PepperStation blog » support

Pretty permalinks for your WordPress site

Steve — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 21:28:59 +0000

Awhile back, I posted about our support for “Almost Pretty” permalinks for your WordPress site on our network. Today, I’m happy to announce that we now support “Pretty” permalinks on your Word Press site. When you host with PepperStation, your website is supported by a number of servers behind the scenes. Recent upgrades to our servers and various dial turning and button pushing now allow us to support “Pretty” permalinks on your WordPress site.

So, if you currently have /index.php in your permalink structure, and would like to remove it, feel free to do so.

What are permalinks? Here is a little refresher from our previous post.

A refresher on permalinks -

Permalinks are the links you can share with others and the search engines for your blog posts. From a search engine performance point of view,links to your site or blog that contain keywords relevant to your page’s content,will boost the ranking performance of that page with the search engines. By default WordPress uses “ugly” permalinks which look something like:http://example.com/?p=N

These links while functional,do not have an added benefit of loading your link with keywords for viewer and search engine consumption. The preferred permalink is the “Pretty” or “Almost Pretty” variety which allow you to create and share links with keywords in them and look like this:http://example.com/yyyy/mm/post-name/

Read more about permalinks on the wordpress site at:http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

To create links for your blog containing keywords, log onto your WordPress admin and goto settings->permalinks. Select a common link structure that you wold like to use ~~and then modify it by adding /index.php to the beginning in the ‘custom structure’field~~. You will have a link structure that looks something like: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

That’s it, you are good to go and now have links that contain great keywords for your blog post.

Enjoy!
Steve

Making sure your email reaches the inbox

Steve — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:17:51 +0000

I’m happy to announce that we’ve made some improvements to our email system that will help your emails reach the inbox.

Did you know that on average 20% of legitimate emails never reach the inbox? Frustrating, I know. Recently, we partnered with an email sending service provider to help us make sure that your emails are reliably delivered.

SendGrid.com offers world class deliverability expertise to make sure your emails get delivered. SendGrid handles ISP monitoring, DKIM, domain keys, SPF, feedback loops, link customization and more.

We run all sources of our generated email through the new system. This includes transactional emails from our Spirit e-commerce accounts, notifications sent from our Recordit web-form service, emails generated from your website forms and word-press plug-ins, and finally, all of your POP/IMAP account emails. Additionally, all of these emails are also run through new spam checks, which will help keep everyone’s inbox a bit cleaner. So, a good day for email!

All of these updates happen transparently behind the scenes. You do not need to update any of your email programs or web forms to take advantage of the new services. Happily, it just works.

Enjoy!

Steve

Updated PHP and MySQL services

Steve — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 19:37:13 +0000

Just a quick service update to let you know that we have updated our PHP and MySQL servers.

PHP version is now 5.3.6

MySQL version is now 5.1.52

Furthermore, your MySQL databases are now kept on Amazon’s EBS, which basically means that data durability is better and the chance of a single drive fault causing problems is minimized. We continue to make hot copy backups of each database several times throughout the day (stored on S3) and have added a daily snap copy of our EBS backed storage to our backup processes. So, in the unlikely event of a hard crash, boy do we have some backups to choose from.

Enjoy!

“Almost Pretty” permalinks for your WordPress blog

Steve — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:06:05 +0000

UPDATE: We now support “Pretty” permalinks for your WordPress website.
See: Pretty permalinks for your WordPress site

Permalinks are the links you can share with others and the search engines for your blog posts. From a search engine performance point of view, links to your site or blog that contain keywords relevant to your page’s content, will boost the ranking performance of that page with the search engines. By default WordPress uses “ugly” permalinks which look something like: http://example.com/?p=N

These links while functional, do not have an added benefit of loading your link with keywords for viewer and search engine consumption. The preferred permalink is the “Pretty” or “Almost Pretty” variety which allow you to create and share links with keywords in them and look like this: http://example.com/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/

Read more about permalinks on the wordpress site at: http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

To create links for your blog containing keywords, log onto your WordPress admin and goto settings->permalinks. Select a common link structure that you wold like to use ~~and then modify it by adding /index.php to the beginning in the ‘custom structure’ field~~. You will have a link structure that looks like: ~~/index.php~~/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/

That’s it, you are good to go and now have links that contain great keywords for your blog post.

Happy blogging -

Steve

Running reports in Spirit’s Reports tab

Mo — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:54:23 +0000

There are two types of reports you can run in the Reports Tab;
Product reports and Customer reports.

Product Sales allows you to generate a report based on the search of 4 product attributes:
Product name: tshirt_red (this is the product name saved in Spirit at the time the product is created)
Product id: tshirt006 (your SKU#)
Product title: Red 100% Organic Cotton T-Shirt (The name displayed to the customer)
Product key: 53 (this is the unique incremental Spirit # assigned when a product is created)

1. In the Reports tab, click on “product sales”
2. Select one of the four search on attributes as described above like, Product title.
3. Enter the name of the product as it appears to the customer “Red 100% Organic Cotton T-Shirt”
4. Enter a date range or leave blank.
5. Click on “create report” button.

Customer Sales allows you to generate a report based on the search of 3 pieces of criteria. I have used my profile as the example:
Email address: bierwag@e-techsolutions.com
Attributes: 85715 (this can be any attribute associated with a customer profile: street, city, state, zip, phone #, last name, etc.)
Customer Key: 26 (my customer number in Spirit is #26 – this number is a unique, incremental, Spirit assigned number)

1. In the Reports tab, click on “customer sales”
2. Select one of the three search on attributes as described above like, zip code.
3. Enter the zip code (or other attribute data).
4. Enter a date range or leave blank.
5. Click on the, “create report” button.

Once results appear, you can click on any individual order to view it. If you highlight the entire results listing, and “copy”, you can “paste” it into an Excel spreadsheet. The formatting will retain the proper columns.