A lot of the traffic to YLF comes from search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live.com. This is easily the highest volume source of new readers right now. So it is important how YLF “ranks” for keywords that relate to YLF subject matter. For example, when someone goes to Google and searches for “smart casual [...]

During July our traffic from Google, which had been growing steadily since we launched YLF in 2005, suddenly dropped more than 50%. To combat this I installed the All in One SEO Pack plugin, removed meta descriptions altogether, and resubmitted the sitemap. Well, something worked. Our traffic returned to pre-plunge levels a few days ago. [...]

One part of setting up the YLF forum development server did not run very smoothly: replicating the database. I wanted to get a full version of the current YLF forum with all 20,272 posts by 1214 users. There is no backup or import/export functionality currently built in to bbPress (or available as a plug-in), so [...]

This is filed under the heading “I don’t know why the solution works, but it does, and that’s good enough for me”. The YLF forum is currently based on bbPress 0.8.3 (great forum system, more on that in future posts). I was setting up a development server to test some new features and hit a [...]

The easy route is to use a service like Widgetbox. Once registered, you can create widgets (like the ones below) in a matter of minutes. I took a bit of extra time to create an image for the widget title, but this pays off by putting the YLF brand stamp on the widget. Other default [...]

Today I needed to set up a staging server to do some experiments with our YLF theme. After setting up the database and installing WordPress, I wanted to import the current contents of YLF to this new site. Since 2.2, WordPress has had the ability to import and export the contents of the blog database [...]

Most websites get a lot of their traffic from search engines. I lifted the chart below from YLF’s Google webmaster statistics and it shows that 41% of our traffic comes from search engines, 32% comes from direct traffic (people typing in the URL or clicking on a link in an email message) and 27% comes [...]

Every few months I spend some time trying to get YLF a little more exposure through directories, which catalog websites much like Yahoo did in the early days of the web. The process is often manual – the directories have real people that review sites and ensure that they get listed in the appropriate categories. [...]