Privacy Policy Plugin

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If you are using AdSense on your blog and have read their recently updated T.O.S. then you know you need to have a privacy policy page. In fact you need one on a static website also or any site you have AdSense on.

Writing a privacy policy can be a royal pain if you have never done it before.
Thankfully Eric Giguere hss come to the rescue of WordPress users and created the Privacy Policy Plugin.

It is one of the easiest plugins I’ve ever used and creates a, well privacy page.
You can view the one for this blog here or by clicking the link in the page menu at the top of the blog.

There’s not much more I can say about this plugin except thank you Eric, good looking out for all of us WordPress users.

Updating WordPress Plugins

Updating WordPress plugins used to be a hit or miss deal.
You had to go to the plugins page to check if there was an update available.
Not anymore.

With the latest versions of WordPress all you need to do is go to the Plugin page
of your blog and you can see right there which plugins have an update available.
(click on the thumbnail to see what I mean)

This feature not only makes it easier to see what plugins have an update, but also make it easy to go to the download page for the plugin and get the update.
Now you have the update what do you you do with it?

Well of course you have to upload it to your plugin folder of your blog.
Sometimes I delete the old version first and sometimes I don’t, for me it depends on the mood I’m in at the time.
Usually I’ll delete the old plugin first and I haven’t found a problem doing it that way.
For the few seconds it takes to upload the new version of the plugin it hasn’t effected anything negatively with the plugin not working.
Also sometimes the old version of a plugin may be a single php file while the new version may have more features that require multiple php files and requires the uploading of a folder instead of a single file. When you run into that you should delete the old version first.

Sometimes the version of a plugin you are using may not be compatible with the version of WordPress you are currently using. You wil see that happen when you upgrade WordPress from say 2.2.* to 2.3.*. In that case it is almost always better to delete the old version of the plugin and then upload the newer version.
An example of that would be with the Google Sitemaps plugin. Originally it was a single php file and now it is a folder of files. Of course there are alot more features to the plugin also.
But if you are using the older version and upgrade wordpress when you write and publish a post you will get a whole boat load of error messages.

So in closing let me say to make it a habit to check out your plugin page every day you wite a post. The little bit of extra time it takes is well worth it.

WordPress as a static site

I see this question all the time in the forums I visit.
“Can I use WordPress as a Static website?”
Of course the answer is yes, you can use WordPress for whatever you want.
The problem that I see is the mis-conception that just by using WordPress the search engines will automatically give you high ranking’s and that simply isn’t true. The same is true using WordPress as it is using a static site. You need content and you need to target your keyword(s). Now it is true that search engines will spider a site using WordPress more frenquently then a static site, but even that will stop if you’re not adding content. I know it’s an old cliche but “content is king” and it always will be.
If you are planning on building a website with WordPress that isn’t a blog, I would reccomend building it as a CMS type site. Use a combination of posts and pages similiar to what I’ve done here.
This way you can build a robust site with fresh content that both your visitors and the search engines will love.

Google Sitemaps Generator

Sitemaps have been used for a long time on websites.
Originally they where simply a page on your site with all the sites pages listed with links going to each page. The idea was to place a link on your index page to the sitemap. This way your visitors could find it and use it like an index or table of contents in a book. Also search engine’s would follow the link from your index page and then be able to find and index the whole rest of your site. Many large sites still use (and should) this type of sitemap.

But in 2005 a new style of sitemap was introduced, the XML-Sitemap.
Google was the first to introduce the XML-Sitemap and naturally it wasn’t long before Yahoo, MSN, and Ask adopted the same format.

It was long after Google introduced the new format that Arne Brachhold
created the first Google Sitemaps Generator Plugin for WordPress.
Sitemaps and WordPress have come a long way since then, and the latest version of the Sitemaps generator has kept up with it all. I say latest because as of this writing the version is number 3.0.3 and was released on 11/28/2007. Read Full Entry