I thought I could send some people in the right direction if they need web design work in Kansas City.
Experiencing Technical Difficulties
Right now, for some reason, I can’t access my WordPress admin. Well, I can. In one way. I can click around on the top menu. The thing is that, nothing appears below as I do this.
The cause: rebuilding my PHP install to add new modules.
The solution: I have no clue until I start sniffing around a bit.
Troubleshooting route:
- Upgrading my WordPress installation to the latest version and hope for the best. This worked once for an issue I was having and I didn’t ask any questions. And it needs this anyway.
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