Exploring The Internet

All in One SEO Pack is a must-have plugin for your WordPress blog/website. It allows you to do the following things:

• Automatically optimize your blog/website’s title for search engines.

• Generate your meta description automatically.

• Edit you own keywords.

• Avoid duplicate contents found on your WordPress blog.

• And more…

It is currently compatible with WordPress 2.5.1. The sad thing is it will no longer to be updated or supported by its original author in the near future; but the good thing is it found its new home - read All In One SEO Pack Finds New Developer to find out more.

I just installed it and loved it. If you are interested, download All In One SEO Pack here.

• Unzip the all-in-one-seo-pack.zip file you’ve download.
• Use FTP to upload the file to this folder /public_html/wp-content/plugins/.
• Login to your WordPress Dashboard; click on Plugins to activate it.
• Now configurate it by clicking on Options/All in One SEO (for WordPress 2.3.x) or Settings/All in One SEO (for WordPress 2.5.x); see how it is done from here.

That is it. Once you set it up, It will automatically optimize your WordPress blog/website for search engines. Some themes may not show the meta tag. That is because those themes may miss the appropriate call to wp_call() usually found in head.php. You can fix this by logging in to your WordPress Dashboard, clicking on Design/Theme Editor/head.php file. Insert <?php wp_head(); ?> right above </head> and save your head.php file. One more thing, once you use this All in One SEO Pack, there is no need to use other plugins such as Head Meta Description and SEO Title Tag. Otherwise you’ll produce duplicate title and description for your blog/website.

If you’ve ever signed up for a WordPress.com blog, you’ll know that Blog Stats is one of the features that came with it. According to Automattic’s blog, a Stats Plugin focuses “on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.” Bloggers who use WordPress blog (WordPress.org blog) now can use the same feature to track their blog/website. Since this feature is hosted within WordPress.com’s server, your blog will not be affected much in terms of speed. So this is the biggest advantage if you use this Stats Plugin. Here are some screenshots I took from My Internet Stuff - a WordPress.com blog:

• Shows your blog’s days, weeks, or months statistics.

• Shows you where the referrers come from and what are your top posts and pages people have visited.

• Shows you what keywords or phrases people have used to find your blog & what links people have clicked in your blog.

• Shows the overall stats about your blog, incoming links to your blog, amounts of spams being caught, and etc.

For WordPress blogs, you can download a Stats Plugin here to your PC (personal computer). Unzipped the file that you’ve just downloaded, then uploaded to this folder /public_html/wp-content/plugins or /public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins depends on how you set up your blog/website. Login to your WordPress Dashboard, click on Plugins, and find WordPress.com Stats to activate it. You’ll need your API Key to use it. The only drawback I found so far is that once you login to your WordPress Dashboard, you’ll need to login to your WordPress.com account to use this feature.

Related articles
WordPress.com Stats
Automattic’s Free Stats Plugin for WordPress Blogs Reviewed

Did you realize that you can post to your blog via email? WordPress allows you to post your article(s) via email. But first you need to configure your WordPress through its Dashboard. More specifically click on Settings/Writing; go half way down, you can see the following statement:

Post via e-mail

To post to WordPress by e-mail you must set up a secret e-mail account with POP3 access. Any mail received at this address will be posted, so it’s a good idea to keep this address very secret. Here are three random strings you could use: dU)Xlo7PFeA%, W3QDkr1M*eL2, (d$b^h1QxZsq.

The question is: how can you set it up to use it? Post to Your Blog Using Email provides details of how to make it work. I was able to follow the instructions below to make mine work:

• Login to your WordPress’ Dashboard
• Click on Setting/Writing
• Create a new email account on your web host’s mail server
• In Mail Server, type in your new email account you’ve just created. Something like mail.example.com; make sure you change example to be your real domain name; leave the port as 110
• In Login Name, type in something like login@example.com; here change login to be your new email’s login name and change example to be your real domain name
• In Password, type in your new password you’ve just created
• Choose the default category
• Make sure you click Save Changes to save it

In order to publish those email messages on your blog, you still need to set up WordPress to do the job. Either you activate your browser manually or activate your browser automatically. I prefer to use automatic browser activation because it will save your headache that you don’t need to send an email to your new email account every time you send a new post. This is how I’ve done it and I find this is the easier way: add the following code in your footer.php file right above <?php wp_footer(); ?> line. You can open footer.php file by clicking on Design/Theme Editor/ from your WordPress Dashboard.

<iframe src="http://yourblogdomain/public_html/wp-mail.php” name=”mailiframe” width=”0″ height=”0″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” title=”"></iframe>

where you must change yourblogdomain to be your own blog domain name. If your blog is resided in your website’s sub-directory, then make sure you follow your blog’s real path. Alternatively you may use Postie Plugin, and WP-Cron plugin to publish those email messages on your blog. Learn how from Post to Your Blog Using Email.

Now it comes to the verification, you need to send an email to the new account you’ve just created. To see the result, you have to refresh your browser to see the new post. For some reason, my testing post showed up on my post list but with the status stated as pending review.

Update: I’ve just found that in your WordPress acoount, you need to have the same email address as the one you’ve used to send an email to your web server. So if you send an email using login@example.com, then login to your WordPress’ Dashboard, click on Users/Your Profile/; in E-mai, type in login@example.com as well. This way you’ll be able to publish your email message(s) directly on your blog. I’ve just tested mine out and it works. If you have any doubts, feel free to leave your comments here.