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Okay, so this might not come in handy for many people whose sites don’t receive a huge amount of traffic, but I think it’s a great idea to keep a handle on bandwidth usage –not to mention helping your site to load faster!

Take a look at this handy tutorial from Lonewolf-Online: Reduce Wordpress Bandwidth Usage. It’s a solid walkthrough of how to find out which files are bogging down your server, as well as how to successfully compress your files. Very nice tutorial.

From file compression to caching and cutting down on database calls, stay tuned for a series of upcoming articles devoted to optimizing WordPress for best performance.

In WordPress 2.3.2 you can now define a custom database error page. In addition to securing WordPress 2.3.2 by subduing many of the database error messages (thus divulging something about the site’s database structure) you can make it where WordPress will always display a custom error message when any database error occurs.

In the past, even ‘cannot connect to database’ errors have displayed brief bits of info relating to the structure of your site. By adding a custom database error page you can eliminate these being shown to visitors altogether.

1. Simply create a page with your custom database error message. You can use HTML or whatever you want, but a simple text message works just fine. Something like “I’m sorry, but you seem to have encountered a database error. Please check back later or notify the webmaster”
2. Save your file as ‘db-error.php’. Even if you’re using a text editor you can save the file with a PHP extension. In Windows notepad, for example, you would select ‘all files’ rather than ‘text’) and type in ‘db-error.php’.
3. Upload your new custom database error file to wp-content/db-error.php of your site.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully created your own custom database error page. This file will be displayed whenever your site has trouble connecting to the database server.

What’s all the hype about WordPress 2.3.2? Mainly, it fixes a few security holes that most people running WordPress really don’t need to worry about.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s usually worth updating WordPress when a new version comes out (I mean you’re going to have to eventually anyway, right?). But with the swamping of new versions over the last couple months I’d say not to worry about updating until it’s convenient to do so.

So what does WordPress 2.3.2 have to offer? They fixed an exploitation by which those in the know could access your database to see things like posts in ‘draft’ status and overall database structure.

Along with tightening up security in terms of error messages that in the past divulged database structure information, it is anticipated that this move will also result in fewer database errors being displayed (this is a good thing because many db errors did not affect functionality but only cluttered up the screen).

As many of you may already know, having site pages with duplicate content can hurt your search engine rankings. One way to avoid duplicate content penalization is to use ‘noindex’ and ‘noarchive’ tags on all but the main, full content pages.

Another tool for fighting duplicate content penalization is to use rather than in all the index files of your theme.

You would make this replacement in index.php, as well as any additional index templates your theme may contain, such as category.php, search.php, archive etc.

What this does is shorten the content on index pages to minimize duplicate content.

Even better

When using in your index theme files, you can wipe out duplicate content altogether by filling in the ‘optional excerpt’ field when you write/edit a post.

If left empty the first portion of the content will appear wherever you’ve placed , but if you use the ‘Optional Excerpt’ field, the text entered there will appear instead. The nice thing about this, besides avoiding duplicate content, is that you can control exactly how long the ‘excerpt’ is, as ALL text in ‘Optional Excerpt’ will be displayed. You can play online casino

To give your Wordpress driven site the best possible chances of reaching top page rank, it’s important to avoid duplicate content from being indexed by Google and the other search engines.

Most Wordpress themes list either the excerpt or the full content of posts on index pages, this includes category index pages. What this does is display the same content on more than one page.

One way to avoid this is to provide ‘nofollow’ and ‘noindex’ instructions to the search engines on all pages that are not home and not full content pages. This can best be done with the help of conditional tags.

In the following example the home page, single post pages and Wordpress ‘Pages’ will tell the search engines to index and archive, while all other pages will tell them NOT to:

<?php if (is_home() || is_page() || is_single()) {?><meta name="robots" content="index,follow,archive" /><meta name="googlebot" content="archive" /><?php } else { ?><meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,noarchive" /><meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive" /><?php } ?>
Make sure this goes within the <head> section of the header.php file of your theme. As long as it is placed before </head> it will work as it should.

Feel free to experiment with the conditional tags to include/exclude other page types.