Today I want to introduce you to another cool new plugin I came across: Online Backup for WordPress. There's quite a few plugins out there doing backups already, WP-DBManager by Lester Chan, for instance, but there's a lot more. But... They all backup to your own server or to email. What you really want is safe and secure off-site backups. Automatically.

This plugin solves that, and, even better, it does so for free. Backup Technology built this because they had to scratch their own itch: Patrick Altoft and his team at Branded3 built their new site, they wanted it to automatically back up, and a plugin idea was born. Once they'd built it, they decided it would be pretty easy for them to offer this to other WordPress users, for free. You get 50 MB of data, which is about 10 backups of my blog, and those backups rotate around.

So what does it do? Well it backs up your blogs database, zips it if your server allows for that, and sends that backup to the Backup Technology server. You'll need to create an account there, so that, in the unfortunate event that you loose your data, you can log in and retrieve your backup. It has a pretty nice backend showing you how many backups you've got:

Click to view a larger version

Of course it allows you to schedule those backups, and it allows for encryption too if your server supports it. So is it cool? Yes it is! There is another plugin out there like it, but this one comes with more free data storage, a better backend and more scheduling options.

So I love the idea, but it lacks one thing that would probably be to expensive to do for free: it doesn't back up any files. I'd very much be willing to pay for a service that does that: my theme, my uploads, and possibly even my plugins.

But still: you should go try it, especially if you're not backing up your blog already!

Backing up your WordPress blog with ease is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

If not, it'll throw an ugly warning on each and every page until you fix it:

The code for it is easy, and as I'd like other plugins to start using it as well, let me give it to you here:

function blog_public_warning() {
  if ( '0' == get_option('blog_public') ) {
    echo "<div id='message' class='error'><p>";
    echo "<strong>Robots Meta Issue: You're blocking access to robots.</strong>";
    echo " You must <a href='options-privacy.php'>go to your Privacy settings</a>";
    echo " and set your blog visible to everyone.";
    echo "</p></div>";
  }
}
add_action('admin_footer', 'blog_public_warning');

That's easy enough, I think each and every WordPress plugin to do with SEO should do this check, to be honest.

Checking Blog Privacy Settings is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hope you enjoy it!

WordCamp NL Presentation is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

There's two reasons for the updates: the first is security, there is an XSS hole (mentioned here) in the latest version of my plugin, which is fixed by this newest update, so please, do update.

The second reason is a lot more fun: I'm going to be adding support for the new asynchronous tracking. It's going to be optional, of course, which makes it a bit of work to implement, so please give me some time. You can expect an update in about a week for version 1, but as this is a new form of tracking, I can't guarantee the new form will be entirely working, there might be bugs in there, etc.

So, thanks for using my Google Analytics plugin, and please share all your thoughts about it in the comments!

Google Analytics plugin updates is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

There's a small issue though: it lacks a bit of functionality that people who were used to my WordPress contact form were really used too, and sometimes even relying on. My plugin added referrer data and the search keyword(s) used to the notification emails. To solve this issue I've written a small "add-on" plugin that adds just that data to notification emails. You can download it here.

There's another tiny thing that people needed: a widget that allows you to easily embed the forms in your sidebar(s). I made another add-on plugin that adds just that.

It should be noted that this widget currently does not add any scripts or style tags, so should your form depend on those, it won't work at the moment unless you load those scripts into your theme manually. Other than that, it works fine!

You can download the Gravity Forms widget plugin here, just upload, activate and use the widget.

I've given the code for both these add-ons to the Gravity Forms guys, so they might end up adding these features to upcoming releases. If you've got anything else you want from Gravity Forms, I'd love to hear it in the comments!

Gravity Forms Widget + Extra's is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Let me start by showing you the "end result", first what a "visit" containing a comment looks like, second what data is stored for each visitor (the new feature adds both the name and the email address):

This is done by some pretty cool combination of the WordPress API and the Clicky API, and it also allows you to add comments as a goal in your Clicky:

Pretty neat huh?

Comment Tracking in Clicky is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Update: the plugin is now out of beta and on wordpress.org, search for Clicky in your backend and install it, or download it from the Clicky plugin page on WordPress.org!

For a 1.0, this plugin has a pretty decent feature set:

• Automatically adding your Clicky tracking code everywhere:
  • Option to ignore admins
  • Option to store names of commenters
  • Option to track posts & pages as goals and assign a revenue to that page or post
• An overview of your site's statistics on your dashboard
• Integration with the Clicky.me Short URL service:
  • Automatically create a short link for each now post and page
  • Option to automatically tweet posts and pages on publish

It's using my backend class for it's admin UI, so it looks nice and clean (click for larger version):

And it adds a box to your edit post / edit page screen in which you can decide to Tweet the post or not if you've got those settings enabled and define the goal tracking variables:

Clicky Tracking for WordPress is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

This seems to have gone in beta now on wordpress.org, where you'll see a block like you see on the right appear next to plugins. I think this is an awesome addition, as it makes the compatibility data a lot more reliable.

Plugin Compatibility data now crowdsourced is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The first thing it does, on the homepage of the blog you've activated it on, is show the most important constants for that blog (see this screenshot). It shows you the important URL's, editor and memory settings etc.

On subpages it will show you something else: the page type, all the query vars that are set and the SQL query for that page. I've found that just doing a print_r or var_dump of $wp_query is hard to read, this theme tries to be a bit smarter about that, see these examples.

This theme also works in the preview, so that might be enough in a lot of cases. It also works great together with Donncha's Theme Tester, as Alex Leonard mentioned in the comments. Be warned that you might want to remove this theme from live sites though!

So all you have to do to use this is download it, upload it to your server and activate it.

If you're a developer this theme might come in handy sometimes, I'd love to know if you use it and what you'd add, maybe we can turn this into something super useful together.

WordPress Debug Theme is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

We talked about which area's of WordPress are under utilized according to Aaron, and he mentioned an area that is dear to my heart as well: the widget functionality that was introduced in 2.8. WP Engineer has a great post on how to build widgets 2.8 style, but if you're a TextMate user, like both Aaron and myself, you should really check out both my TextMate bundle for WordPress and Mark Jaquith's TextMate WordPress widget snippet.

Then we talked briefly about BackPress, which is the attempt to normalise all the code that is shared between BBPress and WordPress into one library of functions and classes that can be used separately as well. Aaron mentioned using it for some non WordPress projects and I've done the same.

We also ranted together on WordPress security, mainly because Aaron did a post on Technosailor with the title WordPress Security and How I’m Going to Take All Your Money. He explained his point: the people who know how to fix this stuff have jobs, they usually make their living building WordPress sites, we don't have the time to fix your blog, so please please upgrade, and if you do get hacked, and it's your dumb fault, we will charge you a lot of money for it.

When asked about his book signing tour it turns out that WordPress authors don't get flown around the world yet to promote their books, which probably has something to do with the WordCamp's being quite local and cheap to go to. I did mention that Aaron should actually be at WordCampNL, where I'll be speaking too October 31st, and he seemed eager to come but probably not this year...

There was a lot more that I'm not going to type out, you'll just have to listen to the show!

Make sure to subscribe to Press This by using the appropriate subscribe button on the Press This page, or tune in live on webmasterradio.fm each tuesday at 2 PM Pacific, 5 PM Eastern, 10 PM GMT, so you can join in the chat! Next week I'll be talking to my buddy Todd Garland of BuySellAds about how to monetize your blog!

Press This with Aaron Brazell is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

So when the guys from startups.com approached me about whether they could take over maintenance on Sociable, I happily said yes. They have plenty of experience and some very good ideas for the plugin, so I'm confident they'll do a good job.

Before any of you ask: yes, some money was involved in this transaction, but I can tell you that if I had to buy everyone who reads this a beer I'd still be bankrupt. I'll still be involved in the development for a while, but they'll be responsible for keeping the plugin up to date from now on. The new home for Sociable is called blogplay.com, and all that is left for me is to wish them all the best with maintaining Sociable!

Sociable gets a new home is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

In the show with John Godley we discussed WordPress Plugins and plugin development, and how the "world" works for WordPress plugin developers.

Last night I had my buddy Frederick Townes on the show, Frederick is the CTO of Mashable, the founder of w3-edge and w3-markup, and the designer of a lot of great looking blogs, amongst which this one. Last nights show was an awesome experience, Frederick talks easily and has a wealth of knowledge about WordPress, and the chat room came up with a lot of cool questions.

I've put up a page here on yoast.com about Press This, which also featuresa the agenda of upcoming shows. If you have any suggestions for cool guests, or would like to be a guest yourself, let me know!

Press This: John Godley and Frederick Townes is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Today, I've fixed that. I've just submitted version 3.4 to wordpress.org, this version makes it possible to add sites to Sociable from either a plugin or from your theme.

You'd simply have to do the following:

function sociable_add_sites( $known_sites ) {
  $known_sites['Joost'] = array(
    'favicon' => 'http://netdna.yoast.com/images/joost.jpg',
    'url' => 'http://yoast.com/submit-to-yoast',
    'description' => 'What else would you do?'
  );
  return $known_sites;
}
add_filter('sociable_known_sites','sociable_add_sites',10,1);

As you can see you can easily add your own sites now. The favicon URL can be both an absolute URL to the file, or just a filename. If it's just a filename Sociable will look for it in the image directory you've defined in the backend.

You could also use this functionality to change the icon for a certain site, just add the following to the code above (before the return statement):

$known_sites['del.icio.us']['favicon'] = 'http://netdna.yoast.com/images/joost.jpg';

As said, you can either add this code into a plugin, or put it into your themes functions.php file. After doing that, the site will become available for you to pick in the Sociable admin panel.

Update: version 3.4.1 also fixes the Sphinn submit button, to work with the new version of Sphinn.

Adding Sites to Sociable is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

So now, MailChimp is the newest sponsor of this blog, or actually of the accompanying newsletter, and the day I switched they also released a very cool plugin, that will be a great companion to my Google Analytics plugin, called Analytics360°.

I should clarify: you do not need to use MailChimp to be able to use this plugin!

To show you how cool it is I've embedded the video of the original release post (but don't forget to read on after watching, cool stuff coming):

Now I couldn't help myself, I had to peak inside the plugin. By default it shows a "site traffic" view, with the following tabs: "all traffic", "email", "organic" and "referral". Now because I use my own Google Analytics plugin, I know my RSS traffic is tagged with RSS as the medium, and because I use Sociable in combination with awe.sm, that traffic is tagged too.

Now I've found that it's very easy to add those two traffic sources to the dashboard.

To do this, go into the plugin directory, into the subfolder called js, and open the file a360.js. On line 814 (in this version of the plugin at least), I changed this:

if (['all traffic', 'cpc', 'email',
  'organic', 'referral'].indexOf(name) >= 0) {

Into:

if (['all traffic', 'cpc', 'email', 'rss', 'yoa.st-twitter',
  'organic', 'referral'].indexOf(name) >= 0) {

And tadaa:

Cool, huh? Thanks to Alex King and Crowd Favorite as well, as they coded the plugin!

Analytics360° - Google Analytics in your Dashboard is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

It looks like this:

Pretty nifty huh? I thought this was kinda funny by the way:

Cool plugin find: Changelogger is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Migration of the data

We got a bit lucky in this project: the client had his own technical guy, who had written the previous platform himself and was willing to write a WXR exporter, so we could reasonably easily import all the posts through WXR. The issue was that some of these WXR files were about 20 MB large though, and the "normal" upload method of importing WXR's turned out to be fairly unstable.

Which is why I wrote a new Importer, based on the default WordPress import class:

This new Importer allows you to browse the local filesystem, and pick a WXR file to import:

This new Importer turned out to be a huge blessing in the process of importing 30 something blogs with a total of 29,019 posts and 46,319 comments. I'm not currently planning on releasing this importer, because of the huge amount of support that would take which I simply don't have time for.

Site wide posts and comments

Another thing that was needed on this site was a global index of all posts and comments. This was when I really found the WPMU Dev Premium package to be worth its money. The Post indexer and Comment Indexer plugins they have are really easy to use, and give you a global table you can easily query on.

Another one of their plugins that's really cool is the XML Sitemap plugin they offer, which generates an XML sitemap for every single blog. All I had to do was drop in a couple of files into a few directories and add one line to my .htaccess, how cool is that?

James Farmer of WPMU Dev has already agreed to be a guest on the upcoming podcast, so you'll hear more of these guys soon!

If you have a blog or blog network you'd like to migrate to WordPress MU, check out our WordPress Consulting services!

A Migration to WordPress MU is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Holy cow... 1 million downloads is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

The plugin didn't work for him, and it only worked for partly for me, which turned out to be because of some new stuff in the WordPress 2.9 branch. I had an email back and forth with Alex, who then fixed and updated his plugin, isn't open source great?

Anyway, what this plugin does is run any image you upload through a service called Smush.it. It uses, and I'll quote the site directly, "image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality".

Basically, it's "save for web" on Steroids. And when you have this plugin enabled, you don't even have to think about it anymore, as it's taken care of when you upload the image.

The plugin also adds another column to your Media Library, where you can Smush images you've uploaded before you've installed the plugin as well. It looks like this:

This will now become a default install plugin for me, as it offers a very easy optimization for your images. Because of how fluently it's been integrated with WordPress, this plugin will work great with the WordPress CDN plugin I'm working on.

SmushIt for WordPress is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

What is a CDN?

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network. Basically, it's a bunch of highly optimized servers all across the world, with a bit of unique logic worked into them: you'll always hit the server that's closest to you. This leads to huge performance improvements for sites that have visitors from all across the world, like this one.

My images were coming from the US, which was better for like 50% of my readers but pretty slow for a lot of my European readers (about 35% of my readers are European). Now, for them, these images can come from the CDNs servers in London, Amsterdam or Frankfurt, whichever is closest to them.

The other servers of this CDN are, in North America: Ashburn, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, San Jose and Seattle. In Europe, as said; Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London, as well as Sydney Australia and Hong Kong and Tokyo in Asia. (There's actually a map on VI's cloud hosting page, another sister company of the same group of hosting providers). So my server now distributes its images, js and css files to those 15 servers, which in turn serve them out to you!

The CDN works with so called Pull URL's. This means you specify a directory on your server that it pulls all files from, which it then starts serving from the CDN. This allows for a few quite neat tricks, for starters, to serve all your uploaded files from the CDN quite easily, once you've done some WordPress stuff that I'll of course take care of for you.

I've moved several things onto the CDN:

1. my themes image files
2. my themes js files
3. my themes css files
4. the js files that come with WordPress that are not hosted by Google (eg. thickbox)
5. all my uploaded files

Most of this was pretty easy, though there's some tricks involved in all of this. I'm working on moving those tricks into a plugin, which I'll try to release at the same time as when the CDN becomes available at VPS.net.

Who should be using a CDN?

Because it distributes your data across the globe, a CDN is beneficial for pretty much everyone. Larger blogs and sites with a lot of traffic, sites serving videos or other downloadable files benefit most, as it speeds up these downloads. Other sites that benefit are sites that are often on Digg or other huge sites - as it spreads the load across a network of servers, rather than just one.

The CDN has pretty cool live stats in the backend, that look like this:

I'm planning on integrating some of these statistics into the WordPress plugin I'm building for all this.

This CDN stuff must be expensive!

You were thinking that, right? Well, that's what I thought too. Turns out I'm wrong, they told me pricing for the CDN will be $0.05 a GB, pay-as-you-go, with a minimum purchase of $50. So you could buy 1TB for $50 and it could last anywhere up to even a year... And as one account can be used on multiple sites, if you put it on a whitelabel type domain, it'll be very useful to a pretty big group of people. It's also good to know that most good CDNs (including this one) don't charge for storage, just for bandwidth.

I'd love to know what you guys and girls think of the new speed, and whether this is something you can use too, let me know in the comments!

BTW. If you want an account like, now, and don't want to wait, let me know in the comments and I'll hook you up with the guys at VPS.net!

Using a CDN for your WordPress blog is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.

Ok, so that's the final truth, because the Software Freedom Law Center (who are of course absolutely NOT partial in this, even though they're called the "Software Freedom Law Center") said so. Nice. Really nice actually as all I've done and released for WordPress, ever, has always been GPL, and I chose to work with Brian because his themes were GPL and the others were not (at the time).

You'd think I'd be happy, and I am, sort of. But I've got an itch that needs scratching. With this final statement, there's also a new page on WordPress.org for Commercially supported GPL WordPress theme makers, and StudioPress is among those of course.

So, all the theme makers who decide to go fully GPL (their artwork and CSS included), can get listed on that page. Well, good for them. You'd think, that by now, Matt and Automattic would have been smart enough to know who their friends and who their foes are. I'm not saying these theme makers aren't their friends. But there are these people out there, who have been building things that have been GPL all the time, who do NOT get that recognition.

Of course, we plugin authors get to host our own plugins on wordpress.org, and we can get links back to our site etc. But where's the page for commercially supported GPL WordPress PLUGINS Matt? Don't you think it's time you started treating the plugin authors the same way as the theme authors? Or do we have to start a theme war for that first?

And yes I do have an interest in this, and yes I am planning on going the "commercially supported GPL" route with some of my plugins, just because keeping them all free doesn't make any sense any more. Free does other things, just as Chris Anderson says, it has helped tremendously in getting my name out, but "free" doesn't make me rich, far from it even. I can be quite honest in that so far, in working with Brian on StudioPress... Well let's just say the effort to gain ratio is a LOT better.

The fact that people are able to build business models around a project, is the reason that projects grow. The premium theme market, started by Brian but also greatly pushed by my buddies at WooThemes and others, has increased development on themes tremendously: it has done the entire WordPress community a lot of good. (BTW, read Daniel Jalkut's post on the GPL vs liberal licenses, it's a very good read and offers some nice food for thought).

So my plea, to you, Matt, is to help people build up viable business models around WordPress Themes AND Plugins. For several reasons, including the fact that I'm loving to be able to make a living with it, but also because I think it will do the community a lot of good. And ow yeah, I'd love a haiku on WordPress.org about me too!

On the GPL, Themes, Plugins & Free. is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!