Facebook Social Plugins

After seeing the latest Social Plugins from Facebook I was testing out a few ways to integrate them on my wordpress blog. As a result of these investigations I would like to share a couple of useful resources to save you the time and effort of hunting this stuff down.

Simple Facebook Connect

This is a great wordpress plugin created by Otto. It basically consists of a Base plugin that configures you blog to interact with Facebook and then has a series of single plugins that you can activate as you need them.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-facebook-connect/

HyperArts

Another really useful resource that I stumbled upon is on HyperArts a blog written by Tim Ware

http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/how-to-add-facebook-like-button-social-plugins-to-wordpress-posts/#og-type

this is more for coders and people who want to get down and dirty with FBML and hacking up your wordpress theme.

Like Buttons

As you can see if you are reading this post on my blog that I have configured the like button to show up at the top and bottom of every post. This is a great way for people to share your content directly to Facebooks newsfeed.

Facebook Change Their Terms Of Use For Fan Pages

If you are the administrator of a Facebo0ok Fan page and you recently got a message like this from Facebook then you are probably a little upset to say the least.

Most people who receive this kind of warning have no idea that they have violated any of Facebooks’ terms and conditions and feel somewhat victimized, especially if they have spent a lot of time and effort building up their Facebook community only to have their publishing rights taken away.

Jane Savoie Gets Her Fan Page Disabled

This exact thing happened to Jane Savoie, an Olympic horseback riding champion who had her publishing rights removed by Facebook because they deem her page to “represent generic concepts” I can only assume that they looked at the name of her fan page and decided that it did not clearly represent her business.

“Solve Horseback Riding Fears” has become a thriving community of horse owners and people interested in horseback riding and Jane has been the driving force behind this community. I have suggested to Jane that she contact Facebook directly (disabled@facebook.com)  to request that they reinstate her publishing rights and that they change the name slightly to reflect that it represents her business more clearly to “Jane Savoie : Solve Horse Back Riding Fears”

Facebook Change Their Terms Of Service

Facebook restricts the publishing rights of Pages that impersonate other entities, represent generic concepts, spam users, or otherwise violate our Terms of Use. These policies are designed to ensure Facebook remains a safe, secure and trusted environment for all users. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit the Terms applicable to Facebook Pages at http://www.facebook.com/terms_pages.php

Facebook Pages Terms : Date of Last Revision: March  26, 2010
1.   Pages are special profiles that may only be used to promote a business or other commercial, political, or charitable organization or endeavor (including non-profit organizations, political campaigns, bands, and celebrities).

2. You may only administer a Facebook Page if you are an authorized representative of the subject of the Page.

3. Pages can only post content and information under the “everyone” setting.

4. When you publish content or information to your Page we have no obligation to distribute your content or information to users.

5. If you use a Fan Box widget off of our site to promote your Page, others will be able to copy and place the widget elsewhere.

6. You may not place a Fan Box widget in an advertisement.

7. If you collect user information on your Page, Section 9 of this Statement also applies to you.

8. If you display advertising on your Page, Section 11 of this Statement also applies to you.

9. You may not establish terms beyond those set forth in this Statement to govern the posting of content by users on a Page you administer, except you may disclose they types of content you will remove from your Page and grounds for which you may ban a user from accessing the Page.

10. You will restrict access to your Page in order to comply with all applicable laws.  For example, if your Page includes content not suitable for minors, you will use your Page to block minors from accessing your Page.

Why Did Facebook Make These Changes

The reason Facebook made these changes is to stop people using Fan pages to spam the news feed of their Fans. A recent trend has emerged due to the immense power of Facebook fan pages to host what would normally be considered a Group on a Facebook fan page, and while most of these pages are harmless a small minority are used by professional marketers and spammers to hijack the Facebook newsfeed and inundate people with offers and promotional stuff.

Since Facebook are sworn to protect the user experience they have modified their terms and conditions so they can shut these pages down or at least take away the power from the administrators. Unfortunatly a few legitimate businesses and Fan Pages will get punished under these new rules, Jane Savoie is obviously one of them

Be Careful What You Name Your Fan Page

If you set up a new Facebook Page you need to be very careful how you name your Fan page to make it clear to Facebook that you are a business. While you should ensure that your fan page name clearly states benefits you will provide to your fans and includes your main keywords (preferably at the beginning) you need to clearly state that you are a business or you will fall into the catch all category of representing “Genric concepts”

Solve Horseback Riding Fears

Jane started her fan page back in October of 2009 and it has rapidly grown to over 10,000 members. Its probably one of the most engaged niche communities that I have seen on Facebook and it will be a terrible blow to the community if Jane is not quickly reinstated with full control of her fan page again.

Help Jane Get Her Fan Page Back

If you want to help Jane get her fan page back you can send an email to facebook at disabled@facebook.com asking them to reinstate her publishing rights. This is especially important if you are also a Fan of her fan page. If enough people express their concerns Facbook will  change their minds and make an exception.

You can also help by leaving a comment, pressing the share button or tweeting about this post to your followers on Twitter.
[facebook_ilike]

Get More Fans For Your Facebook Fan Page

Yesterday Facebook released a new application that allows you to place a Facebook Connect widget on your website that links directly to your Facebook fan page

This article will show you how easy it is to add a Facebook Fan box to your blog or website. What this means is that you will be able to attract more Fans to your Facebook page and your prospective fans will instantly see your stream and your other Fans and get some idea about what type of content you will be sharing

Set Up A Facebook Page

You need to have a Facebook Fan page in order to use this application, just scroll to the bottom of your facebook profile and click on “advertising” and then select the “pages” tab and then select “Create A Page”, for more information on how to create a Facebook Page check out this blog post on AllFacebook  – “how to create a Facebook fan page to attract millions of fans” check out Mari Smiths blog post “how  to create and promote a Facebook fan page”

Once you have your fan page set up you can create your fan widget by going to your admin panel, from your page you just click the link Edit Page link that is below your Fan Page Image/Logo

Select “Add Fan Box” Box from your Admin Panel

Now select your Fan page from the drop down menu and facebook will show you a preview of what your Fan Box will look like. If you want to make it smaller just uncheck the boxes that say “include stream” and “include fans” (this might be necessary if you want to improve the load time of your blog or website or if you are limited for space)

Copy  The Java Script Code

Now select all the code by highlighting it (CTRL A, CTRL C (pc) CMD A, CMD C (mac)) and copy it to your clip board. If you are a techie and want to find out a bit more about customizing your widget click on “advanced options” and you will be taken to Facebook developers where they have detailed instructions on how to add a fan box

Go to your blog and log into the admin section, for this example I am using wordpress but the technique should be similar on any other platform

Add A New Text Widget

From your dashboard , select appearance and then select  “Widgets”

Now create a new text widget.

Depending on which version of Wordpress you are using this will be slightly different, if wordpress 2.8  just drag and drop a text widget to one of your sidebars and place it where you want it to appear. If your blog theme is enabled with footer widgets you might want to place it there as Javascript and Facebook connect are notorious for slowing down your blog load times

Paste The Code Into Your Widget

Now paste the code from Facebook into your text widget and remeber to click Save

Now Go And See What It Looks Like!

That’s it all done, wasn’t too painful was it?  All you have to do now is go to your site and see what it looks like

Advantage Of having A Facebook Fan Box

The main advantage of having a Facebook fan box is that your visitors can become Fans immediatly as long as they are already signed into Facebook. Before this it was a two step process where you had to take people to your Fan page and then convice them to click on the “become a fan” button

What I like even more is that I can see immediatly what content is being shared on a Fan page and who the other members are. All the links are clickable so some marketers might say this is  leak away from having visitors staying on your blog. I personally disagree. I think people are more likely to come back to your blog, engage with your content  and be able to quickly scan your fanpage stream without having to visit Facebook.  If they do decide to leave you have some control over the links that they will visit.

Getting Your Community Connected

The advantages of having your community connected with each other are immense. The more networked your Fans are the more effect any fan interactions will have on facebooks newsfeed. More people will see if their friends are commenting or liking the content that you publish in your stream. Your aim is to create and own an  integrated network of Fans where information and news spreads rapidly and your fan page is the centre and hub  that this revolves around.

If your blog is hosted on Wordpress.com

A number of readers have discovered that it’s not possible to add this widget to free wordpress.com blogs. This is mainly due to  a restriction on allowing Javascript code to be placed on their servers. If this is the case the only solution I can suggest  if you want to have your own Facebook Fan Box is to move your blog over to Wordpress.org and purchase your own domain name and hosting. You can buy a domain name for $10 from Godaddy and get cheap hosting from Hostgator

Share This Post

If you have enjoyed this post, please do me a favor and share it on Facebook with all your friends, they will definitely thank you for it. Please leave any comments or questions below, I would love to hear your feedback.

My Fan Page : http://www.facebook.com/idchapman

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Confused

One of the main problems I face when teaching clients  about Facebook is explaining the differences between A Personal Profile, a Facebook Group and a Facebook Page. I’m also often asked which is better, a Group or a Page. In this article I hope to address this and end any potential confusion

Friend, Fan or Member?

To begin with lets just define the terms before we proceed, a Personal Profile  has Friends, a Group has Members and a Business Page has Fans.  As long as you  stick to this terminology you should not  go wrong. The confusion starts if you begin referring to your personal profile as your Facebook page or your Fans as the members of your Group

Size Restrictions and Messaging Ability

A Personal Profile is currently restricted to a maximum of 5000 friends, you can only direct message your friends in groups of 20 people. A Facebook Group can have an unlimited amount of members and you can send direct messages to your Group until it reaches 5000 members. A Facebook Business Page can have an unlimited number of Fans but has no direct messaging ability. You can only send messages to your Fans as notifications. Unfortunately most Facebook users never check their notifications

News Feed Access

Your Facebook Profile has direct access to the newsfeed, though status updates, sharing links,  posting photos and videos and importing notes. A Facebook group now has restricted access to the newsfeed. Activities will only show up under the highlights on the right hand side of your home page and not in the main stream. A Facebook Business Page has direct access to the newsfeed in  much the same way a Personal Profile does. One of the reasons Facebook Pages are becoming so popular right now is because of the viral effects that this produces

Commercial Activity

Facebooks terms of service directly stipulate that you are prohibited from engaging in commercial activity for your Personal Profile

You will not send or otherwise post unauthorized commercial communications to users

This restriction also applies to groups and they seem to be continually increasing their vigilance with regards to unwitting users who break these rules.

Facebook want all commercial activity to take place from Business Pages and they want you to pay them for the rights to advertise to their users. This doesn’t mean you can’t engage in indirect marketing from your profile or group, it just means you need to be much more careful and adopt conversational marketing tactics rather than direct sales pitches.

Which Is Better:  A Facebook Page or a  Facebook Group?

There is no easy answer to this question, Groups and Pages have different functions and it totally depends on what you want to achieve. For a good overview check out John Haydens recent article – Facebook Groups and Pages – Features, Benefits And Killer Tips

In my personal opinion the recent updates and changes in Facebooks site design has made Business Pages by far the best option for any business or brand wanting to increase their exposure

a study by the search engine journal came to this conclusion

• Pages are generally better for a long-term relationships with your fans, readers or customers;
• Groups are generally better for hosting a (quick) active discussion and attracting quick attention.

The fact that Facebook has restricted a  Groups ability to access the newsfeed means they have much less viral potential now.  The main benefit  of  a group is your ability to direct message your members  and the ability to create closed and secret groups. Mari Smith wrote a comprehensive article on this subject last November – Facebook Groups vs Facebook Pages – which is best? -  that still has some excellent information although since the recent changes in Facebook her conclusions need some revision. Jessica Lee from Inside Facebook also gave 4 reasons why marketers should choose Facebook pages over Facebook groups. Also worth reading is Howard Greensteins article on Mashable  - Facebook Pages vs Group

I hope this article has cleared up some of the confusion concerning Facebook profiles, Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages, if you enjoyed this post please retweet on Twitter or Share on Facebook by pressing one of the buttons below

The Psychological Principles Behind Order Customization

This article will explore the underlying principles behind order customization, more commonly known as upselling and downselling. When a customer has agreed to buy something you have a much higher chance of selling them something else in that moment than you would at a later date. Researchers like Dr Robert Cialdini have shown that there are definite psychological principles that define customer behavior  and how you can influence buying decisions.

Smart marketers are using this to their advantage. The question is,  “Is this unethical manipulation of just good business sense?

The North Wind And The Sun

The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak.

They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other.

Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him;

and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt. Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took off his cloak.

And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two.

Aesops fable about the north wind and the sun illustrates one of the core  principles behind all successful selling. If you make the conditions favorable to your customer then its only a matter of time before they will buy. If on the other hand you attack them with high pressure sales techniques and force them into making a purchase they are going to be very unlikely to continue along the path you have planned for them. In the story, the sun not only got the man to take off his cloak but also prepared the way for him to take off even more clothing.

Don’t Take No For An Answer

When a potential customer decides not to buy your product or service what options do you have available to you. The first thing you must realize is that they have made a decision based on the way you presented your offer.

Leveraged Sales

What psychological researchers like Dr Robert Cialdidi have shown is that even when someone refuses to buy something you can leverage them into buying something as they leave by utilizing one of the variations on Cialdidni’s 1st principle of influence, reciprocity

The Law Of Reciprocity

Reciprocity under normal circumstances can be seen when someone  does a favor  for you.  In almost all circumstances you are  now obliged to do something for them in return.

When applied to negotiation if you appear to give a concession in negotiation your partner is obligated by the rule of reciprocity to give a concession too

So if you want someone to buy something and they initially say no to your first offer , if you now make a concession and offer them something else they are much more likely to agree because of the law of reciprocity. Regardless of whether they even want what you are selling

An Accidental Discovery

Robert discovered this quite by accident while walking through the campus of his university. A boy scout tried to sell him raffle tickets for $5, he declined the offer and as he was leaving the boy said, “Well if you don’t want a raffle ticket maybe you would buy one of these chocolate bars for a dollar”.  Robert instantly reached into his pocket for a dollar and walked away only to be struck moments later by the fact that he doesn’t even like chocolate

He had an epiphany and instantly called his research team to investigate the psychology behind this particular instance of powerful persuasion

The root of it lies in the fact that if you ask someone to comply to an extreme request that they can refuse, they are more likely to accept a lesser request if you ask them immediately afterward

An Extreme Request

Robert and his team took this to the streets to test and began by setting up a fake charity organization and asking complete strangers if they would like to volunteer  to accompany juvenile delinquents on a zoo expedition. Naturally most people declined

They then framed their question in a different way. The first question they asked was. “would you like volunteer to be a buddy and mentor  to a juvenile delinquent and sign up for a 2 year program that involves several  hours commitment each week”

Naturally most people declined this offer. The amazing thing was when they asked their original question to the same people immediately after this extreme request  they got a 75% increased response rate than they did before

Selling at the Exit

Even when a customer is leaving you still have the chance to make them another offer. Lower the price and remove the frills and bonuses and you have a good chance of making the sale.

Launch Tree

Most serious internet marketer are fully utilizing these principles in their efforts to sell more of their products.  Mike Filsaime and Anik Singal recently released their Launch Tree course explaining this whole process and encouraged a movement away from using the terms upsell and downsell in favor of order customization.

A Question Of Ethics

As long as you are selling a quality product or service and you are certain that what you are offering will be of real value to your customer then the question of ethics is not really relevant.

Always have at least two offers prepared so even if your customer refuses initially, you can immediately offer them an alternative

If you pressure someone into buying something they don’t really need at some point they will realize what has happened and start complaining. You might get away with it once but you are potentially ruining the chances of a long term  relationship.

It’s wise to  remember that in today’s social media world,   if  you deliberately take advantage of your customers  your actions will get noticed quickly. Today with 67% of people consulting an online community before they buy anything make sure your company name is on the recommendation list not  the black list.

One Million Followers On Twitter

This week on Twitter Ashton Kutcher reached 1 million followers in a dramatic race to beat CNN to this milestone.  Oprah Winfrey also started tweeting and in her first day amassed over 200,000 followers.

In this article I want to explore the power of influence and ask a question that on the surface seems quite  simple but when you look closer it reflects something deeper and more intriguing.  Your answers can show you your deeper motivations and  reflect  what  you are likely to give and receive from the  world

Imagine if you had the chance to send a message to 1 million people what would you say.Would you be self serving or would you use your message to benefit others

Inspired To Greatness

If I had the ability to message 1 million people I would probably send them a link to something inspirational or to something that would shift their perspective for a few moments,  I would make sure that whatever blog post or video I  sent them to had a way for them to send that same message out to all their friends and I would show people how they could send their own similar message to the world that had the potential to go  viral

The benefit of sharing something valuable and inspiring  rather than asking for something for yourself is that the good feelings that people generate will be associated with your name for  a long time into the future. If you ask for a handout or go begging for clicks like so many people seem to do on Twitter you are just acting in a self serving way. The reason Oprah Winfrey got so huge is because she is authentic and genuine and committed to helping people and serving her community,  people all over the world love her for these very reasons

Judging A Book By Its cover

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is one of those inspirational videos that came to me in the past week, I watched it several times because it reminded me that anyone, no matter who they are or what they look like has the potential to touch the hearts of millions of people around the globe. Susan Boyle has now become the most viral video on the internet with over 40 million views.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf All The Time

On Twitter if you shout into cyberspace  with a self serving attitude some people will certainly hear you and respond. If you continue to shout all the time demanding attention, your response rate will decline and your message will be ignored just like the boy who cried wolf. You can fool people once but you can’t fool people on a long term basis.

Attention Is An Earned Privilege

Only  by building a Twitter following and adding value to your network will you earn the privilege of your followers attention. If everyone else is shouting  how can you cut through the noise. Even if you have  the right tools, you still need loyal followers who will share your message even further

Getting Your Message Out To The World

If you had 1 million Twitter followers and you could send a message to  the world what would you say ? How would you use that power of communication?

Would it be self serving or would it be a message of hope, inspiration and joy? I would love to hear your comments,  send me an @ message  on twitter @iandavidchapman or leave a comment on this blog post or on my Facebook note

Please Share Some of Your  Inspiration

Feel free to share some links to your favorite inspirational  YouTube videos and blog posts  lets make this blog post a cool resource

If you enjoyed this article and want to tweet it to your friends click  on the image below

Automating Your Status

Are you one of those people who has migrated to twitter after being active on Facebook? If you are then there is a strong possibility that you have automated your Twitter account to update your Facebook profile.

Before the recent Facebook changes this was a powerful strategy to use, It gave you an active presence on two social media platforms. In the old Facebook design the newsfeed was filtered and your status updates were kept in a separate tabs and were visible to those who were looking for them

A Change In Strategy Is Needed

The new site design means that the rules have fundamentally changed. I want to highlight the dangers for those twitter users who are either high volume tweeters or who are using RSS feeds or automated services  to populate their twitter stream and syndicate it to Facebook

Twitter Syndication

I have many friends who now spend all their time on Twitter and send  their twitter feed direct to their Facebook Profile.   In the old Facebook design the newsfeed was filtered and your status updates were kept in a separate tab. Now everything is merged and shared in real time to everyone in your network

Has Facebook  Given You Total Control?

By using friend lists to filter your feed you can tailor your news  quite precisely. The newsfeed is both personal and public.  Your status updates and Facebook activties are broadcast to your whole network

The danger comes when you overexpose yourself. By this I mean publishing too many updates so you dominate the real estate on your friends profiles.

Overwhelmed By Links

A few days ago I was observing this phenomenon from several people in my network. My page was overwhelmed by the sheer number of links they were posting. I realized that they probably didn’t even know this was occurring; It looked like they had set their accounts  to run on autopilot.

Are You Shooting Yourself In The Foot?

This is almost certainly  damaging to their reputation.  Personally I would hate to be thought of as a  spammer, it’s frightening to think that such a simple change in design can have such huge immplications

What is even more relevant is that Facebook now gives every user the option to hide someone who become annoying. They make it very easy. One click and you are gone, banished to the little box at the bottom of the newsfeed

The people I observed are all social media marketers. Their business depends on people listening to their messages. If the message is not getting through because they have alienated their audience then they are effectively shooting themselves in the foot. They are burning out their friends much the same way email marketers can burn out their lists by constant messaging.

Possible Solutions

I would like to offer a few suggestions to this situation and urge you to rethink your strategy if you find that you are seeing yourself in the mirror.

Ask yourself  how your status updates  will look from your friends perspectives, do you really want to look like an automated robot?

Take a few minutes to examine your own Facebook newsfeed; Can you see other friends making this same mistake?

If you overexpose yourself people will hide you from their newsfeed and you will never even know

How can you strike a delicate balance between keeping visible and annoying people?

If you are syndicating your status updates from Twitter to Facebook consider using Twirl and PingFM, you can carefully select which tweets to send to your Facebook Status and then turn syndication on and off as needed.

A River Or A Flood

With great power comes great responsibility. Facebook and Twitter are not the same and while on Twitter your tweets might be flowing into a great river of mass communication , over on Facebook you a sending them down lots of narrow pipes and some people don’t like to get their houses flooded.

There are obviosusly some people who this doesn’t apply to, some high volume tweeters send a constant stream of gold. Even If they  get to be too imposing on your newsfeed you can always bunch a few together in their own special list.

Feedback and Discussion

I would love to hear your feedback on this issue. I have Facebook Connect installed so if you are reading this on my blog you can sign in  and leave a comment,  it will automatically post a link to your profile so  your friends can read this article too.

If you are reading this on Facebook let me know what your experience has been. A change in design will always take some adjusting to and only through discussion can we define possible solutions and best practices.

Ian David Chapman

http://www.iandavidchapman.com

Getting Rid Of The Dead Weight

Is your blog taking ages to load, is it weighed down by too many plugins and widgets? If it is then maybe its time you gave your website a spring clean and got rid of some of the dead weight.

Waiting Time

Recently I had some feedback from a visitor to my blog, he commented how much he liked my site but that the load time was pretty slow. His observations were true, it had become similar to those old Facebook profiles that would take 5 minutes to load.

I wondered how many visitors I had lost because they were too impatient to wait. No one wants to sit watching a frozen screen

I know from my own experience that when I hit a site that takes forever to load I often get frustrated and leave.

This motivated me to take some drastic action…..

6 Tips To Speed Up Your Blog And Move You Into The Fast lane

After doing a bit of googling and experimentation this is what I managed to implement.  Some of these steps might be beyond most peoples comfort zone. If you fall into this category then get an expert to help you. It’s definitely worth the effort and your visitors will thank you.

1 – Reduce the number of posts that  are displayed

If you are using Wordpress, go to the SETTINGS menu and select READING now adjust the number of blog posts to display per page. I reduced mine down from 10 to 3. Because many of my posts are quite long I could also adjust my settings so the blog only loads a summary of each post. I could also reduce the number of images that are include in each blog post.

2- Delete any widgets that you no longer use

I’m one of those people who likes to  try everything once; the result of my curiosity is that after months of  adding new buttons, plugins and widgets, I often forget to deactivate them and they start to accumulate. Go through all your widgets and delete all those experiments. Only keep things that have been proven to truly add value to your site

3 -  Install a Caching Plugin

This neat little trick can really speed up the load time for your blogs pages

It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and the building the page from the database.

The one I chose was WP-Cache. you can down load it by clicking on the link

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cache/

4 – Inspect your code with Yslow

Yslow is a firefox browser plugin that you can use to analyse where your blog is getting stuck

http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

It works in conjunction with firebug which is a really powerful tool for inspecting the code on a website

http://getfirebug.com/

It gives you a breakdown of ways to speed up your site and offers great tips and suggestions.

5 – Reduce Java Script

Too much java script on a page will really slow down your load time, it basically blocks the ability for parallel downloads and this is often where the main problem is located. Any non essential code can be placed in the footer of your blog this way the rest of your blog can load without getting stuck.
Yslow told me that 5 Java script applications were in operation when my pages were loading.

I deactivated 2 of the plugins that were responsible and then set to work hacking up a “View my profile”  widget and was left with the bare bones html code that just displayed my links to my social media profiles and cut out all the extra weight

6 – Clean Up Your Theme

Check out  http://yoast.com/speed-up-and-clean-up-your-wordpress/ he gives some great advice for those who want to get into more in depth details. This stuff is a bit more advanced and only for those who really know what they are doing. Remember, if you start hacking into your wordpress theme to take a backup before you start. That way if things go horribly wrong you can still put things back to how they were before. Another great resource that I found was on graphicrating.com it shows you how to speed up your wordpress blog

The Result

I was  quite happy with the results of my tweaking, There is more I could do,  but for now that seems to have solved the main issues and my blog has been given a new lease of life. Its still not super fast, but that’s mainly due to installing the Facebook Connect plugin, I am still experimenting with it to see if it is actually worth keeping.

I hope this has helped you in some way, I am always interested in learning from the experience of others. Do you have any  tips for speeding up a blog, or know of any other good resources?

If you are reading this on Facebook you can visit my blog going to http://www.iandavidchapman.com

feel free to test out the Facebook Connect plugin and tell me what you think,

Ian David Chapman

http://www.twitter.com/iandavidchapman