EBBC14 - Speaker Deck

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SUPERCHARGING YOUR BLOGGING WITH WORDPRESS European Beer Blogger’s Conference 2014 Dublin, Ireland Slides at: https://speakerdeck.com/dbspringer

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WHO KNOWS WHAT THIS IS?

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WHO KNOWS WHAT THIS IS?

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WHO IS  THIS GUY? Derek Springer @derekspringer

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(Nothing to do with whales)

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I’M ALSO HERE WITH On the injured list :(

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AUTOMATTIC We sponsored this conference!

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Trousers

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WE MAKE WordPress.com Jetpack Simplenote Cloudup    VaultPress Akismet Polldaddy Gravatar

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WordPress runs on > 22% of all websites!

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Check it out at: http://wordpress.org/plugins/beerxml-shortcode/

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WHAT IS WORDPRESS? • WordPress is a free (as in beer) and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. • WordPress celebrated its tenth anniversary on May 27, 2013. • Two ﬂavors: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. • WordPress.com is the cloud version of WordPress, supported by Automattic and is the simplest, most secure way to start web- publishing immediately. • WordPress.org sites are self-hosted, running on the site’s own server, and the site has complete control over the code and experience. Anyone can access and download the open source core software.

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• “Get your hands dirty, and host your website yourself.” • On your own to ﬁnd a host. • Maintain everything yourself. • Full control over customizations, no restrictions. • No registration is required. • Install custom themes. Build your own with PHP and CSS. • Install plugins to extend your site’s functionality. WordPress.com WordPress.org • “Focus on your content, we’ll handle the rest.” • Free + paid upgrades. • Top hosting/security/backups/ updates included. • Personal support. • Register on WordPress.com and agree to ToS. • Choose from hundreds of themes (but not your own). • No plugins (lots built in). WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN .COM & .ORG?

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WHAT DO I MEAN BY SUPERCHARGING YOUR BLOG? • Simple tips to add a lot of value to your blog. • The four “spheres” of supercharging: 1.Content 2.Appearance 3.Distribution 4.Infrastructure

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THIS IS NOT A TALK ABOUT • How to write a great blog post.  (I’m here for that too!) • How to use WordPress.  (Come chat with us!) • The ﬁner points of implementing what I discuss.  (“Wisdom becomes knowledge when it is a personal experience” -a teabag told me that.)

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QUESTIONS!

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How many folks here are using WordPress?

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WordPress.com?

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WordPress.org? (aka self-hosted)

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Something else!?

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CONTENT

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ADDING MEDIA TO POSTS • Adding images, video, and audio stimulates your readers’ minds, giving them something more than text to dig through, and a reason to come back. • Media breaks up the text, improves the ﬂow, and makes a long post seem much shorter and more enjoyable to read. • “Show don’t tell.”  “A picture is worth 1,000 words.”  etc

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MEDIA IN WORDPRESS • “An agency by which something is accomplished, conveyed, or transferred.” • In WordPress this includes any rich way of displaying information in your posts. • Text • Images • Audio • Video • Tweets • Calendars • Polls • Embeds

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Is anyone here using images in your posts?

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(Is there anyone here that isn’t?)

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IMAGES • You’ve probably got lots of experience with this. But! Since WordPress 3.9: • Drop directly into the editor, no need to open media manager. • Resize the image in-editor. • See galleries live in-editor. • Support for imgur images and galleries.

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How about audio and/or video?

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AUDIO • Since WordPress 3.6 we’ve had built-in support for MediaElement.js audio and video. • Consistent HTML5 *and* Flash fallback player. • Backﬁlls support for IE6-8 and adds extra media types for Firefox, Opera, & Safari. • Just pop in a link to your audio. • I recommend you embed!

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VIDEO Just embed!

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EMBEDS • Super-easy to embed videos, images, audio, and other content into your WordPress site. • Just paste a supported URL is on its own line. • For instance:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsXm5RqBztE  or  https://twitter.com/beerbloggers/status/481572820095623168

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SUPPORTED EMBEDS  (AN AMUSING HISTORY OF WHAT WAS POPULAR) • Blip • CollegeHumor • DailyMotion • Flickr • FunnyOrDie.com • Hulu • Imgur • Instagram • Issuu • Meetup.com • Mixcloud • Photobucket • PollDaddy • Rdio • Revision3 • Scribd • SlideShare • SmugMug • SoundCloud • Spotify • TED • Twitter • Viddler • Vimeo • YouTube • WordPress.tv

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APPEARANCE  (AKA THEMES)

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CAROUSELS/SLIDERS See:   http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/

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How many folks have updated their theme in the last few years?

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NEW TRENDS IN THEMES • Responsive. (Mobile friendly) • Excellent typography. (Easier to read) • HTML5. (The new standard of the web). • Retina support. (Look great on Apple devices). • Inﬁnite scroll. (Never hit ‘next’ again). • No more Flash!

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GENERAL THEME UPDATES • Since WordPress 3.4 the customizer has been built into the ‘Appearance’ menu. • New in WordPress 3.9 is a combo of a slick new all-in-one theme browser, theme previewer, and customizer. • Now you don’t have to commit to changing your theme until you’re 100% certain it looks awesome!

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THE CUSTOMIZER

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HOW TO FIND A THEME • Keep in mind: not all themes are created equally. • Never, ever do a Google search for free themes (you’re inviting yourself to a malware party). • The best free themes are in the ofﬁcial WordPress.org repo. They’ve been vetted by a community committee. • The themes on WordPress.com are the cream of the crop and typically available in the .org repo as well.

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WORTHWHILE PREMIUM THEME SHOPS • WooThemes • StudioPress   (makers of the über-popular Genesis theme) • Elegant Themes • Graph Paper Press • Array (formerly Okay Themes)

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WHAT TO LOOK FOR 1. A design you like. Your design should project the image you want, be it professional or fun. There’s more to a theme than visuals, but it’s the only thing your readers will see! 2. Responsive. Mobile device usage is quickly becoming users’ primary reading device! Don’t lose readers to a bad mobile experience. 3. Functionality. A theme is functional if it does what you want it to do. Do you want to display a lot of images? Are you primarily news/text focused? Don’t think they’re interchangeable! 4. Regular updates. It’s important that designers update their themes regularly to ensure they work with the latest edition of WordPress. 5. Documentation. Should explain exactly how the theme can be used and point out common problems that arise for the theme.

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WATCH OUT FOR   “KITCHEN SINK” THEMES • It’s tempting to get a theme with scores of great features built-in, but what happens if you want to change themes? • A good theme will be   “lean and mean.”

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DISTRIBUTION

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How many folks have accounts on Facebook? Twitter? Google+?

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How many folks auto-post to those accounts?

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THE DEATH OF RSS

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THE NEW SOURCES WordPress has two great options to share your content

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PUBLICIZE • Share your site’s posts on several social media networks automatically when you publish a new post. • Just publish the post as usual, and you’ll see it show up on the services you enabled. • You can opt-out from any of the Publicize services for any speciﬁc post you’d like. • Multiple authors can conﬁgure their settings individually on your site.

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CONNECT YOUR GOOGLE+ PROFILE! You’ll get the cool author snippet when users ﬁnd your posts on Google.

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SHARING • Give your readers the ability to easily share your content with Twitter, Facebook, and a host of other services. • Adding to your Sharing Enabled Services is as simple as dragging the button from the Available Services area.You can conﬁgure services to appear as icons, text, or both. • Some services have an additional option letting you display ‘Ofﬁcial’ buttons that show the number of times the post has been shared in real time.

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INFRASTRUCTURE

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GOOD NEWS! • If your blog is on WordPress.com, you’re done! • We handle all of the infrastructure for you, just focus on writing posts. • Self-hosted folks, the rest of this is for you.

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COME TALK TO US ABOUT  (I DON’T WANT TO PUT EVERYONE TO SLEEP) • CDNs  (content distribution network) • Caching • Page speed optimization • Hosting types • Google Analytics • SEO

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http://jetpack.me/

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WHAT IS JETPACK? • Plugin that provides a suite of modules for your site.  (WordPress.com folks already have these features!) • We spend a lot of time developing sweet features for WordPress.com, this is our way of making sure everyone gets to use them. • Uses WordPress.com cloud to take load off your site. • It’s free! Connect it to your free WordPress.com account.

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THAT’S A LOT OF STUFF!

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HERE ARE MY FAVORITES • Stats • Related Posts • Photon • Site Monitor • Publicize • VaultPress

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STATS • Get valuable stats like page views, visitors, click details, and more! • Can be run side-by-side with Google Analytics. • Check your stats on your site, WordPress.com, or through the WordPress Mobile apps.

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RELATED POSTS • Keep your readers engaged by showing them more of *your* posts they will be interested in. • Related content is automatically generated based on the content of the post and any tags or categories if they exist.  (Must have at least 10 published posts for related content to appear.) • A post’s featured image will appear as the thumbnail.

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PHOTON • Reduce the load on your site by loading images from the WordPress.com CDN. • Acts on images in posts, pages, and featured images (post thumbnails). • Your images will load fast wherever your readers are!

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SITE MONITOR • Receive notifications from Jetpack if your site goes offline — and when it returns. • WordPress.com servers will start checking your site every five minutes. If it looks like something’s gone awry, we’ll fire off an email notification. (This one has no image, so here’s a cool dog drinking a beer)

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VAULTPRESS • One of the few Jetpack features that requires a subscription. (Starts at €5/mo) • Automated backups with easy restores. • Daily security scans with one- click repairs. • Help from the WordPress experts. • You can actually use VaultPress to transfer your site to a new host!

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ONE LAST THING:  GET A SITEMAP PLUGIN! http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

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FIND YOUR LOCAL MEETUP! http://wordpress.meetup.com/

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LOOKING TO SWITCH?

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QUESTIONS?

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CHEERS! Come chat with us at the WordPress.com booth!  Slides at: https://speakerdeck.com/dbspringer