Andrew Kelsall | Graphic Designer | Logo, Poster and Large-Format Print Design

Image: LivePine

Recently, I installed the DoFollow plugin for WordPress—something I’ve been intending to do for a few weeks now. One of the first places I learned about this tool whilst reading the blog of London-based graphic designer Rob Cubbon.

Basically, for those of you who don’t know what this software is, the DoFollow Plugin is some code for WordPress that gives commentors credit for leaving comments in blog post, like this one.

The credit that is given is the absence of the ‘No Follow’ tag, which allows search engine spiders, such as GoogleBot, to follow the web URL to your site. In a nut-shell, if you leave a [unspammy] meaningful comment on any of my blog posts, your site (providing you entered your URL) will receive ‘Link Juice‘—adding more web-authority and respectability to your own site.

I have done this to reward commenters on this blog, as by default, WordPress blogs treat links in posts with a ‘No-Follow‘ tag. If you have any thoughts on any of my upcoming articles, including constructive criticism, feel free to leave a comment—and benefit your own site in the process.

So if your wondering what sheep and my blog have in common, well, they both follow!

September Update:

Recently, I have discovered a better plugin than NoFollow. The Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin does the same basic function of the other plugin, but is customizable. I can set the plugin to keep NoFollow on my own posts, but set it to follow other peoples’ comments after they have posted a pre-determined amount of comments. I have done this to help prevent comment-spammers from gaining link juice, but still rewards regular commenters. If you’re using WordPress, I highly reccommmend it. Additionally, the comment-count of a commenter is displayed. Great!

This is the second part in a series about how I customized my Wordpress Blog (read the first part). Before I proceed with the next part, learning CSS, I thought I’d tell of my recent experiences with actually hosting AndrewKelsall.com.

For years, I had used US-based hosting service Netfirms. I was reasonably happy with this company for about 4 years, until I noticed huge amounts of downtime on one of my other sites over the following months. I set up some online monitoring with Pingdom (which may I add is an excellent service) and discovered, to my horror, that my sites average uptime was a dismal 95.45%—totally outrageous! After countless emails to their awful customer service folks, nothing was done about it—and they wouldn’t even admit there was a problem with my site uptime percentage.

That was it, I was moving—but to which hosting service? I had never moved hosting providers before, and I’d heard that it can be a chore if you don’t know what you’re doing—like myself. I had a site, a blog and other domains named I owned which needed to be transfered, so I set about spending hours researching the net for advice, answers and resolutions to my needs.

I’m not going to go into great detail about this, but this is the jist of how I chose my new web host—MediaTemple—or (mt). After great deliberation and much research, I initially decided to use Fused Network, a fairly new company who appeared to have great reviews with 99.9% guaranteed uptime. However, these reviews were from a ‘web host review site’ that sounded too good to be true.

As I’m quite cautious, I decided to check the domain servers (via who.is) of the review site, HostJury—and guess what? They were hosted by no other than Fused Network! I can only assume that the sites were linked in some way, as there was also an identical iPod competition running on both sites. What a shame, this company looked promising with excellent customer service, so I found. Also, I found out they were a Canadian host, but I required a US-based one because of my prospective reader-base.

Media Temple, however, was a host that I was initially put-off with. It had mixed reviews—not because of bad customer service and lack of features, or even price. The issue with (mt) was one of reliability on their Grid Server. I’ll not go into too much detail, but the Grid Server is fairly new (and experimental) technology that has one main advantage—handling traffic spikes on blogs, etc. The main complaint I found over and over again on the web, is that the Grid was failing quite a bit and was unreliable.

On the plus side, I read a great deal about how these problems were being addressed and ironed-out by Media Temple’s team of highly skilled technicians. So, after being tired of researching the web-host issue—and the fact that I could just pay (mt) monthly (so I could move hosts again if things didn’t quite work out), I moved over to ‘The Grid’. Now, 3 months into the (mt) experience, I must say that their customer service is excellent, the features are great—and my uptime is over 99.9%. Brilliant (thanks Pingdom).

I intend to stay with Media Temple for two main reasons. Firstly, they inform me of issues with their servers, which are actually becoming less frequent, with the servers more stable than ever. Secondly, their customer service is second-to-none. When I was moving my sites to them, they gave me advice on what to do with transferring my other blogs’ database, as well as transferring all my domain names and their registry information/servers. I hadn’t done this before, but they supported me in my hour of need. Thank-you James Starbuck, Amanda, Alex, Paul, Brandon and the whole (mt) team. Yes, that’s a lot of support (make that hours of need)!

Funnily enough, apart from the fact that my sites had a terrible downtime record with Netfirms, I left them for poor customer service. So, after my move to (mt), I closed my account with Netfirms—and to my surprise, their customer support was top-notch! Maybe the folks in the support department should swop places with Accounts. Just a thought.

Have you had a bad experience with a web host? Can you recommend another host that uses new technologies, such as grid servers? I’d like to hear your thoughts…

Earlier this month, I wrote a post about the birth of my blog. Well, since then I’ve been doing some thinking—and I remembered when I first started to blog for another online project 18 months ago. Back then, I knew nothing about how to set up a blog, customize it and even competently write a post!

Over time, I learned the skills necessary to hand-code CSS, and read a great deal about many aspects of blogging. One thing I can tell you is this—there was a lot of research involved—and I had to trawl many sites to get the information I required.

I always thought how great it would be if there was a series of blog posts, or tutorials, to give me an example of how another blogger set up their site. Sure, there are many articles out there on the web, but none of which were both a personal example of someone else’s experience.

For me, learning by an example is a great way to learn. Rather then reading tutorials regarding how things could be done—I love to read articles outlining real examples and techniques.

So, what I am aiming to do in this series of blog posts in to write the process of setting up my blog from scratch. I’m going to write them in a way that I would personally like to read a ‘tutorial’ myself. I invite you to travel on this journey with me—and I hope that I can either inspire you in some way or provide a good informative read.

I don’t know yet how many parts there will be in this series about Wordpress customization, maybe it will go on and on, evolving with my site. Please let me know your thoughts about this series along the way…

Hello there reader—if you’re wondering what is going on with the layout of my Wordpress Blog, it’s because I’m customizing it. This is my new blog, and I’ve started to write articles before the design is finished. Why? This is for two main reasons—so search engines can start indexing my site (and because this is a new site, get out of the Google Sandbox) and secondly, so my content can be read straight away, so it stays relevant.

I you are a new reader, and sometimes my site looks a bit mish-mashed, just hit the refresh button in your browser to load the new code and stylesheet. If you have any opinions on my blog, or any suggestions, please let me know, won’t you? Thanks for your patience, it will be worth it…