SEO Ultimate Plus Upgrade : Is it worth it ?

Just a quick note to mention few of my wordpress settings have been lost during the upgrade from SEO Ultimate (free version) to SEO Ultimate Plus (premium version). Even if the authors indicate that no settings will be lost during the process I have to say that was not my case at all.

I followed the basic tutorial they provide on their site, which consists of simply desactivating and removing the old plugin and then activate the new using the license key sent by email. Among things I’ve lost : Link mask generator entries, Main title tags and Deep links.  Fortunately for me I had a backup and managed to recover by copy/pasting most of these lost settings. This may have been caused by another cache plugin (WP super cache) but I’m not too sure.

How to keep your previous settings from SEO Ultimate (free version)

If this happens to you you can follow these simple steps:

1) deactivate (don’t delete) SEO Ultimate+ and reinstall SEO Ultimate (FREE version).
2) go to Settings > Export > SEO Ultimate > get both the dat file and also export the deeplinks.
3) then, after you have the .dat file, deactivate SEO Ultimate and activate SEO Ultimate+
Then once you activate the license again, then go to Settings > Import > import the settings > import the deeplinks.
Anyway, if you’re wondering if the upgrade is necessary I would say yes as the classic free SEO Ultimate is apparently going depreciated.  So it’s a kind of a forced update I would say. Considering Yoast as an alternative could be a good option if you’re tired of SEO Ultimate. I personally think it does the job though and it’s still an excellent plugin.
Additionally  if you noticed that your Google Review Snippets don’t work anymore on your review articles then upgrade to the premium version and they will appear. Money magic.

A good customer service

SEO Ultimate Plus  gives at least an excellent customer support. Emails are mainly answered by Jeffrey within 48 hours maximum, which is not that bad.  I’m happy so far with all the answers I got from him. Some of my questions pointed out technical issues, such as the impossibility to get the Open Graph settings taken directly from the post itself without having to edit them manually each time you post something. Mass editing can also be a real pain if you have like me thousands of articles stored in your database.
Some of my feedbacks seem to have been taken into consideration for further updates. Let’s see how this plugin grows now it’s not free anymore.

The best translation plugin for WordPress

I was recently looking for a wordpress translation plugin and had a lot of pain trying to identify which plugin was the best for me. My requirements were a sub domain solution that should come with a management interface in order to deal easily with my different translators and follow up the different jobs they were assigned to.

To my mind the best translation plugin for wordpress is WPML.

I don’t have any affiliation link with them so don’t look for a particular element that would push me to promote this WPML.  I’ve been using their plugin for few months now, to translate a news site into 4 different languages and have to admit this plugin works like a charm. WPML just do the job, is reliable and very well coded and documented.

There is no secret for such a quality, you have to pay, but believe me the investment worth it.

One thing to remember is not translating your content using Google translate in order to avoid any spam score to your pages. My advice : Hire real translators. You can find cheap ones on Fiverr.com and with a bit of time select the right people you can rely on. WPML integrates a full translation management interface that gives the ability to your translators to directly login onto your site and edit your articles.

Very nice one.

LG 29EA73 2560×1080 on Macbook Pro

Beautiful screen but a bit tricky to exploit correctly on your mac.
Beautiful screen but a bit tricky to use it correctly on your mac.

If anyone is wondering how to get a full resolution (2560x1080px) from the LG 29EA73 on a Macbook Pro 15″ without spending a hundred bucks on the Apple Store, here’s a solution.

No need to buy from Apple a Mini DisplayPort/Dual-Link DVI that costs around 99 euros, just get a DVI to Mini DVI cable for 20 euros and it will do the job perfectly. Using a HDMI cable is apparently not enough for your mac to display a 2560×1080 resolution. Only DVI link can do that.

Hope it helps.

Send music from a web brower to an Airplay speaker

Airfoil for mac helps you to stream any music from ay app in Airplay mode
Airfoil for mac helps you to stream any music from ay app in Airplay mode

You’re fan of Grooveshark or Deezer and you just bought a very nice Airplay speaker, thinking you could easily stream your music on it. If you’re naive like me you must have been disappointed when you realized only iTunes could almost do that.

The solution cost 25 dollars and works very well, it’s called Airfoil. What you need is just install it and select the source of your audio (Chrome, safari, Firefox or any other app you’re playing playing from) and Airfoil does the rest.

Hope this will help.

Design in photoshop for an iphone in real size

I always found very difficult to design mockups for iphone while you are on photoshop, because of proportions reasons. Even if a 640x960px document in photoshop is large enough to work on every details, it’s always quite a surprise to see the same document opened on an iphone (using jpg exportation and the native image viewer of the iphone) : font size can look very small, global proportions can look wrong, … Continue reading Design in photoshop for an iphone in real size

Widgets issues with WordPress 3.5

I’ve just spent 2 hours trying to figure out why I couldn’t move my widgets in the admin panel (presentation / widgets) since the upgrade of wordpress 3.5. Apparently the new version of jquery (1.8.3) causes problems with some jquery related plugins.

As usual it’s always advised to desactive all your plugin and to reactivate them one by one, till the moment you see which one was involved in the issue. In my case it was the plugin called “recent post enhanced”. So for those who have it installed and facing the same issues (impossible to drag and drop widgets), just desactive it.

Hope it will help someone around.

Happy blogging.

Socialmonkee backlinks review

Hi, just a quick note as I don’t update this site anymore, at least the little I write could maybe help someone. I’ve tried the socialmonkee.com backlink service. Basically you buy (via paypal) links to your site, in order to increase you Google ranking. Obviously it’s all bullshit, the links you get are from very very low quality websites. It all looks like black seo methods there, with article spinning and so on so forth. Don’t waste your time, don’t buy anything from them, it’s a total waste of money, you’ll probably decrease your site in the rankings than anything else.

Short stories of a wordpress user

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