Creative Storefront» Bradley Charbonneau

WordPress Hosting Review

Bradley Charbonneau — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 17:08:22 +0000

It’s a common question, but with a zillion possible answers: where’s the best place to host my WordPress site? There are several factors (bandwidth, traffic, uptime, and all of those numbers), but most people just want to know:

What’s the best hosting value for money?

It doesn’t always mean the cheapest, but the best mix of cost and service. There’s a great WordPress Hosting Review over at Likoma that gives you the down and dirty of website hosts and doesn’t hold back. In fact, some surprising–if not a bit disturbing–mishaps at a huge hosting company. Ouch.

WorkingPoint: Can it replace QuickBooks?

Bradley Charbonneau — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 18:35:57 +0000

That’s the question I need to answer. WorkingPoint.

Forget what you do. Write about how you do what you do.

Bradley Charbonneau — Wed, 26 May 2010 18:16:36 +0000

Lee Foster is an excellent photographer and prolific travel writer. He posts his writing at his website, has a bazillion stock photos from everywhere on the planet, and even now has iPhone apps for travel photography. Wow, he’s on top of things.

But the content I’m most interested in reading is how (and what) he’s doing in our social media world. I can see that he’s doing it, but I’m curious about how he’s doing it, how it’s working for him, what’s working, what’s not, and how we can learn from it.

Laurie King over at Travel Writers News is also interested as she mentions Lee’s article in her own commentary on apps and the future of journalism. She’s also interested, for her travel writing readers, about how a pro in the industry is doing things. What’s especially interesting about Lee’s write up is that he gives real numbers, real percentages of commissions so we can see first hand what’s going on behind the scenes.

I’ll be curious to see if these posts by both Laurie and Lee get more traffic than a post about, well, travel itself. Stay tuned.

WordPress 3.0: WP + WPMU

Bradley Charbonneau — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:02:09 +0000

Hmm, maybe don’t need to “learn” WP MU after all …

WordPress 3.0 MU Merge Settings To Create Network Blogs

Was talking with someone just yesterday about WP MU and how it might be a solution for her. Thought to myself, “Hmm, guess I should become more familiar with MU … ” but maybe I should just wait for 3.0.

What’s the best forum plugin/add-on for WordPress?

Bradley Charbonneau — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:18:12 +0000

We have some “private” discussions going on here at Creative Storefront and I’d like to have them here on the site somehow rather than just emails.

User Access Manager: we can create categories that are only accessible to certain users. Works well, but then are posts sent to RSS? Also are posts then visible by title, but then restricted/closed? Are they listed in the Recent Posts? (I don’t want them to be.) I think I’d rather have these private/back room discussions less prominent.
bbPress: forum software built by Automattic (the same people who run WordPress), so of course there’s seamless integration. Full-blown forum software so it has all of the bells and whistles.
WP Forum: a WP plugin that’s been around a while, but hasn’t been updated in since Sep 2008.
Forum Server: they modestly promote, “This is a much more advanced and better than the WP-Forum plugin … ” but hey, worth looking at.

Thoughts?

Keyword Chaos

Bradley Charbonneau — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:00:17 +0000

So this site has been live only a few weeks and already we have a zillion keywords (tags — I just liked the alliteration of Keyword Chaos). What’s a good strategy for keeping tags useful? What I’ve usually told people, including myself as I try to keep tags to a minimum, is to use tags that are “smaller” than categories. So if I were writing a post about setting up Outlook with Gmail, the categories might be: Email, Gmail, and Tutorials, but the tags could be: smtp, pop, SSL, iPhone, etc.

How smart are your tags?

User access levels: posts just for a certain group

Bradley Charbonneau — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:20:29 +0000

Test post. I want this post to only viewable by admin users. Ideally not even visible to the public anywhere on the site (not just a “You’re not an admin, so you can’t read this.” I also don’t want it going to the RSS feed. Although it probably already did …

I’m testing out User Access Manager. Looks great, but I just posted this and it showed up under recent posts. Hmm.

WordPress Tutorial: Uploading Large Files

Bradley Charbonneau — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 16:38:44 +0000

Depending on your hosting environment, you may have run into time-outs or errors when trying to upload large files in WordPress. It might be solved by a php.ini or .htaccess file edit, but that’s if you know how to do those things and even then it might not work. Of course, you could upload using any FTP program, but that’s again assuming you know how to do that. I wanted to stick with WordPress and get the job done. I used two plugins: myFTP and Add from Server. The video shows how it works.

Multi-column (and multi-row) table into WordPress

Bradley Charbonneau — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:53:51 +0000

I have a 5- or 6-column Word table I need in a WordPress post. Even more rows and there will be more. I’ve used a WP table plugin before but I’m not sure it’s been kept up.

WP Table plugin
Last resort: Paste from Word
Google spreadsheet embed
Something else?

Do you have experience with this?

WordPress site in two (or more) languages

Bradley Charbonneau — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 19:51:48 +0000

I have a site in English and I need the same site in Spanish. Hmm. Before I just dive in, I’m thinking of my options.

Categories (Spanish / English and then subcategories for each; sidebar content (posts/pages) based on which category we’re in)
Pages: similar to categories: pages with sub-pages for each language
Google Translate: some sort of on-the-fly translation tool … ?
Duplicate WP install: a whole separate WP install for the Spanish site?

What have you done?