wordpress | Jason Palmer, CPA, CITP

WordPress – Claim Google Authorship for your Content

July 30, 2013 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

Google recently introduced a new way to identify, validate, and rank content called “Authorship.” This is accomplished by linking your Google+ Profile, which should contain a head shot picture, to the content (article posts) on your WordPress site.

By claiming ownership of your content, it enables Google to know that the article was presumably written by a real human being, you, as it is linked to a Google+ Profile. When your article appears in the Google search results, a picture of you will be displayed next to the search results.

The coolest things about the new Authorship search result are the two links: “by Jason Palmer” and “More by Jason Palmer.” When you click on the “by Jason Palmer”, you will see my Google+ Profile page. When you click on the “More by Jason Palmer”, you get a mini-Google Search engine of all my content which enables readers to find other articles that I have written.

Google has not yet fully disclosed exactly how the new Authorship link will improve your content position. One could assume that authenticated content will rank higher because it is from a real person instead of an anonymous source that could have simply plagiarized or copied it and republished it with erroneous attribution.

Another great benefit is that if you use Google Analytics, you will get additional activity statistics on your Google Authorship enabled content.

If you have the Genesis Framework, implementing Google Authorship can be accomplished in three easy steps: Find your Google+ Profile URL; Enter it in the Google+ box on your user profile page in WordPress; Add your site to your “Contribute To” section in your Google+ Profile. Rather than duplicate other great content, see this article at CopyBlogger.com “Claim Google Authorship for Your WordPress Website in 3 Easy Steps” for screen shots and an extended narrative on how to do it.

If you are not using the Genesis Framework, you can use a generic “Google Authorship” WordPress plugin to accomplish the same task.

Two of the more popular “Google Authorship” WordPress Plugin options are:
Google+ Authorship WordPress Plugin by WP-Buddy.com (Pro Version $8)
and
AuthorSure WordPress Plugin by Authorsure.com

Once you have this setup, you can test what your article search results will look like with the “Google Structured Data Testing Tool” available in the Google Webmaster Tools site.

If you are still not convinced of the value, again from CopyBlogger.com, here is another great article entitled, “10 Reasons Writers Should Claim Their Google Authorship Markup”

WordPress Twitter Exception Message: SSL certificate problem

July 26, 2013 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

Most plugins for WordPress require little if any technical knowledge to install and configure. Sometimes you have to look under the hood and check the engine yourself to make a plugin work correctly.

Recently the Genesis Framework “Getting Latest Tweets” Plugin widget was updated and site owners started to report SSL Certificate problems. The Getting Latest Tweets plugin securely connects your WordPress site to your Twitter Account and displays your latest Tweets on your web site. To see how this works, visit the home page of www.jasonpalmer.com and look in the lower right hand corner to see my latest Tweets. (You can learn more and download the WordPress “Getting Latest Tweets” plugin here.)

If after installing and configuring the “Getting Latest Tweets” plugin you see the message “No Tweets Found in the spot where it is supposed to display the latest Tweets on your WordPress site, read on to learn how to fix the problem.

The error message appears after installing the “Getting Latest Tweets” plugin and saving the Twitter Application API information. These are the keys and application name information obtained from your Twitter Developer Dashboard. (How to do this is all described with screen shots below the configuration panel of this plugin.)

You will usually one of the following two error messages or similar variation:

“Twitter Exception Message: SSL certificate problem”
or
“Twitter Exception Message: SSL certificate problem, verify that the CA cert is OK. Details: error:14090086:SSL routines:SSL3_GET_SERVER_CERTIFICATE:certificate verify failed”

The reason for this error message is that some web servers do not have the latest Certificate Authority file installed. Digital Certificates authenticate the owners of web sites. To complete this process when making a request from our web server to another web server, we need to make sure that the issuer of the digital certificate that we receive from the web site we visit is authentic. The Certificate Authority file contains this information about well-known companies that issue SSL Digital Certificates to secure web sites. (For a technical explanation, visit Wikipedia here.)

Plugin authors, if they want to make secure connections from your web server to another web server, such as in the case of “Getting Latest Tweets” from Twitter to post automatically on your web site, usually include the latest Certificate Authority file with the installation of their plugin. “Getting Latest Tweets” did not do this.

The solution is fairly simple and will work for most LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) and WAMP (Windows/Apache/MySQL/PHP) implementations.

We need to get a good, current copy of a Certificate Authority file from a trusted source, place it on our Web Server in the appropriate directory folder, then tell the programs that need access to this Certificate Authority file where to find it.

NOTE: If you understand the problem as described above but have absolutely no idea what anything below means, ask the company that hosts your web site to assist you or correct the problem for you.

WARNING: Make sure you have a valid backup copy of your PHP.INI file BEFORE you proceed!

First, get the latest cacert.pem file from:

http://www.curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html

Look to see if you have a \curl or \Tools\curl or similarly named directory on your Web Server. You can also search for “curl” to help find an appropriate directory.

Warning: Do not replace the .pem file that exists in any plugin directory. Only replace the .pem file in a common server directory, like in the example below.

Next: Simply open up your PHP.INI file and add the following line:

curl.cainfo = “PATH_TO/cacert.pem”

Example:

I am running the WAMPDeveloper Stack on Windows from DevSide.net

I added the following line at the bottom of my PHP.INI file

curl.cainfo = “C:\WampDeveloper\Tools\curl\cacert.pem”

Then I placed the cacert.pem downloaded above in:

c:\wampdeveloper\tools\curl

Works perfectly for most stacks, BUT NOT ALL, and resolves the issue for many plugins looking for an updated Certificate Authority File that are returning errors similar to the one at the top of this article.

You may stop reading this article now unless you really, really want the ultra-technical details and are an IT Professional.

IT Professionals, please continue:

If you are looking to understand how to update cURL the library utility that many plugins use to connect and transfer data to and from other sites securely, additional references are below.

It is usually the responsibility of the developer of the application/plug-in to explicitly point to a current cacert.pem file – especially for WordPress users running on Windows AMP stacks such as Bitnami or WampDeveloper (Devside.net).

Backupbuddy, Vaultpress, and Google Analytics plug-in’s all distribute a cacert.pem file and I assume use the proper CURL Reference such as:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, ’C:/accessible/by/apache/cacert.pem);
and
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, true);

The following sites are presented for reference and additional configuration details:

The Main Home Page for cURL:
http://curl.haxx.se/docs/manpage.html

A good Mozilla.org Certificate Authority CA Cert Bundle file is available here:
http://www.curl.haxx.se/docs/caextract.html

The page explains in depth how to make SSL Server to Server Connections:
http://curl.haxx.se/docs/sslcerts.html

How do I update root certificates in Apache/PHP/cURL environment?
http://kb.ucla.edu/articles/how-do-i-update-root-certificates-in-apachephpcurl-environment

How do I use cURL in PHP on Windows?
http://kb.ucla.edu/articles/how-do-i-use-curl-in-php-on-windows

WordPress Plugins and Widgets

July 3, 2012 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

WordPress Plugins and Widgets are specialized code modules used to extend out the functionality of a WordPress web site. Examples of Plugins are the Aksimet AntiSpam Plugin – which helps screen visitor comments and determine if they were written by a human or a machine (spam), the Microkid Related Posts Plugin – which allows you to suggest similar Posts at the bottom of a current Post to the reader, and the ScribeSEO Plugin – which tests a Post for its’ Search Engine readiness, VaultPress Plugin – a WordPress site and database backup tool, and the list goes on…

A WordPress Widget is a specific type of WordPress Plugin that is used to add visual appeal and interactive options to a WordPress web site. Widgets were originally confined to the Sidebar of a WordPress Theme but can now be used almost anywhere including the header and footer of a Theme. Examples of Widgets include tag clouds, search boxes, calendars, weather updates, and surveys.

If you look on the right hand side of this web page, my Twitter feed, called “The Tweetisphere”, is an example of a theme widget as is the list of “Categories” for my JasonPalmer.com site. And, if you look at the bottom of this page, you will see the Related Posts Widget, with the title “Other related stories…”

Plugins and Widgets are created by army of independent software developers in the WordPress Community. (Check out the WordPress Plug-in Listings here.)

Many users will only need just a few Plugins and WordPress includes some popular ones, such as Akismet, by default. However, there are thousands to choose from to do things that previously required the expertise of a programmer to create.

Many Commercial WordPress Theme Developers such as StudioPress.com, the creators of the Genesis Framework, make popular plugins and widgets, such as the “Social Profiles Widget” – used to insert icons links on a site page to your profiles on popular social sharing sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, FeedBurner, and more, which are optimized and tested specifically for their Genesis Themes. As the WordPress Theme Widget specification is a standard, most Widgets, even if developed by a specific Theme creator will work with other WordPress themes without issue.

Plugins (and the Widgets they create) are installed in WordPress through the Plugin Manager of the WordPress Administrative Dashboard. You can usually search by name or keyword and then install the Plugin by clicking on “install.” Once installed, a Plugin needs to be activated, and in some cases, options configured.

In the case of some Commercial “Paid” Plugins, a special compressed file in .ZIP format is provided by the commercial developer and then you, as Administrator, through the WordPress Plugin Manager, upload the .ZIP file to your site, then activate it, and configure options as necessary.

WordPress.org keeps track of over 20,000 Plugins and Widgets and will tell you which are the most popular, in terms of number of times downloaded by users as well as ratings as voted on by the WordPress community.

Check out the WordPress Plugin Listing:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins

Google Analytics for WordPress

June 28, 2012 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

Google Analytics for WordPress answers the age-old question, “I built it, did they come?” Every web server creates a log file that tracks details about the visitors to a web site. The challenge becomes getting access to that file and then having the tools to process the raw data to get meaningful information. It all sounds very complicated and it was, but not anymore. Furthermore, traditional web visitor log file analysis was very generic and not optimized for Content Managed Web sites such as WordPress.

Is there an easier way? Yes, Google Analytics for WordPress. (Note: Google Analytics can be implemented on any web site even though the scope of this article is specific to WordPress.)

Google Analytics for WordPress is a plugin that instantly reports back the activity on your site to the Google Analytics Engine for analysis and reporting.

Information includes Analytics on:

Content – The parts of the web site that had the most activity.

Social – Determines the interaction with Social Media platforms such as Google +1 and many others.

Mobile – Activity/Visitors using devices such as iPads, Tablets, and Smartphones.

Conversion – Response rate to Ad campaigns, direct response, and eCommerce – as applicable.

Advertising – How well social, mobile, search and display ads are working at bringing traffic to the site.

To view the information being communicated to the Google Analytics Engine, you need to sign up for a Basic Account, which is free, at the Google Analytics website at http://www.google.com/analytics. (If you already have a Gmail or other Google Site account, you can simply activate Google Analytics for your account.) Once you have an account, you need to perform a few simple steps to validate your web site domain (i.e. JasonPalmer.com ) to prove to Google Analytics that you are authorized to collect information on the domain. You can do this by manually entering your Google Analytics account number also called the “UA Code” in to the settings section of the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. Or, if you are using Google WebMaster Tools, you can authenticate the site via an entry in the Zone file of the Domain Name Server (DNS) that is Authoritative for your domain. (Note: If you understand the term DNS, and you know who you are, this will be the easier method. For those that do not, Google WebMaster Tools will be discussed in another post shortly.)

Once everything is fully configured and connected, it may take up to twenty-four hours for Google Analytics to start creating reports from the collected visitor data. These reports will be extremely beneficial in helping you understanding the activity on your web site. The reports will break down your visitors by geography, language, location; are they new or returning visitors?; the frequency of their visits and how long they stay on the site; which web browser and operating system did they user – (Internet Explorer or FireFox or Safari) and are they Mac, PC, Android, IOS, etc.; source of traffic such as Google or a Social media site; analysis of the content for speed, page visits, page response time; internal search; and numerous other variations on the major reporting areas listed.

Learn more about Google Analytics for WordPress at:
– http://yoast.com/wordpress/google-analytics

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin at WordPress.org:
– http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress

All in One SEO Pack (Search Engine Optimization) for WordPress

June 27, 2012 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

The All in One SEO Pack for WordPress makes Search Engine Optimization for your site in to an automated, mechanical process while still allowing advanced configuration for the purist.

Each page of a site needs to be properly formatted with “Meta Data”, (which is “data about data”), that includes information such as the Page Title, Description, Keywords, Category, and Site Name in a format that a Search Engine can quickly recognize and properly index. So, how do you do it? Use the All in One SEO Pack for WordPress.

Imagine if a Public Library had no card catalog and all of the books were just placed on the shelves with nothing printed on the outside cover. You would have to open each book, look inside, and memorize what was on each page.

Without Meta Data, in essence, the short “Cliff’s Note’s” information describing each page, a web site looks like a large disorganized pile of paper and the Search Engine has to read each page in its’ entirety and guess how the pages should be organized and indexed.

When you use the All in One SEO Pack Plugin for WordPress, you and the plugin determine and automatically add this Meta Data information to every static and dynamic page on your site so that the Search Engines see the organization, description of the pages on the site, and other key meta data as exactly as you intended.

For example, one set of meta data tags are those containing the web page title and description. This title and description meta data are usually what the Search Engine will display, word for word, in the results listing for a given page. The All in One SEO Pack for WordPress enables you to explicitly set the content of these tags as well as a number of others giving you complete control over what is displayed in the Search Engine results.

Although through the advanced options of the plugin you have the ability to fine tune a number of settings, for beginners, the All in One SEO Pack works right out-of-the-box. Just download and install the plugin and let it do its’ magic.

There are three items in the plugin settings that you should configure manually:

The “Home Title” is the site title displayed in the top bar of the web browser. For example, if you look at the top of your web browser, you should see it says, “Jason Palmer – Technology Consultant”.
The “Home Description” which is the site description, recommended not to exceed 160 characters, is almost exclusively used by the Search Engines and is what will be displayed in Search Results for the home page of the site. For JasonPalmer.com the description is “Complex Solutions to Complex Problems.”
The “Home Keywords” are descriptive words about the site. It makes sense to research various key words through the Search Engines to see which ones are most applicable to the content on your site. Keywords that describe the services offered at JasonPalmer.com include: Management Consulting, Technology Consulting, WordPress How-to.

In addition to setting these three Meta Tags for the Site Home Page, the Search Engine friendly Post Title, Post Description and Relevant Post Keywords each must be set for each individual post as well for SEO to be effective.

The All in One SEO Pack plugin is available in both a Free and Pro version, both of which can be installed on an unlimited number of sites – the key difference being the elimination of Advertising and the availability of Priority Support with the Pro version.

Learn more about the All in One SEO Pack Plugin at:
– http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Purchase the All in One SEO Pack Plugin for a one-time fee including lifetime upgrades and support at:
– http://semperplugins.com/all-in-one-seo-pack-pro-version

VaultPress Completely Automatic Backup for WordPress

June 26, 2012 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

VaultPress is the logical response to the expression, “It is not a question of if your WordPress site will crash and you will lose all of your data, it is just a question of when.”

A WordPress site, like any other web site is susceptible to hacking, a virus infection, or just a plain technical glitch that in a matter of seconds can erase hours or months of work. Backup, Backup, Backup is something that everyone is reminded to do but seldom does on a regular basis.

Traditional thinking says to backup your site once per day. In some cases the Site Hosting Company may do this for you. If the site is an active one with visitors posting comments or articles and media being added throughout the day, can you really afford to potentially lose the last 24 hours worth of content?

The VaultPress plugin is a realtime, continuous backup solution that will grab a copy of every post, comment, media file, revision and dashboard setting, every time a change is made to your site.

The Basic VaultPress plan, starting at just $15 per month includes: Realtime Backup, Automated Site Restore (for just files or the Database), Archiving of your site at a point in time, Statistical Information, a Backup Activity Log, Full Site Disaster Recovery (for when things go very bad) and Concierge Support Assistance to help you get started or in case of crisis.

The Premium VaultPress plan is $40 a month and includes all of the basic plan features plus various security scanning features and a slightly more seamless site migration solution for moving the site between servers (usually only for changing Web hosting companies.)

There is an Enterprise VaultPress plan at $350 a month that might be appropriate for very large and very active sites that have thousands of visitors daily and requires a rapid response and recovery time in case of a site failure.

The greatest thing about VaultPress is that it will backup a WordPress site of any size and can be installed and configured in about five minutes. Download and install the VaultPress plugin, add in the license key and that’s it. Within minutes VaultPress starts to backup the site. And every time any change is made, VaultPress initiates a process to backup that change.

I use it for JasonPalmer.com and it is the easiest and most seamless backup solution I have ever deployed.

Learn more about VaultPress at:
– http://www.vaultpress.com

WordPress, Anti-WebSpam, and the Akismet Plugin

June 24, 2012 By Jason Palmer 1 Comment

One of the great things about WordPress is the ability to get immediate feedback. Readers can leave comments on individual entries, and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own sites as well.

Imagine how excited I was to see that within hours of my first official WordPress post on my newly launched site, I had a comment. In fact, on a fairly consistent basis, within hours of most of my posts, I had received comments. Wow! Is this Internet thing great or what? What is it they say, “If you publish it, they will come?”

And come they did, but “they” were BOTS (Computer Programs acting like people) and not actual people. This weekend Google honored what would have been the 100^th Birthday of the famed British mathematician, Alan Turing (born June 23^rd, 1912). (See the Google Doodle here.) His invention of the “Turing Test”, which is designed to test if a human can tell if the responses received from a series of asked questions are from another human or if they are programmed responses from a computer, was the inspiration for today’s article. The true purpose of this test described in a 1950 paper was to answer the question, “Can Machines Think?” (Entitled, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, click here for background)

At first glance, many of the comments received seemed perfectly legitimate. Sentence structure and grammar were correct and contextually relevant. On closer examination, even though the comments were complimentary in nature, they were also very generic and could have been written about any post. Other clues that the comments were not sent by humans, but by machines, were that the sending email addresses were mostly made up of random characters and all from free email services. The final clue was the link provided by the purported author of the comment. (When you make a comment on a WordPress Site, you enter your name, email address, and optionally, a link back to your own site.) None of the links went to legitimate sites. Some went to sites that offered fraudulent software license keys at extreme discounts, others were to doorway pages setup strictly to generate revenue from Google Adword impressions, and some went to discount offers for well know pharmaceutical sold through questionable channels.

WordPress has a number of features to make sure that only legitimate comments appear on your site. The first and most powerful is that all comments can be moderated by the Administrator. On the WordPress Dashboard, a little message cloud appears showing the number of comments awaiting approval by the Administrator. If you have a low traffic site, moderating the comments manually and without the assistance of a WordPress Anti-WebSpam Plugin may be sufficient.

However, if you would a little help from technology inspired by Alan Turing, you can let a “machine” determine if the comment is from a human or another machine. This is where the Akismet Anti-WebSpam plugin can help. Akismet provides a monthly subscription service for commercial sites (free for personal sites) that applies hundreds of tests to each comment and returns an up or down answer to the question: Is this comment WebSpam? The result of the Akismet tests properly tag the comment and place it in the correct Comment Queue for your further review giving you a head start on your comment moderation tasks.

The Akismet Plugin is installed by default with every installation of WordPress. However, you must visit Akismet.com to register for a subscription, free or paid, to get an activation key so that all of the comments to your site are submitted to the Akismet engines for review.

Learn more about Akismet
– http://www.akismet.com

Learn more about Alan Turing
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
– http://www.alanturing.net/

Learn about the Turing Test
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

Building JasonPalmer.com in WordPress

June 23, 2012 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

So how is JasonPalmer.com built? Even though I have the technical skill to build and design a web site from scratch, I wanted to focus on creating the content, not the technology. I wanted a site that had a professional “look and feel” and that I could add features to without requiring any custom programming. And, most importantly, it had to be an extensible platform that I could put up in minutes and hours, not days and weeks. The answer was WordPress.

Installing the WordPress platform took less than ten minutes. For many web hosting packages, adding in a WordPress site is a “one-click” install, and then just a few minutes to answer some basic configuration questions like: Web Site Name, Time Zone, and Preferred Date Format – along with setting up the Admin user and password.

Next, I decided to purchase the Genesis WordPress Design Framework and Theme Pro Plus Pack from StudioPress.com and selected the “News Child Theme.” The advantage of this commercial package is that it is already Search Engine Optimized, offers a Turn-Key Design with dozens of built-in Widgets (similar to WordPress Plug-In’s) that extend the functionality of the design (think fancy menu bar options), and it is unlimited use, which means I can use it on any site I create. (Individual Themes can be purchased as well and are very competitively priced.)

Within approximately four hours I was able to build JasonPalmer.com in its’ entirety with all of the static content (everything you see in the top menu bar) and begin to post my first dynamic content article (blog and categories sections.)

Anyone can easily put a web site up at Bitnami Web Hosting and Amazon Web Services for Free (for the first year.) See how you can do that too by reading my post on the subject here.

Technical Disclosure Note: Although I am an expert in the installation of WordPress and Web Hosting, you do not need anywhere near my capability level to experience a similar outcome of being able to install and configure WordPress with a Theme of your choice and be “up and running” within one day with your new web site.

Official WordPress Site:
– http://www.WordPress.org

Genesis Theme Framework from Studio Press
– http://www.StudioPress.com

WordPress Content Management System Platform

June 22, 2012 By Jason Palmer Leave a Comment

The biggest misconception about the creation of a web site is that professional expertise is an absolute requirement to produce a commercial quality experience for the visitor. To put that myth to rest, “There’s an App for that” and it is called The WordPress Content Management System Platform. WordPress is web software that provides a complete off-the-shelf, ready to go site that one can easily manage completely through any web browser such as Internet Explorer, FireFox, or Chrome.

WordPress is billed as being a personal publishing system, which enables users to create, post, and manage content – things that you write about, details about yourself or your company, product information, photographs – in short – any kind of content you see on any other web site can usually be managed in a WordPress site without “professional” help.

It is called a Platform because it provides a framework to which one can choose from thousands of little pieces of code called “Plug-Ins” to extend out the feature set. Plug-In’s are created by army of independent software developers in the WordPress Community.

Web Designers can create ready to install “Themes” which allow users to seamlessly change the look and feel of a website using templates without altering any of the content of the site as easily as one changes their shirt at the click of a button. (Click here to see a number of Free Themes available.)

Examples of Plug-In’s include Search Engine Optimization tools, Site Backup, Event Calendars, Weather Reports, Picture Gallery’s, Ratings and Surveys and much more. (Check out the WordPress Plug-in Listings here.) Many users will only need just a few Plug-in’s and WordPress includes some popular one’s by default. However, there are thousands to choose from to do things that previously required the expertise of a programmer to create custom code.

Since WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems, many Web Hosting companies offer it by default as part of their packages. In fact, there are a number of companies that are dedicated to hosting WordPress sites exclusively. Price is no longer a barrier as WordPress hosting is available for less than $5 a month for small sites.

Learn about WordPress
– http://www.wordpress.org

WordPress Plug-in Listing
– http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins

WordPress Free Theme Listing
– http://wordpress.org/extend/themes