GuessAges is a new site I’ve launched for a bit of fun, but mostly as a “can I do it?” sorta thing. The point of the site is simple and fun: find out how old you look (and help others find out the same).

The site is built on WordPress and heavily tied into Facebook. Users are required to login with a Facebook account, and then they can begin to guess the ages of other users. You can add your own photos with one catch: the only photos allowed into the system are those from your Facebook profile photos album. This helps to keep users accountable to using appropriate photos, plus profile photos are generally your better shots, right?

I’m interested in all feedback. Like I said, this was sort of an experiment. I learned a lot building this and really improved by programming skills, which I only dabble in as a front-end developer. From talking to Facebook’s API to creating standard deviation formulas to figure out how accurate you are at guessing I feel pretty good about what I was able to accomplish.

The latest thing keeping me busy was the launch of DevPress’ new theme: Visual. Its a simple photoblog theme with support for the BuddyPress social network plugin. It’s made for keeping family photos, staying connected with friends, and/or running your own photos community.

Visual is the follow up to our incredibly popular News theme (~3,000 downloads a week). The DevPress team prides itself on simple, easy to use, yet powerful code. I have to say, we’ve nailed it with both of these themes. Visual is quite powerful, especially when paired with BuddyPress.

Please check it out and let us know what you think.

I was skeptical at first. I mean, a service that requires you to change your DNS hosting is asking a lot. It didn’t take long for me to realize how beneficial the 5-minute setup was.

Before I go on, let me make it clear that I’m not using any affiliate links here. I genuinely love CloudFlare’s technology and believe that everyone should be informed.

CloudFlare claims to be a performance and security enhancement. At the DNS level, they intercept traffic and weed out the bad requests (i.e. spammers, unwanted bots, malicious IPs, and more) before they even get to your server.

Additionally, they can insert Google Analytics tracking code for you. They can obfuscate email addresses to protect them from spammers. They cache your site’s resources around the world and are able to return the files directly from the cache server that is closest to the visitor. I could go on, but you get the point … they do a lot to speed your site up and keep it safe.

The proof is undeniable. Take at look.

• Average pageviews per visit rose from 2.06 to 3.98 – 90% better!
• Bounce rate fell from 61.98% to 3.57% – 94% better!

I also had an average of 48 spam comments before CloudFlare … after, an average of 6.

These stats don’t mean much without an explanation. It should be obvious though. CloudFlare stops all the bad traffic from ever getting to my site, so Analytics is only tracking quality traffic. So my human visitors click around the site more and don’t leave immediately as opposed to bots and spammers. These stats don’t prove their experience is any better — although it should be. The increase in pageviews may also be due to the better load time due to the caching.

With all of the crappy traffic excluded my traffic stats are a much more accurate representation of my authentic visitors.

The image above shows the traffic that tried going to my site. You can see that 81% of my traffic was from non-threatening, real users like yourself. The threats were weeded out and not allowed into my site.

There are some caveats to CloudFlare. Because they are brand new there have been a few hiccups. For instance, I’ve experienced an increase in downtime because they’ve made some hardware changes since their number of customers blew up after the TechCrunch coverage. Its minutes worth of downtime so I’m not worried. With time their DNS hosting will improve.

By now you might be expecting to pay a pretty penny. You’d be dead wrong. In fact, the basic services are free. You can pay for advanced security and real-time stats, but all the benefits I’ve seen are achievable through a free account. Really, give CloudFlare a shot. I wouldn’t have spent this much time doing a CloudFlare review if it wasn’t worth it.

How many dreams do you get to realize in your lifetime? Ever since I’ve been comfortable coding for WordPress I’ve had the dream of working with a team as motivated and fascinated with WordPress as I am. You might be thinking to yourself, “that’s a lame dream.” If all I wanted was to work with other WP developers … sure, it’d be lame.

But the underlying requirement to such a project is the participation of the kind of people that are the best at what they do. Accepting anything less than this would simply make for another company doing the same thing as the rest.

DevPress seeks to be the very best at an array of WordPress solutions. It’s as simple as that, but such a simple statement is much weightier than it sounds. It doesn’t emphasize that we really do mean the very best.

Who are we talking about then? Who is this team of WordPress rockstars ninjas ordinary guys that plan on producing the very best WordPress design and code?

• Justin Tadlock – Founder of Theme Hybrid, Justin runs one of the most active WordPress theme frameworks and it’s community. He’s produced several well-known themes and plugins and the Hybrid theme alone has been downloaded from the WordPress repository nearly 100,000 times. He has a reputation for well-planned, clean code and will ensure all DevPress work is just as great.
• Ptah Dunbar – Another theme framework author, Ptah created WP Framework with a clear understanding of how WordPress operates. To further that, he contributed much of what you now know as the WordPress 3.0 menu system.  Ptah brings nothing less than pure WordPress and programmer expertise to DevPress.
• Tung Do – More well known  as Small Potato, Tung is credited for being one of the first to bring premium WordPress themes to market. He ran an extremely successful marketplace for a while before deciding to take a WordPress hiatus. Since then, Tung’s design skills have only improved and he brings to DevPress some incredible looking work.
• Myself, Patrick Daly – Its a lot easier for me to brag on the three guys above. What I can tell you about me, though, is that I love “front-end engineering” or the “presentation layer” or more simply, the HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I plan on making it drop-dead gorgeous.

Between the four of us, we’re confident we’ll offer some of the best WordPress products available.

It won’t be long before we launch and there are many more details to share. So go to http://devpress.com/ to be notified when we launch. You can also follow us @devpress.

Use that promo code to get the largest available package (300 evaluations) for $27/month which is usually $97/month. Just visit scribeseo.com, select the Advanced Plan, register and use the promo code PROMO27.

It won’t work after 5:00 p.m. Central on Friday, June 4, 2010.

What is Scribe anyway?

Scribe is a search engine optimization software service that analyzes the content of web pages, blog posts, online press releases, or any other web content … all at the click of a button.

Next, it reports back and tells you how to tweak your content to get better search engine rankings and more traffic, all while maintaining quality reader-focused copy.

And you’re probably a WordPress user so you can just install the plugin from the repository like any other plugin. But now there’s also a web-based version of Scribe as well as one for Joomla and Drupal with more platforms on the way. In other words, Scribe is available wherever you publish so you might as well take advantage of optimizing all your content.

Find out more about Scribe here.

You can read my review of Scribe here.

Do you use Hybrid?

Scribe was built to work alongside other great works of SEO. One of the theme frameworks the authors deemed credible was Hybrid. If you’ve ever used Hybrid you know that it does a great job of optimizing a site’s structure and HTML. Optimizing the content is up to you.

Since Hybrid has some built in SEO features (like the ability to customize page titles and description) Scribe takes advantage of those. So rest assured that installing Scribe on your Hybrid site will work like a breeze.

Free 28 page SEO report

Go grab the free SEO copyrighting report to help you before you hit the analyze button.

By the way, affiliate links were unashamedly used in this post. Scribe is the only thing I promote using affiliate links … because I trust it enough to do so.

TXT File Code (WordPress strips out iFrames so I can’t post it directly here)

That adds the button to the end of your posts when on individual blog posts. Add that code to your functions.php file.

Try out my like button below!

Props to Ruhani for urlencode.

This is the most biased Scribe SEO review you’ll ever read. Why?

Well, for one, I designed and developed scribeseo.com. Secondly, I had a hand in the development of the Scribe platform.

That said, bias isn’t all that bad. In fact, in this case it just allows me to give you a magnified review of Scribe.

If you’re not familiar with Scribe yet, here’s a bit about it:

Scribe is an SEO software service for WordPress that analyzes the content of web pages, blog posts, online press releases, you name it… at the click of a button.

The Scribe API then reports back to the WordPress interface and tells web writers, bloggers, affiliate marketers, and small business owners how to tweak their content to get more search engine traffic, all while maintaining quality reader-focused copy.

Let’s assume you’ve installed and configured the plugin (which is pretty easy) and you’ve written a post. Now, you just hit the “Analyze” button and Scribe gives you its report…

SEO Score Card

The first screen you’re presented with is the score card — an overview of scoring factors and recommendations. It gives you a quick glance at things you can do to improve your copy.

The Good

Beyond a simple interface that highlights the changes you need to make, it scores a host of factors that make the score card quality:

• Character and word count of the title
• Title keyword usage and placement
• Character and word count of the description
• Description keyword usage and placement
• Character and word count of the body
• Body keyword usage and placement
• Keyword density
• Hyperlink count and prominence
• Reading ease

The Bad

Every post/page is unique and following the recommendations blindly could hurt you. Achieving a score of 100% shouldn’t be your goal. Keep in mind that the analysis is only scanning the content you’ve just written and not the rest of the content that will appear around the post (header, sidebar, footer, etc.). As long as you remember that the score card is a guideline you’ll be ok.

Keyword Analysis

You’re likely writing content with the hopes that people will find it through a search engine (duh!) so you need to be aware of what keywords people are going to use to get to your page. Its pretty tough to pull these out of the air. You never know if a word you might search for is what other people would use. So, we have keyword analysis…

The Good

There’s some tools out there that let you paste in your content and specify the desired keyword. Well, like I already said — you don’t really know what people are searching for. Scribe takes the guess work out of it finds the keywords you are using. You can see which words will likely get you ranked and then you can make a judgment call about whether you want to target that term. Fortunately, that call is easy to make with all of the data provided.

• The keyword’s rank within your content
• Prominence
• Frequency
• Density
• Annual Search Volume

Plus, Scribe gives you suggestions for making keywords more of a primary keyword or less.

The Bad

Despite what any analysis tells you, there aren’t any hard and fast numbers to determine what the golden number of keywords should be. So, the suggestions Scribe gives are based upon industry theories, but like most SEO advice, they need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Tags

Categories and tags are used in WordPress for organization which helps users just as much (or more) as it does search engines. Sometimes its hard to remember to add tags. Even more difficult is to come up with tags.

The Good

Scribe gives you semantically relevant terms that you can use as tags. These are terms that the plugin as determined to be good search keywords and are relevant to the content of your page or post.

The Bad

Scribe should give you an option to add tags to your post. Maybe a check box and an “Add to post” button? Its not all that bad, but would be a time saver.

Conclusion

I’ve left out a handful of other features (SERP example, SEO best practices, integration with WordPress themes and plugins, etc.). Although, I’ve covered the meat and potatoes of what make Scribe SEO what it is.

Scribe for WordPress is an excellent plugin that can be used by anyone and is especially helpful for those that already know what they’re doing but just need to save time.

Just remember that SEO can’t be completely automated and it requires some common sense. With that in hand, I give Scribe two thumbs up. But don’t take my word for it.

By the way, affiliate links were unashamedly used in this post. Scribe is the only thing I promote using affiliate links … because I trust it enough to do so.

Scribe is a WordPress plugin combined with an API that allows you to tap into the content optimization service right from your WordPress interface.

The site was designed and built to be promote the Scribe service and and WordPress plugin. Together with Brian Clark of Copyblogger, we were able to put together something appealing.

Website: Scribe

Platform: WordPress

Scribe SEO Review

Malleable is a news-type theme that features a configurable slider and address (with microformats). It is based upon the Hybrid News theme so it shares many similarities.

• More Details on Malleable

There’s plenty of PSD to WP conversion companies out there, but none that tailor to child themes, specifically. So I’m giving this a test run.

The first five requests I get will be $300. Send the tweets out and let your friends know about this deal because it won’t last long.

What you get:

• A custom Hybrid child theme
• One home page and one interior page
• W3C Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict/CSS
• IE 7+, Firefox, Safari, Chrome compatibility
• SEO Code, Load Speed Optimization

In addition, I’ll be turning the designs around in one day each. Meaning, you’re likely to get your site the next day and, at most, five days later.

Interested?

Just visit the Contact page and I’ll get back to you ASAP.