serpentcouncil.com

We are going to gussy things up a little bit now, and we are going to add another plug-in.   Go to:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jquery-lightbox-balupton-edition/  and select the big orange download button.  do the usual download/install/activate plug-in dance.

Now, once you have done that, go and download and install this plug-in:  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-lightbox/

Once they are both installed, click on an image in one of your blog posts(or one of mine) and the screen should turn black and your image should appear.  Nice eh?   This is know as a lightbox.   The first plug-in we installed creates the lightbox using a java scripting language called jquery which we will be discussing later.   The second plug-in “auto magically” adds the code to make the lightbox appear for each of your images, both existing and as you go forward.   Otherwise, you would have to specify the code to do that for each image you add, and any images you previously added would require a retrofit to make lightbox work.   We could have installed this right at the beginning but it’s more dramatic this way don’t you think?

My philosophy with plugins is try to only use them if they add real value.  We have already installed seven with more to come, so we try to be careful in deciding what to add.

In our last of our mini 3-part series on setting up some Google tools, we are going to setup Google Analytics.   Analytics is a term used to define the information that is collected and analyzed about a web site or in our case, a blog.  Google raised eyebrows a few years back by buying a fairly this analytic solution and making it available for free to smaller websites.  If you have a larger website, you could still use it for free, but had to be part of Google’s AdWord program, something we’ll discuss later on.   As our website is at least initially very small it’s free for us for now.

To access Google Analytics, go to http://www.google.com/analytics/. As you already have a Google account just follow the prompts to sign up for a account.   I’m not going to go through the steps as I already have an account and may not see the same screens as a new user, but you are basically going to provide your web address and some other basic information.

There is also a Terms of Service that you should read carefully, as you will be allowing Google to access and store information about your website, and you should be comfortable with what that means.

Now we come to the most important step.   Google will provide you with a tracking code.   This is a block of code that will be placed in the code of all of our web page which allows Google to collect data.   I’m not going to go into the specifics of how it works.  If you’re interested in finding out more information then you should read through the documentation on the Google Analytic site, but suffice to say we need this code.   For now copy and paste it into a new .txt file.   You can also come back to the Google Analytic site at anytime and get this tracking code now that you are signed up.

Now we’ll switch over to the WordPress world and guess what?   We are going to install another plug-in.   This one is called “Ultimate GA” and is found here.  Grab the newest .zip file on offer and download, install and activate as per usual.  Come back here when you are done.

Ready?   OK, if you were working ahead, you might have already noticed there is now a Settings > Ultimate GA section that was added by the installation of this plug-in, so let’s go there.

You should have a page like this:

The first thing we need to do is provide our Google Analytic account ID.  This information is found in the tracking code, and as described in the plug-in instructions.   Once you have replaced the placeholder account ID with your real one, you are pretty much ready to go and can select update options.   As you might have guessed we don’t need to put the Google Analytics tracking code in all our pages, the plug-in handles that for us.   It just needed the account ID as that is the only specific thing different about each tracking code.   you can validate it works by viewing your own blog, selecting “View Source”  and seeing the tracking code embedded in the header information.  One note, logout of your blog before doing this, as their is logic built in to this plug-in which doesn’t add the tracking information for site administrators.   This is so your analytics data doesn’t include all the times you visit your own site and refresh pages to see edits you might make.

You can change this, as well as some additional settings by logging back into your blog and going back to the Ultimate GA section and clicking on Advanced configuration.  I’m going to leave mine on the default settings at this point but if you want to find out what other options you have at your disposal you can read the plug-in documentation at it’s home page - http://www.oratransplant.nl/uga/

Don’t forget to also go and look at your Google Analytics page and see what kind of traffic might be coming to your website.  Their is a wealth of information here, and combined with the information that you already have access to from Google Webmaster tools, you can start to shape your website or more specifically blogs future.   For me, it’s laying the groundwork or foundation for all the future possibilities that might come to pass.

OK, we are continuing to add some of the supporting tools that are important to blog proprietors to gain valuable insight into what is happening on their blog.   Google have 3 tools which are highly valuable, the first one, FeedBurner, we covered last time.  This time lets look at Google’s Webmaster tools at Google Webmaster Central.

As long as you have a Google account, you should see this page…

Follow the instructions to get started and setup on Google Webmaster, once you have done that you will need to add a site.  Put the address for your site in the Add Site text box and select “Add Site.”

Once you have done that your site should appear as a hotlink.  Select that link and it will start walking you through the steps to setup your site on this tool.

First you are asked to “Verify your site.”   This is a little complicated but fairly easy.  Select the “Upload an HTML file option.”   It will then ask you to create an html file with a specific name.  Just open up your favourite text or HTML editor and create a blank file with the name specified.   Then all you have to do is upload this to your site using your favourite FTP program, or any web based tool you’re hosting provider has to the root directory of your site.  Once you have completed this then select “Verify” and this should complete this step!

You now get a page with a host of information that will help you learn about your users, and you have also let Google know about your site.   This is important because of how important Google is in terms of people finding out about you.   There is one more thing that we want to do here, and that is link Google to our sitemap.   First however we are going to install a plug-in that will generate our sitemap and keep it up to date as we change our site.   A sitemap is the organized structure of your website and Google uses it, as do other search engines to apply some logic to how sites our organized.   Because we will be adding new content constantly, as is the nature of blogs, we want to have our sitemap dynamically updated to represent these changes.  Arne Brachhold’s plug-in will do this for us, and you can download it from his site.

Install and activate it the usual way and then go to Settings > XML-Sitemap, which is a new option available to you introduced by this  plug-in.  Their are TONS of options available here, and as always I encourage you to learn more about what they can do, but that is outside the scope(for now at least) of what we want to cover here.   Here we are going to leave all the options as is, and just select the generate a sitemap option at the top of the page.  If successful you should get a page like this returned:

If you used the defaults as I did, your sitemap would be located at http://yoursite/sitemap.xml.   You can verify this by scrolling down and checking in the XML-Sitemap options page.   copy that address, whether it’s the default or not and go back to the Google Webmaster tools and share this link there:

Now the most popular site and search engine in the world knows about your blog.  There are more options you can explore in Google Webmaster tools and if you were paying attention in the XML-Sitemap options, there were options for setting up similar options with Yahoo! and Microsoft.  Now that you know the basics, feel free to explore more and decide what is right for you to add to, or just make note of there options in case you want to come back to them later.  

These behind the scenes things may not make a lot of sense at this point if you don’t have a lot of familiarity with setting up a blog, but will come in handy later.  

One more of these next time as we set up Google Analytics and then we’ll move on to some other stuff.

We are going to continue with prepping our blog for public consumption, and we are going to introduce a set of tools from Google that are very useful for doing this.   The first one of these is called Feedburner, and it’s a terrific way to manage your feeds, which we touched upon previously.   First thing is if you don’t have a Google account, get one.   Having one will give you access to great set of tools, including all the ones we are going to work with here.   As well, it means you can have a gmail account which I am a huge fan of, in fact I use it as much as possible to manage all my mail.

Now, with your google account go to Feedburner.com and select Get Started.

Then you are given the option to "burn" a feed as below:

As you can see, I’m all set to burn my feed.   Click Next and Feedburner will query your site to determine what feeds are available to it.   By default when you setup WordPress, it will create 2 feeds.  One regular one which will be all your blog posts, and a second one for comments.    We are only going to deal with the regular one right now so select that and click Next.

I made one small change here to the feed name and shortened it from the default it gave me, serpentcouncilcom to serpentcouncil.   Select Next yet again and your feed is setup.

You now have the option of adding some additional features to your feed via FeedBurner which is one of the reasons we have selected to use FeedBurner.

First it asks what to track, I suggest that you just select everything it offers.  I did!

Now it’s the integration step.   You will be shown a bunch of option for all different blog types.  The one you are interested in is "Self-Hosted WordPress" (of course.)

When you click the link under that it will open another page which is a Google support page about FeedBurner.   The key aspect that we are interested in right now from this page is the link to the FeedBurner plugin.

Once you have downloaded this, you need to install it and activate it, which you can do per the method previously covered.  

Once that is done, go to Settings in your WordPress admin section and you will have a new option for Feedburner.  Click on that and you will presented with 2 text boxes.  One for your primary feed and one for your comment feed.   Put your feed address in the primary one.  In case you forgot what that was it will be something like mine listed here:  http://feeds2.feedburner.com/serpentcouncil.  You can check yours in your profile page at FeedBurner.com by clicking "My Feeds", select the name of your site(it will be in big blue letters" and then "Edit Feed Details."  Look for Feed Address.   That might sound complicated but it really isn’t and now your feed is managed through FeedBurner which is better then not being managed by FeedBurner.  If you don’t believe me then you should read this article - How and Why to use Feedburner.

Now that we have all that sorted out, we need to re-activate the link to subscribing to our feed which we removed when we were setting up our sidebar.   Go to Appearance > Widgets and select RSS Links from available Widgets.  Once it’s over on the list on the right select Edit.   The only option is to give it a tile, in my case I’m going with "Subscribe to the Feed."

We can do more with this later, but functionality wise, this is what we need.

Next time we are going to get into Google WebMaster tools and setup a sitemap

OK, you know what?   We are going to make our blog public in 2 more tutorials.   First, this one on creating non-blog post pages, and then a second on prepping your blog for public consumption.  

I have built up a reasonable body of work here on this blog, and noticed actually while searching for something else to do with WordPress that this blog appeared(albeit, well down in the search results.)

So what is left to do before this blog is ready for the general public?  One is an “About” page.   This is a page that tells people about the proprietor of the site they are visiting.  Maybe a little background, a picture, a biography, whatever you want.

For the purposes of this tutorial, and because I don’t really want a lot of information on my “about” page I will keep mine short.

Now because, we are not doing a blog post, you will actually not be able to use Windows Live Writer to create and edit your post.  So we will log into the admin section of our blog and select Pages.   As you will see their is already an About page created.  This is their by default.  Select  “edit”  and this opens the page up in the WordPress editor.  I am going to change the header/title to “About Me” just to make a change that we will see and replace the standard text that came with WordPress with my own:

Nothing fancy, just a starting point that I can add to at a later date.  As with many of the other features of WordPress, there is much more beyond what I have discussed with Pages, and I encourage you to read more as always at the WordPress Codex , or search via your favourite search engine for other WordPress information.   One of the great things about WordPress is the size of the community and the terrific amount of help their is available out on the interweb.

Next time, we finalize the blog for a public launch, but don’t worry that doesn’t mean we are finished with it.  This is really literally just the beginning.