Permalinks on GoDaddy “Page Not Found”

For this post I’ll need to step on my Soap Box and express my frustration with GoDaddy and the unnecessary added steps when installing WordPress on their servers. Yeah, yeah I’ve gone back and forth – but after dealing with them for several months now, I am singing another tune. Granted, I was (this is past tense for a reason… future posts will explain – I have several planned…) hosted on their Windows servers… I haven’t tried their Linux – and probably won’t myself – but may for clients in the future if they choose to. But here is what happened, and here is how I resolved it.

When you install WordPress manually on GoDaddy, you immediately have to go into the >> Settings >> Permalinks and set your permalink structure right away or when you start blogging and set it after, you’ll run into errors. When you do this, it automatically generates a web.config file within your root directory. DO NOT delete this! If you do, it’ll cause your site to show a “Page Not Found” error. If for whatever reason you do accidentally remove the web.config or mess with the file in any other way, go back into your dashboard and set your Permalink again.

“Page Not Found” mostly has to do with the Web.Config file. Set your Permalinks, and that should do the trick.

If anyone has had to deal with this, and has more details to share or other ways you’ve resolved this – please share. Setting the Permalinks and refreshing the web.config file is what resolved it for me.

Thanks! 🙂

My Top 10 WordPress Plugins

Lately I have been fascinated with the latest WordPress Plugins that are ‘hot on the market’. Some of the most popular among WordPress.org downloads and other users opinions across the web. These are always changing as people like myself experiment with new ones that pop up here and there, but these 10 have been my favorite lately.

In no particular order, here are my current Top 10 Favorites – and what I feel are must have’s:

1. All in One SEO Pack – Absolutely amazing. You’ll have to type in the keywords yourself, having Google’s Keyword Tool search your post and give you the most popular searched keywords (with the least competition) and then you go back and edit your post and place a keyword rich title, description and a list of keywords. Don’t over-do it – but pick the top 10 (max) that are over 25,000 or near to full 100% in the popularity scale they show with that green bar. This plugin is GOOD to have if you want your blog to excel in the search results.
2. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin comes in handy when you don’t have a clue how to create an XML SiteMap. This plugin will do the work for you. It’s best to create a link at the bottom of your blog in the ‘footer’ area for Google-bot to find it better. By placing a formatted xml file with site map on your webserver and a link to it on your site, you enable Search Engine crawlers (like Google) to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly. XML sitemaps were not, as some people thought, a tool for search engine optimization. It does not affect ranking, but it does allow search engines to make more accurate rankings and searches.
3. Akismet – I haven’t had a need to go to any other Comment De-Spammer because Askimet does such an amazing job. One thing I love about WordPress is that it allows you to block pesky comment spammers by IP – awesome!
4. StatPress Reloaded – AMAZING, AMAZING, AMAZING! This tells you EVERYTHING about your visitors. Their IP address, where they’re from, what they looked at and how they found you. Also it shows you how many times within a day they visit your blog. It gives graphs and charts on RSS feed, pageviews, site hits & a day to week to month comparison. Also shows a comparison on browser usage. AWESOME! I still use WP-Stats & Google Analytics for an overall idea about my visitors.
5. CFormII – The current Top-Favorite according to WordPress.org is Contact Form 7, which I have really liked and do use on several of my blogs, but I have REALLY enjoyed CFormII lately. It gives you more flexibility in being creative with your contact form as well as other ways to use it. I also think its more pretty Both these forms allow you to use CAPTCHA verification to eliminate SPAM email. Very nice.
6. Lightbox 2 – To give an elegant edge to picture viewing on your blog and to help your site look more professional – I highly recommend this plugin. Instead of opening up pictures in a new browser window, or have a dull pop-up window view – this plugin uses ajax which darkens the background and gives a slideshow when multiple images are linked in the post. Very nice!
7. WP-Ban – Have someone in mind that you know you wouldn’t ever want them to read your blog? Or just someone you want to block from viewing your blog/site? This tool comes in very handy if you know how to locate their IP address via their nasty emails. Good tool to have on hand if you want to block someone. It’s not recommended (because you could easily block someone unintentionally within the IP address range) – but I haven’t seen any problems so far using this.
8. WP-PageNavi – Good tool to have if you want to get rid of the “<<Older Posts”  “Newer Posts>>” bottom page nagivation. This Plugin replaces those default navigation links with [1] [2] [3] number navigation. More classy I think.
9. WP-Polls – A nice simple way to add polls to your WordPress Blog. No need to be worried about only having a limited supply like PollDaddy. This plugin also provides a way to Archive your polls. You can add polls within the posts as well as a widget on your sidebar. It also allows a simple way to customize it with CSS.
10. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – A VERY essential Plugin to have if you want one more way to pursuade your readers to linger longer on your blog. This Plugin automatically adds a list (to your specfication count) at the bottom of your post, of related posts according to category and tag. VERY nice Plugin!

WordPress Installation on GoDaddy

GoDaddy is a great server, but it can be very confusing how to install the software manually. They do provide an easy to install ‘one-click’, but that will only do you good for your Master domain on your hosting account.

You can have multiple domains on one hosting account – however, if you want to install WordPress on any of them – you’ll need to do it manually.

For the sake of getting right to the point of this post, I’ll assume you have already imported your additional domain into your hosting account AND have created the folder to point the root [for your additional domain] to. If you don’t need an additional domain, I suggest using GoDaddy’s one-click install for your 1 domain that should be the master domain for your hosting account and save yourself the trouble of these next steps. The one-click install will be located on your homepage of your hosting account control panel:

Follow their step-by-step instructions (Should only take you 10 min max) and make sure to write down what you name the DB and username and password.

Now, onto how to install manually. First thing you’ll want to do is make sure you have FileZilla installed to be able to upload the WordPress Software files to your root domain folder, and either Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web to edit the wp-config.php file. Without these programs, you’re pretty much toast. 😛 You need them, so go get them 🙂 Then move on to the following:

You’ll need to create your Database, so go to the Database area of your GoDaddy Control Panel:

1. Click ‘MySQL’
2. Click ‘Create Database’

Make sure you write down everything that you input. You can name it anything you want, doesn’t matter what you put as the description. Make sure you select version 5.0 php. If you want to work on your WordPress Blog Remotely then make sure you select that option or else you’ll have to re-create a database.

Now open up your FileZilla, the next step includes using your FTP username and password that you set up on your GoDaddy Account. This is not the same username and password that you use to login to your GoDaddy ‘domain account’. To find/set-up your FTP username & password, go to the Manage FTP Users section of your Hosting Control Panel:

Now, open FileZilla and set up your local and remote settings in File >> Site Manager. The Host should be: ftp.mysitedomain.com and below you put the username and password you set up in your ‘Manage FTP Users’ section on your hosting control panel. Set your servertype to be ‘FTP – File Transfer Protocol’ and Logontype as ‘Normal’. After you set this up, select your local folder (the folder where your WordPress Software files are) on the left hand side next to where you see ‘Local Site’:

When you click ‘Quickconnect’ your folders on your remote site should appear to the right hand side of the screen. Make sure you double click on the folder that you selected as the root of your additional domain. This is where you are going to copy all the files and folders from your local folder to. Once you have this set up, there is one file we need to edit before we copy all these files.

Open up your file editing software (either Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web). Open up your local folder and double click on wp-config.php file.  You are going to edit the following areas of this file: DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, and DB_HOST

You should have the information for the first 3 from when you set up your MySQL database. The ‘hostname’ you’ll need to get by going back into the MySQL section of your hosting control panel (Databases >> MySQL). Click on the pencil icon next to your database.

Once you have clicked on that pencil icon you should see the hostname at the top of the list of information. It should look something like

DB_NAME.db.0000000.hostedresource.com

Copy and paste that address into the proper area of the wp-config.php file and then close out your software editing program. We’re done with it. Now go back into FileZilla and highlight ALL the files in your local remote folder (should include wp-admin, wp-content, wp-includes) and all the other files in the folder. High-light and drop and drag these files into your root folder of your remote server. It should be empty. Once you drop them into that folder, FileZilla should go to work in copying all the files. This will take several minutes.

When it’s all complete, now open up your browser window and go to your domain www.mysitedomain.com. You should see a screen that looks like this:

• Fill in your Blog Title
• Fill in Your E-mail
• Make sure your allow your blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati is checked
• Click on Install WordPress
• Next screen you see should say Success! and should give you your Username and Password. WRITE DOWN the password it gives you, as you can change this later.
• Click on Log In.
• Now you will see your blog’s Log In page. Make sure to bookmark that URL.
• Fill in the Username and Password you have just received
• Click on Log In.

Then you should see your WordPress Dashboard. Get familiar with it and click around. If you want to go and change your password to one that you’ll remember, click on the ‘admin’ link in the top-right-hand corner of your screen. 🙂 Have fun!