The trouble is, not everyone knows that you can easily and freely turn office documents into PDF files. Typically, it’s assumed you need some (expensive) professional software to create PDF files. For example, you could get Adobe Acrobat Pro or Distiller. Not cheap options, and not for the average user.

I was reading the NJEA review that I got in the mail today, and they listed Zamzar as a great resource because, among other things, it can convert documents to pdfs. While this is true, you don’t need an online service like Zamzar. There’s another free option: Open Office.

Within the entire OpenOffice suite, you automatically have the option to save a document as a pdf file. If you create a handout in OpenOffice Writer, you can have a pdf file instantly by hitting the PDF button. If you want to share a presentation, you can open your Impress file and save it as a PDF. It’s built into the OpenOffice suite, in part, because OpenOffice is about using open standards to share information… PDF is an open standard. “.docx” is not.

I still wonder why more schools don’t turn away from expensive, licensed proprietary options when there are perfectly good open source alternatives available. For some students (i.e. graphic design, photography), you’ll want a PC or a Mac that can run the Adobe Creative Suite. For just about everyone else… Ubuntu, OpenOffice, and any number of open source alternatives is a perfect solution. I’d say something like 90% (or more) of students would be perfectly served by a purely open source system.

But, you also want some quality to that traffic. Traffic with a high bounce rate – where people come to your site and immediately leave – isn’t so useful. If you have a high enough search volume, that may be ok. But, it’d be nice if people browsed around your site for a while. Users that read four or five pages in a visit increase your traffic numbers (and, therefore, advertising possibilities) a lot faster than one-off bounce visitors.

Today, I was looking through the Google Analytics report for this site. I haven’t been doing a good job of maintaining it, so the traffic isn’t amazing, but there are still a decent number of daily visitors that read some of my old guides/walkthroughs. When I looked for the pages with the lowest bounce/exit rate, I noticed one page that stood out from all the others: How to Complete the Main Quest Line, Chapter 6: Tranquility Lane.

What you see above is the navigation summary for that single page. On the right hand side, you’ll notice one interesting thing: only 15% of the people that get to this page then leave this site. 85% of them click on a link and stay on the site.

On the left hand side, you’ll notice a second interesting thing: people getting to this page are both entering the site (either from a referral or a search engine) and clicking through from another page on the site. The page is a hook that keeps people on the site – whether they’re fresh from another site or reading through for specific information about this topic.

What Makes This Page So Successful?

So what makes this page so successful at keeping visitors here? Here are two things I see that are beneficial here.

It’s part of a series. The site introduces a topic (a walkthrough for a section of Fallout 3) and then links to various parts of the walkthrough. People can then jump in to the specific point that they need to read about.

Each part of the series links back to it. There are six pages in the walkthrough, and each one contains links to the previous part, the next part, and this table of contents page. The left-hand side of the chart shows pretty definitively that people are reading one of the sub-pages, clicking back to the table of contents, and then clicking through to another sub-page. It’s an example where intuitive navigation is helping users find the content that they want.

So, there’s two components to this. On the one hand, there’s good content. People want this information, and I gave it to them. I wrote the walkthrough a year and a half ago, and people are still searching for and reading it. Two, I designed the pages to have intuitive navigation, and people are using that to stick around on the site.

So, if you want to reduce your bounce rate, start writing up some series of articles that address a big topic or theme. Then link them together with a table of contents, and make sure people can find it. If it’s good, they’ll stick around and click around.

Recently, I found a great plug-in that eliminates this step. I went out and found it because, somehow, I accidentally removed the code from the footer on this website. I don’t remember when or how I did that, but it became apparent when Google Analytics showed that I had 0 traffic for about two weeks.

The plug-in, Google Analyticator, is great for two reasons: it’s entirely automatic and it puts a snapshot of your analytics report in your dashboard.

To set it up, you activate the plug-in and go to the settings section of the dashboard. There, you can log into your Google account and authenticate your WordPress installation so it can access the Google analytics information. The necessary code is automatically inserted, and you don’t have to worry about cutting and pasting anything.

The snapshot of the stats is also cool. It definitely isn’t the full-featured report you get on the Analytics page, but it’ll give you a simple graph of visits and let you know the top performing pages/searches for the past 30 days.

I love the plug-in so much that I’ve installed it on all three of my current sites: this one, Olinda Gibbons Photography, and Digital Photography How To.

If you want to do this, here are a couple tips.

Write a original article about a topic you wrote about on your blog. For example, today I wrote up a quick review of Mozy, an online backup service. I had written about that several times before on my photography site. This allowed me to a) write up an original piece of content and b) naturally link back to my own site in the text of the article.

Use natural links in the article to “deep link” to your content. When I write up the article, I don’t just include a link back to the root page of my site. That’s kind of senseless self promotion, and SEO-wise it’s probably not the best idea. The idea here is to create deep links – links to actual articles that you’ve written. Plus, these links will flow better with the article that you’re writing for AC. Check out my AC article on Mozy to see what I mean.

Link to Your Site’s Root in the Additional Resources. There two kinds of links in the SEO world – “rel=nofollow” and follow links. When a search engine like Google sees the “rel=nofollow” attribute on a link, it discounts that link in calculating page popularity, search engine rankings, and such. The gold standard in SEO is “real” follow links.

When you’re writing an article on AC, you need to understand that links in different places work differently. If you include a link in the article (as per the above tip), it’s a real link, no “rel=nofollow” strings attached. If, however, you link to a site in the additional resources (which appear in the sidebar of your article), they have the “rel=nofollow” attribute. I typically use this area to link to my site as well as one or two others that might have general information about the topic.

The important thing to remember is to write something useful and don’t just link to your site. Read your article over. Does it include some useful information for the reader, even if they don’t follow the links? If yes, you did a good job and your article is acceptable. If not, then you did a lousy job and you should re-write it. Chances are, that kind of junk will not get read and could probably get flagged for removal.

In the admin area, you can create custom thumbnails for your images. An image is supposed to pop up that you can drag a thumbnail over. But for some reason, when I opened up the window to create a thumbnail, the image didn’t appear. The image was coming up blank, like if you link to an image that isn’t there.

The actual image was there on the server, so that wasn’t a problem. I followed the trail a bit and figured out that the image for the thumbnail creation process was created by a script, nggshow.php (part of the Nextgen plugin). The script itself was working. It fetched all the information, put it in an object, and then it was supposed to spit out an image.

The problem was that the final output is supposed to be a jpeg. But, some white space was added at the top of the file, so the output was corrupted. The jpeg was there, but the browser couldn’t render it because of the added white space at the top of the file. I don’t know where exactly that was coming from, but it was added in somewhere in the Nextgen Gallery plugin files.

I tried to go through, eliminate any extra lines outside the php tags, and get rid of the white space. I eliminated one of the two newline characters that was in the output, but I couldn’t find the second. After pulling my hair for a while, I realized that I was working with an older version of Nextgen Gallery (1.5.3). I updated to the most recent (1.5.5), and it worked fine. Doh.

So… simple solution. Upgrade to the latest version of the plugin.

But, a key part of the concept was to include a Nextgen Image Gallery in that excerpt. It’s a photography website, and the point of the blog posts is to show pictures. Seems kind of silly to show a text excerpt without the image gallery, eh? I love the Nextgen gallery because it lets me easily upload pictures to the server, organize them into galleries (i.e. job for clients) and then post them on a WordPress page/post with a single piece of shortcode.

The problem is that this shortcode will, by default, execute in the post (when you call the function the_content()), but it won’t execute in the excerpt (when you call the function the_excerpt()).

I searched around and found a simple solution. Open up (or create) a “functions.php” within the root folder of your theme. Insert these two lines of code…

add_filter( 'the_excerpt', 'shortcode_unautop');
add_filter( 'the_excerpt', 'do_shortcode');

This tells WordPress to execute any shortcodes that it finds when you call the_excerpt(). Just what I was looking for…

But I digress. WordPress is awesome. You can have a blog, like this. You can set it up more like a static site (see this portfolio site, Olinda Gibbons Photography). You can do… just about whatever you want if you get a little creative with the template.

What’s more, there are tons of useful plug-ins waiting for you, so you don’t have to spend as much time custom coding stuff. One simple task I needed a solution for was backuping up my WordPress database and files. I used to use WordPress Database Backup, but I don’t think it’s compatible with WordPress 3.0 and it didn’t actually fulfill all my needs.

After some searching, I finally found a suitable replacement this morning: Updraft.

How I Use It

The cool thing about Updraft is that it doesn’t just backup your database. What good is the database if all your uploads are gone? You’re gonna have a lot of wholes in your posts where there used to be pictures!

Updraft takes this into account and backs up four things – your database (pretty important), your plugins (which you might not have locally if you installed them all automatically), your uploads, and your themes (well, you should have this saved locally for development purposes anyway).

You can schedule the back-ups. You can select a custom folder to save it in (anywhere on the server; not just in the wp-content folder). If you have a cloud file storage service, you can send the files there. And you can specify how many backups it should retain, so you don’t end up with a hundred backups floating around your server by the end of the year.

This solution is perfect for me.  I set Updraft up on all of my WordPress sites so that it automatically backs everything up. It dumps it into a folder above the public_html folder (something like /home/backups). From there, I can set up SyncBackPro with a scheduled backup to download the backups from the server and store them locally on my external hard drive.

So what are you waiting for? If you don’t have a backup plug-in installed already, go get Updraft. Hopefully you’ll never need it… but it could be a life saver.

But it does allow you to open those proprietary file formats (i.e. *.docx, the Word 2007 files). This is a great solution for people that would otherwise be running old versions of Office and don’t want to or can’t install the compatibility pack. One problem that I’ve seen, though, is that people accidentally use the native Open Office file format (i.e. *.odt). This is all well and good in a world where everyone uses the *.odt file… but a lot of people using MS Office won’t be able to open it.

It’s easy enough to save a file as a Word document in Open Office, but it makes life even easier if you set Open Office to do this by default. Here’s how.

Open Up the Options Dialog

First, you’ll need to open up the “Options” menu. You can do this in any form of Open Office (i.e. Writer, Calc, Impress) – it doesn’t matter which part of it you’re using.

Click on the “Tools” menu and then choose “Options.”

Go to Load/Save -> General

On the lefthand side of the Options menu, you should see a bunch of choices – from “OpenOffice.org” at the top to “Internet” at the bottom. The various menus here let you set a lot of options about how Open Office functions.

Look down the list until you see “Load/Save.” There’s a + icon next to it, indicating that you can expand the list and see more options. After clicking on the plus icon, choose “General” from the new list of menus.

Always Save As…

Look to the bottom right for the drop down menu titled “Always save as.”

This is one of two related menus. To the left, you can choose a “Document Type” – i.e. text document, spreadsheet, presentation. By default, text document is selected. The “Always save as” menu lets you choose which format Open Office will use when you create a new text document.

If you want to be compatible with non Open Office users, you probably want to change this to a Word document. Click on the drop down menu, and choose “Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP”. Now, all of your Word documents will be save as .doc files.

You may want to do the same thing for Spreadsheets and Presentations, so that both OpenOffice Calc and OpenOffice Impress use the old Microsoft Office format.

I just launched Digital Photography How To.

It’s a blog aimed at beginning to intermediate digital photographers. More about my reasons for writing it here, but the idea is to help me organize my thoughts about photography and hopefully provide a resource for other beginners that are looking to get into photography.

Aside from articles about photography, another of my goals is to maintain the Picture of the Day section. Although I’ve toyed with 365′s and 52′s (taking a picture every day or every week), they’re a lot of work and commitment. Instead, my goal here is to look through flickr for at least a few minutes every day, pick out a nifty photo, and explain what I like about it. You can’t become a better photographer without looking at other people’s work, can you…?

To get things started, I took a stab at developing a website for her: olinda-gibbons.com.

I’m not 100% happy with the theme, but we kind of had to launch it under short notice so that we could post/sell images from a few events that she worked. I’ll probably re-vamp the theme over the summer when I have free time, but at the moment there are some really cool things in there that I want to show off.

Auto Portfolio with a jQuery Gallery

One feature I definitely wanted to have was a portfolio page with some kind of nifty jQuery functionality. I looked through some options on this list of jquery gallery plug-ins, and I liked the galleria plug-in. Although I think it might now be out of development, I was able to get it working to my satisfaction with a static html demo.

Of course, I wanted to be able to easily and automatically create and change portfolios with WordPress, and the NextGEN Gallery plug-in for WordPress made that possible. I created a custom template file to display a gallery with the mark-up necessary for the Galleria plug-in to work. Now all I have to do is upload the pictures to a gallery, insert a piece of short code, and instant portfolio page. Nice.

There are two samples on the site now: Olinda’s portrait portfolio and her events portfolio.

Integrating PayPal Web Payment

The second thing I needed to do was integrate PayPal’s web payment system so that we could accept payments and then print/ship pictures after events. Portrait sessions can be handled through invoicing and other payment methods, but PayPal makes it really convenient to handle larger groups of people more efficiently.

Again, this was made possible by the NextGen gallery plug-in. I marked up a custom template to include the html mark-up for the PayPal payment buttons. Now, I just upload the proof images to a gallery and with one piece of short-code I have an instant ordering page.

This is a place where I definitely want to work on a better design, but I was working under short notice and just wanted something functional…

Example: William Paterson Fashion Show proof album.

How Did I Do It?

I plan to write up some detailed guides to how I designed those pages. I’m not sure if I’ll post them here or start up a blog section on olinda-gibbons.com and post it there. Either way, I’ll post about the guides here because I think they’ll be valuable for anyone looking to develop a site for a photographer. The more I work with it, I’m really impressed with the combination of WordPress and the NextGen gallery plugin.