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.

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).

(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!)

1. 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
2. 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/
3. 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!)
4. Type in wget http://linkto.com/theplugin.zip
5. Wait for the plugin to download onto your server
6. 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.

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

Previously I had other plugins to do some of those things so it’s nice to have it all in one. I was a little concerned about bloat or annoying interface extras but I don’t find that to be a problem (yet). Here’s a screenshot of the title tag settings page:

HeadSpace works with modules that you can add to your write page, either hidden behind a link or always appearing. It’s basically an all-in-one metadata customizer and editor.

Here’s a screenshot of how this is implemented on the “write” page:

More screenshots are available from the HeadSpace site.

Customization on title tags could also be done with the SEO Title plugin. This one works a little differently by allowing you to add a custom title tag for individual posts and pages. I don’t think it can change the default format of titles but I haven’t installed it so I’m not sure about that.

If these solutions seem like overkill to you, my old title tag code may work just fine.

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

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.

My preferred format

This is how I like my title tags:

Home page: Blog Name – description
Category Pages: Category Name – Blog Name
Archive Pages: Post Title – Blog Name

The default code

The default code is in the header.php theme include and looks like this:

<title>< ?php bloginfo('name'); ?> < ?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> »
Blog Archive < ?php } ?> < ?php wp_title(); ?></title>


Step 1: Add conditional for home page

There are a couple of things I had to do. First, put in a conditional so that it generates different title tag for the home page. Then get rid of those » characters.

I started with a modification I found in this article on Perfecting Your WordPress Title Tags. This puts in a description for the home page and takes out the “Blog Archive” bit:

<title>
< ?php if (is_home()) { ?>
< ?php bloginfo('name'); ?> » < ?php bloginfo('description'); ?>
< ?php } else { ?>
< ?php wp_title(); ?> » < ?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
< ?php } ?>
</title>


If it’s the home page, put in the blog name and description. Otherwise, just use the title and blog name. The first problem I had with this is that when I copied the code it put in curly quotes around the php attributes which caused an error message. Make sure those are straight.

Step 2: Remove » separators

That still has the » characters so I replaced those with hyphens (when choosing a title separator, think about how a screen reader would read it. » reads “right double angle bracket”. No good. I used to like | but that is read as “vertical bar”. Also no good. A plain old dash or colon work best).

<title>
< ?php if (is_home()) { ?>
< ?php bloginfo('name'); ?> - < ?php bloginfo('description'); ?>
< ?php } else { ?>
< ?php wp_title(); ?> - < ?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
< ?php } ?>
</title>


Step 3: Arrange separators properly

The problem I had after this is that the »’s are built into the title. So I ended up with titles that looked like this: » Fixing my wordpress title tags – MeganJack.com. To remove those I had to consult this post on wordpress accessibility hacks. Scroll down about half way to find the part about Removing superluous fluff from being read aloud. There is a solution to removing the other » from the title tag: simply put a $sep=’blah’ value into wp_title().

The problem with this is that in that example the author did not rearrange the order of the title bits. The defined separator automatically goes in before the title text. So I just took it out altogether and entered in my dash between the title and the blog name.

The Optimal Title plugin solves this problem by changing the position of the separator to after rather than before the title. I thought about using it but decided it’s not worth cluttering things up with another plugin since my solution works fine.

Final Solution

Now my code looks like this:

<title>
< ?php if ( is_home() ) { ?>< ?php bloginfo('name'); ?> - < ?php bloginfo('description'); ?>
< ?php } else { ?>< ?php wp_title($sep = ''); ?> - < ?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
< ?php } ?>
</title>


If it’s the home page, put in the blog name then the blog description (my tagline). For all other pages, put in the title then the blog name, seaprated by a dash. That works for the category pages too. Perrrrrrfect

Update 16/12/2007: Added headings to clarify sections, inserted note about the optimal title plugin.

P.S. I am now in the process of removing the rel=nofollow from comment links. I think it’s kind of rude for people to do that to their commenters. Same with discussion forums. You’re doing me a favour by participating on my blog, the least I could do is give you a followable link (pathetic link value as it is!). Askimet catches most of the spam here so I’m not worried about that. We’ll see though

Update 16/12/2007: My current dofollow plugin only removes the nofollow for commenters who have already posted at least 3 times. If I’ve let a few of your comments stay up then you’re probably cool