Comments on: Self-hosted 3-column Pressrow

By: Freelance Unbound

Freelance Unbound — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:29:14 +0000

It is indeed Soilman’s job – which is why he tries to spend as much time on his allotment as possible…

By: Myrtle

Myrtle — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:50:44 +0000

I am not a Luddite, I embrace most technology, I read instruction booklets – but I have to say having read several of your postings (that’s probably not the right word in your world) , I feel totally inadequate and may have to go back to an Olivetti for my correspondence and fastening the results to the legs of fast flying pigeons! I do hope Soilman does this stuff for a job – if not he needs to get out more!

By: Soilman

Soilman — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:30:17 +0000

PS Who needs captions when you’ve got hover alt text?

By: Soilman

Soilman — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:28:26 +0000

Re captions.

I’ve been unable to make them work with lots of themes. Either the padding around the image is too big or non-existent, or the caption won’t display under the image when it’s resized. Particular issue with themes that aren’t fixed-width column, I’ve found.

To be honest, don’t care. I hate the bloody captions anyway, and just delete the call-out code for them in the post html. You could tweak the PHP to remove the call-out altogether, but I’ve never got round to it…

By: Freelance Unbound

Freelance Unbound — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:27:31 +0000

Bill/Soilman – thanks for that. There is some Google analytics plugin already installed – though I have a learning curve to figure out how it all works. Although I seem to have lost my own Gravatar for now, which is a pain…

By: Soilman

Soilman — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:11:53 +0000

Well done! Welcome to the real WordPress experience!

First move: Install a Google analytics plugin for some proper insight into what’s happening.

Bill (above): I doubt much very much your search problem is to do with page rank. More likely to be changes to URL structure and/or domain names, broken links from other sites, possible duplicate pages etc etc. Your results WILL recover in time; mine took about 6 months to get back to where they before I switched.

By: Bill Bennett

Bill Bennett — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 08:46:40 +0000

I went through a similar move from WordPress.com to self-hosted about six weeks ago. It’s been a mixed experience.

On the plus side, I’ve learnt some .php, found out how to tweak pages and plan to expand my site’s scope in coming months.

On the negative side, I dropped from a Google page rank of 4 (sometimes 5) to zero – which I understand is punishment for breaking some rule, but I’m stuffed if I know for sure what I did wrong.

The fall meant my Google traffic plummeted. And with Google accounting for half my traffic, this has seen a 40 percent overall drop in traffic to my site. I thought things might recover, but they haven’t.

I’m still working through the possible causes of my fall from grace.

So, good luck with the switch. Let me know if you run into similar problems.