Now I don’t know if it happens to be a coincidence or not but during the same time the TimThumb hack came around, I had a lot of old sites and old clients having issues. For the most part, the fix was easy. Update the thumb.php file and you’re good to. Only for some, they let it go too long and had serious issues to deal with because of it.

One particular site I had got slapped by Google and I for the life of me couldn’t figure it out. I ran through all the usual checks, updated files, checked for malicious files and then would request a review from Google to remove the block. After quite a few tries with Google requests and not being successful it turned out it was sitting right under my nose, literally.

Like I said, this was after quite a few tries with Google and I finally noticed the issue Google was having when trying to verify the site was because it was being re-directed to some Russian site. If it was re-directing, it had to do with the .htaccess file. I popped open the .htaccess and sure enough, I scrolled down almost 100 lines and there’s a whole list of re-directs and encrypted code.

DELETE that shi.

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.

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

You should choose your blogs categories carefully.  Not that I am some self-proclaimed “blogging pro” (haha) but I do know a bit about site functionality and allowing your visitors an easy way to navigate your site.

I don’t know… maybe I shouldn’t jump the gun like that but don’t you agree with me?  I mean some blogs are just getting ridiculous with their category list.

Next time you have a minute you should make sure your categories aren’t getting out of hand.  I get that you don’t want to be too generic but also don’t get so fine tuned with your categories that it starts to get overwhelming.

So this turned out to be quite the random post/thought but I think this is important to keep in mind with a brand spanking new blog or a blog you have had for years.

More to come…

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 5 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 post another one that is the “Top 10 WordPress Plugins”

Here we go… Top 5 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.

Download the All in One SEO Pack.

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.

Download the Google XML Sitemaps

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.

Download Akismet

4. 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.

Download WP Super Cache

5. 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…

Download Share This.

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…

It looks like the Theme Directory is going to be revamped here, wordpress.org/extend/themes/

It’s been a long time since themes.wordpress.net stopped accepting new themes. Since then most theme authors have been distributing their themes from their own sites, without a good centralized place for people to browse, search, comment on, and rate themes. With the success of the plugins directory, we’ve wanted to have those same benefits in a theme directory. Today is the day we start making that happen, with the introduction of wordpress.org/extend/themes/.

I thought this was cool enough to let all of you know.  It will be nice to have one structured, legit wordpress theme destination.

I will still be featuring WordPress Themes on my site to help you all from having to digging through the masses of WordPress Themes they have on there.

Good luck finding your Themizzle!

I wrote a post last night featuring the Aesma Pro WordPress Theme

Today I was going through my Google Analytics account like usual and notice a ton of traffic already from terms like, wordpress, wordpress themes, pro wordpress themes.

I did a quick check in google for a few different variations on the above keyword terms.  So, I come to find out that I am on the 1st page of Google for the keyword, pro wordpress theme and pro wordpress themes

Anyway, not that I haven’t been ranked for any keyword variations in Google before but for such a competitive niche I thought that was pretty crazy to be on the first page of google for.  I am going to dig some more into other keyword variations but pretty cool stuff huh?

Can you automate your social media?

For example, you have a blog right?  Then you have a twitter account right?  Then Facebook account, MySpace account, Digg account, Flickr account… AH!

It’s hard enough for most of us to keep track of our usernames and passwords.  But social media truly can helpful and if you use them right they can be very powerful to promote yourself, business or ideas.

Here’s where I am getting at… sometimes it gets overwhelming to have to re-write everything you just wrote in your blog in all of your other accounts, sites, etc.  So what can we do to help automated this?

I have been doing some research about this particular topic and I have chosen to start with Twitter.  Twitter seems to be the hottest thing right now since Big League Chew (love that stuff, especially the grape flavor) so I thought that would be a good place to start.

Right now I am testing out 3 Twitter Widgets or Plugins that work with WordPress.

Not only do they work with WordPress but… of course it talks back and forth with Twitter.  Here are the plugins I have installed.

Twitter Tools – Alex King

WP Twitter

Twitter Updater

Now, unfortanetly the theme I use currently doesn’t allow me to use the plugins with all their features. (Displaying in my sidebar.)  But, I have used these themes to see all of their features.

Already Twitter Tools is leading the race.  I noticed with others, my site would take some time to load because the Twitter Updates on the sidebar were taking so long to load. (If you use Twitter you know that their servers sometimes can’t take the traffic!)

Twitter Tools, like I said is great!  It automatically updates your Twitter account when you are posting blog post, editing, and so forth.

But, here is my favorite part so far. When you are in your WordPress Dashboard and you click the “Write” tab you are giving a new sub option.  The usuals are new post, new page, new link and now a new one shows up, “Write Tweet”  How cool is that?  So right from my blog dashboard I can make an update on my Twitter account.

I think this one might pull away with my vote but I am interested to see what others have thought?

Anybody have comments or found something better for WordPress and Twitter to communicate?

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P.S. – You can Follow Me on TWITTER.

Lately, I have noticed quite a few blogs/sites that are not taking advantage of the permalink feature in WordPress. With how competitive it’s getting to be out there SEO wise, every little bit helps.

Lets take this post I am writing right now as an example – the URL that displays to all users and the search engine is:

Permalink: http://www.jrfarr.com/creating-seo-friendly-urls-using-wordpress/

Now some of the site’s I have seen are looking more like this:

Permalink: http://www.thisiswhackjack.com/?p=17

You can see that URL is not getting the advantage it can from a keyword targeting standpoint because the URL structure is not properly structured.

AH! My URL’s look like that… What can I do to FIX THIS!?

Luckily for anyone new to WordPress with the most current download or anyone who has upgraded to version 2.5 or 2.5.1, wordpress now displays the permalink structure as you input the title of the post. Plus you can even edit it right o the spot! Sweet!

Click the image to view larger if you can’t see it well enough.

Now, for anyone using an older version of WordPress, don’t worry you can still change your non SEO friendly URL ways! Sweet!

The following is an example of how to change your permalink structure in WordPress version 2.0. I believe all of the version’s leading up to 2.5 are pretty similar to this version. If you go back even further then that, then dude you need to update your WordPress version ASAP! No I am kidding, let me know and I’ll see what I can do to help.

Ok so here we go…

Login into your dashboard, and click the options tab. Then click the permalink tab.

Under the “Common Options” you can see that its most likely set to “Default”

Select the “Date and Named Based”

Now if you select the “Custom, Specify Below” you can create a custom structure…

I usually choose this option and delete the date information and just leave the “postname”

This is a great URL structure for any of your sites to have. If your current site is not using a strategic URL structure then you need to make sure you start doing it.

Hopefully anyone reading this post found this helpful and now on your URL’s are full of SEO friendly goodness! Now give yourself a pat on the back!

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P.S. – You can Follow Me on TWITTER.