WordPress Podcast Support Issue

Previously, I'd mentioned how cool WordPress picks up on mp3 files automatically. It is still a very good and time saving feature but I was a bit dissapointed when the audioblog.com files just wouldn't show up on my feeds as a podcast.

It wasn't that easy to get the answer but eventually figured out, WordPress has difficulty picking up on files that are hosted off site. What a bummer and I thought I could save me some bandwidth. I didn't want to start paying for more bandwidth since I'm already paying audioblog.com and was determined to figure out how to make my audioblog.com entries a podcast and there are two ways.

Use feedburner or when you create your blog entry, go to Advanced Fields, go to the section custom fields and select enclosure. In the 'value' blox enter the URL to your mp3 file on one line, next line enter the file size and next line enter audio/mpeg then save and publish, you should now have a podcast with mp3 files hosted offsite.

So What Caused The Traffic?

If you read my last entry, something happened to my blog that pretty much doubled my traffic over at TechBasedMarketing.com . Well, my suspicions were wrong although related in some way. You see, I was trying to make the blog by email feature on WordPress to work so I installed a plugin that would simulate cronjobs.

Unfortunately that plugin worked WAY too well may have been an error on my end too - not blaming the devs. But when I came back to my computer the next day I had over 200 repeated entries. And because I'd set WP to ping only upon publish it kept publishing and pinging 200+ times. I don't know how often in between the script did that.

But I can personally attest now that blogging (and pinging) often increases your traffic because after I cleaned up everything my traffic came back down. Still better but not as good as the 200+ entry days.

In some ways, this is worrisome. Don't you think it encourages spam?

Almost doubled my traffic

In my last entry I told you about the delayed ping plugin. You know something? I have every reason to believe that combined with the extended ping almost doubled my traffic. Now I've done a few things after I applied that plugin so I can't be 100% sure. Will enter more here when I gather more information. Meanwhile you can get the plugin here

More technology powered marketing

Delayed or Scheduled Ping With WordPress

I've been waiting for this forever! You can now delay or schedule your pings for those future dated entries with this cool plugin. Previously, WordPress would ping the update services immediately after you hit publish so even if you schedule the entry for tomorrow or next week, it would ping immediately. This is not good because when a crawler comes looking or when people click through they may find that the blog has not changed or be presented with a not found page and can be percieved as spam.

This plugin will basically supress the ping at publish function and then check every so often to see if the blog has new entries. If it does it will automatically ping the update services. And another nice thing about the new 1.5.1.x Wordpress, it supports extended pings. What is that?

In a basic ping, the update services only receives your URL. But with extended pings, update services receive both URL and RSS feed URL. How is that better? From my research, I found out something I didn't know.
"Some update services (like PubSub), won't read your blog unless they get your RSS feeds too" - from As I May Think.
Because of that, we're not maximizing our syndication opportunities, SEO or whatever the reason you blog and ping. Hmmm something to think act on huh?

I only started researching this today and I'm certain there are more benefits than just that because in Dave Winer's blog he said
"In December 2004, as an experiment, we implemented an "extended" ping handler that allows a caller to specify the address of an RSS feed in addition to the address of the weblog. This could make it easier for applications that use the output of weblogs.com to do interesting things with RSS." I wonder what interesting things...

Leverage technology for your marketing

WordPress Teaches Me Something New About RSS

So I was going through the RSS Feed of my new blog The Big Seminar First Timer and discovered hey! Now this feed rocks! It's attractive! I could not only see the HTML formatting but also images and Instant Video Generator Video straight from my feed! I looked through the raw feed that WordPress generated and now I see how it's achieved. Cool - learnt something again!

WordPress Possible Security Measure

Recently I had to help a few people with their phpBB forums because of the rash of hacking acitivity. One of the things that made the vulnerable forums stand out is the version was published for all to see in the footer pages. So all someone has to do is search for phpbb version X footprints out there and you now have a list of vulnerable forums. As I was updating the Tech Based Marketing blog today, I realized many WordPress themes including the default also betrayed their version numbers in the page footer. "Now that can't be good" I thought since WordPress is very popular and probably getting more so, sooner or later someone's bound to target them... So I did a very simple low-tech security measure - remove the version number from my footer pages. Of course this won't really beef up anything as far as code security is concerned but why make it easy for them to mutilate my page right?

Aww Shoot. Not WordPress!

As you may know I'm a happy WordPress user. So this article on eWeek really caught my eye. My initial thought is... relief that this is not a problem with the script itself but a question of search engine optimization (or trickery) methods. At this point it's still not clear at least to me because it is claimed to be an effort to generate some cash for the project by hosting those pages. But I guess many will still not be happy with that. Do I still think WordPress is a good blog tool? Oh yes. Will I continue to use it? No reason why not