With the release of WordPress 3.1 comes a new admin bar that appears on your site if you are logged in.
If you don’t like it, you can turn it off under your profile settings.
I think I will stick with my current admin bar plugin by Viper007Bond because it has more options.
The spammers are out there, and they are relentless.
You leave one unprotected email address in a post and they will find it.
emOba does a nice job of hiding your email addresses whether you have the email address embedded in a link or displayed as text.
If you are using a plugin like WP Touch to make your site mobile-device friendly, be sure to copy the CSS code from Emoba’s CSS file into the mobile theme’s file or the @s are going to appear huge.
So I changed the domain to WPressureCooker.com.
I thought I’d share how I did it to show how to do it so you don’t have to worry about folks trying to get to your site through the old domain and getting a 404/”file not found” message.
The first thing I did was some research to find the best way to do this.
Quick disclaimer: This may not be the best way for your site. But this worked for me. Be sure to back up your database and files before proceeding.
I followed the Yoast.com site’s advice and created a robots.txt file, but ended there because I was not moving any files and he was giving instructions for an Apache server where I was using a Windows server hosting plan.
In my Godaddy hosting account, I set the new domain (wpressurecooker.com) to point to the same folder wordpressurecooker.com is pointing to, and waited for the status to go from Pending to Setup.
Logged in my site’s admin and went to the General settings. There I changed the Blog URL and Site URL to the new domain name.
I installed the plugin, Domain-Change by Soz which creates the 301 Redirect for you that automatically redirects folks from your old domain to the new. So if someone comes to your site by a link that goes to a specific article, the page comes up under the new domain. Even my shortened Pretty Links worked.
I deleted the robots.txt file from my site.
Next came the stat tracking. I use Google Analytics. I was hoping that the 301 redirect will take care of most of the problems, but just in case, I made a change to my Google Analytics account and the Google Analytics for WordPress by Joost de Valk settings. There is the possibility I did this wrong, but in Google Analytics for wordpressurecooker.com I set it to track “multiple top level domains”. I noticed the code (that you would paste in if you didn’t use the plugin) changed where _gaq.push([‘_setDomainName’, ‘none’]); so in the plugin settings, I set Domain Tracking (which sets _setDomainName) to “none”.
I also have WordPressurecooker.com registered under Google’s Webmaster Tools. That required me to verify the wpressurecooker.com domain, then for wordpressurecooker.com, I clicked “Change of address” under “Site configuration” I set the New URL for wordpressurecooker.com to wpressurecooker.com. In the settings for wpressurecooker.com I set the sitemap URL.
It took me a lot longer to type this all out than to make the changes, so I think you will find it pretty easy.
So did I miss anything?
As I mentioned in my last post, I’m using FeedWordpress to syndicate affiliate links. I turned on the option to have the permalink to the affiliated articles to go straight to the affiliate link instead of the page (that may be bad for SEO, but one less click for visitors).
The problem was the RSS feed became invalid because of the affiliate link. So I need to encode the link. So on line 590 of feedwordpress.php, I changed
$uri = get_syndication_permalink();
to
$uri = esc_attr(get_syndication_permalink());
The esc_attr function is a built in WordPress function that converts certain characters to their HTML encoded equivalents. Such as “&” becomes “&”.
Everything seems to be working fine now.
If you are a LinkShare affiliate, there a great plugin called LinkShare AdMix that uses the RSS feeds of retailers you have partnered with to automatically insert posts of each item in the feed. I had to do 2 things to get it to work:
I noticed that the images the Linkshare feed was posting were not SEO’d – no alt or title tags.
Enter the SEO Friendly Images plugin which adds alt and title tags for you based on the posts title and keywords. But it didn’t work.
Usually plugin problem lie in an incompatibility with another plugin, so I disabled a plugin one at a time to determine which one was causing the problem.
Guess what? It was the LinkShare AdMix plugin.
I wondered if the original FeedWordpress plugin had the same problem, so I disabled the LinkShare AdMix plugin and installed the FeedWordpress plugin. Same problem. I remember seeing filters were called in the source code, so I searched for “filter” and found a commented paragraph about preserving the feed and not allowing other plugins to change it. The 2 offending lines of code followed, and I promptly commented them out:
//add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘feedwordpress_preserve_syndicated_content’, -10000);//add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘feedwordpress_restore_syndicated_content’, 10000);
