wordpress

Beautiful WordPress Themes

Posted by james on Feb 13, 2007 in wordpress | 2 comments

Smashing Magazine has a list of “83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen“.

If you’re in need of a free theme for WordPress, you DEFINITELY have to go take a look.

If you ALREADY have a WordPress them you like, go look what you COULD have had…

Though I think this blog’s theme from ericulous should be on the list, don’t you?

Found via ProBlogger

301 Redirect for WordPress

Posted by james on Feb 6, 2007 in wordpress | 0 comments

I recently decided to move a post from one blog to another because I thought it was more relevant, so I decided to do a 301 redirect for all traffic trying to get to the old post to the new post.

If you do a search in Google for plugins you’ll find a few that can do 301 redirects, but generally they do it for 1 blog. For example, there’s a great WordPress plugin called “Redirection” that I thought would do the job. It has a good admin panel, and it’s pretty easy to use. Unfortunately it is also just for managing 1 blog. It does the following (which a lot of people might actually need):

• Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
• Strip or add www to all your WordPress pages
• Redirect index.php, index.html, and index.htm access
• Redirection statistics telling you how many times a redirection has occurred, when it last happened, who tried to do it, and where they found your URL

The first one is something I really needed a long time ago, and the last 3 are to help you solve a “duplicate content” issue you might end up having with Google. For example, Google might view “www.geniosity.co.za” and “geniosity.co.za” as 2 different websites, and obviously they aren’t. Of course, I’m sure Google has worked on this issue, but who knows…

Anyway, here’s the juice. If you want to redirect a post from an old blog to a new blog, you’ll need to open your “.htaccess” file (which will be in the root folder of you WordPress installation) and add the following line:

Redirect 301 /2006/08/29/old-post-slug/ http://www.new-site.com/2007/02/05/new-post-slug/

If you are using the “Feedburner Feed Replacement” to redirect your RSS Feeds to FeedBurner, then make sure you add this line either before the “<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>” or after the “</IfModule>”

The first URL (after the 301) is just the post’s URL excluding your Blog’s domain. The new URL is the FULL URL of the new location of your post. This would also work if you were just moving it around within the same blog, but then I would just recommend you use the plugin above.

This might be a pain if you’re moving a LOT of posts, but I just had to move the one article, so it worked fine for me.

Add-Meta-Tags WordPress Plugin

Posted by james on Jan 31, 2007 in wordpress | 2 comments

Here is a plugin that EVERY WordPress user should use. Personally, I think the features should be added to the default WordPress installation, but hey, that doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon.

So, what does this plugin do? It adds the META tags for Description and Keywords to each blog post, blog home page and blog category. Here’s how it gets these tags, via the “Add-Meta-Tags WordPress Plugin” webpage:

Front Page

• Automatically.
• Customization is possible from the plugin’s configuration panel.

Single Posts

• Automatically.
• Customization of the “description” META tag either via custom excerpt or via custom field.
• Customization of the “keywords” META tag via custom field only.

Static Pages

• No automatic generation of meta tags.
• Customization is possible with custom fields like it can be done in posts.

Category Archive Pages

• The description of the category, if set, is used for the description META tag. The name of the category is always used at the keywords metatag.

I generally add an “Optional Excerpt” to each post describing what the blog post is about. Then this plugin will add that excerpt as the Description Meta Tag.

Most people know that having the Description and Meta tags is important to SEO, though a lot of people are saying that it doesn’t play anywhere NEAR as important a role as it used to. Well, in my mind, it is still VERY important due to the fact that a Search Engine will generally use this “Description” tag as the summary of your webpage in the Search Results. You are quite likely to attract a visitor if they see that your web page has a relevant description.

So go install this plugin!

Less Spam, more meat

Posted by james on Jan 24, 2007 in wordpress | 0 comments

An update to the “Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin and Akismet” post. There is a new version of the Akismet WordPress plugin out. This one has quite a few handy dandy features. Here’s a list of some of them from the Akismet Blog:

• Instead of just viewing the last 150 comments, you can now page through everything caught by Akismet.
• There was a performance bug which could cause the old plugin to be pretty hard on the DB when getting a ton of spam, now it doesn’t.
• You can now search the Akismet caught queue.
• Longer timeout so it’s less likely to let spam through if you have a free key and the load is high. (With a paid key you always are in the priority queue.)
• The counters now update properly when you clear things out.
• A recheck moderation queue page on the WP moderation page to re-submit things in your moderation queue, so if gosh forbid Akismet ever were to go down you could have it recheck all your comments later.
• A new counter widget you can put in your sidebar to show a live count of your spam, see an example on my site.
• It kills the open_proxy_check option in WordPress 2.0 that causes false positives.
• You can hardcode your API key in the plugin file to hide the configuration page and enable Akismet as a mu-plugin for WordPress MU.
• If Akismet is unable to contact the mothership, it now has much friendlier debug messages.
• And finally my favorite, you can now tell Akismet to discard spam that comes in on entries older than a month. (On the Akismet configuration page under Plugins.)

Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin and Akismet

Posted by james on Jan 8, 2007 in wordpress | 4 comments

If you haven’t heard of Akismet and you are running a blog or a forum, PLEASE go and check it out here: “Akismet” It is a free (for personal use) service whereby you can install a plugin, and every comment that gets posted to your blog gets verified against Akismet’s servers to see whether it fits a SPAM profile.

On one of my blogs I was receiving about 300 spam comments a day. Compared to some people, that’s not actually a lot, but for me it was. In WordPress, these comments then sit in a “SPAM queue” waiting for 15 days before being deleted automatically. They sit there so that you can double check them to see whether there are any “false positives“, i.e. comments that are not supposed to be spam. But having to sift through 300 comments a day just in case is a REAL pain in the @$$.

So I installed another plugin, the “Math Comment Spam Protection Plugin“. (As yet, I haven’t installed it on this blog, in case you’re wondering). What THIS plugin does is adds another field to the comment form with a simple maths question, such as “What is 9 + 1″, and when a visitor adds a comment, they have to answer this field correctly for the comment to be submitted.

Does it work? HELL yes!!! I’m now getting 10 SPAM comments a day!