Tech Sharing Blog

The official stats over at WordPress.com have been updated to count WordPress installations as well as WordPress.com blogs, and the total number of WordPress-powered sites has just reached a startling 50.1 million!

For comparison, that’s just a little bit less than the populations of California and Florida combined, and about 19% of all known sites on the web.

For those of you who were here when WordPress began in 2003, did you ever imagine that its use would spread so rapidly?

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Few days back, when I try to log into my Google Analytics to check my blog status, I’m suprise that my blog is not being tracking after I change to the new Masagana WP Theme. After try out few way including deactivate and activate back the analytics plugin, reinstall the plugin, but still no luck to make it work.

I try to google and finally found out that that’s not only my self have this problem, there are a lot of people who using the same blog with me also having the same problem.

I came across a post which highlights the solution to fix this issue.What has caused this issue is that a function has missing or left out from the theme which prevents WP Stats and Google Analytics from working. Apparently, the theme owner has forgotten to insert the function. To fix this issue, you need to edit the footer.php in your theme editor. From your WordPress’s admin panel, navigate to Design > Theme Editor > footer.php.

In the footer.php, just add the following code intot it, I believe the new downloaded Masagana WP Theme footer being encrypted, so just insert the code before the encrypted code to make it work.

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

Once done, update the file. WP Stats and Google Analytics should be working by now.

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How can a company like Automattic make money if they are giving away all their products (including WordPress) for free? Someone asked this question to WordPress founder Matt at WordCamp India and he surprised, at least some of us, by saying that Automattic is profitable.

Here’s how WordPress makes money according to the creator himself:

1. Blog Hosting – WordPress offers blog hosting services at $500 per month to big publishers like Om Malik, All Things D and CNN’s Political Ticker among others. They use WordPress.com’s server infrastructure to host your blog and therefore the performance will obviously be great but unlike other web hosting services, WordPress VIP Hosting doesn’t accept everyone who applies so good luck.

2. Google AdSense - Free blogs hosted on WordPress.com may sometimes carry Google ads but these ads may only appear if all the following three conditions are met:

1. The visitor is not using Firefox browser.
2. He has logged out of his WordPress account, if he has one.
3. The referring source is not a WordPress powered blog. So a person reaching abc.wordpress.com from xyz.wordpress.com won’t see any Google Ads.

Even with all these conditions, the revenue generated from serving Google AdSense ads on WordPress.com hosted blog may still be significant as do around a billion page views per month.

3. Automattic Kismet – You don’t see Viagra spam in your blog posts because it all gets filtered automatically by Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short), the excellent spam protection plug-in available for WordPress.

Now Akismet spam catching technology is free for personal blogs but if you maintain a corporate blog or run a network of blogs, you are required to buy a commercial license of Akismet that starts at around $50 per month.

What may surprise you is that professional bloggers, or anyone who is making more than $500 per month in advertising revenue from a WordPress blog, also needs to pay a $5 per month fee for the Akismet license.

4. Premium Accounts – While anyone can host a blog on WordPress.com for free, they charge you a fee if you want to buy additional storage space for your multimedia files or want to use a custom web domain instead of the default wordpress.com sub-domain. These arepremium features.

There’s also (unconfirmed) talk that WordPress may soon allow users to add AdSense in their free blogs for a subscription fee.

5. Web Host Referrals – WordPress.org suggests of list of third-party web hosting companies where you may self-host your WordPress blog(s) for a fee. Now all these are referral links so Automattic gets a commission per sale.

In fact, this hosting referral system may be extremely profitable for Automattic because if you search for “WordPress Hosting” on Google (a very competitive keyword phrase), the first sponsored link on the Google results page is paid by WordPress itself and it says – “Top 5 WordPress Web Hosts – Chosen by the developers of the WordPress blogging software”.

6. WordPress Support – If you need help with WordPress (or WordPress MU) but the free support forums aren’t solving the purpose, consider subscribing to the Support Network of Automattic. The WordPress development team will help you solve problems related to your WordPress system and the response time can be as low as 6 hours. This service is primarily for Enterprise users who are willing to shell out a $2.5-5k per year for support.

7. Poll Daddy – I am not sure if Matt discussed this but Automattic also provides a paid version of Poll Daddy where you can have unlimited number of questions per survey and there’s no Poll Daddy branding in your polls or surveys.

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Sitemap play a very important role in the world of SEO, so it is a much has component for your wordpress. But most of us are not really familiar with what is sitemap, how it look like and how to generate it. 

Thank to the Arne Brachhold with the wonderful XML sitemap Generator for wordpress, now you no need to worry how to generate sitemap.

The XML sitemap that generate by this plugin are compliant with the format use by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and also MSN Search.

Another best part of this plugin is it will help you to generate your sitemap automatically and will submit it to the major search engine such as Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and also MSN Search. You just need to configure how you want your sitemap to include, what to exclude, the location of the sitemap, that’s all.

Click here to go to XML Sitemap Generator home page
Click here to download XML Sitemap Generator for wordpress > 2.1 (recommended)
Click here to download XML Sitemap Generator for wordpress < 2.1 (discontinued)

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