Blogging

Another Gift For WP.com Users

Wordpress.com Logo

Well, Christmas may be done and over with but Matt Mullenweg and company are apparently still in a giving mood. Starting today, every registered user of WordPress.com will see their upload space go from 50mb to 3,000mb. This is 60 times more storage than what was offered previously. According to Matt, if you were to get half that amount over at Typepad, you would have to pay at least $300.00 per year. The great thing about this change is that it’s free. No charge to current or future users of WordPress.com

Thanks to the hard work and behind the scenes efforts put forth by the Automattic team, you’ll no longer need to worry about how many kilobytes of data you have left on your storage limit. Also, for those who purchased a storage upgrade in the past to 1GB, that 1GB will be increased to 5GB at no extra charge.

Hows that for a late present?

Google Still At The Top

Neilsen Online has released search share rankings within the U.S. As expected, Google is leading the way with over 4 billion searches. Over half of those searches are shared while 37.9 searches were attributed per searcher. Yahoo! came in 2nd place with 1.2 billion searches, 17.7% of those were shared while there were 22.4 searches per searcher. The lesson here is that Google is till at the top of their game when it comes to search. Especially when you consider, that the figures of Yahoo combined with MSN/Windows Live Search still don’t compare to Google’s numbers.

searchmarketshare

WordPress Meetup In New York

Looks like there will be a WordPress meetup in the New York City area on Saturday, February 16th 2008 at 4:00 PM. The date and where the event is taking place is subject to change so be sure to keep an eye on the official event page for more information.

Other WordPress related conferences/meetups are as follows:

Simply Basic Releases WP Plugin

Simply Basic Logo

Blogging buddy John Kolbert has released his very first WordPress plugin called Admin Favicon. Not long ago, John published an article on his blog that explained how to give your WordPress admin area it’s own favicon so that you could easily discern the WP Admin tab in your browser from all of the other tabs. As it turns out, each time you upgrade WordPress, the hack disappears. That problem is solved with this plugin.

When you install the plugin, a new entry is created within the OPTIONS page of your administrative backend. Click on Admin Favicon and you should see a box where you can type in a custom URL where your favicon will be stored.

Favicon Setup

After setting the URL to your icon, click OK. It might require you to restart your browser before the icon is detected but usually, all you’ll need to do is browse a few pages in your Admin area until the icon is detected.

This is another example of how open the WordPress code is. A simple problem solved with a simple solution. And thanks to John releasing this plugin, other people who have noticed this similar problem, now have a solution in which to use. Thanks John.

For support or inquiries regarding the plugin, check out Admin Favicon.

Proposed WP Plugin Standards

WordPress.orgLogoWow. Someone has come through and put together a list of proposed standards that plugin authors should abide by. This person goes by the name of Weathervane and considering this fella has downloaded 530 plus plugins, I tend to think he knows what he’s talking about. A little warning, the list of proposed standards is a bit long but it’s definitely a worthy read.

Weathervane makes a ton of proposals that I agree with. But there is one thing he didn’t mention that I think would solve many of the problems that are mentioned. That being, the use of the Official WordPress Plugin Database. Weathervane takes the approach of plugins being available on the authors main website. I take the stance that any and all plugins should be submitted and stored in the WP Plugin Database. This provides a central location for all types of plugins, provides the hosting necessary for plugin authors if need be, provides the ability to have a discussion/support area for each individual plugin, and something I feel that is really important. Automatic notification that a plugin has been updated.

Of course, my view on the proposed standards for WordPress Plugins requires that we start off at the top of the food chain. This would be the WP Plugin Database. Once a series of guidelines were established at the top, the rest of the job becomes easy. Think of the advantages of having a central repository for WP Plugins. As end users, we wouldn’t need to Google Search or bookmark tons of seperate web pages that housed plugins. We would automatically be notified of updates within the plugin page in our WordPress back end. Depending on the coding guidelines that allow plugins to be entered into the repository, as end users, we would have that much more confidence that the plugin actually works and won’t do any hanky panky.

It’s awesome that I think weathervane put in the time and effort into his proposal and I believe a lot of his guidelines would be great to use for WP plugin database. Now that we have someone who has put together a base of their own proposals, it’s time we put our thinking caps on and contributed to the list.

Turning Categories Into Feeds

Out of the box, WordPress generates a number of RSS feeds for you automatically. These include feeds for comments, posts, and believe it or not, categories. I had previously thought that a plugin was required in order to turn categories into RSS feeds but that is not the case. Check this out.

WordPress supports a number of different syndication specifications, those of which are listed below along side their respected WordPress generated URL.

RSS Spec / WordPress URL

RSS 0.92 / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss.php or http://www.yourdomain.com/?feed-rss

RDF RSS 1.0 / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php or http://www.yourdomain.com?feed=rdf

RSS 2.0 / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php or http://www.yourdomain.com/?feed=rss2

Atom Feed / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-atom.php or http://www.yourdomain.com/?feed=atom

Comments RSS Feed / http://yourdomain.com/?feed=rss&p=50 where p stands for post and 50 is the post id.

Now here is the feed link which I found interesting.

Category RSS Feed / http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=50 where cat stands for category and 50 is the category ID.

Finding the ID number for a category is easy if the blog your browsing is not using pretty permalinks. However, if the blog IS using permalinks, you can type in the following URLs to access their RSS Subscription Links.

http://www.domain.com/feed – Main RSS Feed

http://www.domain.com/comments/feed – Comments RSS Feed

http://www.domain.com/category/category-name/feed – RSS Feed For That Category

Why would you want to know this information? Now, if you come across a site that publishes articles within only a category or two of interest, you can subscribe directly to those categories instead of the entire blog making your RSS reader that much more efficient. For instance, I occasionally publish jokes or perhaps something out of my personal life when all you really care about, are reviews or news.

WordPress Premium Theme – Reviewed

I don’t think I’ve ever done a review of a WordPress theme before, so this ought to be interesting. However, ever since I laid eyes on the WordPress theme called WordPress Premium, I’ve been wanting to review it.

WordPress Premium Logo

WordPress Premium was designed by R. Bhavesh and comes with 3 different color styles. Black, Soft-Red and Brown. In the screenshot up above, that is actually the Soft-Red version. At first, I didn’t like the color scheme. But after I altered the brightness settings on my LCD monitor, the color scheme has grown on me and I actually think it’s soft on the eyes.

First Things First:

WordPress Premium Subscription Area

One of the things you’ll notice first is the RSS button that is predominantly located at the top of the design. What I like about this particular section of the theme is the beautiful integration of a subscribe via email form, right next to the RSS button. This allows your readers to easily choose between which method works best as far as keeping up with your posts. Believe it or not, there are still a large number of users who subscribe to websites via email. In fact, there are at least 5 individuals who have subscribed to this blog via email, not including myself. Another nice aesthetic is the rounded corners presented all across the design. Despite what critics have said, I believe rounded corners to be easier on the eyes than 90 degree corners. Of course, my own blog design is filled with hard edges. I get a ton of emails from readers complaining about being cut from the blog. At any rate, the rounded corners just add to the smoothness of the overall design.

Advertising Strategy:

WordPress Premium Advertisement Spaces

As for advertising placements, WordPress Premium comes preloaded with three advertisement squares that are built into the sidebar. These are 100X100 squares that typically hold advertisement images similar to the ones found on WeblogToolsCollection.com

3 In 1 Module:

WordPressPremium 3in1 Widget

Other highlights worth noticing is the multi use, tabbed search box. This tabbed widget serves three purposes. A search box, an archive displayer, and a list of categories. I believe this to be an excellent use of space and wouldn’t mind having something like that for my own design.

The Sidebar Effect:

The sidebar for WordPress Premium takes special notice from me. It’s hard to come across a blog with what I call a 2 in 1 sidebar. That is, a wide sidebar built into two smaller sidebars. That way, you can put those big widgets in the bigger sidebar, while putting smaller width items in the skinnier sidebars. That is the kind of side bar I wanted for this blog, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. With WordPress Premium, this kind of sidebar is built in, and should serve as an excellent area for those third party widgets to reside in.

Content Is King:

WordPress Premium Content

As for the display of content, the content background is white while the foreground text is a dark gray. I think the dark gray text provides a smoother contrast when compared with the black on white. Out of the box, displaying images either on the left or right side of the post looks good as they have the appropriate padding attributes so that the text is not squashed up against the image. As a nice touch, the comment notifier is displayed in the top right hand corner of each post. This little gem displays the number of comments per blog entry and links to the comment section of that post.

Conclusion:

To download and see this theme in action, click here.

Before the new year started, I browsed around for hours, checking out numerous WordPress themes along with template designs on Templatemonster.com, looking for inspiration for the redesign. As you can see, I merely rearranged my current theme and elected not to go for a completely new look. However, had I changed the blog to a completely new theme, this is the one that I most likely would of chose.

Actually, while I might still have your attention, do you think the color scheme or some of the elements from WordPress Premium would look good on Jeffro2pt0? There are a few things I wouldn’t mind trying to implement from that theme into this one. But I figured I’d ask first.

Make Post Titles Less Spammy Looking

Keyword Stuffing Is Bad

Stephan Spencer has written a brief article highlighted by an interview he conducted with the infamous Matt Cutts. The article discusses why it’s a bad idea to have a ton of keywords as part of your URL permalink. In WordPress, depending upon how your permalink options are setup, whatever words are placed into the post title, are the same words that will appear within the permalink, unless you manually configured the post slug.

When Stephan asked Matt what is excessive in the length of a keyword-rich URL?, Matt responded with:

If you can make your title four- or five-words long – and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.

The thing to be aware of is, ask yourself: “How does this look to a regular user?” – because if, at any time, somebody comes to your page or, maybe, a competitor does a search and finds 15 words all strung together like variants of the same word, then that does look like spam, and they often will send a spam report. Then somebody will go and check that out.

So, I would not make it a big habit of having tons and tons of words stuffed in there, because there are plenty of places on a page, where you can have relevant words and have them be helpful to users – and not have it come across as keyword stuffing.

While Stephan goes on to offer some tips on keyword permalink management, I have a tip of my own. When you are writing a blog post or an article, come up with 3-7 keywords at a maximum that are relevant, and give the reader a good idea as to what the article will be about. Once again, we come up against the word of Relevancy, and you don’t need 500 keywords in your permalink URL to be relevant.

I’ve seemed to have had success with my permalink setup. In case you were curious, this is how I have mine configured:

Custom: /%postname%/

WordPress Releases V 2.3.2

WordPress.org Logo

With just under a month to go before the expected release of WordPress version 2.3, Automattic has released WordPress version 2.3.2 which contains what else, security fixes. This release fixes a bug that would allow your draft posts to be exposed to the public. 2.3.2 also suppresses some error messages that would occur that could give away information related to your database structure. On top of all that, this fix stops information leaks in the XML-RPC and APP implementations.

As a little bonus, 2.3.2 allows you to define a custom DB error page. Place your custom template at wp-content/db-error.php. If WP has a problem connecting to your database, this page will displayed rather than the default error message.

For more detail on what’s new in 2.3.2, view the list of fixed bugs and see the changes between 2.3.1 and 2.3.2.

Special thanks to Alex Concha for his help on this release.

As with any new version, please upgrade as soon as you can, preferably after a fresh backup. As of this time, this blog has successfully been upgraded to 2.3.2.

Google Takes Feeds Out Of Search Results

Not sure how long this has been going on, but a post on the Google Webmaster Blog talks about the removal of feeds showing up in search results with the exception of podcast XML feeds. I for one am really happy that Google took this measure because it was becoming increasingly annoying, to browse search results, only to click on one XML feed after another without ever actually coming across the content.

As a webmaster, you may have been concerned about your RSS/Atom feeds crowding out their associated HTML pages in Google’s search results. By serving feeds, we could cause a poor user experience:

  1. Feeds increase the likelihood that users see duplicate search results.
  2. Users clicking on a feed may miss valuable content available only in the HTML page.

To address these concerns, we prevent feeds from being returned in Google’s search results, with the exception of podcasts (feeds with multimedia enclosures).

You can check out the entire blog post here.