To move a wordpress site from one domain to another, you need to execute the following SQL scripts on the database:
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'http://www.old-domain.com', 'http://www.new-domain.com') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';
UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://www.old-domain.com','http://www.new-domain.com');
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://www.old-domain.com', 'http://www.new-domain.com');
This works as of Wordpress 2.8.
There are increasingly a range of acronyms being thrown around in web marketing that sometimes slip out when interacting with clients. Here’s a brief overview of some of the more common e-marketing acronyms to ease the conversation.
- SEM
Search Engine Marketing
SEM is a broad term covering the range of activities you might engage in to improve the extent to which you generate revenue via search engines
- SEO
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO focuses on the organic listings as opposed to sponsored listings, or PPC. The position of your site in the listings for a given search term is determined by a wide range of factors, each contributing to the search engine’s algorithm. They can be broadly divided, however, into two groups:
- Content Relevancy: The greater the extent to which the content of a page matches the search term in question, the better it will rank (subject to the engine’s spam protection measures).
- Trust relevancy The greater the extent to which a page is connected (by hyperlinks) to sites also well connected to other sites relevant to the search term, the better it will rank, based on it being a trusted resource.
- PPC
Pay Per Click
Many search engines present two listings when the user makes a search - the main, organic search results, and the sponsored listings. To achieve a sponsored listing, you must agree to pay a certain amount to the search engine every time someone clicks on your listing. Your bid compared to that of your competitors determines your position in the listing - bid prices can range from a few pence for less competitive phrases to several pounds for very competitive phrases. Most often however clicks will cost less than £0.50.
- SMO / SMM
Social Media Optimisation / Social Media Marketing
More recently, a new area has opened up in web marketing with the arrival of social networking and in particular social news websites, such as Digg, Reddit, and a host of others. These sites allow you to submit content to their ‘Upcoming’ listing, presented initially in reverse date/time order. As time passes, if your site receives votes, it maintains it’s high position and may reach the ‘popular’ listing. This is encouraging marketers to be creative and generate interesting content, as the potential returns of getting ‘dugg’ are substantial in the short and long term.
Following our post last year on Google UK’s market share in 2007, here are some figures providing an indication of Google’s Market share in the UK in 2008. Hitwise are providing the numbers again, and in a relatively short sampling period during March 2008, they found Google to be holding a market share 87.5%, 10 percentage points greater than the same figures for 2007. They found 73.7% to be using google.co.uk, and 13.8% google.com. Clearly Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask among others have therefore lost ground to their primary competitor.
Particularly interesting in the same report was the statistics regarding the proportion of users opting to use Google’s ‘Pages from the UK’ search option. The report confirms intuition by showing only 13.6% of searchers to make use of this facility. This will help you decide the relative value of a .co.uk TLD vs. a .com or alternative (a google.co.uk search for ‘Pages from the UK’ will only return pages with a .co.uk TLD).
For more details, click through hitwise.
I wrote a post before the weekend about some performance issues with MooTools, DHTML and AJAX, but having found the solution to a related problem this morning, I wanted to post a followup.
I’ve been working with a large, dynamically generated and AJAX populated table that features sorting, filtering and row highlighting, and was finding that my table took a long time to render, and was also very slow to close - that is, when I tried to close the window or refresh the page, there would be a delay when the browser would first hang for a few seconds. IE often (but not always) popped up the error/prompt Stop this script running?, and Firefox less often threw it’s Unresponsive Script warning.
I’d heard of MooTools’ garbage collection functions that reduced memory leakage, and figured that these were probably responsible. I then found Kevin Smith’s write up of his similar experience, and came to understand the problem. MooTools’ garbage collection takes time to clean up any element that has been extended. My table was executing the following code, effectively extending every table row in the table, resulting in some 500+ extended elements.
// MooTools Code
Element.extend({
…
getChildren: function(){
return $$(this.childNodes);
},
…
});
…
// My Code
this.tablerows = this.body.getChildren();
When it came to cleanup, this javascript processing took longer than IE’s configured script timeout, and thus prompted the warning.
To avoid this cleanup overhead, you’ll have to avoid extending the elements with MooTools’ extensive set of functions and instead extend the specific elements in question with the specific functions required.
I first delved into javascript frameworks with Prototype, but I quickly realised that the Prototype+Script.aculo.us combination, even in Protocoluous or Protopackt form, was never going to work - it was just too slow.
I moved to MooTools, and for a while was pretty happy - load times were quicker, effects smoother.
But having recently tried to build sorting and filtering functionality into an HTML table of 200+ rows, I’ve been forced to take a closer look at how different browsers execute javascript, and at where the bottlenecks are. Here I’m going to promote a few best practices, largely via Julien LeComte at Yahoo.
Inserting new Elements
Working with the DOM in MooTools is a breeze - code like the following is a pleasure to write and to read:
var div = new Element(’div’, {id:’example’}).addClass(’example’).setHTML(’Example Content’).injectAfer(’previousElementID’);
However it’s worth noting that the Element class uses ‘document.createElement’, which is much more expensive than the alternative, albeit less readible innerHTML. Further, inject() and adopt() functions use appendChild() and are also thus very expensive. An it certainly feels like this effect is magnified when working with tables.
Changing Existing Elements
Working with with DOM can cause performance issues, but if the DOM element in question is not visible (display:none), or if the DOM element is ‘off-DOM’, you’ll acheive a performance gain.
Retrieving Values from the DOM
Retreiving values from the DOM is much more expensive than referencing a local variable:
// bad code
children.each(function(child) {
if (child.getText() == otherElement.getText()) alert(’slow’);
});
// good code
var text = otherElement.getText();
children.each(function(child) {
if (child.getText() == text) alert(’fast’);
});
Attaching Event Handlers
Attaching events is also very slow. To tackle this, instead of looping through multiple elements attaching events, attach the event handler to the parent, and within the handler detect which element has been clicked:
// bad code
children.each(function(child) {
child.addEvent(’mousedown’, function () {
alert(child.getText());
}
});
// good code
parent.addEvent(’mousedown’, function (e) {
var child = new Event(e).target;
alert(child.getText());
}
By applying these ideas, I was able to cut the processing time of loading a table by more than 70%, and hopefully you can benefit too.
