Today we’re covering the Sociable WordPress Plugin. Similar in function to the Share This WordPress Plugin, Sociable adds link and share icons to the bottom of your blog posts and pages to make it easy for your web visitors to share your content through their favorite social network. List of social sites is extensive and include Digg, Facebook, Delicious, Twitter and MySpace and also provides an share via email option.

Features Include:

• Ability to order the icons with an intuitive drag and drop interface
• Disable/Enable the roll over functionality
• Select which types of pages icons should appear on, such as posts, pages, homepage, etc..
• Switch between icons and text links
• Option to use a pop up (thickbox) to display icons
• Open links in new window option
• Use your own custom icon images

Plugins Podcast Skill Level: Any

To learn more about the Sociable WordPress Plugin, please visit the WordPress plugins sociable page, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/.

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.

If you’ve recently upgraded to WordPress 2.8 and you’ve noticed that your friendly post editor (WYSIWYG by TinyMCE) no longer appears, you must likely have Google Gears enabled for your site. The Javascript error console includes a line number error and when viewing the script source, unreadable binary characters are present.

To fix, remove your site from the list of sites Google Gears is enabled. To do this from Firefox, click the “Tools” pull down menu and select “Gears Settings”. Click ‘remove’ for the sites listed that are having the problem.

From my research, I’ve discovered that Google Gears Caches files locally without regard to javascript errors, cleared browser cache or taking into account the query strings in the URLs.  It may be too complicated for Google Gears to detect javascript errors, but it should detect when the cache has been cleared in a browser in my opinion. More importantly, when the URL changes, e.g. from /wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-tinymce.php?c=0&ver=3241-1141 to /wp-includes/js/tinymce/wp-tinymce.php?c=0&ver=3241-1141&change=1), Google Gears should treat this new URL link differently, as the query string may tell the server to send back a completely different code.Google Gears Developers: Please treat the URL including the query string as separate files to be cached in Google Gears.

The only way I could see WordPress developers from preventing this from happening in the future is to rename the wp-tinymce.php file for every release. There may be some documentation for Google Gears as well to tell it to upgrade all of the locally cached files.

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 Search and Replace plugin to find and replace text in your blog.

The plugin allows you to find and replace text found in many of the database fields including:

• Content Body
• Titles
• Excerpts
• Meta Data
• Comments
• Tags
• Categories
• Category Descriptions

The plugin permanently changes text in the database. It is highly recommended that you first backup your database using the WP DB Backup plugin before proceeding with this plugin.

Show Feedback

Gene inquired about using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin (covered in episode 5) for multiple WordPress blogs located in sub folders on one web site domain. By default the Google XML Sitemaps plugin will create the sitemap within the root folder of the WordPress installation. Since Web Crawlers look for the sitemap.xml in the root folder of your web site, Gene was wondering if the plugin was intelligent enough to merge each blog’s sitemap into one in the root folder.

Unfortuantely, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin isn’t designed for managing multipe blog installations. Luckily, there is another solution to this problem. Setup a sitemap index as your root sitemap.xml file that links to other sitemaps on your web server. Here is an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/blog1/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2008-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/blog2/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2009-01-01</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

More details on sitemaps is available at www.sitemaps.org.

Today we’re covering Search Engine Optimization and the All In One SEO Pack plugin. Remember, a well optimized web site for SEO will help your ranking in search engine results.

Key features in the All In One SEO Pack include:

• Reorders page titles to optimize search engine coverage
• Detailed HTML Meta descriptions and keywords
• No follow options to prevent search engines from indexing pages that contain redundant content such as category and tag result pages

The plugin is developed by Semper Fi Web Design. To learn more about the All In One SEO Pack plugin as well as other plugins developed by Semper Fi Web Design, please visit www.semperfiwebdesign.com.

Instructions how to setup Permalinks are included in this episode. Permalinks, or permanent links, give your blog site friendly URLs for your pages and blog posts that search engines love to see.

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?