Choosing WordPress Date and Time Formats for a Global Audience
According to Wikipedia, nearly half of the world’s population use the Day-Month-Year format and nearly another 25% use Year-Month-Day. The standard format used in the United States (Month-Day-Year) could confuse anyone not familiar with this formatting.
12-hour and 24-hour time formats are both used around the world. There isn’t as much standardization as there is with date formatting.
The first question to ask yourself is if date and time are even relevant to your content. For example, providing any commentary on recent events would warrant both and date and time being attached to a post. However, providing information about a piece of software (e.g. this site), may not. I have chosen 24-hour time formatting and Year-Month-Day date format for this particular site.The reasons are that I prefer these formats and date and time aren’t very relevant to my content. It’s not critical that my readers understand or even see this information.
I like Year-Month-Day date formatting. It makes sense to show dates in this way. I think anyone from the United States accustomed to Month-Day-Year would see this and understand it immediately. People from Europe who are accustomed to Day-Month-Year would also understand this format. Whereas if you chose to display the European formatting it could confuse U.S.-based readers. Choosing U.S. formatting would confuse European readers.
Decide who you target audience is and choose a date and time format that you think would be easiest for your readers to understand. Pick one that you like best if it’s irrelevant to your readers.
Five Essential WordPress Plugins for Beginners
Setting up a WordPress blog for the first time can be a daunting task. WordPress has been around for nearly a decade, so there is a huge ecosystem of 3rd party plugins and themes available. Almost all WordPress plugins are free and available at the WordPress Extend website. Many plugins aren’t essential, but help customize a blog to the content being written. I’m going to cover 5 plugins here that I could not live without no matter what type of blog I’m writing.
1: WP Super Cache
You may start off a blog thinking that it won’t gain much traffic at first. This is a mistake. You can never tell when a post is going to become popular. By default, WordPress must retrieve each post from its database every time a page is loaded. This is very demanding on the server and can cause it to crash if your blog is too popular. If you’re using cheap, shared hosting you may even find your account disabled because they can’t handle the traffic. WP Super Cache makes a static copy of a page the first time it’s loaded after a change. This means that instead of retrieving pages from its database, WordPress simply gives users the static page. You can serve many thousands of users on even the cheapest hosting if this plugin is configured properly.
2: Akismet
Comment spam on blogs is a huge problem. One way to combat this is to use a service like Akismet (run by the parent company of WordPress). Every comment left on your blog is checked against a central server to determine if it is spam. If it is, it will enter a spam folder in your WordPress admin site. You can choose to be notified by email when this happens. This method of fighting spam is more effective than the default option of moderating comments that include links.
3: Google Analytics for WordPress
Google Analytics is extremely popular. It enables you to embed a short snippet of Javascript on your pages and then track your users in detail on their website (anonymized, of course). This plugin makes it easy to embed your Google Analytics ID in your WordPress site.
4: WordPress SEO by Yoast
SEO is a difficult topic to cover. There are so many variables that beginners could easily become overwhelmed. WordPress SEO by Yoast integrates many common SEO tactics such as disabling duplicate content pages and producing a sitemap XML file for search engines to index.
5: WebsiteDefender WordPress Security
WordPress is pretty secure as long as you keep it updated. If you installed WordPress yourself, you may want to get this plugin because it will scan all of your WordPress files and tell you if any of them need to be secured. For example, your wp-config.php file may have the wrong permissions which could expose your database to the world. It also automatically disables some WordPress features such as version numbers to make it more hard to attack if you get behind on updates.
I’ll probably go into detail later on about how to optimally configure each of these plugins. There’s no one-size-fits-all configuration that would cover every blog, but I think at least setting up these five plugins will carry a blog a long way.
Be the first to comment - What do you think?
Posted by James - February 8, 2012 at 7:33 pm
Categories: Plugins Tags: analytics, cache, comments, security, seo