So if you’re interested in either, please drop me an email: david@holowiski.com

Setting up a podcast – without any plugins. Heck, without Wordpress. Acutally, without a web site even. I show you how to set up a podcast for $0 (free!) without having to have a web site. Pretty cool.

Download the episode here

Interested? Want more information? Give me a call on my Google Voice number: (917) 512-9397 and we can talk!

So Bill, I would be happy to set up a web site for you to host a proper Podcast, for no charge. I would build this site on the free and open source platform – Wordpress. I would configure an RSS fed for you and even set you up with some great stats packages to know how many people are listening. You know what, I even have a spare Behringer PodcastStudio USB package which has a Microphone and a small mixer that is just perfect for podcasting – I’d be happy to send it to you at no charge. I assume you would have no problem getting listed in the Zune marketplace so I’ll let you handle that, but I will take care of the dirty details of getting your podcast listed in the iTunes podcast directory – you won’t ever have to talk to anyone from Apple. I bet we could even get your podcast featured on the front page.

This isn’t a joke Bill, I would be happy to help a fellow geek out. If you’re interested just use the call me button on the top right hand of this site, or drop me an email: podcast@teachmewp.com and let me know.

Thanks
Dave Holowiski

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Never install plugins or themes from any site other than wordpress.org!

Check out the video and links to some articles below…

Stop downloading Wordpress themes from shady sites
How Downloading a Premium Theme/Plugin From the Wrong Place Can Ruin Your Site
Watch Where You Download That

A quick look at the new image editing features with Wordpress 2.9, and I show you how to customize the 404 (Page not found) page in your Wordpress Theme.

Download the episode here

How can you get viewer stats from iTunes? You can’t but I show you how to use Podtrac to get viewer stats. I also introduce you to the Atahualpa Wordpress theme which is highly configurable.
I use Podtrac to count downloads of my podcast. I use them specifically because they are free and it’s a simple redirect in the download link so it doesn’t affect download speed.
It’s fairly simple to use, you just modify your download link. As an example here is how I would modify a download link for my podcast:

The original file is:
http:///blip.tv/file/get/Dholowiski-034__Page_Redirection_and_Click_To_Call261.flv

To modify it to work with Podtrac (first make sure you have a podtrac account) remove the http:// and add the podtrac url:

http://www.podtrac. com/pts/redirect.flv/blip.tv/file/get/Dholowiski-034__Page_Redirection_and_Click_To_Call261.flv

The stats update daily, and are usually necessary if you are looking for an advertiser.

I also show off the great Atahualpa Wordpress theme, which is highly configurable. Some of the things you can configure:

• How many sidebars
• header graphic/behaviour
• Highly configurable widgets
• Fonts, sizes are all changeable through the theme options
• HTML and CSS can be inserted through the theme options without having to edit files

That’s all for the podacst, have a great day!

Download the episode here

Jobs « Automattic: ” In fact everyone who joins Automattic, regardless of position, does support for 3 weeks”

(Via Automattic.com.)

First I want to thank all of the viewers from the past year. I really appreciate you sticking with the podcast, through it’s on again off again, variable video size and quality and everything. If you want to know how many people viewed the podcast, be sure to watch this week’s episode.

For the first tutorial, I walk you through adding click to call to your web site. This is basically an icon a user can click on, and they will receive a phone call – so will you, and you will be talking to the user. This is great for marketing, but I also use it on teachmewp.com and point it directly to voicemail so that users can leave feedback on the show, from their phone, just by clicking. Be sure to watch the video for the details.

In the second part of the tutorial I show you how you can make a page link to an external site using the redirection plugin. Check out the “Discussion” tab along the top of this site, which started life as a page, but now links to the discussion forums at teachmewp.ning.com.

There are now many ways to give feedback on the show.  First, you can just leave a comment on this post! That’s probably the easiest way.  You can also use the click to call button, you will receive a phone call and be able to leave a voice message that I can play on the next podcast episode.  You can also go over to the discussion forum at teachmewp.ning.com and start a discussion, or you can email podacst@teachmewp.com or you can even get ahold of me on twitter @dholowiski

I look forward to hearing from you! Enjoy the podcast!

034 – Free Click to Call, Page Link Redirection and a Podcast Status Update

WordPress › JanRain RPX – Authentication from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Windows Live ID and OpenID « WordPress Plugins: “JanRain RPX – Authentication from Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Windows Live ID and OpenID”

(Via Wordpress.org.)

Also, today I just recieved two books to review for the podcast. Of course it will take me some time to read them, but I will be doing book reviews on the podcast in the future. Yay!

8 Top Facebook Wordpress Plugins – WebM.ag | Web Design Magazine

Social media is probably one of the best ways to promote and drive traffic to your blog, with the numerous API’s and sharing features the social media outlets are releasing it makes your job that much easier.”

(Via WebM.ag.)

I did use Drupal once in the past but I really had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know any PHP or even what MySQL was so I was totally lost. This time, I came prepared. I selected Drupal pretty much at random – it was either Drupal or Joomla.

So the Installation of Drupal is fairly easy – pretty much the same as WordPress. You create a MySQL database and user, then run an installation script and it does the rest for you. I did this via SSH (command line) and I suspect if I had done it through cPanel it would have been much easier. I did run into two speed bumps. First, I had to change the configuration file to be world writeable (yikes!) and the same for a folder. I did make quite sure to change the permissions back when I was done.

Second, I had to go set up a cron job. Actually I haven’t set up the cron job yet, so I’m sure my site will explode in a massive firewall any minute now.

Once it was set up, I went on to select a theme, and had to add some modules (think Plugins). This was relatively easy, but there is no ‘one click install’ in Drupal like there is in WordPress, so I had to download and unzip the files by SSH (I could have used FTP too).

It did surprise me that I had to install a non-core module (think ‘third party plugin’) just to get pretty URL’s with the post name in the title. It was also kind of tough to wrap my head around modules, and blocks which are almost like plugins and widgets, but just different enough to make my head explode.

What I did like is that it is highly customizable. Once I installed the ‘Views’ module, I was able to build almost exactly the type of site that I want, actually I was able to build something in Drupal that I’ve been wanting in WordPress for quite a while. Have a look at the layout of teanoob.com (not the content, because there is none yet).

It will always show a box with the most recent video podcast episode, with normal posts going below it. There is also tons of extra places to put ‘blocks’ and a very configurable hierarchical menu system. All of this without touching any code. I am kind of enjoying it, although I’m sure I will have to get into some PHP coding once I try to figure out how to post Podcast episodes, and who even knows how the RSS Feed will work.

Anyway, I am enjoying using a different CMS for a change. I certainly wouldn’t recommend Drupal to anybody who doesn’t decide they need it on their own. It is much more “hands on” thank WordPress and definitely requires some Unix, PHP, and Apache skills that you can easily get by without in the WordPress world.

So that is my Drupal adventure. Stay tuned… once I get a working podcast I will post some more. I might even do a podcast episode about that. Nah… you don’t want that, do you?

Why WordPress? | WPShout.com: “WHY WORDPRESS?

Reading this by RSS? YOU’RE MISSING OUT.. PART 2 is now online. SUBSCRIBE BY RSS to catch the rest!

That was the question I asked twenty one WordPress theme designers, developers and bloggers; I wanted to get a good balance – not just the theme developers who everyone has heard about! Their answers are very interesting, to say the least. I asked four and the answers will be published over the next couple of days. The questions are:

Why WordPress?
First question. Why WordPress? Why not Joomla! or Drupal or any of the other CMSes out there?”

(Via WPShout.com.)

To accomplish this I use the PHPURL script from: http://blondish.net/resources/scripts/phpurl/

It’s a pretty easy script to install.  First you download the file from the above URL, then extract the files using winzip or any other file compression software

Then you can FTP the files up to your web server.

Once you’ve done that, you need to create a database, and a user, and give that user access to the database.  I do this from the MYSQL command line, using the following commands:

• create database databasename;  (I used a database name of ‘tinyurl’)
• create username@localhost identified by ‘password’;
• grant all on databasename.* to username@localhost;

Once that’s done, you edit the config.php file and enter this information, as well as entering a admin username and password (make sure to change it from the default password of password!)

Then you run the install script at yourdomain.com/install.php

That’s it!  Once that is done you have a fully functioning URL Shortening service that anybody can use.  It works great.  Enjoy!

Download the episode here

Wordpress security can be confusing and even a little bit scary. In this episode I show you some simple things that you can do to secure your wordpress blog and prevent it from being hacked.

First thing I cover is a article that talks about some great tips for securing your wordpress site: bit.ly/7sKOJE the most important thing from this article is choosing a secure password.

You can go to grc.com/pass to get a very secure randomly generated password, or if you choose to create your own, make sure it’s 8 characters or longer, with numbers and letters and some upper and lower case passwords.

Next up is the “Secure Wordpress” plugin which does several of the things shown in the article above, but in a convenient plugin.

Last but not least is the Login LockDown which automatically locks a IP address out if it tries to log in unsucsesfully 3 times within 5 minutes.

So that’s the end of the show, please check out the new discussion forums at teachmewp.ning.com, and be sure to fill out the listener survey if you haven’t yet, because it really helps out the podcast.

Thanks for watching!

032 – Wordpress Security

Also, I use delicious.com to bookmark sites of interest and resources for the podcast, so if you want a preview of what next week’s episode might be about, check it out.

I’m still working on new episodes, trying to release a new episode each monday. Next week’s episode will be about wordpress security. A bit scary but something we all need to think about.

So today I was working on setting up my new office, and one thing I’m doing is putting up pictures i’ve taken of web celebrities that I saw speak. So far I have Leo Laporte (saw him at Macworld 2009), Matt Mullenweg and Timothy Ferriss (saw them at Wordcamp SF 2009). Then I started thinking, it sucks that I don’t have a picture of Cali Lewis (geekbrief.tv) since I’ve seen her speak twice.

So I got to watching some episodes of Geekbrief.TV that I have had sitting in iTunes for a while. I watched episode 620, and at around 2 minutes she starts talking about a wordpress plugin. Now the plugin sounds interesting, and it’s called Pretty Link. It’s basically a link redirector, kind of like tinyurl or bit.ly, but for your own wordpress site. Now I started wondering why she didn’t mention my favorite redirection plugin (simply called ‘redirection’) or any of the other 200 redirection plugins you can get from the wordpress plugin directory.

Then came the bombshell. It’s a $97 plugin (well, actually there is a free version available too but she never mentioned that). I won’t go into a rant about how wordpress is open source and how wrong I think it is to charge for plugins (or themes for that matter) especially if they do the same thing as freely available plugins – that’s just opinion, and if Cali thinks that paid plugins are a good thing that’s hers. My problem is this: at 2:05 she shows a link: geekbrief.tv/prettylink which uses the prettylink plugin to redirect (and cloak the link) from her web site to the purchase page for the prettylink plugin.

So here’s the problem. This is clearly not a commercial, Cali makes it clear she is telling us about “one of the coolest plugins I have ever found” and gives a short review of it. But the link she gives is an Affiliate link. If people go to the link I mentioned above, somebody (presumably Cali) gets a paid $. Now I have no problem with affiliate links in general, in fact I use them in my podcast, but I make it VERY clear that if you click on the link and purchase something, I get paid!

Cali Lewis took a blatant ad for Prettylink Pro and disguised it as an unbiased review (watch the episode). One can only wonder how many people purchased the plugin, strictly because of the trust she has built with her viewers. I guess she’s cashing in some of that trust…

If you want a free alternative to Pretty Link Pro, first search the Wordpress Plugin Directory for redirect, there are many excellent plugins. I’ve also asked for alternatives on Mahalo Answers, and funded it with $10 out of my own pocket. Be sure to check out the answers.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Download the episode here

Download the show here

You can download the file here

I’m trying a new host for my files – blip.tv.  This is a big download, over 400mb. Please let me know if you have any trouble.  Tomorrow sometime when the file finishes converting I’ll update this post so you can watch the video right on this site.

Download the file here

In this episode I walk you through making changes to a Wordpress theme, including editing the style.css and index.php. I show you how to edit some static content and change a header graphic, and describe how I go about hacking an unfaimilar theme. 

Download the episode here. Yay, Now you can view the video right here thanks to my new best friend, Blip.TV!

Feedburner is basically a service that takes an existing RSS feed and lets you do all kinds of things with it.  A few of the major features are: Inserting ads into your RSS feed, Stats and making your feed iTunes compatible. Those reasons aren’t specifically why I have used it.  There are a couple of other features that have saved my butt in the past. 

1.  Feed redirection.  This isn’t even advertised as a feature, but it’s great.  So here’s how I have my Podcast RSS feed set up:  Wordpress RSS —> Feedburner —> iTunes.  You may wonder, why stick Feedburner in the middle, when Wordpress can generate a feed that works just fine in iTunes?  In the past I was using Libsyn’s feature where they generate RSS for you, so it was actually set up like this:  Libsyn RSS —> Feedburner —> iTunes.  But I wanted to use Podtrac for tracking downloads, and Libsyn doesn’t support that.  They also don’t support feed redirection so I couldn’t redirect the feed to my wordpress feed.  If I had it set up like this: Libsyn —> iTunes, I’d be out of luck, I would have had to submit a new podcast to iTunes and rebuild my subscriber list. 

With feedburner, the solution was simple.  Edit Feed details, and change the Original feed url from Libsyn (Libsyn —> Feedburner —> iTunes) to Wordpress (Wordpress —> Feedburner —> iTunes.  

I also have the re-assurance that if I ever lose control of my web site (dispute with hosting provider, hacking etc) I can go into feedburner and just point the feed somewhere else. 

2. Title/Description burner.  I love this one.  If you are using some service that creates an RSS feed but doesn’t give you much control (like I did with Utterli in episode 20), and you want to pass that feed into iTunes (Utterli —> Feedburner —> iTunes) often the title or description won’t be something you want. In episode 20, the title was “Utterli” instead of something like “dave’s podcast”.   Title/Description burner simply overrides the title and description fields in the RSS feed before it is passed on. It’s just that easy. 

The only major concern, and one that you should have when you’re relying so heavily on any service, is will it be there tomorrow?  Especially in today’s economic climate it’s not a given that an internet company that was here yesterday will necessarily be here today or tomorrow.  The nice thing about Feedburner is that Google owns them now.  And let me tell you, google isn’t going away any time soon, so niether is feedburner. 

Feedburner has tons of other great features too.  When you go in to edit your feed, make sure to click on the Optimize tab, and check out all the cool options.

Still there? Great.  

I used quite a few different CMS’s before I stubmled on Wordpress.  I used Joomla for a while. I’ve been told it’s very powerful and you can do all kinds of things.  I couldn’t ever figure it out though (and my job is figuring out things). I’ve used PHP Nuke, wow what a POS, NEXT!  Where I used to work, we used DotNetNuke. First thing it’s based on .net from microsoft. Second thing, most of the plugins you have to pay for. Third thing it looks like absolute crap! We used it as an Intranet site and it was so terrible that users wouldn’t even visit the site.  I even used Scoop for a brief time. Definetley a very interesting CMS, but ultimatley like the others – hard to use.

So on to Wordpress. Why do I love Wordpress? Let me count the ways…

1.  Wordpress is Open Source, and almost all of the plugins, and most of the Themes are free and open source.  Because of the open-ness of both Wordpress and it’s themes and plugins, it’s extremely easy to customize. It’s hard to find a user who hasn’t gone into their theme to change something.  This really is a big deal. Because it’s easy to understand, it’s easy to change and easy to maintain.  Maybe having a CMS written in Javascript is techncially better (I don’t think so) but nothing beats good old PHP, CSS and XML for being easy to understand. 

2.  Wordpress is designed for users.  Unlike those other CMS’s, wordpress is designed for users, not web developers. I’ve done a manual install of wordpress before, and it’s something I would feel comfortable walking my mom through over the phone.  Now with 2.7 it’s almost too easy to install plugins (Please Automattic, do the same with themes). And the dashboard makes it trivially easy for even the simplest of users to post new content and create pages. 

3. It just works.  Maybe I’ve been lucky but I’ve never really had problems with wordpress breaking. You can add all the plugins and themes you want and it keeps working just fine.  Sure, from time to time I have done something incredibly stupid that’s totally broken my web site but it’s always been easy to fix.

Mostly I love Wordpress because it’s so darn easy to use and customize. I have absolutely no problem setting up a wordpress site and handing it off to a family member to use, knowing that I’ll have to support it.

Still with me? Good. If you haven’t yet, download and install Wordpress today.

How to install, P2 – Prologue 2 from Automattic. Where to find it, how to install it, and most importantly how to use it.
or High Quality (720P) version of the video either subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or download the file here.

In this episode I show you how to link to a category both if you are using permalinks and not using permalinks, and I show you how to add a contact me form to your site using the contact form 7 plugin – it’s very easy. 

For High Quality (720P) version of the video either subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or download the file here.

After than, finally on to some theme hacking.   Thanks for all the support everyone I look forward to many more episodes.

In this episode I show you a really easy way to do a audio or video podcast, without having to install any software on your computer. Using a we siter called utterli, and feedburner we record podcasts right in your web browser and they are sent right to iTunes. It’s all free and it works great, enjoy!

For High Quality (720P) version of the video either subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or download the file here

But wait, there’s more!  Right now there are about 150 viewers of this podcast.  If we can get the viewer numbers up over 2000 viewers, I am throwing in a big bonus prize.  Not only will I build your web site for you, I will give you 1 free year “Baby” web hosting account from Hostgator, and a free .COM domain name from Godaddy.  I will be handing you a fully functioning web site, that won’t cost you a cent for the next year!

You need to be subscribed to the newsletter to be entered in this contest.  A winner will be chosen at random from list subscribers.

Please help me get up over 2000 viewers. The easiest thing to do is go write a review of this podcast in the iTunes store. It’s really easy and if I can get enough reviews we might get featured on the main page.

In this episode I show you the new easy way of installing plugins in Wordpress 2.7. No more FTP’ing files, install plugins directly from your dashboard, super easy! I also walk you through downloading and installing the wp-postrating plugin, which allows users to rate your posts, and includes a widget that lets you display your highest rated posts. I also announce an awesome contest that you won’t want to miss.

Download the full quality episode: Rate your posts, easy plugin installation - Episode 19, or subscribe iTunes. Watching the Utube video isn’t the best way because it’s fairly low quality.

So I’m asking for help please! I need ideas! This is your chance to have your most pressing wordpress questions answered.  What would you like me to show you how to do?  What would you like to learn about?  Maybe you’d even like to call me on skype and we can talk about wordpress? 

Without your ideas there is no show.  Please help – email me at podcast@teachmewp.com or leave a comment on this post.  Thanks and I do look forward to many more episodes!

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I’m still working on dialing in the audio quality, but it is much better in this episode than previous episodes. Enjoy!

Play the Episode

Please note that the video opens in a pop-up window. You will need to enable popups for this site to view this video!

This also means that only the 3 most recent episodes are available in the feed. If/When Revver comes back up, I’ll download all the old videos and make them available on this site. If not, then I’ll put them up when I have access to them, in about two weeks (I’m 5,000 miles away from them right now). 

Also, Revver, you still owe me $6 in advertising revenue. Thanks. 

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. I hope you all enjoy the new high resolution videos.