visnum

A couple of days ago, I had to transfer a post from one of my blogs to wordpress.com for mirroring purposes. This may be something you will rarely need but it happens. I had a post which became very popular and at the time I transferred the post there was 900 plus comments in that post. Handling huge amount of comments in WordPress is another issue, I’ll try to mention that later in this post but now I will move on to ‘how i did it’ section.

I created another user in my WordPress installation. That’s very easy, you just go to users on the right of the WordPress admin menu and add a new user, of course with a different name than yours. You can also set its password and other details there but that part is irrelevant with what we are going to do. Then go to post(s) you want to export exclusively and edit them by changing their author. You can do that in the post editing page below the editor.

Then go to ‘manage’ and select export. There, you will have the option of restricting posts you will export to a certain author. Select your newly created author for exporting his posts. Then click ‘download export file’ and you are done. You have an export file where your selected posts are included. Now you can use that file for importing them on any other WordPress blog provided that they have the proper version of WordPress, I mean supporting this export – import thing.

For more practical options, when you need a temporary place to export & import your posts, just use WordPress.com. Go to WordPress.com and create a new blog for just that. Don’t forget to set privacy options there so you don’t have duplicate content in case search engine robots hit your carrier blog at the time. It may be also proper to close the blog for normal visitors too, according to what you do with that blog.

Using a WordPress.com blog is especially a necessity when you transfer posts from Blogger (blogspot) to WordPress because self hosted WordPress still lacks that functionality. The option is there but it doesn’t work (taking about 2.6.2 at the time of this writing).

Well, it’s that easy. Now let’s discuss the scalability of WordPress when it comes to hundreds of comments. In my case, WordPress was not able to handle them for me. Both the amount of comments (900 plus) and the traffic was heavy on that single page. There wasn’t any issue with the server. The traffic and the server load this page created was equal to any page that would receive the same amount of traffic and attention. Pagination of comments is a solution but it didn’t work for me because I find existing plugins immature. The only solution to this in the future might be that WordPress have built-in, nature pagination feature for comments, like in Drupal. Most probably that was why Dooce made the switch to Drupal from WordPress. She opens her posts to discussion rarely (only every four or five posts) and she receives thousands of comments under those posts.

If your receive less than 100 comments on your posts than WordPress is scalable for your in termes of comment load handling. But if your receive hundreds of comments on each of your post than WordPress may not be the best option for you. Of course there are ways for handling this however a naked WordPress installation is just not sufficient to handle 1000 comments effectively.

Let’s go back to our transfer business. That’s how I did it. I mirrored the post with all the comments to a WordPress.com blog and everybody looks happy now. Don’t forget to close comments and pings while you start exporting those posts because it is very possible to receive comments after you have started the export process and those comments will get lost.

Another tip: I copied everything for that post. The text, the url and the exact date and time. Then I have recreated the same post with the same url with the same date and time. Then I closed the post for comments and only opened them for pings. I also stated in a single comment that discussion is now going on in another address, in a mirror. Now, things are fine. Everybody is happy, including me.

One last thing that I have learned from this experience: It is a wise thing to close comments after a period of time you have published a post. I think one month is convenient. Otherwise, the post’s comments turn into a forum instead of a discussion of what you have written.

Look for the following qualities in terms of knowledge and practice: Your web designer must have an understanding of web standards. Web standards basically means that your website is going to be visible on almost all devices. You may ask which devices are they? Today, websites can be visited not only from web browsers on a pc but also browsers from handheld computers, cell phones, sony play station, HDTV’s, iPhone, and many other devices which are not compatible with ordinary web browsers. A web designer who knows standards will be able to design and develop a website for you that can be seen virtually anywhere.

You can look for online web design services. Today, you can easily choose a reliable web designer online. There are a couple of websites for you to do just that.

Your web designer should not necessarily be an expert on website advertising but he must be able to keep that in mind. He has to keep in mind that the website he is going to design and develop is going to be targeted on many levels, both general and specific.

Your web designer should also know about contemporary content management systems like Drupal, WordPress, etc. Today, CMS’ can be used for virtually any purpose and using them means that you don’t have to develop a network security system for your web site from scratch. Those content management software usually publish updates in time and you will not get into trouble worrying about security, archiving, etc.

Of course, a free-lance web designer should not be jack of all trades. It is reasonable that he or she can do your graphics on his favorite graphic editor and then put pieces together via CSS and XHTML. Don’t look after a photoshop expert for an ordinary, successful corporate website.

For complex systems on online sale, you may have to hire someone for maintaining your online business. Online sale services always need technical support. If your customers are clueless, they may choose shopping elsewhere. And those tiny but important technical details aren’t parto of your web designer’s job.

In the final analysis, choose somebody who pays attention to knowledge and practice equally. Try to feel that he loves his job and is determined to stay in the business for a long time. Pay attention to e-mail conversations. Don’t go with im and take his time.

As with the fees or prices, an average web designer who has those qualities is working for around $50 per hour. Less than that is an alert for decrease in quality. After all, you are paying for a website which you will use through all media and for a very long time.

Recently, I moved a couple of my blogs from wordpress to blogspot. The main reason for this was my hosting service. It has been nearly one month that I started using blogspot often as a blog service. Now is the time to make some comparison as well as suggestions on how to choose a host for your blog.

Well, let’s look at what you want to do with your blog. If you trust your creativity and believe that people will enjoy reading whatever you write, there are two options in my mind. You should whether choose wordpress.com or blogger.com. Here is why: both services are very easy to maintain. If you want to monetize your blog, blogspot is the way to go because it is very easy to implement adsense on your blogger blog whereas this is not difficult but impossible on wordpress.com. Wordpress.com doesn’t allow publishing ads on your blog.

If you say that you are not creative up to par, you will need tools and facilities that will make it easier for people to visit your blog and read more and then come again. And this is usability. Usability in navigation, usability in content creation etc. In this case, I recommend you a self hosted wordpress blog. For a self hosted wordpress blog, I can suggest you liquidweb.

Blogger is better than a self hosted wordpress blog based on some criteria. If you are good in coding, then I would suggest you to use Blogger because they are also very scriptable. However, with the introduction of new Blogger layout system, you have to be en experienced coder because you need to know how to “escape” some of the characters between two blocks of Blogger layout tags. This is difficult for a beginner and very prone to syntax errors. Wordpress is not the same. On any self hosted wordpress, you have thousands of different documentation in your hand and even if you are a beginner you can mess with code as much as you want without harming your blog too much.

And this is needed for any blogger because there is always the need for customization. You may want to display ads only on certain posts in certain categories on your blog or you may want some archive pages to look different than ordinary pages in your design. Then a self hosted wordpress is the way to go.