Best WordPress Modifications: Feedburner

Posted by on July 12, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

Feedburner is a great tool for making the most of your RSS feeds. A free service now owned by Google, Feedburner extends the functionality of your standard RSS feeds in multiple ways:

Metrics – The basic WordPress RSS feed doesn’t give you much of an idea about your readers.  Burning your feeds allows you access to important metrics such as how many people are subscribed to your feed, where they are located, how many unsubscribed readers are accessing your content, etc.

Social Media -Under the optimize tab in your Feedburner account exists an option for FeedFlare–a super easy way to add interactivity to your RSS and email subscriptions.  While the options are somewhat limited, the big names such as Digg, Facebook, del.icio.us and a few others are there and easy to use.

Email – Feedburner makes it easy to deliver your content through email.  Under the publicize tab in your account settings, simply enable email subscriptions and copy and paste the snippet of code into your template.  Your emails will be delivered at a specified time every day that you post something on your blog.  While you don’t have the same degree of control as might be provided by an HTML email service such as MailChimp, your content gets distributed without any work on your part.

Future Modifications – Feedburner routes your feeds through their own servers to provide the benefits described above.  While this may be a drawback to some because your feed address is now of the form feeds.feedburner.com/FlintHillsDesignSnippets instead of something associated with your domain like flinthillsdesign.com/blog/feed, the upshot is that now if your blog moves or your feed address changes, your subscribed readers will not be lost!

Filed under How To, Marketing, Web Design, Wordpress · Tagged with , , , ,

Best WordPress Modifications: WP-Database-Backup

Posted by on July 11, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

WP-Database-Backup (plugin) – This amazing little plugin takes care of backing up your mysql database, allowing instant or scheduled backups to automate the process and ensure that this important task actually gets completed with regularity. WP-Database-Backup only takes care of the database content (the backup is in the format of an sql dump) so you’ll have to take care of images, themes, plugins, etc. with a different method, but it allows you to sleep peacefully knowing that your clients’ content is safe!

You can find WP-Database-Backup here. Thanks to Austin Matzko for such a great modification to WordPress!

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Dropbox

Posted by on July 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

For the past few weeks we’ve been using a folder sharing service called Dropbox. While there are many alternatives to using an online hosted service such as this one, Dropbox fit all of our requirements:

  • Easy to use for computer experts and novices alike
  • Cross-platform (Flint Hills Design is Mac based, most clients use PCs)
  • Easy to backups
  • Minimal resource requirements (individual computers and network)
  • 24/7 access

Basically, we needed a reliable file sharing application that we could control as we see fit. Dropbox met all these requirements.  Some other options didn’t:

  • Web App
    We thought about creating our own web app, but hundreds already exist and we didn’t have time.  Plus, most of the existing apps such as Basecamp provided many more features than we really needed (simplicity is one of our most basic guiding principles).
  • MobileMe
    We’ve found MobileMe to be flaky, especially for some of our PC using clients.  We really needed this to be bulletproof.
  • File Sharing
    The Apple based file sharing was a possibility, but if a computer is turned off you’re out of luck. And it didn’t seem right to be tying up others’ computers and their internet connections every time another user requests a file.
  • Dedicated Linux Server
    Probably a good option, but we didn’t want to hassle with the configuration or security issues…

So in the end Dropbox won out.  It’s easy to use and install on all operating systems.  Because it looks and acts like a regular folder on our hard drive, everything is backed up automatically (and dropbox provides a time-machine style online backup as yet another measure of safety).  It’s always on and doesn’t consume precious computing resources due to our files being hosted on Dropbox servers.  And best of all it’s free for accounts under 2GB!  From our experience so far we’d recommend it to anyone.

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