J.R. Farr - Keep it real.

If you’re seeing this error, I’ve hopefully got a solution for you!

Over the last 4-5 days, I’ve been literally locked out of my WordPress admin because of this “fatal error”.

After launching my Rockstar Marketing Series, this of course would need happen. If you’ve been following my series on SEO & now PPC, I’m sorry I haven’t posted in bit but I have a good reason!

When I upgraded my version of WordPress to 2.8.2 I received this fatal error message. I was able to see the frontend homepage, posts & pages but whenever I tried to login to dashboard or to even edit a post I got an error like this:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 71 bytes) in /home/theblogb/public_html/jrfarr/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 824

I of course started Googling on how to fix the error. I tried and tried to get into the database and find the bug. Based of other peoples experiences there were a few solutions but nothing was working for me.

What’s the Solution?

Step 1: Find wp-settings.php and at line 13, increase the memory limit from 32M to 96M. Or whatever number suits your fancy. You’ll be looking for the memory limit section of this file like this:

if ( !defined('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT') )
 define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '32M');

Again on line 13, change it from 32M to 64M or 96M, etc.

Immediately after increasing the memory limit I was able to login without any errors. You can of course, leave your memory limit that high and you most likely won’t have anymore issues. But then you’ll find that  your site will start chugging pretty slow as it’s trying to allow too much memory at once.

Step 2: Deactive ALL plugins  & Re-Activate.

As you begin re-activating each plugin, change the memory limit back to the original 32M and see if the error comes back. Eventually, I found that the “Lifestream” plugin was causing the error after I had upgraded to WordPress 2.8.2.

After deleting the Lifesream plugin and setting my memory back to 32M, I was good to go.

Now what?

One thing to always remember with WordPress, is you can’t trust all the plugins that are available. Use them at your own risk.

And Finally, I can get back to the new Rockstar PPC Series and the rest of the Rockstar Marketing installments. Hopefully, if anyone else has the same problem, they’ll find my solution useful.

Stay tuned as I get back on track with the Rockstar PPC Series.

Short Snack Version: Don’t want to read through the whole post? You’ve got 2 options then. Watch the video below or scroll to the end & read my 3 points on why MailChimp has got it going on.

Over the past 3 1/2 years I’ve been using WordPress as my CMS. I think I can honestly say I love WordPress more than a friend. Is that weird to say? On top of that, I’ve been using Google Analytics as long as I can remember.

Anyway, today I found a brand new WordPress plugin built by Crowd Favorite for MailChimp. The WordPress plugin is called Analytics 360 WordPress Plugin. They just made it possible to manage WordPress, Google Analytics & your email marketing campaigns all in one central location. Yeah I know, it got my attention too!

What’s MailChimp?

Essentially, MailChimp is another email marketing service. You can send newsletters, manage your subscribers, track campaigns etc.

For the past 2 years I’ve been using Aweber and been totally satisfied but over the past few months I’ve been been following MailChimp and their clever marketing campaigns. I’m always impressed and intrigued with the company as a whole.

I had an account setup with MailChimp but just didn’t want to spend the time switching my email marketing services.

MailChimp’s Analytics 360 WordPress Plugin changed that.

Got a few minutes? Here’s why I made the jump.

If you didn’t feel like watching, that’s cool. Let me break it down real quick why I switched and you should seriously consider testing MailChimp out.

1. All-In-One Place: My favorite thing about the WordPress plugin is I can access my Google Analytics & my email subscribers, all while being logged into my WordPress admin. That’s just plain dirtyness right there.
2. Value: Is your list 0-100 subscribers and you only send out a few emails a month? Awesome, then MailChimp is $Free.99 If you need more, then checkout MailChimps pricing here. It’s pretty dang cheap. Like dirt cheap.
   
3. Are People Listening? Best part of the plugin hands down. On the days you send out a newsletter or publish a blog post, it syncs it to your Google Anaytics so you can see if your traffic was increased. It’s a good way to see if the content your pushing out is really grabbing peoples attention.

Download & Install the plugin from WordPress

Download Analytics 360 WordPress Plugin: Click Here

I‘ve done a post before where I talked about creating SEO friendly URLs with WordPress but this is something a bit different. For some people that have quite a few posts already with their WordPress blog it’s tough to just completely change your URL structure. Even with 20-30 posts you easily have most of those already indexed with the search engines so from an SEO standpoint you need to setup a 301 redirect.

URL redirection, also called URL forwarding, domain redirection and domain forwarding, is a technique on the World Wide Web for making a web page available under many URLs.

Well for anyone in this situation there is a plugin available for WordPress that can help you fix this problem in 3.8 seconds

With this plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website,and even doesn’t affect your search engine rankings.

Enough with the talking already and on with the downloading!

DOWNLOAD: Dean’s Permalink Migration for WordPress

Installation

1. unzip and upload the file into your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Activate it on your Admin Panel->Plugin Management page.

Usage

1. goto admin panel->options->PermalinksMigration.set the old permanlink structure of your site.
2. goto admin panel->options->Permalinks.change the new permalink structure to what you want. (personally I recommend /%category%/%postname%/)
3. Done,enjoy it.

A big thanks to Dean Lee for his awesome contribution to the WordPress community!

Top 10 WordPress Plugins

I thought it would be helpful for people to have something like this if you’re using WordPress.

These plugins are more for SEO, functionallity and usability of your site. Having these wordpress plugins will help with SEO efforts, spam and of course the “end user’s” experience.

Obviously the Top 10 are my opinion but I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions on other wordpress plugins that should be in the list. Maybe I can even add to this list!

Here we go… Top 10 WordPress Plugins.

1. Ah yes, the All in One SEO Pack. Love this plugin.

Some features:

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• For WordPress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.

2. Google XML Sitemaps – Easy 1 Click Sitemap Installation.

This is a very important wordpress plugin for any blog. This should just be required for crying out loud! It gives your site the ability to display a nice little road map for the search spiders to crawl through your whole site.

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

3. Akismet – Life saving spam filter

Send those damn comments to the cleaners. I’m so over all of the spam I get on a daily basis. This spiffy little wordpress plugin checks against Akismet to see how dirty the comments really are. If they look at all suspicous… peace out nasty comments. Brilliant, you’ll love it.

When you install the Akismet WordPress Plugin there is a bit more setup then adding the plugin to your (wp-content/plugins directory) and hitting activate. You will need to setup a wordpress account. Once you do that they will give you an API key which you will enter to complete the installation.

Don’t worry it’s very simple and like wordpress always does they hold you hand along the way… making installation much easier for you.

4. Share This – Post to Social Media Sites in Seconds

Let’s face it… We are some social SOB’s! The society is taking it all in and laying it all out.

I like this wordpress plugin over other Social Media wordpress widgets for two reasons.

1. It doesn’t take 10 million years to load all of the fancy logos and what not. I have used Sociable and others in the past, but they were bogging down my site like no one’s business.

2. It offers more then just allowing users to post to social media sites like the others. You know like Digg, Propeller (Netscape), Stumble Upon, Reddit, etc. You can also post it to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter. And the last thing is you can simply email it if you like.

I think that offers much more to the user, especially since everyone might not have accounts setup with the usual social sites. I like having options…

5. Tweet This – Allow users to Tweet your Posts

This plugin fetches a shortened URL from Th8.us for each of your blog posts’ permalinks server-side, then displays a link to Twitter for each post, with a cute icon. This is done automatically for each post as needed, but the shortened URLs are permanently cached (as a custom field in the postmeta table) to keep load times fast.

6. Related Posts – Show related posts at the end of a post

WordPress Related Posts Plugin will generate a related posts via WordPress tags, and add the related posts to feed.

7. cformsII – Easily add a contact form

This is a must for your contact page! It’s also very easy to integrate.

cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!

8. WP Polls- Get your users involved with Polls

WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.

9. WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Save some brain cells.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.

WordPress automatic upgrade upgrades your wordpress installation by doing the following steps.

1. Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
2. Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
3. Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
4. Puts the site in maintenance mode.
5. De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
6. Upgrades wordpress files.
7. Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
8. Re-activates the plugins.

The plugin can also can be run in a automated mode where in you do not have to click on any links to go to the next step.

10. WP Super Cache – Cache like you’ve never cached before!

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts…

…As this plugin is based on the older WP-Cache plugin you can switch off the Super Cache static html caching. Caching will still be performed, but every request will require loading the PHP engine. In normal circumstances this isn’t that bad, but if your server is underpowered, or you’re experiencing heavy traffic you may run into trouble. Super Cached html files will be server more quickly than PHP generated cached files so there’s very little reason not to use the Super Cache feature.

Did that make sense to everybody? Basically, you should install this plugin because visitors & subscribers of your blogs will have a much more enjoyable experience when they don’t have to wait for everything to load when they visit your site. Your pages will load much faster as Super Cache does it’s magic, creating a much better blogging party.

Well there you have it

I hope that was informative and helped point you in the right direction. This might be more of a beginner’s post but you’d be surprised how many people don’t take advantage of these simple plugins.

I would love any feedback on other plugins. I am sure I am not utilizing all of the plugins I should be using as well.

More to come…

Review of Woo Themes

It’s official, J.R. is now a Woo Themes subscriber. Yep, I gave in and bought the developer subscription on Woo Themes.  I did this about 2 months ago, but sadly I am just finding time to review them and give my thoughts about Woo Themes custom Worpdress Themes.

Before finding Woo Themes and eventually purchasing their subscription I began to follow Adii, one of the founders of WooThemes.  I subscribed to his blog and followed him on Twitter.  When I started to see post’s about their new project I was pretty anxious to see what they would come up with.

Who is Woo Themes?

WooThemes is a project started by three respected designers – Adii, Magnus Jepson and Mark Forrester – whom all share one thing: their passion for WordPress. All of the themes available on WooThemes are 100% unique and we can assure you that you won’t find similar CMS solutions elsewhere for any other platform.

We pride ourselves not only in the quality of our themes releases, but also that of our support & customer service. Our ultimate aim is to build a community of passionate WooThemes users, where future themes will be influenced by our userbase.

We truly love WordPress and after using any of our themes, you’ll not only love WordPress, but you’ll love WooThemes as well!

I won’t lie, there are plenty of “so-called” Custom WordPress Themes, so I couldn’t imagine it being much different.  I already had purchased one of Brian Gardner’s themes and he is one of the pioneers of custom WordPress Themes.

The Bottom Line… Worth It or Not?

100% Yes.  I am not new to WordPress, I have had my fair share of free and premium WordPress themes and these themes are worth every damn penny.

They include a one of kind “theme option tab” in the admin section which includes all kinds of goodies:

• Easily change your logo
• Add Feed Burner URL
• Add Google Analytics
• Add Flickr photos
• Add Twitter updates
• And More!

The best part is, all of those things I just mentioned take about 5 seconds flat to add to your site.  There’s no digging through the code, not worrying if you placed it in the right section, it’s all laid out for you ready to go.

Lastly, WooThemes has collaborated with well respected designers (Elliot Jay Stocks), making their designs not only genuine but truly nothing you have ever seen before.  They also guarantee that you’ll see at least 1 new theme every month.  So far they have delivered.

UPDATE

Today is December 28th, 2009. It’s been well over a year since actually wrote this post and bought the Woo Themes club package. I’m happy to say, I’m still a customer. I pay my $15 every month and I have yet to be disappointed with Woo Themes. From fresh design to a speedy customer service team, they’ve got a handle on it. With that being said, just go and purchase a theme and I promise you won’t be disappointed.

You don’t need to take my advice though, go to their site and demo any of the themes, read what the community is saying on their blog and you’ll know what I am talking about.

—

P.S. – You can Follow Me on TWITTER.