I frequently receive email from readers of How to Blog, sometimes thanking me and other times with blogging questions that they have which they hope that I can answer. In many of the latter cases, I am able to answer their questions and get them back happily blogging. But there are times when I just don’t know the answer. So, I have decided to post the support questions that I receive that I cannot help with on How to Blog to see if any of the blog’s readers can help each other out!

I already posted the first Reader Question regarding a problem after a WordPress upgrade.. I hope that you guys are able to help out on that one b/c I’m clueless.

What do you guys think of this new addition to the blog – the occasional posting of Reader Questions or even any articles or opinion pieces? I’m all ears!

Well, it’s official! I’ve finally gone ahead and done what I’ve been wanting to do for ages now — I ported “How to Blog” from TypePad to WordPress and it now resides happily at http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/

Please update all of your bookmarks and feed subscriptions to reflect the new location!

I’m very excited to have the site powered by WordPress for a number of reasons:

• I can reopen trackbacks on all my old posts (which I’m still in the process of doing) and allow pings on all new posts because WordPress’s anti-spam plugins will delete all the crap (meaning I’m not stuck wading through hundreds of spam a day trying to find legitimate trackback pings) and you will soon be able to trackback to any and all of my posts, restoring full blogging functionality to How to Blog (since you all know I think trackbacks are essential to the blogging experience!) It may be a day or two before all of the posts have been updated to allow pings — in the port from typepad, WP used typepad’s settings and had pings turned off for all posts and unfortunately I haven’t been able to find a plugin that will allow a mass change to all posts to allow pings (developers – there’s an idea for ya!) so I’m sitting here manually going through each post and checking the ‘allow pings’ box, so bear with me
• I can have subcategories!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
• I can finally have pagination controls (previous page, next page), making navigating the blog much easier (and something that TypePad was sorely missing).
• I can have an Archives page which displays Archives by month, by category, as well as an entire archive of every posting on How to Blog, essentially creating a sitemap so that you can more easily find what you’re looking for
• Speaking of sitemaps, I can use the Google Sitemap plugin to automatically generate a Google Sitemaps compliant sitemap of How to Blogand automatically ping Google everytime a create or update a post
• I can save time by using plugins like Jerome’s Keywords to automatically create my technorati tags for me based on the keywords I’ve entered
• I can save time by using the autolink plugin to automatically setup the hyperlinks for me on phrases that I often use, like WordPress
• I can allow people to subscribe to my blog by email using the Subscribe2 plugin, where you can choose how often you want to be notified by email when I create new posts, and you can even specify which categories of posts you want to be notified about
• I can get MUCH better stats, since I’m running wordpress on my dedicated server on my webhost (Prohosters.com) and I get really detailed stats through the use of Sawmill
• I have a seemingly endless number of wordpress themes to choose from (I haven’t had time to figure out what I want to go with for the long haul — I really like the look of Semiologic, but it’s very hard to customize because it requires serious PHP knowledge and whatever theme I choose will likely be heavily customized when I’m done with it — OR, I might just take the plunge and create my OWN theme )
• I can allow people to subscribe to comments on any particular post, and they will then receive subsequent replies to that post through email
• I’m sure there are a million other things I’m forgetting, and I’ll write about them in due time. The one thing I am gonna miss from TypePad is their excellent WYSIWYG editor — WordPress’s is rather disasterous and I recommend that all users disable it. If you still want a wysiwyg interface for blogging, there are several excellent tools available including the Performancing extension for Firefox, the windows client BlogJet, etc

For now, I’ve got to get back to the ultra mundane task of updating all of my old typepad posts one at a time to show the new URL of where the post can now be found and turn of commenting on those posts. Then I get to go through all of my posts in WordPress one at a time and check the box to allow pings. Then I get to email all the people who have linked to my old site and ask them to update their bookmarks. And I get to pray that I don’t lose all of my traffic and the great search engine rankings that I had on my typepad version of the blog.

By the way, I do realize that blogging.typepad.com is certainly an easier URL to memorize than www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/ – however, I wanted to have it on my emilyrobbins.com domain – but not in the root of the domain as How to Blog is only one part of who I am. And, when I experimented with porting the typepad blog over to wordpress, google immediately started indexing the URLs (something I hadn’t anticipated to happen so quickly – especially since I hadn’t made a final decision as to what I wanted the URL to be – should I use a subdomain or a subdirectory, or should I give it it’s own domain) and rather than having to set up 301 permanent redirects I decided that this must be what fate wanted as the new How to Blog location – so here we are, and I look forward to being able to get back to posting (and I have many posts which need some updating including my theme list) when the drudgery involved with making the move is completed!

I know that I promised to test out the process of upgrading an existing WordPress installation from 1.5.x to 2.0, but until 2.0 has resolved some of the existing bugs (and the resulting slew of additional minor point release upgrades have been completed, forcing users to upgrade to 2.0.1, and then 2.0.2 possibly days later, etc – (remember what happened after 1.5?)) I’m holding off.

As mentioned before, I’ve done a clean install of WordPress 2.0, and while I’ve been told that much has been done in the underlying code base to provide for the possibility of future themes and plugins that are more spectacular than ever, those themes and plugins don’t exist yet, WP 2.0 itself is still way too buggy, and from an end-user perspective I just don’t see that much that’s new and exciting to compell anyone to want to upgrade.

Yeah, the new user interface is prettier. And it’s nice to have a built-in WYSIWYG plugin, but that too is quirky and WYSIWYG plugin options already existed for 1.5.x users who wanted them. The built-in spam plugin of Akismet is pretty darn cool, BUT it requires you to register at WordPress.com in order to get an API key to use it, and apparently if you use it too much you’ll be required to get a commercial license for it (and there’s some talk about the ethics of packaging a somewhat commercial product like Akismet with an opensource free product like WordPress). Not to mention the fact that there were already some pretty amazing spam fighting plugins available for WordPress 1.5.x that now don’t work properly in WordPress 2.0 (like SpamKarma2, for example). The purported benefit of Akismet over plugins such as SpamKarma2 is that it is always 100% up-to-date and never requires any upgrades.

I’ve no doubt that, eventually (and hopefully sooner rather than later), the bugginess of WordPress 2.0 will be resolved, and some amazing 2.0 specific themes and plugins will start to appear that will tantalize us to make the switch. But until then, I’m staying put.

Update: I’ve ported How to Blog to WordPress 2.0.1 and am thrilled to have done so! (Although the process of changing blog platforms and URLs is a nightmare of tedious endless little annoying tasks) Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds to reflect the new, permanent location at http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/

I just found the coolest resource! It’s called Rent A Coder, and you can post any project that you need help with, whether it be as simple as installing WordPress / MovableType / etc for you on your server, or as complex as asking someone to write a custom blogging platform for you. Want a custom template for TypePad or a special WordPress theme and don’t have the time or skills to do it yourself? Just Rent A Coder to do it for you. You can even find people to help you with Search Engine Optimization, people to write content for you, etc.

Once you post the specifics of the project you need help with, coders will then bid on your ‘job’ and you can decide who you want to hire based on their bid, the feedback they received from other users on other projects they’ve completed, etc.

From their website:

Need a coder to help you create the next ‘killer app’ or answer questions? Just post your program or question here and coders from around the world will email you bids on doing the work.

You can review each bidder’s resume and reputation online, and when you’re ready to make your decision, you can rent your personal, expert, coder with just a few clicks! Its that simple!

Posting a bid request is free, and you are under no obligation to accept any bids sent to you unless you choose to. Once you accept a bid, you will place your payment into escrow. The money is not released to the coder, till they complete the work according to your original specification. There are no service charges or finders fees for buyers.

On the flip side, got skills? Flaunt ‘em and earn cash!

Looking to earn extra income using your hard-won technical skills? Rent a Coder lets you locate and bid on coding projects and questions from around the world! By completing a free registration, you can publicize your skills on the online resume system and receive emails as new bid requests come in.

So those of you who are creating all those great free themes and plug-ins (which I hope you’ll continue to offer for the sake of the blogging community), you may wanna consider listing your talents at Rent A Coder and earning some extra $$ through freelancing.

I just did.

5/20 update – the problem was indeed a bug in wordpress and requires an upgrade to WordPres version 1.5.1.1. Then you’ll be happily blogjetting your way along! Yay!

5/12 update – despite the comment that indicates this is a bug in WP that is fixed in the nightly builds, wordpress 1.5.1 has been released and after upgrading to it, I’m still experiencing the same problems with Blogjet not working with wordpress. However, the below workaround I came up with still works w/1.5.1

4/27 update - I’ve come up with a workaround, that, while annoying, does allow me to use BlogJet to post to WordPress 1.5. Basically, I make my posts in BlogJet and then from the Blog Menu choose the item ‘Post as Draft’. Then I have to login to WP, click ‘Write’ and click each draft and then click publish. Yes, pain in the rear. But it works… I prefer BlogJet’s editor because it is wysiwyg without using up a lot of resources on my webserver (I’ve heard the wordpress plugins that allow for wysiwyg are very resource intensive), which is why I post from BlogJet – but the having to go and label as draft and then republish and all that may make it not worth the effort. Original post follows:

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I’ve been enjoying my trial of BlogJet to make these posts to TypePad, but before I figure out whether it’s worth buying the program I needed to test it on other blogging platforms.

So I decided to start with this new WordPress powered site I’m just launching called absurdness.com, (which will have tons of funny pictures, quotes, and jokes when I’m done with it…partly it’s a test to see if it gets traffic as quickly as my typepad powered funny pictures site did, because I’m still wondering if typepad powered sites just seem to rank better in the search engines…I think it has a lot to do with typepad’s list of recently updated blogs..and while I’m off on this tangent, does anyone know if there’s a plug-in for wordpress that does the equivalent?) Anywhoo – back to my trials and tribulations posting to wp from blogjet — wouldn’t you know it – I can’t get the darn thing to work. It’s very bizarre, because when I create a post in BlogJet and then click to publish it to WP, the post shows up in my WP dashboard’s list of posts – yet trying to view the post brings up a 404 error. When I duplicated the post but created it from within wordpress’s own UI, the post worked fine (except for the fact that I was hosting my images on yahoo photos, so half of them aren’t even showing up – need to host my images elsewhere and maybe go for a flickr pro account..)

So has anyone else had success posting to a wordpress 1.5 blog from BlogJet? I know I’ve configured it correctly because, as I mentioned, the BlogJet posts are being listed as posts when I log in directly to wordpress, but they don’t seem to have actually been published (even though they’re labeled as such – it’s more like they’re drafts)