E-mail spiders have become a full-blown epidemic (er… infestation?) on the web, crawling sites and collecting email addresses for evil spammers. Fortunately there are a number of ways you can protect yourself.

The number one thing you can do to prevent your address from being harvested is to not provide it to your visitors at all. Unfortunately, this isn’t practical for most people. Visitors generally feel a site is more reputable if contact information has been provided.

If you feel you must provide your email address to visitors, here are a few methods to secure your address, as well as a few methods to avoid.

…read full articles of "How2: Protect Your Address from Email Spiders"

Popularity: 100% [?]

One of the most popular plugins out there for WordPress is the Popularity Contest Plugin by Alex King. This plugin ranks the popularity your posts by pageviews, trackbacks, comments, etc and displays a popularity value at the bottom of the post.

It also allows you to put a list of “Most Popular Posts” on your sidebar.

Unfortunately, WordPress 2.5.1 users get a fatal error when trying to activate the plugin. The good news is, it’s a fairly easy fix, especially if you were using the plugin in a previous version of WordPress. If you weren’t using the plugin before upgrading or installing WordPress 2.5.1, the fix is a bit more involved, but still doable. Please note, this fix isn’t my own. I learned about it here. I’ve rewritten the steps to hopefully provide a clear step-by-step account of the process (complete with screenshots for those of us who like pictures).

…read full articles of "How2: Get Popularity Contest Plugin Working in WordPress 2.5.1"

Popularity: 95% [?]

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) can be confusing for even the most knowledgeable bloggers and web designers. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of SEO taken from their article on SEO:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site.

If you’re confused about what SEO is and what it means for your site, don’t worry. A quick Google search will produce numerous articles that can help you understand SEO (I recommend starting with Wikipedia’s overview of SEO first).

But here’s the good news! You don’t really have to understand SEO to start improving your web site or blog (although understanding it certainly helps). Free SEO tools like Website Grader can help you understand where changes to your site are needed to help improve your site’s SEO.

…read full articles of "How2: Optimize your Blog or Web Site with Free SEO tools."

Popularity: 66% [?]

Adding the Google Analytics Tracking Code (even the new and improved ga.js version) is as simple as downloading the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin from Yoast.com.

…read full articles of "How2: Embed Google Analytics Tracking Code into WordPress 2.5.1"

Popularity: 48% [?]

As you continue to tweak and modify the content of your web site or blog, eventually you’ll want to customize your sites favicon. For instructions on how to change your favicon for WordPress 2.5.1 click here. For instructions on how to create your own favicon, continue reading below.

What is a favicon? A favicon is the tiny 16 x 16 image that’s associated with your web page. If installed properly it will show up to the left of your web address as well as in other places like the tabs of a tabbed browser like Firefox.

…read full articles of "How2: Create a Favicon icon for your Web Site or Blog"

Popularity: 57% [?]