ZillionBits-Its about number$ and te<h^0!0gy

Today we continue our series on creating an AdSense-friendly blog using WordPress. Please read Part 1 before continuing.

WordPress Installation Made Easy

After you’ve decided on your blog name, gotten the domain and setup the hosting, it’s time to actually create your blog. WordPress is written in the programming language called PHP and requires a database as well, with MySQL being the preferred (and default) choice. Advanced users can install WordPress using the detailed WordPress installation instructions on the WordPress site.

Or, if you’re lazy like I am, you can simply use cPanel and Fantastico, assuming of course you chose a hosting service that supports both. Let me walk you through a typical deployment using those tools.

Create Your Blog Home

Before you run Fantastico, you have to decide where your blog is going to be located. Is it going to be at the root of your site (www.mydomain.com), a folder within your site (www.mydomain.com/blog) or a subdomain (blog.mydomain.com)? Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I mentioned using a WordPress blog that shows postings in chronological order as a way to quickly create a mini-site. I thought I’d back it up a little, though, and start by discussing what it takes to create the perfect “AdSense-ready” WordPress blog. (Much of what I say in this series applies to other blogging platforms, but everything is written specifically for and about WordPress.)

Why WordPress?

First, let’s talk about why we’re using WordPress in the first place. WordPress is the first choice for many bloggers because it’s:

• Free
• Well-supported
• Customizable
• Extensible using plugins
• Free (did I say that already?)

There are other free blogging solutions available, Blogger being the most obvious, but for ultimate flexibility it’s hard to beat WordPress. (Note that this blog you’re reading is not running WordPress, for geeky reasons, but I run other WordPress-hosted blogs like Mortgage Guide…) Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Matt Cutts posted more details about the caching that Google’s crawlers are now doing to further clarify the whole AdSense push vs. AdSense pull issue. One of things he mentioned was how webmasters can turn on “gzip encoding” to save even further bandwidth. Since not everyone reading this is a webmaster, I thought I’d explain what he meant in further detail.

HTTP Headers

As you know, the HTTP protocol is what a web browser uses to communicate with a web server. The browser (a type of web client or user agent) always initiates the conversation with the web server by sending it a URL. In other words, if you type http://www.memwg.com/blog/adsense into your browser to read this blog, the browser sends a request (technically, a “GET” request) to the server located at www.memwg.com for the content located at the path /blog/adsense.

Following on from here, perhaps the two most common questions I’ve seen people ask, when it comes to evaluating PHP applications are;

• Does it loook good?
• Is it easy to install?

Now not everyone is a programmer or a system administrator—”normal human beings” rank these highly because they relate directly to the two most pressing problems they’re facing: they want a site which is visually attractive and, with limited technical expertise, installation can be a significant hurdle to overcome.

But when it comes to security or maintenance, those requirements rank pretty low down. So here’s some different things to think about, following on from this talk (PDF) on page 19, which I’d argue rank much higher when evaluating a project you plan to use (further suggestions appreciated).

Note that in an ideal world you’d have time and expertise on hand to do a full code review but in reality that’s not going to happen so what I’m suggesting here is meant as a reasonable compromise to help you build up a “ballpark” feeling for an application without making a huge effort.