Yoast’s Analytics plugin solves one of the most vexing issues I’ve had with Analytics: how do I screen out visits from my own account? In today’s age of mobile computing and dynamic IP addresses, filtering by IP isn’t an option. You can solve this problem using browser cookies, but it’s a bloody hack.

Yoast GA solves this problem cleanly. After installing the plugin, click Settings -> Google Analytics on your WordPress Admin Panel, and scroll down to the Advanced Settings section. Here, you can choose  to tell the plugin not to generate Google Analytics tracking code whenever you’re logged into WordPress. You can screen out only visits by Administrators, or you can screen out visits by a lesser role. As the useful UI help text explains, the GA plugin screens out all visits from users of that role or greater. Screening out Editor, for example, will tell the plugin to ignore visits by both Editors and Administrators.

That’s only one feature among many that this free plugin supports. Install it, and if you find it useful, send the author, Joost de Valk, a few dollars via PayPal to show your appreciation. He’s earned it.

Need help installing plugins for WordPress? Check out my article on how to install plugins on your Hostgator account.

Consider my dreams dashed. There’s no good way to export your chat history from a Gmail account. (Notice I said no good way. I’ll discuss the bad way in a moment.) The best I was able to do was import all of my old e-mail from my old account into my new account, and keep the old account around for reference.

Importing Email from Your Old Gmail Account

I clicked on Settings in my new Gmail account, and then on the Accounts tab. Here, I added my old Gmail account by clicking Add an Account You Own. I entered my old Gmail address in the text box dialog, and clicked Next. Gmail automagically filled out all of the technical details for me. Such a sweet young lad.

Once I linked my accounts, Gmail began sucking in all of my old email from my gmail.com address and into my jayallenwrites.com account.

Speeding Things Up

If your old account has a ton of email, importing is slooooow. And by “slow,” I means days. Gmail only sucks in about 200 messages at a time from your old account.  If you’ve used filters to apply labels to emails you receive from high volume mailing lists, I recommend purging them before synchronizing with your old account.

If you’re not using labels and filters, you can delete everything from your account that you don’t want to keep by constructing an advanced search query that excludes all the email you do want.  For example, say that you only want to keep all messages to and from your spouse. Simple – use the following search syntax:

-(from:mysweetbaby27@gmail.com) -(to:mysweetbaby27@gmail.com)

The negative sign tells Gmail to exclude all messages that match the specified search criteria. You can use the same technique for other Gmail search fields, such as subject and cc. Click Select: All on these search results, then click the Select all nnn conversations link, and then click the Delete button. Congratulations – you’ve just purged your life!

Once Gmail finishes syncing your archive, it will periodically check your old account for new mail. This ensures you can still remain in touch with friends and business partners. You can (and should) set a Vacation message in Settings that tells people you’ve shifted. But trust me: there will be people who won’t change your Contacts entry, and will pull up your old address from Gmail’s autocomplete feature. Be safe, not sorry!

Spam Spam Spam Spam…

Be warned that Gmail may mark an inordinate amount of imported mail as spam. In particular, it loves to toss Facebook notifications into the Unsolicited Commercial E-mail bucket. Stay on top of your Spam folder during import, and mark valid messages as Not Spam as they arrive. (If your Spam folder isn’t visible in the Gmail label list, go to Settings->Labels, and click show next to the Spam label.)

Exporting Chats

Unfortunately, neither I nor anyone else has discovered how to bulk-mail your chats to a new account. It’s a good idea to keep your old account around in case you ever need to refer to a past conversation. However, if you only have a few chats you consider keepers, you can email them individually to your new address. View the chat in Gmail, and click the Forward link at the bottom. And yes, you can only do this one chat transcript at a time.

This isn’t an endorsement of these devices. Judging from the reviews, the Archos tablets need to ripen for another release or two. But these are the first Android tablets to hit the market. Word is that Motorola is releasing its own Android-powered tablet in November.

Even before the iPad imitators hit the market, Kindle and Nook were in trouble: Apple’s iPad outsold Kindle in just three months, despite the iPad’s heftier price tag.

Why is all this significant? Because you can read Kindle books on Android, just like on a Kindle (or a PC, or an iPad.) Why spend between $150 and $200 on a device that can only read books and play music, when you can spend the same cash for a multimedia device with a full operating system? True, the eInk technology on the Kindle and Nook eliminates the screen glare that can strain your eyes on an LCD screen. Personally, I’d trade a little readability for a fully functional computer than can stream video, play multimedia, and run games in addition to displaying text.

This doesn’t mean e-readers will disappear. I’d gladly buy a Kindle – if it cost less than three figures. With cheap tablets on the horizon, I’m betting you’ll see sub-$100 Kindles before the summer of 2011.

As this article and an earlier one in the New York Times elucidates, there were at least three other career NSA employees, and a Republican staffer on the House Intelligence Committee, who shared Drake’s apoplecticy. [Emphasis mine]

No, “apoplecticy” isn’t a word. It wants to be, but it isn’t. It’s an abortive attempt to noun a verb – a tragedy compounded by the existence of “apoplexy.” Come to think of it…can you even “share” apoplexy? (“Hey, Don, can I borrow some apoplexy?” “Sorry, Drake, I used all mine up on the Gulf oil spill last week.”)

I don’t mean to pillory this author. Let he who has never mangled English cast the first stone. I’m citing this because it’s a good example of how the desire to be inventive or seek economy of expression can get the better of us, leading to constructions that aren’t useful, but plain wretched.

Of course, plenty of folks would argue that my verbing of “noun” above itself presages a literary Apocalypse. Verbing is the subject of Wordnik founder Erin McKean’s recent article in the Boston Globe. McKean comes out firmly on the side of verbing, even in a business context:

Some of the outrage might be connected to verbing’s popularity as a feature of business jargon: Liase, incentivize, leverage, and status are often cited as horrible bizspeak to be shunned at all costs. (Why are businesses supposed to be superefficient in everything but their use of language? “He didn’t have a chance to status us before he left” is four words shorter than “He didn’t have a chance to give us a status update before he left.”)

I agree, in theory. Language is dynamic, and authors shouldn’t be shy about extending it, so long as their intended meaning is clear. But there’s no reason to noun verbs that already have noun forms. That’s just lazy. In McKean’s example above, “status” doesn’t convey additional meaning; it’s a linguistic secret decoder ring that establishes the speaker as part of an in-group or clique. “Update his status” may be three words as opposed to one, but it also conveys its intended meaning while avoiding the alienating feel of jargon. And if you’re aiming for word economy, there’s always “apprise.”

I’m fine with creating new words – but not before using the ones we have.

I’ve argued that online authors should use their own installations of WordPress. Administrating WordPress is easy if you use HostGator. Like many providers, HostGator drives its site hosting using an application called cPanel. After signing up for HostGator and registering your domain name, go to http://www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel, and you’ll have everything you need to install and maintain WordPress.

Installing WordPress is simple using the Fantastico De Luxe installation tool listed under the Software/Services tab. This will give you everything you need to set up your blog, give it a theme, and begin posting to the world.

Eventually, though, you’ll want to expand what your installation of WordPress can do by installing plugins. A WordPress plugin is a piece of software that extends WordPress with new features. The plugin architecture of WordPress permits thousands of developers around the world to add features to your blog without waiting for the WordPress developers to do it for them. By installing plugins, you can make your blog easier to use, and set it apart from the crowd.

In the following article, I’ll show you how to install the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in. This nifty extension improves your search engine results by generating a file used by Google and other engines to prioritize your site’s content. You can use the sitemap to instruct Google to give priority to your feature articles over your regular blog posts, or to highlight certain categories of blog posts over others. The steps provided below remain the same for any plugin. Once you install one, you’re free to upload new plugins to your heart’s content.

Note: While this article is specific to HostGator, it may work just as well on other service providers that use the cPanel interface. Emphasis on the “may.”

Upload The Plugin to WordPress

Plugins are downloaded from the Internet as a ZIP archive. This is a set of files compressed into a single file that ends in a .zip extension. Before you can use a plugin on your blog, you must upload it to your WordPress installation, extract it, and activate it. This section covers uploading and extracting the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

1. Download the Google XML Sitemaps plugin from WordPress.org by right-clicking on the Download link and selecting Save As…. Firefox and Chrome on Windows should offer to save this file in your Downloads folder, which is hunky-dory.

2.  Navigate to http://www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel, where yourdomainname is the domain name you registered when signing up with HostGator. This will bring up HostGator’s cPanel interface for your domain.

3. Click on File Manager in the Files box.

4. On the left-hand side (the treeview), expand public_html. Expand wp-content underneath public_html. Select the plugins directory.

Your treeview should look like this. Unless you installed WordPress into a subdirectory, public_html is the location of your WordPress installation on your site. This is your WordPress root. All of your installed plugins will reside in the wp-content/plugins folder.

5. Click the Upload button in the File Manager toolbar (along the top of the browser).

6. Click the Choose File button, and select the .zip file for the Google XML Sitemaps plugin from its location on your computer’s hard drive. Wait until the upload box says 100% Complete, and then click the link that reads Back to /home/<username>/public_html/wp-content/plugins directory.

7. You should be back in File Manager. You’ve successfully uploaded the plugin, but WordPress can’t use it yet. You must uncompress the .zip file containing all of the plugin’s files. Click the checkbox next to the Google XML Sitemap .zip file. Then, select Extract from the File Manager toolbar. You’ll see a dialog box asking you where to extract the files. The default is the plugin directory, which is what you want, so just click Extract Files(s) on the dialog.

Congratulations – you’re done with File Manager! Now, it’s time to go into WordPress and activate the plugin.

Activating Your Plugin

A plugin isn’t running under WordPress until it’s been activated.

1. Go to http://www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin and log into your installation of WordPress.

2. Select Plugins from the left-hand menu.

3. Find Google XML Sitemaps in the list of plugins on the Plugins page, and click the Activate link.

You’re Done!

Google XML Sitemaps is now active. Play around with it by clicking XML-Sitemaps underneath the Settings menu on the left hand side of your WordPress administration panel. For guidance, read the Google XML Sitemaps FAQ page.

From here, you can repeat the process and install other popular plugins to round out your new WordPress installation, such as All-In-One SEO Pack to further improve your search engine results, or Facebook Connect for complete Facebook integration with your blog.

Perhaps that’s why Jeffrey Toney’s reminiscence of the physical books he loves struck a chord. As Toney notes, art books are ill suited to the Matrix. One of my prized possessions is a copy of Alphonse Mucha: The Spirit of Art Nouveau, a beautiful coffee table compilation of this groundbreaking artist’s work. I remember coveting this book online for weeks, and being shocked upon finding a copy in the Art shelves at Half Price Books for $37. I’ve spent hours pouring over it, both alone and with friends. Someone may, one day, convert this tome into a rockin’ iPad application. But you can’t Kindle or Nook this book. The content is the pictures, not the type.

Digital books are fine for easy storage and search, but they carry no history. I can go on Amazon.com and download Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz for free. (And I have!) That doesn’t compare to when my high school girlfriend Mandy, aware of my fondness for the author, bought me a rare turn-of-the-20th-century print out of an antiques store window in Rochester, New York. Digital media is Teflon-coated against memories. None of us will look back 40 years from now and say to our grandchildren, “Yes, I remember the day I downloaded The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo.”

Maybe digital will make these “real book” moments even more precious. Maybe we’ll find that we treasure the physical books we own more – not merely because they’re rare or beautiful, but because they’re doorways to our histories.

What physical books do you cherish?

(* Actually, Mark said, “You can’t grep dead trees.” I decided to take mercy on the 99.7% of you who wouldn’t get that. You owe me.)

WordPress comes in two versions: one you can use freely over the Web (WordPress.com), and one you can download and install yourself (available through WordPress.org). In the first case, you have no responsibility for the blog software. WordPress.com upgrades WordPress periodically, applies security fixes, and keeps your blog up and running. It’s the (seemingly) low-cost, low-maintenance way to host your content. In the second case, you open an account with a hosting service such as HostGator, and install your own copy of the WordPress software. When WordPress is updated, you’re responsible for installing the upgrade. If something breaks, you’re responsible for fixing it.

Does self-hosting sound like a pain? It can be. Most authors and subject matter experts avoid it, because they’re not “techno-geeks.” They want a Web site so they can educate people on stocks, gardening, or the forthcoming Robot Revolution – not so they can tinker with software. But if your business requires building a fully functioning Web site that grows along with your operation, there are many reasons why you’re better off opening a hosting account and installing WP yourself.

1. It’s not as hard as you think. WordPress is so popular that all of the major hosting services have made it easy to install. Services like DreamHost and HostGator provide one-click installation of the latest version. After the initial installation, WordPress can upgrade itself. WP will tell you on your Administration panel when an upgrade is available. In most cases you can click a couple buttons and, bam – new WordPress!

What if you’re just starting out, and can’t afford a custom design for your site’s appearance? No worries. There are over 1,200 free themes that will give your blog a professional look and feel in a matter of minutes.

2. WordPress.com isn’t as cheap as it looks. Hey, they have to keep the lights running somehow. The site makes its money by charging for “advanced services.” Want to change your blog’s background color? That’ll be an extra $10 a year to edit your site’s style sheet. You’ll also pay extra to host your own domain, upload video, remove ads, and obtain more storage space. Depending on what you need, hosting your blog on WordPress.com can be just as expensive as hosting it yourself.

3. Self-hosting is cheap. When you consider what you receive in return, self-hosting is a steal. For $10 a month, HostGator will provide you a hosting account with unlimited disk space, unlimited domain name hosting, 24-hour support, data backups, Web site traffic analysis, mail hosting, FTP access, and secure e-commerce services. And HostGator calls that their “Baby” hosting service!

$10 a month is a drop in the bucket even for the most piddling blog whose sole revenue stream is Google AdSense. If you self-host and your blog does even moderate traffic (1,000 visitors a day) by the end of its first year, self-hosting will pay for itself.

4. Self-hosting means more features and happier users. With WordPress.com, you’re restricted to using the features that the site offers all of its users. That’s a rip-off! WordPress has a plug-in architecture that allows third party software developers to add new features. As of this writing, there are over 10,000 plug-ins available for free download. WordPress users who self-host can distinguish their sites and keep their customers engaged by installing a few well-chosen plug-ins.

As an example, this blog uses Redirection to automatically redirect users when a URL changes; Contact Form 7 to provide an easy means to contact the author (moi); Facebook Connect to enable complete Facebook integration; All in One SEO Pack to optimize my posts for search engines; and Google XML Sitemaps to make my content easier to find. That’s only a small sampling of the plug-ins available to turbo-power your WordPress installation.

5. No restrictions on site advertising. WordPress.com makes additional dosh off of ads it places on your content. That’s right: they’re profiting off of your hard work. You can pay to have ads removed, but most bloggers can’t host ads themselves. Some high-traffic blogs (i.e., blogs pulling in more than 25,000 visitors daily) can apply to host their own ads, and split the revenue evenly with WordPress.com. No offense to the good folks behind the scenes, but I find that obscene. Your content is yours. You should own it lock, stock, and barrel. If anyone’s making money off of your output, it ought to be you.

If you’re using your Web site for business, your business deserves better than being hosted on WordPress.com. Open up a HostGator account, and you can start developing a uniquely branded site immediately. And remember: if you get stuck, I’m only an e-mail away.

But my favorite feature is Custom Post Types. Let’s say you run a movie blog, and want to have a separate listing for DVD capsule reviews, with the reviews containing affiliate links to Amazon.com. You don’t want these posts to show up in the main feed, as you may be adding several every day. Before 3.0, this required coding and template hacks. With WP 3.0, you can create a new custom post type specifically for your DVD reviews. This collection of posts will have its own tab on the Administration menu, just like Posts and Pages. By default, these custom posts are distinct from your main publishing stream, and can even have their own post templates.

Want an example? Visit my Humor page, which I generated by defining the custom post type “Humor.” Here’s a screenshot of how these posts appear in the Administration UI:

You can read a full tutorial on Custom Post Types at Justin Tadlock’s blog. But don’t start fiddling with your blog just yet! Hop on over first to Matt Wiebe’s Smart Custom Post Types page. Matt provides additional template code (it goes in your template’s functions.php file) that improves WP’s native support by enabling custom landing pages, custom index templates, and more. I used Matt’s code to generate the Humor page without defining any additional templates or functions.

Between blogs, fan sites, and document libraries like Scribd, the Internet is a vast repository of textual content. Publishers refer to their collection of unsolicited submissions as the slush pile. The Internet is the world’s largest slush pile: there’s a wealth of information waiting to be tapped…if you know how to find it. This is where having friends comes in handy.

Before I read the Times article, I hadn’t used Scribd. “Great,” I thought, “another wasteland of content to navigate.” Fortunately, I have plenty of friends on Facebook, and Scribd supports Facebook integration. Everything my Facebook friends have uploaded to or read on Scribd is visible to me. That gives me a foothold into a service I would otherwise find unnavigable.

I hadn’t realized until I read this article how social media has changed the way I content-surf. Once upon a time, I would monitor hundreds of feeds in Google Reader – and i had the pinched shoulders to prove it. Now, I track less than 30. Most of these are high quality sites producing original content, such as NPR Music. Some are aggregators of quality articles, such as ArtsJournal. Everything else I read online comes from the recommendations of my online acquaintances. Instead of suffering under the delusion that I can monitor everything, I keep my eye on my infinitesimal slice of the Internet. And my friends keep their eyes on their slices. Whenever one of us finds something worthwhile, we shout “Eureka!” and fly it up the digital flagpole.

Combing through piles of crappy content to unearth a few gems is exhausting. But it’s manageable with a little help from my friends.

Writing is re-writing. One goal of re-writing is condensation. Your second draft ought to be shorter than your first. A second draft is a first draft on Weight Watchers. You condense by removing irrelevant material, avoiding repetition, and omitting needless words. As William Strunk put it in The Elements of Style:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Which words are needless? Strunk covers common verbosities in his book, such as “the fact that,” “who is,” and “which was.” Children’s writer Casey McCormick rails against adverbs and adjectives. Don’t use a verb phrase like “ran speedily” when “dashed” will work. Strike most instances of “really” and “very” from your writing – and demand that the survivors defend themselves. Your writing will flow and float without all that garbage weighing it down.