The Blog of Laura Clough » Web

SEO Toolbar for Firefox

laura — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 14:28:29 +0000

I just downloaded the SEO Toolbar for Firefox from SEOBook.com. It is a free Firefox add-on that saves time and effort optimizing your site for search engines.

It allows you at a glance to see:

Page rank (according to Google cache)
Number of inbound links (according to Yahoo)
Monthly traffic (according to Compete.com)
Number of directory listings on dmoz.org
Social media statistics

SEO Toolbar

It doesn’t appear to effect performance, but when you are casually surfing you can easily turn it off if you’d like.

Upgrading to WordPress 2.7 Quickly

laura — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:42:40 +0000

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7. I was a little scared, but these instructions were easy to follow: http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress. I didn’t even follow them that closely. All I did was:

Make a backup using c-panel, and just to be safe also made a backup from the ftp site.
Downloaded the new version of WordPress and unzipped it.
Deleted the wp-admin and wp-includes folders from my ftp site.
Uploaded the new version of these two folders.
Copied everything in the root directory of the new version to my ftp sites wordpress root, and overwrote what was there. This preserves your wp-config file.
Compare your wp-config file with wp-config-sample to see if they’ve added anything new in this release.
Log into your wp-admin screen, and press the Update Database button.
Poof, you’re done.

The new dashboard is nice, and you can drag-and-drop to rearrange the items to customize, much like a Google homepage.

But, by far the best reason to upgrade, is that this is the last manual upgrade you will ever have to do. This version now contains a one-click upgrade feature to save us all from this level of effort again.

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Social Media Primer

laura — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 19:12:19 +0000

I just posted in the comments of Eben Pagan’s blog about what is Social Media and how to get started using it. Be sure to read his post and the comments. There some interesting ideas there. Also, you may want to add Eben’s blog to your RSS feed, he thinks outside the box and always has some interesting ideas to share.