Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category
Mar
09
2009
at 12:38pm
I just stumbled upon an article about the increasing obsolesence of Dreamweaver and tools like it. The point is that websites are becoming increasingly dynamic. Building static html pages with a tool like Dreamweaver just doesn’t cut it anymore.
In the relatively near future every website will be a dynamically-generated web application and all of today’s sites built on multiple static pages will be ripped out and replaced.
I was trying to explain this to people in a meeting a few weeks ago. Static files clearly can’t handle the demands of todays websites. Even attempting to build in your own functionality by coding your own php is fraught with problems. Why should you do it yourself when you could just use (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, your CMS of choice)?
Will there become a time when nobody publishes static html files anymore? Will new designers jump right into WordPress instead of building static websites first? An intersting topic to ponder.
Posted in Web Culture, Wordpress | 20 Comments »
Aug
17
2008
at 10:06am
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 | 4 Comments »
Jul
11
2008
at 9:11am
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:
- open a terminal
- type ssh username@yourwebsite.com
- agree to any host authenticity messages
- 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 -xvzf theplugin.tar.gz.
Done! Now you can go into your wordpress admin panel and activate the plugin or theme.
Posted in Software, Wordpress | 2 Comments »
Jul
03
2008
at 12:41pm
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
Read more…
Posted in Marketing/SEO/Monetization, Wordpress | 13 Comments »
Apr
19
2007
at 10:40pm
The wordpress theme I developed for tomorrow’s “Orange and Maroon Effect” webmaster challenge is now available for download. Here is a screenshot:
Here is the zip file and the tar.gz file.
I hope some of you have the chance to actually use it! And let me know if you have any problems. This is the first theme I have attempted to distribute. Also, I am really not sure about the copyright on the photo. Please let me know if you decide to use the theme so I can contact you if there are any problems regarding the photo.
With the exception of the photo, this theme is released under a Creative Commons Lisence
Posted in Design, General, Wordpress | 2 Comments »
Nov
21
2006
at 4:24pm
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.
Also note that this code was posted in 2006 and may not be compatible with current versions of WordPress.
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.
Read more…
Posted in Accessibility, Marketing/SEO/Monetization, Wordpress | 49 Comments »
