Yoast’s Analytics plugin solves one of the most vexing issues I’ve had with Analytics: how do I screen out visits from my own account? In today’s age of mobile computing and dynamic IP addresses, filtering by IP isn’t an option. You can solve this problem using browser cookies, but it’s a bloody hack.

Yoast GA solves this problem cleanly. After installing the plugin, click Settings -> Google Analytics on your WordPress Admin Panel, and scroll down to the Advanced Settings section. Here, you can choose  to tell the plugin not to generate Google Analytics tracking code whenever you’re logged into WordPress. You can screen out only visits by Administrators, or you can screen out visits by a lesser role. As the useful UI help text explains, the GA plugin screens out all visits from users of that role or greater. Screening out Editor, for example, will tell the plugin to ignore visits by both Editors and Administrators.

That’s only one feature among many that this free plugin supports. Install it, and if you find it useful, send the author, Joost de Valk, a few dollars via PayPal to show your appreciation. He’s earned it.

Need help installing plugins for WordPress? Check out my article on how to install plugins on your Hostgator account.

I’ve argued that online authors should use their own installations of WordPress. Administrating WordPress is easy if you use HostGator. Like many providers, HostGator drives its site hosting using an application called cPanel. After signing up for HostGator and registering your domain name, go to http://www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel, and you’ll have everything you need to install and maintain WordPress.

Installing WordPress is simple using the Fantastico De Luxe installation tool listed under the Software/Services tab. This will give you everything you need to set up your blog, give it a theme, and begin posting to the world.

Eventually, though, you’ll want to expand what your installation of WordPress can do by installing plugins. A WordPress plugin is a piece of software that extends WordPress with new features. The plugin architecture of WordPress permits thousands of developers around the world to add features to your blog without waiting for the WordPress developers to do it for them. By installing plugins, you can make your blog easier to use, and set it apart from the crowd.

In the following article, I’ll show you how to install the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in. This nifty extension improves your search engine results by generating a file used by Google and other engines to prioritize your site’s content. You can use the sitemap to instruct Google to give priority to your feature articles over your regular blog posts, or to highlight certain categories of blog posts over others. The steps provided below remain the same for any plugin. Once you install one, you’re free to upload new plugins to your heart’s content.

Note: While this article is specific to HostGator, it may work just as well on other service providers that use the cPanel interface. Emphasis on the “may.”

Upload The Plugin to WordPress

Plugins are downloaded from the Internet as a ZIP archive. This is a set of files compressed into a single file that ends in a .zip extension. Before you can use a plugin on your blog, you must upload it to your WordPress installation, extract it, and activate it. This section covers uploading and extracting the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.

1. Download the Google XML Sitemaps plugin from WordPress.org by right-clicking on the Download link and selecting Save As…. Firefox and Chrome on Windows should offer to save this file in your Downloads folder, which is hunky-dory.

2.  Navigate to http://www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel, where yourdomainname is the domain name you registered when signing up with HostGator. This will bring up HostGator’s cPanel interface for your domain.

3. Click on File Manager in the Files box.

4. On the left-hand side (the treeview), expand public_html. Expand wp-content underneath public_html. Select the plugins directory.

Your treeview should look like this. Unless you installed WordPress into a subdirectory, public_html is the location of your WordPress installation on your site. This is your WordPress root. All of your installed plugins will reside in the wp-content/plugins folder.

5. Click the Upload button in the File Manager toolbar (along the top of the browser).

6. Click the Choose File button, and select the .zip file for the Google XML Sitemaps plugin from its location on your computer’s hard drive. Wait until the upload box says 100% Complete, and then click the link that reads Back to /home/<username>/public_html/wp-content/plugins directory.

7. You should be back in File Manager. You’ve successfully uploaded the plugin, but WordPress can’t use it yet. You must uncompress the .zip file containing all of the plugin’s files. Click the checkbox next to the Google XML Sitemap .zip file. Then, select Extract from the File Manager toolbar. You’ll see a dialog box asking you where to extract the files. The default is the plugin directory, which is what you want, so just click Extract Files(s) on the dialog.

Congratulations – you’re done with File Manager! Now, it’s time to go into WordPress and activate the plugin.

Activating Your Plugin

A plugin isn’t running under WordPress until it’s been activated.

1. Go to http://www.yourdomainname.com/wp-admin and log into your installation of WordPress.

2. Select Plugins from the left-hand menu.

3. Find Google XML Sitemaps in the list of plugins on the Plugins page, and click the Activate link.

You’re Done!

Google XML Sitemaps is now active. Play around with it by clicking XML-Sitemaps underneath the Settings menu on the left hand side of your WordPress administration panel. For guidance, read the Google XML Sitemaps FAQ page.

From here, you can repeat the process and install other popular plugins to round out your new WordPress installation, such as All-In-One SEO Pack to further improve your search engine results, or Facebook Connect for complete Facebook integration with your blog.

WordPress comes in two versions: one you can use freely over the Web (WordPress.com), and one you can download and install yourself (available through WordPress.org). In the first case, you have no responsibility for the blog software. WordPress.com upgrades WordPress periodically, applies security fixes, and keeps your blog up and running. It’s the (seemingly) low-cost, low-maintenance way to host your content. In the second case, you open an account with a hosting service such as HostGator, and install your own copy of the WordPress software. When WordPress is updated, you’re responsible for installing the upgrade. If something breaks, you’re responsible for fixing it.

Does self-hosting sound like a pain? It can be. Most authors and subject matter experts avoid it, because they’re not “techno-geeks.” They want a Web site so they can educate people on stocks, gardening, or the forthcoming Robot Revolution – not so they can tinker with software. But if your business requires building a fully functioning Web site that grows along with your operation, there are many reasons why you’re better off opening a hosting account and installing WP yourself.

1. It’s not as hard as you think. WordPress is so popular that all of the major hosting services have made it easy to install. Services like DreamHost and HostGator provide one-click installation of the latest version. After the initial installation, WordPress can upgrade itself. WP will tell you on your Administration panel when an upgrade is available. In most cases you can click a couple buttons and, bam – new WordPress!

What if you’re just starting out, and can’t afford a custom design for your site’s appearance? No worries. There are over 1,200 free themes that will give your blog a professional look and feel in a matter of minutes.

2. WordPress.com isn’t as cheap as it looks. Hey, they have to keep the lights running somehow. The site makes its money by charging for “advanced services.” Want to change your blog’s background color? That’ll be an extra $10 a year to edit your site’s style sheet. You’ll also pay extra to host your own domain, upload video, remove ads, and obtain more storage space. Depending on what you need, hosting your blog on WordPress.com can be just as expensive as hosting it yourself.

3. Self-hosting is cheap. When you consider what you receive in return, self-hosting is a steal. For $10 a month, HostGator will provide you a hosting account with unlimited disk space, unlimited domain name hosting, 24-hour support, data backups, Web site traffic analysis, mail hosting, FTP access, and secure e-commerce services. And HostGator calls that their “Baby” hosting service!

$10 a month is a drop in the bucket even for the most piddling blog whose sole revenue stream is Google AdSense. If you self-host and your blog does even moderate traffic (1,000 visitors a day) by the end of its first year, self-hosting will pay for itself.

4. Self-hosting means more features and happier users. With WordPress.com, you’re restricted to using the features that the site offers all of its users. That’s a rip-off! WordPress has a plug-in architecture that allows third party software developers to add new features. As of this writing, there are over 10,000 plug-ins available for free download. WordPress users who self-host can distinguish their sites and keep their customers engaged by installing a few well-chosen plug-ins.

As an example, this blog uses Redirection to automatically redirect users when a URL changes; Contact Form 7 to provide an easy means to contact the author (moi); Facebook Connect to enable complete Facebook integration; All in One SEO Pack to optimize my posts for search engines; and Google XML Sitemaps to make my content easier to find. That’s only a small sampling of the plug-ins available to turbo-power your WordPress installation.

5. No restrictions on site advertising. WordPress.com makes additional dosh off of ads it places on your content. That’s right: they’re profiting off of your hard work. You can pay to have ads removed, but most bloggers can’t host ads themselves. Some high-traffic blogs (i.e., blogs pulling in more than 25,000 visitors daily) can apply to host their own ads, and split the revenue evenly with WordPress.com. No offense to the good folks behind the scenes, but I find that obscene. Your content is yours. You should own it lock, stock, and barrel. If anyone’s making money off of your output, it ought to be you.

If you’re using your Web site for business, your business deserves better than being hosted on WordPress.com. Open up a HostGator account, and you can start developing a uniquely branded site immediately. And remember: if you get stuck, I’m only an e-mail away.

But my favorite feature is Custom Post Types. Let’s say you run a movie blog, and want to have a separate listing for DVD capsule reviews, with the reviews containing affiliate links to Amazon.com. You don’t want these posts to show up in the main feed, as you may be adding several every day. Before 3.0, this required coding and template hacks. With WP 3.0, you can create a new custom post type specifically for your DVD reviews. This collection of posts will have its own tab on the Administration menu, just like Posts and Pages. By default, these custom posts are distinct from your main publishing stream, and can even have their own post templates.

Want an example? Visit my Humor page, which I generated by defining the custom post type “Humor.” Here’s a screenshot of how these posts appear in the Administration UI:

You can read a full tutorial on Custom Post Types at Justin Tadlock’s blog. But don’t start fiddling with your blog just yet! Hop on over first to Matt Wiebe’s Smart Custom Post Types page. Matt provides additional template code (it goes in your template’s functions.php file) that improves WP’s native support by enabling custom landing pages, custom index templates, and more. I used Matt’s code to generate the Humor page without defining any additional templates or functions.