My Life and Pursuit of Becoming A Millionaire
I have been forced to do tons of mass URL redirections on several of my WordPress sites as of late.
It’s an unfortunate, but necessary biproduct of messing around with URL structures.
For instance, on this blog, a URL to a post used to be: http://eliteeternity.com/category/post-name/
But now, it is http://eliteeternity.com/post-name/
Damn this bothered me for a long time. The default image upload folder is some crap like wp-content/uploads/date/blabla/finally-your-image.jpg. I’ve always been a fan of just having my images in the mydomain.com/images/ folder. I do it for seo, so that the spiders don’t have to search so deep for the images on my site. I’m not really sure if it helps anything, but it seems like a lot of the images from my websites do show up under a lot of the google image searches, so I just might be on to something.
There seems to be quadrillions of dead-end threads out there (especially on the wordpress forums, which I hate), and some people seem to have it figured out, but most everyone doesn’t. Hopefully this helps you if your’e trying to change the upload folder. I’ll show you what my settings look like.
What I did was went in to my cpanel and found the actual path on my server to my website. It’s something like /home/myusername/public_html/images.
I then plugged in that URL into the “store uploads in this folder” box under Settings > Media > Uploading Files . . .
Then, just add the full path to the folder you want to upload the images in to in the “Full URL path to files” box. This just happens to be http://eliteeternity.com/images on this server.
If all else fails, ask your host what the server path to your website is, they should be able to help you if they know anything.
This made my day a bit better, hope it helps you out.
Now, hopefully this post kicks all of those dead-end threads in the ass in the search results so that you can find it.
UPDATE: If you’re having this problem, delete your IP Blocking Filters within the individual website profiles in Google Analytics. Turns out this was the problem. I mass applied a huge list of the IP’s I wanted blocked (aka my ip’s that Ididn’t want tracked) and that’s when the sites stopped tracking. I don’t know much about IP blocking. It seems like my IP changes like every two minutes, so I ended up with a long list of blacklisted IP’s. Apparently there was some internal conflict and the tracking stopped altogether. Hopefully this helps some other IP BLOCKING NOOB.
I have a suspicion that it’s a plugin that I updated, but I have since deleted the tracking code (which Google still reports as “receiving data” by the way after I remove it) then reinstall it, but still no data.
Anybody have any ideas?
Oh, the joy. Another tutorial born of my frustrations and annoyance over the lack of ease of installing something that should have been much easier than it was.
Installing the commercial (paid) version of the LongTail JW Player for WordPress should only take about 5 minutes, but I swear all of the directions for a successful install and implementation of the tool cannot be found in a single location. This is the goal of this post. I’ll take you from purchasing the JW Player to installing it on your WordPress blog to posting your first video.
Stuff You Need to Know
Quick Instructions:
Detailed Instructions
JW Player is an open source project and you can use the player for FREE. So why pay for it? Well, if you’re using your website – and in turn the JW Player – to make money, well, then you have to buy a commercial license. Sucks, but gimme a break. Just pony up the $70 bucks. It’s worth it.
Click on the link in the email you are sent after purchasing the product. You’ll need to know your license code to log in to the site. The license code will be emailed to you as well. Easy enough.
Installing plugins is super easy. Especially with the recent advancements WordPress has made. It used to be that you had to download the plugin from the WordPress site, then upload it manually to your server, but now, you just go to Plugins > Add New > then search for the name of the plugin. Then just click install.
After you download the JW Player files from the LongTail site, you’ll need to extract the folder. (This can be done very easily with 7zip). Once the folder is extracted, you’ll see two files inside of it (among others). Find the player-commercial.swf and the yt.swf file and then navigate to this directory of the plugin (on your server) /wp-content/plugins/jwplayerplugin. Now copy the player-commercial.swf and the yt.swf files into this directory. Now, change the name of the player-commercial.swf to player.swf on your server. Now activate the JW Player Plugin for WordPress.
By this, I just mean find the link to the .flv video file. Something like http://yoursite.com/video/movie.flv.
You can create a new player with your custom options and stuff by going to Settings > JW Player Plugin > then look for “New Player” and name it something. Click “Create”. The name of this player is important because you’ll insert it in the “<Player name>” bit of shortcode in the next step below.
This was the major missing link for me when I was trying to get this bad boy working. Turns out, you just need to insert a bit of code in the “HTML” view of the WordPress editor, and then insert the link to your .flv file as well as the name of your player. The code you need is simply this:
[jwplayer config="<Player name>" file="<your video>"]
So if your player name is “myplayer” and the location of your file is http://mysite.com/video/movie.flv then your short code will look like this:
[jwplayer config="myplayer" file="http://mysite.com/video/movie.flv"]
If you’ve done everything properly as shown above, then you should be able to publish your post and see your video in the the JW Player on your site.
Hopefully I didn’t miss anything. If something’s jacked up, let me know in the comments. It’s a Saturday afternoon and I’m too lazy to double check everything. 
You may have noticed the “Like” button that I added under my post title. Now, instead of those cheesy rating stars that nobody ever clicked on, I can have a sweet Facebook Like button that nobody will ever click on. 
I’m not going to rewrite the whole tutorial, but if you have the Thesis WordPress theme, and you want to be a sheep like me and everybody else that has a blog, check out this tutorial to learn how to add the Like button to your blog.
Just a tip: when you get to the end of the tutorial and he tells you “Finally, place that snippet anywhere you want the like button to appear!”…if you want to make yours look exactly like mine, just place the snippet in the “Byline Item” hook if you’re using the free Thesis Openhook plugin.
