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Blogging
Blogging – Wordpress mostly because its what I use.
Stop Comment Spam
Oct 24th
Who cares about stopping comment spam? If you are a blogger, or the owner of a website that allows comments, reviews and posts by the general public, you should. Most notably, if your comments allow a website to be entered, you should care.
I’m going to talk about comment spam in WordPress blogs, because I run WordPress blogs and have experience with them. Here are some links for researching comment spam on other blogging platforms:
Dealing with comment spam in Blogger
Dealing with comment spam in Tumblr
Dealing with comment spam in SquareSpace
Dealing with comment spam in Posterous
COMMENT SPAM IN WORDPRESS
Comment spam in WordPress is insidious, lets use these recent examples from this blog:
Click To Enlarge
Turbo-Charging Blogger Themes with Dynamic Views
Oct 7th
Google has turbo-charged blogger’s themes by introducing Dynamic Views. There are currently 7 choices which let you present your blogger blog in different, sortable and searchable ways.
Maybe you want try out Blogger’s new Dynamic themes on your blogger site …. do this:
Adding a Dynamic View to your blog is as easy as changing your template. Log in to Blogger, click on the Template tab on your dashboard, and select whichever view you want to set as your default. Note that readers can still choose to navigate your blog in a different view by selecting from the pulldown in the upper left of the screen.
- from the Blogger Buzz post, Dynamic Views: seven new ways…
Another nice touch is the “loading” graphic which shows gears turning as your page loads …. I’d like to have that feature on George’s Technology blog! Hmmm…
You can test-drive these new views on the Blogger Buzz site. They look pretty cool, but many of the views are best with images to make them more visual, since dynamic views are heavily into the visual – obviously. You’ve got to watch the YouTube about it … see below.
Blogger Dynamic Views
WordPress Permalinks
Sep 15th
WordPress lets you choose the link structure for your URL’s for posts, which is really cool and handy. Here’s a permalink structure I use on a lot of blogs:
/%year%%monthnum%%post_id%/%postname%/
That lets me see at-a-glance the year and month of the post, then the post id, then the post title. The URL would look something like this:
http://example.com/201010/123/post-title-here/
The most important part for SEO is the post title, and the rest helps male a URL that is unique without getting URLs like:
http://example.com/tips-for-gmail
and…
http://example.com/tips-for-gmail-2
Imagine you have a post titled Tips for Gmail and you do 2 of them, and your permalinks do not insure unique URLs, then you end up with something like the 2 above.
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Trying Mystique Theme for a Day
Aug 27th
UPDATE: Obviously the Mystique Theme is here for more than a day. I ran into all of these cool new features, and am now re-thinking what I want as I build my next modified WordPress theme, probably built off of Thematic… maybe.
I thought I’d try out a new theme for a bit, any feedback would be appreciated, and make sure to let me know if this is your first visit or not.
Mystique 2.4.2
Feature-packed theme with a solid design, built-in widgets and a intuitive theme settings interface… Designed by digitalnature.
Tags: light, white, two-columns, three-columns, one-column, fixed-width, flexible-width, right-sidebar, left-sidebar, theme-options, threaded-comments, translation-ready, custom-header, editor-style
So, drop any comments below…
Skinning WordPress with Child Themes – More Than Skin Deep
Oct 27th
Even though Darren Hoyt talked about it in his Exploring WordPress Frameworks and Child Themes post, I missed the point that you can override more than the CSS file using Child Themes. According to WordPresss.com’s Theme Development article you can go to your parent theme’s folder (at /wp-content/themes/yourparenttheme/) and copy any of those template files into your Child Theme’s folder and edit it, and that will override the parent theme’s file.
Additionally (as of WordPress 2.7), the child theme may contain template files, which can be selected in the admin panel as normal, and will override the parent’s template files where those possess the same name.
For example, if you want to edit the header and you are using Thematic (folder = /thematic) and your Child Theme is called My Theme (folder = /mytheme) you can copy /wp-content/themes/thematic/header.php to /wp-content/themes/mytheme/header.php and any edits you make will show up on your blog because WordPress (as of v2.7) will check for template files in your Child Theme folder before looking for your Parent Theme’s template files.
With WordPress Child Themes you can…
- build websites more quickly with more flexibility than “traditional” sites
- use WordPress as a CMS
- gives your clients the capability to edit their own sites
- more easily develop websites that are HTML and CSS compliant with less work than custom “traditional” sites
- re-design, skin or add different functionality to themes you like but are missing “something”
- make your own WordPress theme without starting from scratch
Skinning WordPress
Oct 24th
If you visit tonight or during the next couple of days, you may notice the layout of this blog changing – radically. I’m writing below about skinning and am practicing with Thematic. During this process you will see the blog in customized Thematic one moment and in devart the next. Have fun, I am!
Skinning WordPress, or using Child Themes is something I’ve just discovered at work, although its been a hot topic for some time now. I’ve kept a suspicious eye on using blogs to build websites because I didn’t want to have to learn how to make a WordPress theme myself to avoid endlessly re-uploading updates after new WordPress releases. In the past if you made customization to a theme, when you upgrade the theme you would lose your work. Or, you had to make sure to keep local copies and upload them after upgrading the theme so your customization would be in tact. WordPress Child Themes does away with that, and two products I’ve read about help you Skin your WordPress blog… safely.
The first is called Mimbo Pro which carries a price, although Mimbo is a free version. The second is Ian Stewart’s Thematic – a WordPress Theme Framework that makes it easy to implement WordPress Child Themes.
GoDaddy File Restore/Rollback
Oct 23rd
Recently I made a critical error editing one of my blog’s files – I forgot to download the file before editing it, then uploaded my changes and it took my entire blog down. Needless to say I was upset with myself because I knew better, but I called GoDaddy hoping they could restore my site or file for me, and hoping it wouldn’t cost much or take too much time.
The tech support operator ran me through their procedure on restoring a file or folder using the GoDaddy File Manager. I was able to select the day before I changed the file, and download it, back it up (this time), apply my edits and my blog was down for less than 20 minutes (about 10 minutes of that time was spent running around like a headless chicken while my wife and girls looked at me as if I had just landed on the planet).
So, if you delete a file or folder by accident, forget to download a file before editing it and permanently lose your work, remember GoDaddy’s File Restore and get your stuff back. Thanks GoDaddy!
