Ennui Blog

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Sometimes going through Google Analytics reports is like looking at porn. I could spend hours pouring over the figures and seeing what far flung parts of the globe that traffic comes from.

I recently ran into a problem though, on this blog actually. It appeared I was getting no visitors. This saddened me greatly because of all the work I’d put into it and SEOing it correctly. Something was fishy.

I double checked everything and everything appeared to be set-up correctly. I decided to install a Wordpress Plugin and compare the two. I installed the Statpress Wordpress plugin. I immediately discovered that something was terribly wrong.

Google was not tracking the site at all, despite everything being set up correctly. I was actually getting more than a hundred pageviews a day and Google wasn’t picking it up! I did have readers, by golly!

I re-installed Google Analytics and now it appears to be working correctly.

This raises an interesting point that I want to share with everyone. Don’t rely on one web traffic statistic platform. If you’re running Wordpress, it would be a good idea to install both Google Analytics and Statpress, that way you have redundancy and can have fun comparing the two data sets. Google does not pick up everything, especially since a lot of people block javascript and their visits would not be read. If you’re running other CMS’s such as Drupal, there are traffic monitoring programs built in that provide pretty good data.

So, from now on, Statspress will be part of my default Wordpress installation, along with Google Analytics.

I recently decided that it would be a good idea to add a link directory to one of my blogs, Anglotopia. I wanted to create a repository for links related to Britain and Anglophilia. I figured there was a simple Wordpress directory plugin for this.

I was wrong.

A google search revealed two competing link directory plugins. Neither of them actually work and have been abandoned by their developers. Both have not been updated in sometime.

If you’re really interested, here are the links.

WP-Directory
WP Link Directory

Initially, both were rather impressive. They were integrated well into Wordpress and their interfaces made sense. The only thing is that they didn’t work. Both suffer from pretty much the same problem, they fail to actually display any links.

They both display the categories just fine. But both fail to show the actual links. I did some digging and this has to do with them being incompatible with the latest Wordpress updates. And since neither plugin has been updated in quite a long time, that leaves us with no Wordpress Link Directory Plugin.

Since I don’t know PHP or how to write Wordpress Plugins, I have not idea how to figure how to fix the Wordpress Link Directory Plugins.

There is, however a roll your own solution that I adapted to fit the situation. It’s called PHP Free Directory. It’s a simple PHP script that can run along side Wordpress since they use the same platforms. It can even coexist in the database you use for Wordpress (be sure to use a different prefix).

It’s fully customizable and themeable. Though, it would take some work to make it look like your Wordpress theme.

PHP Free Directory doesn’t take much work to set up. Just change the setting in the config.php file with your preferred text editor and upload the files. Run install.php and in a few seconds you’ll have a full operational link directory. Best of all it’s free.

The only caveat is that to remove the footer, you need to buy a license, which is $50. There is also a more advanced script that has more functionality such as charging people for links.

Now, the question is how to integrate PHP Free Directory into Wordpress? The simple solution is to just keep it separate and put a static page link in your header to it.

That’s all well and good but it’s not integrated in the blog.

The solution I found was simply to embed the page in an iframe (using the tag. This will put the directory in a frame on the template page and the user can navigate through the whole directory.

I don’t think there are any SEO issues with this, Google theoretically treats the iframe as a separate page and should crawl it accordingly. It’s not elegant, but it works. I don’t have an example because I opted to just let the directory live on it’s own for now.

It would also be feasible to simply copy the code of a loaded PHP Free Directory index page into your wp page body. Again, this works. But any clicked linked will take you to the actual directory and you’ll have to update the page every time you make changes to the front page.

Hopefully, some good soul familiar with PHP and Wordpress will adapt this fantastic script into a Wordpress Plugin. I’d like to see PHP Free Directory as a Wordpress Plugin.

Stay tuned for tips on how to customize PHP Free Directory. There is also a forthcoming post on how to put a static link in a Wordpress header.

Check out the two link directories I’ve set up.

Anglotopia - Anglophile Link Directory
BacklinkUtopia - SEO Link Directory