Here’s a nifty little function you can add to you’re theme’s functions.php
to append the post category link in you’re rss feed, but the same technique can be applied to add just about anything. This can be especially useful if some sites are scraping you’re content from you’re rss feed and you want to include a link back. It utilizes the ‘the_excerpt_rss’ and ‘the_content_rss’ hooks depending on how you’re rss feed is configured.
function feed_link($content) { global $post;
foreach((get_the_category()) as $category) {
if ($category->category_parent == 0) {
$cat_name = $category->name;
$cat_ID = $category->cat_ID;
$link = get_category_link( $cat_ID );
break;
}
}
$content = $content.'<br /><a href="'.$link.'">More '.$cat_name.' posts</a>';
return $content;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss','feed_link');
add_filter('the_content_rss','feed_link');
Have you ever wondered how exactly “direct” traffic is measured in Google Analytics? For the most part, this traffic comes from users directly navigating to your site through their browser toolbar or a bookmark. As it turns out there could be other sources that are counted as direct traffic when they aren’t. These include ppc,display or links from other sites that for some reason don’t pass a referrer.
You can paste the following code into you’re browser toolbar after clicking through an ad to you’re site to see if (any) referrer was passed. If it’s empty than Google Analytics will count it towards direct traffic if you don’t pass any campaign tracking parameters.
javascript:alert(document.referrer)
How do I fix this?
1. Realize that a chunk of the traffic that shows up in your “direct” bucket ~(10-15%) could be attributed to some other source e.g (ppc,display,link). This could be from click-through traffic or type-in traffic (where people see you’re ad and type in you’re url instead of clicking on it.) The latter case is essentially free advertising and while hard to measure directly should be considered into the ROI calculation for advertising. This is why it’s always important to display a url in you’re advertisement.
2. Always use tracking parameters in your urls when possible. http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics
Once your wordpress blog starts getting traffic besides your mom and cousins you will likely have to start taking measures to reduce it’s cpu footprint.
Note: Some of these methods will work on a shared host without root access, but ssh is required for some methods, like installing memcached.
Step 1: Offload Images to Amazon S3
Images generally make up a large percentage of the total page load (up to 50%, see below). By using Amazon S3 as a CDN, you can save on bandwidth costs with your host and speed up your page load times significantly.
Graph taken from the YSlow firefox plugin, a great tool to help diagnose page load performance issues.
Costs for S3 are reasonable, but can add up if you are hosting large files. Below is a report of costs for the first 10 hours of a blog that I run. Most requests are for a single image (2k in size) loaded externally.
Tantan S3 is a great plugin for wordpress that links your Amazon S3 account to your wordpress blog. You can configure it such that your media uploads are sent to your S3 “bucket” on upload.
Another useful tool is S3Fox, a plugin for firefox that you can use to manage and sync files in your S3 account through your browser. You will need your S3 security credentials to set it up.
(more…)
