Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with 24-year experienced SEO professional Peter Mahoney

Gwibber and the new Twitter API

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I noticed Gwibber, my social networking app for Ubuntu, stopped updating my Twitter status after the API was updated. Basically, it was broken.

And as of yet, it’s not been patched.

Here’s a fix I used to get Ubuntu updating my Twitter account again.

[sourcecode]pkill gwibber
sudo gedit "/usr/share/gwibber/plugins/twitter/__init__.py"[/sourcecode]

Then search and replace “api.twitter.com/1” to “api.twitter.com/1.1”

Tada!

For the sake of honesty, I’ll admit I didn’t find this fix myself, I found it here.

Make a “Share on Twitter” link with URL and Hashtags

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This is a little coding trick I get asked about quite a bit.

The link you have to make to share something to Twitter is quite simple:

http://twitter.com/share?text=text goes here

But getting a URL and hastag in there is a different matter. To be honest most developers do know how to include the URL, but hashtags have proved more elusive!

http://twitter.com/share?text=text goes here&url=http://url goes here&hashtags=hashtag1,hashtag2,hashtag3

Here’s an example to try out:

http://twitter.com/share?text=Here’s an awesome tip!&url=https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/make-a-share-on-twitter-link-with-url-and-hashtags/&hashtags=peter,is,awesome

And that’s it!

Website code template

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This is for my fellow developers out there.

I have a small series of files I copy and paste whenever I’m about to start a new project, they have default templates for various files I use a lot. Like a header, footer, index page, blank stylesheet, and something called “top.php” that I use to open sessions and connect to databases.

There are also some of my standard folders pre-made too (with the correct server permissions) like “img” (images) and “upl” (uploads).

This was going to be last week’s #fridayfreebie, but here it is on a Wednesday instead.

This particular version is the one I use most commonly, and it’s set up for:

  • PHP
  • MySQL
  • HTML5
  • CSS (any version!)
  • and ideally a unix/linux based server, because it references the top level of the site as being “/”.

I’ve zipped it up to share! Feel free to do whatever you want with it—although there is a lot of Peter Mahoney specific stuff in there, so you might want to take that out. Unless of course you like giving me credit for your work. 🙂

HTML5 website template (.zip)

Speeding up your site

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There is a slew of methods to speed your site up–which is not only the polite thing to do for your guests–but helps with Speed Engine Optimisation (SEO) too. Google in particular looks at how quickly your site loads when deciding how to rank your site in search results.

Now, if you’re familiar with web servers then everything you need to know is written below. If not, this is the sort of thing you want to have an expert do for you; a faster site is too good an opportunity to pass up.

Browser caching is a process whereby we’re able to reduce the number of HTTP requests the server needs to process, which reduced page load times. Your server tells the visitor’s browser not to look for certain files everytime–usually the file that don’t change often anyway.

Edit your .htaccess file for your site, and include this code:

## EXPIRES CACHING ##
# by Peter Mahoney of petermahoney.com
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 2 days"
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES CACHING ##

Restart your web server, and you’re done!

Noe this isn’t all there is to optimising a website for speed. Especially WordPress websites. As you’ll know by now I’m a WordPress SEO expert so I really pay a lot of attention to speed. There are plugins, image compression techniques and even extra code snippets worth using.

When it comes to plugin choice for WordPress speed I recommend WP Rocket – it does a great job out of the box and with just a few setting changes you can really push the envelope. Using that as well as a series of manual image compression techniques I’m able to improve the average WordPress site’s speed by 40%!

Speeding things up usually does require a few manual tweaks to code here and there – it’s really a job for a professional rather than just trying it yourself (it’s all too easy to stop a site working properly with this stuff.)

I can’t recommend a faster site enough. For your users, SEO – hell even the good of the web itself. Let’s get that content flying.

Donate monthly via Paypal, and HTML

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BINGO! This is just what I needed tonight. I was starting to create a PHP solution that would enable me to set up monthly donations (rather than a subscription) to Paypal.

But then I thought, “Paypal must have a more elegant solution for this, and if not more elegant, than certainly simpler”.

And while they didn’t, a quick Google search revealed someone else had. In HTML.

Monthly Donations Button | PayPal.

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