WordPress Website Overhaul Follow-up

It has been two months since I posted my Wordpress Website Overhaul 3 part series and I thought I should do a follow-up to that. Making sure your site is functioning just the way you want it, is an on going effort. So I thought I would provide some stats and also let you know what I removed, what I added and also cover a couple of things I didn't mention last time.

In my first post I mentioned how I had used multiple Themes and finally selected one that I like based on some functionality that it brought along with it. That is a good way to go, but you should also consider that relying to much on that functionality can eventually be a curse if you decide you want to change Themes down the road. I like the built in Google Maps functionality the Theme brings, but you can get that functionality without needing it in the Theme.  Just something to think about.

There is generally a lot of chatter about how many plugins you should use and I mentioned that I use P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler). The reason I use it, is that it helps me to compare the efficiency of plugins of similar functionality. I can make a better choice if I know all of the pros and cons of each plugin. Not all developers understand performance tuning. That typically takes some time and skill to develop. I currently use 33 plugins on my site. I don't see P3 being a plugin that I keep active on my site, rather download it when I need it.

After 2 months of running NoSpamNX it had not caught a single thing, and after posting this information to the support site I receive no input from the author other than to mark my question as resolved. I noticed there was more support from members than the plugin author. So no results, no answers or help, it is gone. I deleted it from my plugin list since it wasn't doing anything.

Next up for my follow-up series was looking at the firewall plugin that I was using. In this case it was WordPress Firewall 2. It had not been updated for a long time and my site has more recently been getting hit harder and harder with spam traffic. There were times my site was being blocked by the plugin thinking it was a SQL Injection Attack. In reality it was me at Best Buy viewing my site from one of their laptops. Another case it was sending emails every half hour for over 2 days from the same IP address. There was no sign that it would ever stop. I needed to get a new firewall plugin!

I decided to remove the "WordPress Firewall 2" plugin and replace it with OSE Firewall™,  it is a single plugin but it also comes with OSE Anti-Spam™ (uses Stop Forum Spam IP address pool) and OSE Virus Scanner™. 

The anti-spam feature is great and provides me with the extra coverage I was looking for after removing NoSpamNX. No need to look for a replace for it!  The OSE Anti-Spam™plugin will allow you to set how aggressive you want it to be identifying spam. For those things it lets go by, I depend on Akismet and AVH First Defense Against Spam to catch. So far no spam has made itself seen on my site. It is either stopped or displayed in the spam area of my comments for review. My only comment is that OSE Anti-Spam™ doesn't provide any feedback on what it is doing unless you have emails sent to your inbox, so that is what I am doing. I get a lot of emails of type "Stop Forum Spam IP"! Right now I feel the combination of the three anti-spam plugins I have running are doing a fantastic job of controlling spam.

The OSE Virus Scanner™ feature of the plugin provides scanning for viruses. It also displays a security badge on the bottom right corner of your site providing information to your visitors that you care about the safety of your site and theirs.

My updated list:

For security and spamming I use several plugins and most likely this is something that I will look at from time to time and perhaps try a few new plugins. I currently use;

• Akismet
• AVH First Defense Against Spam
• OSE Firewall™ (includes OSE Anti-Spam™ and OSE Virus Scanner™)
• AntiVirus
• BulletProof Security
• Login LockDown (Updated 5/7/13: BulletProof Security added "Login Security" as a feature so I no longer use Login LockDown)
• Fast Secure Contact Form
• WangGuard

For those of you who like to see screen shots, attached are a few that I snapped for this article. You can see that March was a big spam month on my site. However, now that I have started to use OSE Firewall™ the AVH counts will be smaller, but only because the new firewall anti-spam is catching some of those spams now.

 The new firewall can block against many types of attacks. If it detects an attack, a block page is displayed to the attacker. You also can test your sites firewall via a built in check in the plugin. This can give you peace of mind that your site is being protected.

I have not spent a lot of time discussing AVH but it is a great plugin and part of the trio of plugins I use for spam. It provides links in email communications that allow me to blacklist an IP with just a click. It will also notify me when some attempts to access directly the wp-comment-post.php.

A distributed denial-of-service attack? What's up with that?

I have not talked about the other plugins I use that personalize my site, those are very subjective. However, I will mention that I recently changed my view on social buttons. I originally liked displaying the buttons (Twitter, Facebook, G+, Pinterest) with counters, but more recently I decided that I don't want to add any overhead to my site that getting the counts brings with it. I recently switched to Simple Share Buttons and am very satisfied with the look and performance of the plugin. Check them out.

I hope the information above helps you in your ongoing work of keeping your Wordpress site up-to-date and if you think some of the plugins I mention could be of value to you give them a try. All are easy to use and provide good results.

Now back to my photo editing! Working on scanned negatives from December 1983. Enjoy life!

Quote For The Day

       We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid. Benjamin Franklin

Epson Perfection V700 Photo Scanner

I spent about 2 years debating what type of scanner I wanted to buy before purchasing the Epson Perfection V700 Photo Scanner. I even sent 50 slides to ScanCafe to see what the quality was from them. If you are interested, you can read my post about them. A service can be a great time saver if you have a large film and/or slide collection. I had a Microtek scanner that I bought in 2002 that desperately needed to be replace. Some recent scanning of color pictures finally drove me to decided to get the V700. I had the negatives, why was I scanning the picture! I did a lot of reading of scanner reviews before my purchase. Important to me was the Digital ICE technology and I like the SilverFast software that comes bundled with the scanner. I didn't want to spend half my life in Photoshop healing hair and dust off of my film, so a scanner and software that supported infrared was high on my list of must haves. I don't use it for every picture, but it is amazing how much dirt there actually is on the film. Be careful how aggressive you get with the infrared or you can impact the final picture quality. For handling film I have cotton work gloves that I use to keep the oil from my skin off of the film. In addition or as an alternative, using a compressed gas duster on the film and scanner bed helps control the dust problem. A very good investment when scanning. I use it to dust the outside of the scanner as well.

There were many other things I would love to have on the scanner, like auto focus or better film holders, but I also wanted to keep my price in the $500 range if possible. I ended up spending $636 on the V700 at Micro Center. Overall I would rate the quality of the scanner a close 5 out of 5. There is very little to complain about and even the film holders provide the ability to adjust the height to improve focus. I scanned 12 slides using the different height adjustments and found that the factory setup was the sharpest scan (arrow pointing to +). The light source isn't LED so there is a short warm-up time, but I am looking for output quality as a priority.

Here is what's in the box.

• Epson Perfection V700 Photo scanner - with DIGITAL ICE technology
• 8" x 10" transparency unit (built into lid)
• Four film holders: 35mm negatives, 35mm slides, medium format and 4" x 5"
• Film Holder Height Adjusters
• 8" x 10" Film Area Guide
• CD-ROM with Epson Scan software and productivity applications
• DVD-ROM with Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 9
• CD-ROM with LaserSoft Imaging™ SilverFast® SE6
• USB 2.0 cable
• Epson Setup Sheet
• AC adapter and power cable

The scanner isn't worth much without the software and there is little purpose to have the scanner and not run the best software you can afford. The software it ships with is good and it may be all that you need. The first thing I did was to download the latest demo version of SilverFast 8 and made sure that it worked on my system and that I was comfortable with it. I spent about three days using the software and took advantage of their upgrade offer from version 6 to version 8 Ai Studio.

Using SilverFast 8 I currently scan to jpeg at 3,200 dpi. I have done some scans to tiff, but I will reserve that for photographs that I feel are of a special nature. Otherwise jpegs are fine for the scans. The software function in SilverFast I make the most use of is the Histogram. The scans on a flatbed scanner will never be perfect, but for my work as a serious photographer the investment was worth it.

Above is a scanned 35mm close-up picture I took of an electric meter in 1977 using a GAF 35mm camera.

The above picture was taken in Mohican State Park forest in August 1977. The flash fired, resulting in highlighting the foreground rocks and tripod. I scanned 39 slides from the camping trip to the park. I had forgotten about visiting the park until I scanned the slides.

The above picture had histogram adjustments only. No sharpening was applied to the image when it was scanned.

The same picture compared side-by-side to the raw scan and the adjusted finished product.

See the follow-up to this post about scanning negatives, click here.

Unlock your memories and find those old photos!

WordPress Website Overhaul Part 3

Welcome to part 3 of my WordPress Website Overhaul. In my last post I listed the plugins that I use for security, spammers and sploggers. These are important plugins and should be used on your site.  Although I am posting about my WordPress overhaul this is really an ongoing process that I do from time-to-time. After 2 years of my site being on WordPress it was time to review everything and make some changes. I will watch the stats on my plugins and make some changes as necessary, maybe I will be able to delete another plugin!

The next set of plugins that are import are the cache enabling ones. Pre-loading your pages to memory makes them much faster to load and can increase your rankings in search engines. More than that, your visitors won't be discouraged by slow load times and are more likely to take a look at your site.  It isn't unusual that I will close out a tab in my browser if a site takes too long to load. I like WP Super Cache and it seems to play well with my other plugins. There are plenty of basic and advanced settings that when used can really speed up your site. I also use WP Widget Cache and Use Google Libraries. You may get both increased speed from Google Libraries as well as the latest javascripts hosted on Google helping to keeping your site up-to-date and conflict free.

[dropshadowbox align="none" effect="lifted-both" width="autopx" height="" background_color="#f1ca37" border_width="1" border_color="#dddddd" ]Some say plugins don't add to your sites load times....yes they can![/dropshadowbox]

Now that we have discussed the necessary plugins lets look at a plugin that I feel is second only

to the security ones. It is a plugin called P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler), and it is my favorite plugin. This plugin actually scans your site and plugins and provides a performance profile of your site's load time, and displays which plugins are impacting your sites load times the most. This is where you can make important decisions on which plugins to keep and remove/swap out. Not all code is created equal and not everyone can write efficient code. This plugin will help you understand what plugins take the longest to load and aid you in comparing similar plugins to one another. Make sure you take a look at this one, perhaps after seeing its analysis you will stop blaming your host for your sites poor performance.

A nice complement to P3 is Pingdom. Pingdom provides uptime monitoring and performance monitoring. I periodically visit Pingdom and check on my sites performance and compare it to the history of tests that I have done. Well worth the time it takes.

When adding plugins to your site do your homework and research what is available and when checking the plugins out don't forget to check their performance with P3 and Pingdom.

I hope you have gotten something out of my three part series about WordPress site building/plugin selection. Keep doing your research and revisit your site from time to time to see what improvements you can make.

WordPress Website Overhaul Part 2

Welcome to the continuation of my Wordpress Website Overhaul Part 2. If you haven't read part 1 you can go here to read it. In part one I spoke about getting the right theme and removing the plugins that you really do not need. Of course that can be subjective, but you do need to take a hard look at what plugins you just don't need. I am a register DISQUS user and was using it on my site. However, I really don't do that much commenting on the web and my site has very few comments (not that I don't get a lot of comments in the spam bucket that I delete). Of course the amounts of comments I get can change, but thinking about it, I really didn't need to be using DISQUS and of course it was adding to my site load times. I am now using the WordPress comment system and do not require registration. That can add to the spam on your site and the need for additional plugins to control. I felt that not requiring registration makes it easier to comment and more visitor friendly so for me that is the best route to take. I know a lot of people debate what comment system is best and it is probably more of a personal option and choice more than anything else.

The next thing you really need to consider is how to protect your site from the evil of the world. You don't want to host viruses, link to shocking sites, participate in pyramid schemes or have your website host shut you down! Like it or not you should try to lock your site down. Make your login  password secure and look at plugins that can help keep access to your site secure.  I use Login LockDown  "Adds some extra security to WordPress by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted from a given IP range". There are other plugins that you can look at and determine which is best for you.

For spam I use several plugins and most likely this is something that I will look at from time to time and perhaps try a few new plugins. I currently use;

• Akismet
• AVH First Defense Against Spam
• NoSpamNX (update: after 2 month Akismet and AVH have caught everything and NoSpamNX hasn't been needed/hasn't caught anything. I deleted it on 4/4/2013)

I also have a few other plugins related to security;

• AntiVirus
• BulletProof Security
• Wordpress Firewall 2

Finally I use a couple of plugins to help control splogging and junk email.

• Fast Secure Contact Form - "Includes CAPTCHA and Akismet support to block all common spammer tactics"
• WangGuard - "Remove the generator META tag, checks for blocked domains, Verifies that an associated Mail eXchange (MX) record exists for the email domain"

I had a plugin that provide a system health/info display on my dashboard, but I could get similar information from the BulletProof Security plugin so I was able to delete that plugin and still get the info from BPS.

I recommend you take the time to look again at the plugins you are running and see if there is any overlap in the functionality they are providing you. Look at other plugins not installed and see if perhaps they are better suited for your needs.

Look for part 3 of my WordPress Website Overhaul series.

WordPress Website Overhaul Part 1

I have completed my WordPress Website Overhaul and it was well worth the time that it took. This post is more about approach, but part 2 will contain more information on the plugins that I use. BhagaVideo.com is a self hosted WordPress site that makes use of many plugins. When I started the overhaul, my site load times were running in the 5 seconds area and I really wasn't happy with the overall look and feel of the site. I mostly do video and photography for fun and blog about my travels both near and far. Through this website I encourage others to digitize and restore their old photos and document their travels.

My photo website is Photos.BhagaVideo.com and it contains 6,000 pictures that I have taken since I was 10 years old. Most of the pictures are available for public viewing and many others are in private albums. The two sites contain links between them, with most of the pictures in my blog originate from the photo site. My photo site is hosted by SmugMug.

Before using WordPress I was writing my own code, but decided that I wanted my site to be more of a blog and WP seemed like a good way to go. I have used many themes trying each one out but was never really satisfied. One of my requirements for my photo site was GEO Mapping of my pictures, yet my blog did not make use of that. That didn't make sense. So I started looking at themes and came across Travel Blogger. Its theme was travel and it had Google Maps functionality built in. A perfect compliment to my photo site. I installed the Theme and made the adjustments to the size of the columns using a slider provided by the Theme.  If your blog is about cruising they have a Theme entitled "Seaward Bound" there is also a NYC Theme. Check them out.

Once I installed the theme I had the option of adding maps to all of my posts. I went back through my older posts and updated them to include a Google Map where that made sense to do. That is as simple as adding the shortcode to the end of my post. I only had about 50 posts that I needed to review so for me this wasn't a daunting task.

The second task was to review all of the Pages for content. I needed to update them to emphasize the travel focus of my site as well as still providing the inspiration around capturing old photos and converting 8mm film to video. This isn't exciting work but I believe that your site should have some consistency to it and stick to the theme.

The third task was to look at all of the plugins that I had installed and decide which ones I really didn't need, want or were overlapped by another plugin. You can get pretty hung up on cool thinks that really doesn't matter to anyone, and just adds to the load time of your site.

If you are going to run stats on your site pick the one that you like and go with it. I had Google Analytics, "Visitor Maps and Who's Online", and Woopra. I like Woopra but it really didn't give me anything more than what I can get with Google and the live chat isn't something that I will be doing. The most visitors I have ever had at one time is 26 and almost no one leaves a comment so what is the point? Worth considering if you are spending a lot more time on your site. "Visitor Maps and Who's Online" is something I like as well and the map of the world is great, but at the end of the day it is something I like and nothing my visitors really care about. The Who's online is good but again Google Analytics has it covered. It is a great option for anyone who wants to disconnect themselves from Google. I run Google Analytics on my photo website so I decided to go with Google Analytics and deleted the other 2 plugins. My first victory!

The next to go was copyrightpro. It works very well, but nothing on my site is worth protecting so again I had to ask myself, what's the point? It is just adding to the load time of my site, so deactivated and deleted. Next was Google Fonts, I wasn't using the plugin and I don't see a need to ever use it. I want to keep my site cleaner looking without a lot of colors and differing fonts.

I suggest that you follow the same idea that I did and delete the plugins that you no longer use or care about. The search engines are looking at your sites load time to improve its ranking so it is best to make site speed your priority rather than plugins that don't bring value to your visitors or you. The net result of doing the above dropped a full 1.5 seconds off the load time of my site. Well worth the effort that I made.

Look for part 2 of my overhaul post. I will get more into the plugins I decided on keeping and how I decided what to get rid of or replace.

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