BhagaVideo.com is now Harold-Brown.com

Welcome to Harold-Brown.com. For the past 10 years I have maintained my website under the name BhagaVideo.com. A few months ago I decided to switch from a self-hosted WordPress site to Squarespace. My name was available this time around for a domain name so I decided to go with that as well. So for the 10th anniversary I have moved the site and changed the name of my Blog site. I still have a photo website under the BhagaVideo name so I will most likely keep that name as well.

Why the switch? WordPress is a great product and I would sill recommend it, but for me I have decided to simplify everything and change platforms as well. WordPress actually has more features and more ways to customize the look of your site, but doing so brings with it more potential problems and additional complexity. Most days my WordPress site is repeatedly under attack in attempts to login. I manage the security with WP Plugins and have not been hacked, but I am tired of working on this all the time. I sure wish people would give this stuff up.

Squarespace provided the tools to import my posts and pages from WordPress but there was still a lot of work to do making sure video would play, pictures would display, banners and color buttons had to be reworked, and I had to recreate the location maps using Squarespace mapping features. I also had a lot of SEO data that did not come over in the WordPress import, nothing is perfect.

I am still learning the little details of Squarespace, but over-all the learning curve is pretty quick. It only took me a couple of hours to get all of the information I needed with very little time spent on the help screens.

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The old BhagaVideo.com WordPress Site

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I decided on the Squarespace business account in the event I want to take advantage of the features in the future ( I already have more than 8 pages that forced my into the business account because I decided not to reduce them).

Watch for more updates on Squarespace as I start to use it more in 2016.

WordPress Website Overhaul Part 3

Welcome to part 3 of my WordPress Website Overhaul. In my last post I listed the plugins that I use for security, spammers and sploggers. These are important plugins and should be used on your site.  Although I am posting about my WordPress overhaul this is really an ongoing process that I do from time-to-time. After 2 years of my site being on WordPress it was time to review everything and make some changes. I will watch the stats on my plugins and make some changes as necessary, maybe I will be able to delete another plugin!

The next set of plugins that are import are the cache enabling ones. Pre-loading your pages to memory makes them much faster to load and can increase your rankings in search engines. More than that, your visitors won't be discouraged by slow load times and are more likely to take a look at your site.  It isn't unusual that I will close out a tab in my browser if a site takes too long to load. I like WP Super Cache and it seems to play well with my other plugins. There are plenty of basic and advanced settings that when used can really speed up your site. I also use WP Widget Cache and Use Google Libraries. You may get both increased speed from Google Libraries as well as the latest javascripts hosted on Google helping to keeping your site up-to-date and conflict free.

[dropshadowbox align="none" effect="lifted-both" width="autopx" height="" background_color="#f1ca37" border_width="1" border_color="#dddddd" ]Some say plugins don't add to your sites load times....yes they can![/dropshadowbox]

Now that we have discussed the necessary plugins lets look at a plugin that I feel is second only

to the security ones. It is a plugin called P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler), and it is my favorite plugin. This plugin actually scans your site and plugins and provides a performance profile of your site's load time, and displays which plugins are impacting your sites load times the most. This is where you can make important decisions on which plugins to keep and remove/swap out. Not all code is created equal and not everyone can write efficient code. This plugin will help you understand what plugins take the longest to load and aid you in comparing similar plugins to one another. Make sure you take a look at this one, perhaps after seeing its analysis you will stop blaming your host for your sites poor performance.

A nice complement to P3 is Pingdom. Pingdom provides uptime monitoring and performance monitoring. I periodically visit Pingdom and check on my sites performance and compare it to the history of tests that I have done. Well worth the time it takes.

When adding plugins to your site do your homework and research what is available and when checking the plugins out don't forget to check their performance with P3 and Pingdom.

I hope you have gotten something out of my three part series about WordPress site building/plugin selection. Keep doing your research and revisit your site from time to time to see what improvements you can make.

WordPress Website Overhaul Part 2

Welcome to the continuation of my Wordpress Website Overhaul Part 2. If you haven't read part 1 you can go here to read it. In part one I spoke about getting the right theme and removing the plugins that you really do not need. Of course that can be subjective, but you do need to take a hard look at what plugins you just don't need. I am a register DISQUS user and was using it on my site. However, I really don't do that much commenting on the web and my site has very few comments (not that I don't get a lot of comments in the spam bucket that I delete). Of course the amounts of comments I get can change, but thinking about it, I really didn't need to be using DISQUS and of course it was adding to my site load times. I am now using the WordPress comment system and do not require registration. That can add to the spam on your site and the need for additional plugins to control. I felt that not requiring registration makes it easier to comment and more visitor friendly so for me that is the best route to take. I know a lot of people debate what comment system is best and it is probably more of a personal option and choice more than anything else.

The next thing you really need to consider is how to protect your site from the evil of the world. You don't want to host viruses, link to shocking sites, participate in pyramid schemes or have your website host shut you down! Like it or not you should try to lock your site down. Make your login  password secure and look at plugins that can help keep access to your site secure.  I use Login LockDown  "Adds some extra security to WordPress by restricting the rate at which failed logins can be re-attempted from a given IP range". There are other plugins that you can look at and determine which is best for you.

For spam I use several plugins and most likely this is something that I will look at from time to time and perhaps try a few new plugins. I currently use;

• Akismet
• AVH First Defense Against Spam
• NoSpamNX (update: after 2 month Akismet and AVH have caught everything and NoSpamNX hasn't been needed/hasn't caught anything. I deleted it on 4/4/2013)

I also have a few other plugins related to security;

• AntiVirus
• BulletProof Security
• Wordpress Firewall 2

Finally I use a couple of plugins to help control splogging and junk email.

• Fast Secure Contact Form - "Includes CAPTCHA and Akismet support to block all common spammer tactics"
• WangGuard - "Remove the generator META tag, checks for blocked domains, Verifies that an associated Mail eXchange (MX) record exists for the email domain"

I had a plugin that provide a system health/info display on my dashboard, but I could get similar information from the BulletProof Security plugin so I was able to delete that plugin and still get the info from BPS.

I recommend you take the time to look again at the plugins you are running and see if there is any overlap in the functionality they are providing you. Look at other plugins not installed and see if perhaps they are better suited for your needs.

Look for part 3 of my WordPress Website Overhaul series.

WordPress Website Overhaul Part 1

I have completed my WordPress Website Overhaul and it was well worth the time that it took. This post is more about approach, but part 2 will contain more information on the plugins that I use. BhagaVideo.com is a self hosted WordPress site that makes use of many plugins. When I started the overhaul, my site load times were running in the 5 seconds area and I really wasn't happy with the overall look and feel of the site. I mostly do video and photography for fun and blog about my travels both near and far. Through this website I encourage others to digitize and restore their old photos and document their travels.

My photo website is Photos.BhagaVideo.com and it contains 6,000 pictures that I have taken since I was 10 years old. Most of the pictures are available for public viewing and many others are in private albums. The two sites contain links between them, with most of the pictures in my blog originate from the photo site. My photo site is hosted by SmugMug.

Before using WordPress I was writing my own code, but decided that I wanted my site to be more of a blog and WP seemed like a good way to go. I have used many themes trying each one out but was never really satisfied. One of my requirements for my photo site was GEO Mapping of my pictures, yet my blog did not make use of that. That didn't make sense. So I started looking at themes and came across Travel Blogger. Its theme was travel and it had Google Maps functionality built in. A perfect compliment to my photo site. I installed the Theme and made the adjustments to the size of the columns using a slider provided by the Theme.  If your blog is about cruising they have a Theme entitled "Seaward Bound" there is also a NYC Theme. Check them out.

Once I installed the theme I had the option of adding maps to all of my posts. I went back through my older posts and updated them to include a Google Map where that made sense to do. That is as simple as adding the shortcode to the end of my post. I only had about 50 posts that I needed to review so for me this wasn't a daunting task.

The second task was to review all of the Pages for content. I needed to update them to emphasize the travel focus of my site as well as still providing the inspiration around capturing old photos and converting 8mm film to video. This isn't exciting work but I believe that your site should have some consistency to it and stick to the theme.

The third task was to look at all of the plugins that I had installed and decide which ones I really didn't need, want or were overlapped by another plugin. You can get pretty hung up on cool thinks that really doesn't matter to anyone, and just adds to the load time of your site.

If you are going to run stats on your site pick the one that you like and go with it. I had Google Analytics, "Visitor Maps and Who's Online", and Woopra. I like Woopra but it really didn't give me anything more than what I can get with Google and the live chat isn't something that I will be doing. The most visitors I have ever had at one time is 26 and almost no one leaves a comment so what is the point? Worth considering if you are spending a lot more time on your site. "Visitor Maps and Who's Online" is something I like as well and the map of the world is great, but at the end of the day it is something I like and nothing my visitors really care about. The Who's online is good but again Google Analytics has it covered. It is a great option for anyone who wants to disconnect themselves from Google. I run Google Analytics on my photo website so I decided to go with Google Analytics and deleted the other 2 plugins. My first victory!

The next to go was copyrightpro. It works very well, but nothing on my site is worth protecting so again I had to ask myself, what's the point? It is just adding to the load time of my site, so deactivated and deleted. Next was Google Fonts, I wasn't using the plugin and I don't see a need to ever use it. I want to keep my site cleaner looking without a lot of colors and differing fonts.

I suggest that you follow the same idea that I did and delete the plugins that you no longer use or care about. The search engines are looking at your sites load time to improve its ranking so it is best to make site speed your priority rather than plugins that don't bring value to your visitors or you. The net result of doing the above dropped a full 1.5 seconds off the load time of my site. Well worth the effort that I made.

Look for part 2 of my overhaul post. I will get more into the plugins I decided on keeping and how I decided what to get rid of or replace.

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