I was recently looking for a decently priced VPS where I could host a couple of small to medium sized websites. I actually signed up for a few random ones that I found on Google and tried them for a few days, but they didn't strike me as working very well. One of them actually crashed after about an hour, and it took about eight hours for support to finally restart it for me. Eventually I started looking around the internet a bit more, and ran into a relatively new company called Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean VPS I realize that not all web companies have nice looking web pages, but whenever I ...

I was recently attending WordCamp Europe near Amsterdam, and met Vladimir from ManageWP. I've heard lots about ManageWP over the last year or so, and even helped do an integration with WPtouch Pro to make it work with their system. But I've never actually sat down and spent any time with their system, and decided it was time to sign-up for an account, do a bit of exploring and write a basic ManageWP review to let people know what the service is all about. ManageWP is a service that basically helps you manage multiple WordPress websites, all from their own proprietary dashboard. As anyone who writes ...

One of the first things I did when I committed myself to travelling around the world was to set up a blog. Indeed, I recently just assisted two other people in getting theirs up, one for a trip around the world, and one for a yearly RV trip down to Arizona. This post will give you easy instructions for how to set up a blog using WordPress. Part of the motivation I find with most people is the desire to share some of their experiences, both positive and negative, with others. Since so much of travel research is done these days via the Internet, the desire for most people to contribute to that wealth ...

After my recent mention on Reddit last week, I decided to try and improve the responsiveness of my little DigitalOcean VPS even more than it already was. I was definitely happy that I was able to withstand almost 20,000 visitors in just a few hours, but thought I might be able to improve things further by switching from Apache to Nginx. I debated it a long time ago, but never made the plunge for a few different reasons. First, I typically used hosting services based on cPanel. From what I gather, cPanel doesn't really work well with Nginx (or at all), so that was never really an option. And second, ...

I've been trying to track where exactly people go when they leave my website for a few pages recently, and wrote some code based on a few other examples on the Internet. Basically this bit of Javascript will force Google Analytics to log a special request so that you can see where the user went. It uses jQuery, so you have to make sure you have that included in your theme. Here's some code that will let you track outbound links on your WordPress website. jQuery( 'a' ).on( 'click',function( e ) { var url = jQuery( this ).attr( 'href' ); var customName = jQuery( this ).attr( 'data-link-name' ...

I've recently been optimizing a few different WordPress websites, and wanted to share with everyone some of the easy ways to speed up your WordPress website. Some of these tips are intended for server administrators and assume that you have root access to your server and/or cPanel/WHM (if you're using cPanel). Other tips are intended for any WordPress website administrator. This article has 5 different tips for how to speed up your WordPress website. If you currently don't have a WordPress website but are considering setting one up, here is information on how to setup a WordPress blog. Install ...

I recently returned returned about four month's ago from a three week visit to Australia. I managed to make it as far as New Zealand in 2011, but didn't have the time to get across to Australia. Despite appearances, most people think Australia and New Zealand are fairly close - but they are actually separated by a distance that would take between 3.5 and 4 hours to fly between them, which is obviously quite far (like going from Calgary to Toronto). I left Vancouver on a Wednesday with the goal of being in Sydney on the Friday (you lose a day crossing the date-line). It was a long flight (14 hours), ...

I had an opportunity the other day to record an hour long podcast with my friend John Biehler. John recently started a technology-based podcast called TekEh that has a particular emphasis on Canadian content and guests. His first episode was Kemp Edwards from HootSuite, and talked mainly about the experiences of being in Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. I was excited to be the second guest in the series, and spent an hour sipping a rum and coke and talking about WordPress, our experiences at BraveNewCode creating commercial plugins, having clients, photography, travelling around the world, ...

Update: Here are the slides from the presentation - enjoy! I'm giving a talk in a few hours down at The Network Hub, and wanted to start a post here for some of the information. For those of you who can't make it or are stuck on the waitlist, I'll be talking about the following items: Creative Commons Licensing WordPress and Social Media Stats Plugin: Copyrighted Posts (Licensing Content) Plugin: Tweet, Like, Google +1 and Share (Sharing) Plugin: ShareThis (Sharing) Plugin: Sociable (Sharing) Plugin: Flickr RSS (Flickr) Plugin: MudSlideShow (Flickr/Picassa) Post From Flickr to WordPress (Flickr) Plugin: ...

Rebecca is over in Victoria right now for Social Media Camp, and it sounds like it's a great event. WIthout a doubt, everyone is interested in social media right now, and learning how they can leverage it to build relationships and better run their business. While it hasn't been officially announced yet, I'll be giving a talk about WordPress and social media on June the 23rd at the monthly WordPress meet-up in Vancouver. It'll be at the Network Hub, and should be a fun event. Hopefully whoever comes out will be up for hitting a pub afterwards and continuing on the WordPress discussions over a ...

Since some of the current readers are new to blogging, I thought I'd spend a bit of time explaining the whole concept of trackbacks. Trackbacks are sort of an automated form of commenting so that when a blog entry is referenced by another one, this is reflected in the comments of the original blog entry. For example, let's say I write a blog entry here, and Clay comes along like the bigshot he is and wants to link to it from his blog. There are two ways he can do it. First, he can link to the actual blog entry itself, which at first seems like a good thing to do if you're Clay. Unfortunately, ...