Blog24 » WordPress

20 Resources to for Getting Started with WordPress

Chris — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:28:27 +0000

Whether you are new to WordPress or not the Theme Forest blog has an excellent list of resources that cover the process of installing WordPress to creating your own themes from scratch.

20 Resources to Get You Started with WordPress from Scratch

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Some Amusing Spam Comments Caught By Akismet

Chris — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:00:00 +0000

Like everyone else, I hate spam, whether it be email, via SMS or through the post — but most of all I hate comment spam on blogs. Luckily there is help with filtering out most of the spam when blogging, as a WordPress user I make use of the Akismet plugin.

Since using Akismet it has caught all the spam on this blog and only one legit comment (ham).

Once a fortnight, sometimes weekly, I quickly look through the comments that have been filtered out at spam by Akismet. Using the spacebar I can scroll and scan the list of junk-filled comments with ease. I do this just to make sure that there are no worthwhile, legitimate comments that have been filtered as spam. Comments that contain lots of URLs soon whizz past, whereas the shorter ones may actually be permissible, so those are read.

Very occasionally there are those that amuse:

Interesting web page is, i’ll see you later one more timed
Your guestbook is example of middle-class guestbooks. Congratulation!
Just serfed in. Great site, guys!

Personally I like the way that there is a single ‘congratulation’ in the second comment.

Strangely the following religiously themed comments have been posted on Blog24 recently.

These prayers help me to keep God in my life, especially with the many distractions I encounter.
I have always wanted a compendium of novena prayers. Thank you for sharing all these prayers with us. It brings joy and happiness to everyone. I know, I do feel that way.
I can find the prayer I want. I thank God for this website.

Please do not thank God — thank me, via the comments perhaps.

To conclude, I highly recommend using the Akismet plugin for WordPress, and other blogging platforms. Alternatively use a service such as Disqus to manage and publish comments on your blog. Disqus also uses Akismet to filter spam from comments.

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WordPress 2.6 Released

Chris — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:04:42 +0000

I have yet to update and test the latest incarnation of WordPress but there are some features that look promising.

Post Revisions allow WordPress users to track changes to posts with ease and restore earlier versions. (Mac users — we’ve got Time Machine for WordPress!)

The Press This! bookmarklet has been improved to make blogging about things you’ve read or seen on the web much easier and faster.

In WP2.5 uploading images to your blog was improved immensely. Once uploaded a caption could be added for each image. Unfortunately these captions would not be shown in your posts without editing the theme template files. However, with 2.6 installed your Captions will be added under your images automatically.

Still on the subject of images, it is now possible to change the order of Gallery images using ‘drag and drop’. Sweet!

Watch the following introduction of Wordpress 2.6 for further information:

View a larger version of this video.

I do like the addition of the live Word Count. Useful for making sure that a post is not getting too prolix.

There will doubtlessly be many subtle updates and features to discover once installed. So I’m off to download and install WP 2.6 right now.

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Upgrading to WordPress 2.5.1

Chris — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:59:51 +0000

WordPress 2.5.1 is now available so I will be upgrading tonight at 21:30 BST. Hopefully WordPress 2.5.1 will put an end to security risk that prevents blogs being added to Technorati.

The upgrade should not take too long but the site will be put into ‘Maintenance Mode’ while the upgrade is made and plugins tested.

Sorry for an inconvenience — Blog24 will be back as quickly as possible.

Regards,
Chris

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Semantic Page Titles Improve Search Engine Optimization

Chris — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:16:41 +0000

There is a lot of discussion about the ultimate title for webpages. Of course much of this discussion is about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Having read Mark Jaquith’s WordPress tip on the subject I thought that I would add my own tip via the comments.

Here’s what I wrote;

Personally I use ‘%post_title% presented by %blog_title%’ or ‘%post_title% on %blog_title%’ via the All In One SEO plugin for WordPress.

This makes the title element a sentence that is easier to read and probably scores lots of points for accessibility. I read somewhere that page readers (for the blind) read the separators that so many of use have used in our title tags.

For example this page’s title [on Mark's website] would be read out, “wordpress tip colon reorder your title tag left-pointing double angle quotation mark mark on wordpress.” How annoying is that?

Another comment, by Lodewijk gave another useful WordPress tip, it read;

And while you’re at it, you could also simply replace with your own blog name. It will reduce the amount of queries to the database by one for every pageview.

All he means by this is to replace %blog_title% with actual title of your blog. A simple suggestion but not good for distributed themes!

Think about the different places that the contents between the tags are shown. Most obviously, they appear at the top of the browser window. If readers use tabs with their web browser software, titles are shown there too. Bookmark a page and the title is used as a reference to where that bookmark points. The same applies to online bookmarking like del.icio.us and similar web services like digg.com and reddit.com. Drag a URL from a browser to your desktop and the title will be used.

For these reasons webpage titles must be descriptive and relevant to the page content. Ideally they will not contain separators such as colons ‘:’, pipes ‘|’, left ‘«’ or right-pointing double angle quotation marks ‘»’ and the like. Omitting these improves accessibility and, I would imagine, probably improve your SEO.

After Mark Jaquith’s tip links led me to the following SEO articles, all of which are worth reading if you want to optimize your website or blog for the search engines:

Semantic Header Markup Means Search Engines Will Understand Too
The Simplest Most Effective SEO Move You Can Make
Magnetic Headlines
The Sound of the Accessible Title Tag Separator

Update added on April 25, 2008

As mentioned in Phil Nash’s comment below screen reader users are used to punctuation being read out and the less verbose delimiters are acceptable. He uses double colons ‘::’, as I have done in the past, and I think that this is a suitable and acceptable delimiter, if required.

Conclusion

If you wanted to use your blog’s name and the post’s title along with a keyword or category then consider these three ways of formatting that information between the title tags.

Bad Title:
♦♦♦ $BlogName » $Category » $PostTitle ♦♦♦

Good Title:
$PostTitle :: $Category :: $BlogName

Screen Read Friendly Title:
$PostTitle presented by $BlogName and filed under $Category

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Plugin Problems on Blog24

Chris — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:40:08 +0000

Some of you may have noticed a few quirks in Blog24 layout and design. These are caused by plugins that are being used to improve the site but their output has not been styled yet.

Sorry for any vexation caused by irksome layout. Be assured that these little oddments will be fixed as soon as possible.

I suppose that there is a lesson or two to be learnt here:

Don’t test plugins on a live blog.
Do not test CSS on a live website.
Do not activate plugins just before sleep.
Don’t share blog-probs with your readers?

Plugins That Need Styling

At the time of writing I have spotted three problems with the styling (or lack of) of the output of plugins. These plugins are Other Posts From Cat, ShareThis and Similar Posts.

Another Troublesome Plugin

I thought I would test Twitter Tools by Alex King. I thought it would be a nice feature to have a daily summary of my Twitter activity and Twitter Tools can do this without hassle. The problem is that every post on Blog24 is added to Twitter using TwitterFeed so these summaries are also added to Twitter.

This is a problem that I hope to fix by ditching TwitterFeed and letting TwitterTools update my Twitter account while filtering out the Twitter summaries.

While I strive to make Blog24 better my to-do list seems to be expanding exponentially. I wonder if Thomas Malthus had to-do lists like this.

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Matt Mullenweg: WordPress 2.5 and Beyond

Chris — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:23:23 +0000

WordPress Project Leader Matt Mullenweg’s presentation at this year’s WordCamp in Dallas.

Matt mainly talks about the latest release of WordPress (2.5) minutes after its release. This video shows off WordPress 2.5’s new features but also serves as a great introduction to WordPress for new users.

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WordPress 2.5 Gallery Problems

Chris — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:30:09 +0000

Having appreciated an easy way to upload and display photographs using the new gallery feature in WordPress 2.5 I have only just discovered that it has broken my theme’s layout.

At first I thought it was the extra long titles given to each photo. After editing every title the layout is still screwed up! I’m sure it is just a snippet of CSS away from a fix and I will have to look into it.

Another Problem (Perhaps)

I have also noticed that the pages created to display the photos are placed into the default category (Design on Blog24). While this might not be a major issue the fact that I haven’t seen a way to change these pages’ categories is. Again it is something that I will have to look into.

The best solution I’ve thought of so far is to change the default category to Photography so when the gallery feature is used at least they will be in a suitable category.

ALT and TITLE Attributes Issue

There may be a very slight problem with the way that alt and title attributes are assigned. I need to examine the resulting code further as I could be wrong. If I am right, I will report back.

How Many Classes?

Finally, I am slightly disgruntled with the class attributes that are added when adding uploaded photos to a post. Again further investigation is required and it could be these classes which are interfering with the theme’s CSS.

‘Temporary’ Conclusion

While the introduction of the gallery feature into WordPress has been welcomed by many it is still early days and no doubt improvements will be made. WP’s Gallery does look promising but perhaps there is a plugin that will provide a more elegant solution for bloggers to add galleries in their posts. (Suggestions below please.)

It will take time to look into these problems further and when true solutions and conclusions are found I will publish them.

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Another Place by Antony Gormley

Chris — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:07:29 +0000

Here’s a selection of photographs I took of Another Place by Antony Gormley. Another Place is the name given to the array of 100 iron cast statues that stand on Crosby beach in the northwest of England.

The main reason for publishing these was to finally test the new Gallery Feature that has been added to WordPress 2.5. To make the gallery I simply uploaded the photographs using the multi-file upload, another new feature in WP 2.5. After that the gallery was added with just one click. Really easy and efficient way to display a series of photos on a WordPress blog.

Hope you like the photos and the new gallery feature – feel free to comment about either below.

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No Wordpres 2.4? Here’s Why

Chris — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 03:50:58 +0000

I (very) recently wondered why there was no WordPress 2.4. I soon found the answer, strangely enough by chance shortly after posting my query in the last post.

Anyway, here’s the reason;

As discussed in the developer mailing list, the next release of WordPress will be in March instead of January because of the holidays and the amount of changes that will take place in the codebase as well as the admin section. The decision was made to consider 2.4 a skipped December release and move straight on to 2.5. The reasons for the change in the schedule include some good things cooking in the oven and the developers do not want this to become a rushed release.

The quote above was from weblogtoolscollection.com (yet another useful site btw).

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