Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category

Aug 17 2008 at 10:06am

Website Makeover

Well, it’s finally here. After months of work my new design is ready for showtime. I don’t have time to say much about it right now. As with the A Padded Cell/the Webmaster Forums design this was a joint effort between Liam and myself.

I also upgraded my photo gallery from Gallery 2 to Zenphoto. Liam ended up having to write a complicated sql statement to convert it, but I’m much, much happier with the new system. I’ve been using zen for a work project and find it to be much easier to work with than Gallery 2.

If you notice anything that doesn’t look right please do let me know. I haven’t tested the new design much in IE 7 and I know it doesn’t work right in 6 (too bad).

Posted in Design, Wordpress | 3 Comments »

Jul 11 2008 at 9:11am

Quick Wordpress plugin installation with ssh and wget

Have you ever wanted an easier way to install Wordpress themes and pugins? If you have ssh access to your website you can install them directly on the sever with a few simple commands. No more downloading to your computer, extracting the zip file, and uploading again. This also works really well with Drupal Modules or any other script you need to download from another site.

(Unfortunately, most shared hosting accounts don’t have ssh access, but hopefully this will be useful for anyone on virtual hosts or dedicated servers who don’t already know how to do this!)

SSH into your website. Don’t know how? Try this:
1. open a terminal
2. type ssh username@yourwebsite.com
3. agree to any host authenticity messages
4. enter your password at the prompt
Navigate to your wp-content directory. Depending on your hosting setup the command will look something like this:cd httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/ or cd httpdocs/wp-content/themes/
Get the URL for the plugin or theme you want to download. The full url to the zip file. (This makes it really annoying when plugin developers hide the full url!)
Type in wget http://linkto.com/theplugin.zip
Wait for the plugin to download onto your server
Unzip the file by entering unzip theplugin.zip. If you have a .tar.gz file use tar xfc theplugin.tar.gz.

Done! Now you can go into your wordpress admin panel and activate the plugin or theme.

Posted in Software, Wordpress | 1 Comment »

Jul 03 2008 at 12:41pm

Fixing my wordpress title tags, revisited

One of the most popular posts on my blog is my guide to fixing the wordpress title tags. It’s enjoyed a great run so far, but as of today has become obsolete. Well, for myself anyway.

Via Wordpress SEO I discovered the HeadSpace plugin. HeadSpace allows you to specify a custom title format for all wordpress page types. It does lots of other cool stuff with metadata, like:

auto-suggesting tags
mass-editing metadata, including title, description, slugs (urls), and tags/keywords
adding a custom title or description per post
adding custom css of javascript files depending on the page type or on a per-post basis

Fixing my Wordpress Title Tags

Update 03/07/2008 - I am no longer using this solution for my title tags. Read more about my new solution in Fixing my wordpress title tags, revisited. The solution below may still be useful for anyone who finds the plugin options to be overkill.

I thought I’d document this just for my own info and in case anyone else is looking to do the same thing.

Default title format

The default wordpress titles look like this:

Home page: Blog Name (and that’s it)
Category Pages: Blog Name » Category
Archive Pages & individual posts: Blog Name » Blog Archive » Post Title

I wanted to reverse this for a few reasons. Firstly because it’s good for people that have a lot of tabs open and can only read the first part of the title. Secondly, it might be better for SEO and actual reading of SERP’s. Thirdly, because I just like it better that way.