In this episode, Angelo goes into detail of the WordPress coverage at this year’s PodCamp Pittsburgh.

Quick Announcement: I will be speaking on Friday, October 16th at the 2009 Blog World and New Media Expo within the WordCamp Las Vegas sessions track. I’ll be speaking on how to setup WordPress for Podcasting at 12:45pm. Friday and Saturday I will be present at the Blubrry/RawVoice booth, so if you’re at Blog World, please stop by and say hello!

PodCamp Pittsburgh 2009

The first session I attended was WordPress Knowledge Exchange hosted by Mike Woycheck (Woy) & John Carman. The session covered an array of recommended plugins and had a lot of insight on WordPress. Here are links to John’s and Woy’s recommended WordPress plugins. Plugins that stood out to me were Bookmarkify, Useful 404s, Time Zone, and Maintenance Mode.

The second session I attended was SEO Plug-ins for Your WordPress Website: Using SEO Tools for your WordPress Website hosted by Jami Broom of Clicks to My Site. Her session slides are available as a downloadable PDF. Jami covered a number of resources for SEO including Google’s Starter Guide, SEOBook.com and SEOMoz.com. Plugins that stood out during this session were Google Analyticator, Robots Meta, Redirection, SEO Friendly Images, Nofollow Case by Case, Platinum SEO Pack, and SEO Smart Links.

PodCamp Pittsburgh was a great unconference! The organizers and volunteers did a great job with the event. I can’t wait for next year!

Next episode I’ll be speaking with Max Sweet (TimeStampStudios.com), a WordPress plugin developer and web designer for WebmasterRadio.FM. Max discusses why his employer moved to WordPress and how the custom plugins he’s developed meet specific needs for the online radio station. We also discuss WordPress MU.

Today we’re covering the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin.

Google Analytics is a free web site statistics service provided by Google. This plugin allows you to easily add the Google Analytics tracking code to your WordPress blog.

Features include:

• Easily set your Analytic Account ID
• Disable tracking of outbound clicks and downloads
• Set the extensions of files to track as downloads
• Sub-domain tracking
• Track AdSense

The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin makes it easy to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog and to configure custom features in Google Analytics. If you do not need any of these custom features and you’re comfortable with editing your theme, you can simply add your Google Analytics to the footer of your theme rather than use this plugin.

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any

To learn more about Google Analytics for WordPress plugin, please go to yoast.com/wordpress/google-analytics/.

Today we’re covering the WP-DB-Backup plugin and touching on a few other backup tips. With just a few simple steps, you can keep backups of your blog so you can feel confident you’ll never loose data.

Key features in the WP-DB-Backup Pack include:

• Complete database backups
• Exclude post revisions
• Exclude comment spam
• Backup to folder on server (not recommended)
• Email backup as attachment
• Save backup on your computer
• Schedule backups

To learn more about the WP-DB-Backup plugin, please visit the WordPress plugins WP-DB-Backup page, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/.

Some other backup tips include:

• Keep a backup copy of your wp-config.php and .htaccess file on your local computer
• Occasionally backup the entire wp-content/uploads folder and all of its contents
• Keep a list of your important plugins handy in case you need to re-install them
• If you modified your theme, backup the entire theme folder and its contents, typically found in the wp-content/themes/your_theme/

PodCamp Toronto This Weekend

I will be attending PodCamp Toronto this weekend. On Saturday between 2-2:30pm I will be speaking in room 357 on “Setting up WordPress for Podcasting”. If you can make it out to PodCamp Toronto, please feel free to say hello.

Today we’re covering the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to generate valid site maps for popular search engines such as Google, MSN Search, Yahoo and Ask.com to process.

Key features include:

• Automated regeneration (New and edited posts and pages automatically regenerate sitemaps)
• Auto Notify Google, MSN Search, Yahoo and Ask.com when sitemaps are updated
• Optional compressed version of sitemap file
• Detailed selection of content to be included in Sitemaps (e.g. only posts and static pages)
• Customize priority weights based on page type (homepage, archives, static pages, etc..)
• Works with WordPress 2.7 (latest version as of this writing)

The plugin is developed by Arne Brachhold. To learn more about the Google XML Sitemaps plugin as well as other plugins developed by Arne, please visit www.arnebrachhold.de.

Today I gave a friend my list of web logs I like to ping. If you’re not familiar with pinging as far as blogging is concerned, it is a method for your blog to let other web blog directories know that you’ve published a new post. If you don’t ping sites to let them know you have new content, then your post will not get picked up until a web crawling app crawls your site. I personally like things to be instant, which is why I love weblog pings.

In WordPress, these ping sites are saved in a field titled Updating Services. Each Service (or weblog, as I like to call it) URL is entered on a new line. Here’s my list of weblogs I currently ping when I publish a new post.

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rssrpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://odeo.com/api/xmlrpc/1.0/ping

Pingomatic.com one is the default value. Technorati.com, weblogs.com and blogsearch.google.com I believe are the most important sites to ping. I still include some others as you see above to get the most bang for my ping.

You can learn more about this topic on the Update Services page on wordpress.org.

What sites do you ping and why?