Zack Katz is the creator of GravityView and the President of Katz Web Services. He lives in Leverett, Massachusetts with his wife and cute beast of a cat.
A great domain goes up for sale on GoDaddy. I have put the BoulderSEO.com domain up for auction: with the upcoming release of the top-secret WordPress real estate plugin, I have chosen to sell this prime property. The BoulderSEO.com auction will be ending in 18 hours, so if you’re into Colorado, Denver, Loveland, or Boulder SEO […]
You may have noticed this blog has gone un-updated. That’s because I’ve been working on an awesome new plugin. WordPress + Real Estate + User Data + SEO In the past, I’ve written posts about how to optimize your WordPress real estate website for SEO and I’ve created a Trulia plugin for WordPress. This WordPress real estate plugin […]
RAMP allows you to make all the changes you need in your staging environment, then selectively push these changes to your production site. You can set up a new section of your site, upload some images to fill out a nice carousel for it, and add a link to it on your home page. Once […]
In my last post, I wrote about the benefits of using YOURLS, a self-hosted link-shortening service. I’m finding that YOURLS is great, but it’s not perfect. Some of the issues I have experience are part of what you get using most URL shortener services. Some of the downsides of using link shorteners are: Google Analytics doesn’t […]
I was having trouble finding the right URL shortening service. My requests for shortening were not too picky. I wanted two simple features: Good statistics that are visible only to administrators Edit the long URLs after generating shortened links …but not one service has both features: http://sn.im has editable URLs, a bookmarklet, but no stats. Oh, and […]
How the +1 Button Works The +1 Button uses an advanced sprite technique to simulate an animated `gif`. The animation occurs when hovering over search results with +1 enabled, and the shine moves across the button. (The image to the right is an animated `gif` I made…) The +1 Button is not an animated `gif`, […]
Easily add TruliaMaps to your website! Add a Trulia maps widget showing homes in your area, without touching any HTML or code. This plugin allows you to configure tons of options; check it out today! The Trulia real estate plugin includes options for: Map size Map, Satellite or Hybrid map type Slideshow – automatically cycle […]
There’s been a lull here on the SEODenver.com website. That doesn’t mean I’ve been standing still. What have I been up to? I’m going to tell you a bit about these projects and something I’ve learned from each of them.
Links are not first-class citizens in WordPress In developing the a website for professional genealogists, I was tasked with creating link directory functionality in WordPress. I didn’t want to install some big plugins; I wanted to use the Links Manager that’s built in to every WP install out of the box. There were two problems, however: Link […]
Finally, a way to download Bit.ly link data as a CSV. Bit.ly is one of the most popular link shortening services, and rightly so: it is stable, easy to use, and has pretty looking statistics. One thing Bit.ly does not do is export data. There is simple no other Bit.ly exporter out there. The Bit.ly […]
Today I found out that the SEO WordSpinner plugin is no longer available via its WordPress Directory page. I emailed WordPress plugin-master Mark Riley asking what was up, and he just emailed me back: Hi, There were some complaints about some SEO plugins. Your plugin was among those checked and given it’s purpose is not […]
Optimize your site, find niche keywords How the Google Instant Scraper works: Enter a “seed” keyword (or multiple keywords separated by commas) and choose how many levels deep you would like to scrape; The Scraper gets results from Google Instant for that keyword. These are level 1 keywords. For each level 1 keyword, the Scraper gathers […]
If you’ve ever tried to use WordPress’ built-in bookmarks / links manager, you know that its limits can be frustrating. One of the biggest issues I’ve encountered is that the link categories are not hierarchical. Let’s say you have a tech blog and you link to a lot of pages about TV’s. You may want […]
I know about Gravity Forms…but what are shortcodes? Think of shortcodes as a placeholder for where other content will be displayed: instead of “Insert a Gravity Forms form here,” we use the `gravityform` shortcode. Learn more about shortcodes on WordPress.org. The Gravity Forms `shortcode` has five pieces: “ `id` (required) – The ID of the form, […]
Google is changing your titles for you…whether they’re “optimized” or not! Google is overruling your title tags when they determine that your content headlines are more relevant. Previously, I had only seen this behavior when there were not well-structured title tags, keyword-stuffed title tags or no title tags at all. This has been well documented […]
The CubeCart file and image uploader in the product editor only allows for a small set of file types: jpg, gif, jpeg, png, swf, fla, jpg, gif, jpeg, png, avi, mpg, and mpeg. If you want to upload a PDF in CubeCart, you will have to manually FTP it into the uploads folder, and even […]
I recently discovered that FDA Warnings have been unwittingly adding value to the very websites and products they are trying to warn about. What does this mean in the context of Google’s new negative review algorithm? Google has been working on de-valuing bad reviews… There has been lots of press over the NY Times article exposing […]
Download the plugin from WordPress.org Shopify is a great hosted eCommerce provider. WordPress is the best blogging platform. I first learned about Shopify in 2007, and was very interested in their service: they take care of every aspect of an eCommerce shop, and you pay them monthly plus a little cut of your sales. Themes: […]
Much cleaner. One static and unchanging JS file to cache. Parameters get put into your HTML itself as a one-liner. You can deal with the parameters using a normal PHP array before passing them over. No need to screw around with generating Javascript from PHP or looking for wp-load or even messing with tricky actions. […]
Coding better WordPress plugins As I’ve worked with WordPress plugins, I’ve learned new ways of working with WordPress. WordPress has tons of built-in functionality that is very useful and easy to use once discovered. I am by no means a great PHP coder. I am still learning OOP principles and how to write code better. […]