First of all, “WordPress SEO” (read more here) by Joost de Valk is FAR superior than than “All in One SEO“, it also does the XML sitemap and the SEO (better than all in one). In fact, the SEO is done in a better and more intuitive way with multi-step recommendations.

As for the “AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget“, delete this. It’s pretty terrible because of the JavaScript loading times and the dependency on that JavaScript to be loaded. In my opinion, install WordPress.com’s “JetPack” and put their share widget in there (it’s way better and coming from a better and faster download source).

Can’t beat “Flagrant Disregard’s Feedburner Plugin“, you should be using this.

Must have plugins

1. Google Analyticator
2. WordPress SEO
3. JetPack
4. Flagrant Disregard’s Feedburner Plugin

TL;DR (summary)

Less plugins are good, because:

1. less to update
2. less to debug
3. less to manage
4. easier to install again on other WP sites

Installing JetPack will save you a lot of time in the future as Automattic are going to eventually be adding all the good functionality, availability and extensibility of the plugins at WordPress.com.

More about JetPack

Check out JetPack, read more about it on WP Founder Matt Mullenweg’s blog and the ultimately important link.

Now to google bot, go update these pages from cache please:

Page rank and MSN avatars. This is a shameless plug to get these pages updated in Google.

First of all go to your Twitter page and a web browser and look at the source code. From there you should see something that looks a little like ‘http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/6156482.rss’ (this is my Twitter timeline feed RSS). Save this or get ready to insert this into the code later. Let’s move on to making this page.

Making the template page

To make my Twitter RSS feed page, I made a copy of page.php from my theme folder and renamed it to template-twitter.php.

For it to be used as a real template in the WordPress system I added this to the top of the code:

The final page as a regular template now looked like this:

Adding the Twitter code

The code to produce the feed is really simple and there are many more ways of expanding upon it but for the sake of simplicity we let’s go with a plain unordered list of items. First of all we’d like to enclose our items in an unordered list and each Tweet will be a list item. Wrapped around this is he hyper link to the actual tweet on Twitter.

Explanation of the code

This is a call to include the WordPress feed api so we can make use of the feed functionality (software reuse, amazing!)

I added the comment here that we’d be making a feed object from the Twitter RSS. Pretty self explanatory. This is where you insert your Twitter RSS feed.

This is the place to enter the number of items you’d like to display in your feed. Again, pretty self explanatory!

This is where we build out the array and tell it to start from zero items and count all the way up to the number of items specified previously.

If there aren’t any entries in the feed, this will help it be (somewhat) graceful and spit out a string to that effect.

Assuming we have some feed entries, the code begins to step through each value with ‘foreach‘ and creates the array ‘$item’.

The code above is the real meat of it all. This is the code that spits out items from the ‘$item’ array from the Twitter RSS feed. This block of code is all contained within a list item (‘<li>’). Within the ‘<a>’ tag you can see the ‘href’ attribute is output as ‘$item->getpermalink();’ as well as the ‘title’ attribute.

The anchor text is displayed by outputting ‘$item->get_title()’ and is cleaned up somewhat by the ‘htmlentities’ function.

At the end, the date is added in a similar way to how it is added in the ‘title’ attribute of the link and the ‘<li>’ list item is terminated.

Finally, the foreach control structure is terminated and the unordered list is closed.

The complete code is here. You can save this and upload to your /wp-content/themes/THEME-NAME-HERE/.

Now to make the page in WordPress.

From here onwards it’s really easy. All we have to do is make a regular WordPress page and write any introduction paragraph explaining what that page is and then select the template.

Now, because WordPress is super hi tech these days, people can move around certain components of their working installation so you should be looking for something that allows you to select a template which is included in the ‘Attributes’ section (min is on the right hand side).

Here is a screenshot of what it looks like:

WordPress - choose a template

Of course, if you’ve made it to there, you need to choose the correct template, like this:

WordPress - choose a template from the dropdown

The end…

Write your paragraph blurb and make sure you’ve selected the twitter template and loot at your new page (mine looks like this).

I believe Google should introduce some responsibility to it’s results pages so that there are some relative weights given to valid and compliant code (W3C).

Enhancing a site for W3C compliance could potentially bring more users who require accessible websites. I’ve tried to do some research on the law of accessibility but didn’t draw too many good/useful results for this article’s purpose. I did see the US Usability blog which isn’t a terrible read at all but no real info on where governments stand on creating usable and accessible content. There is no doubt that people with disabilities can benefit more from better coding. If we can all try to stick to standards then engineers can develop better methods of delivering the information. That to me, is a good enough reason to deliver standard code.

The accessibility idea is a spin off from standards. Think of coding standards from a logical point of view. You want your website to go the distance, right? Bad code isn’t going to do that for you. To put it frankly, deprecation is a mother f*cker… The chances of compliant features and code becoming deprecated in the near future are not very likely.

So if not for the future of your web content, how about for people who have disabilities? Either way, ignoring compliancy will eventually decrease traffic either from missing a segment of human users (Accessibility) or from losing traffic from service adoption due to deprecation.

When I optimize a website and its pages for search terms it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy when I check the logs and see that I am getting a large percentage of my traffic from search engines and more importantly from the search terms that I have optimized my pages for.

I also like to see my site in the top 10 on a SERP for a phrase I am optimizing for.

Unfortunately, I don’t see Google apply a page rank to my sites and pages that reflect my top positioning for the core terms.

• If I have a site about “blue widgets”, let’s state the following assumptions:
• the site has the domain blue-widgets.com or bluewidgets.com.
• the site has a moderate volume of traffic, nothing to write home about.
• the site is on page one of Google for the term “blue widgets”
• the site is #1 for the term “blue widgets” since it is a niche site with no real competition
• 90% of my traffic is from search engines
• 80% of the traffic from search engines are from key terms and phrases that I have optimized for, including “blue widgets

I have optimized many sites for myself and for others that fit this framework. What I am finding is that the traffic may me low to moderate in volume but the product or information is being received well, users are clicking on related adverts and everything is looking good with regards to visitors coming to the site because they searched for the right phrases that my site provides information on.

Then Google applies its Page Rank. I get my first Page Rank allocation after a few months. My traffic is growing and the traffic is good and related to what I am discussing/advertising/selling/ranting about. I get a PR of 3, woooot!!! The next 6 months I get upgraded to Page Rank 4, wow! All that hard work and now I have PR of 4! Then what? My site is making a lot of money from the targeted ads I am using and from Adsense. I am the #1 authority on “blue widgets” globally so I decide to make more localized results and pages for specific countries and hope that my PR grows!

After a year it is still a 4, maybe I’ll get lucky and hit a PR of 5. What next? I can go to advertisers and say, “hey I have a Page Rank of 5 and ummm, I am top of Google for “blue widgets” which is what you sell, oh, and my traffic is growing!” I wonder why they would care about Page Rank in that sentence? It is ultimately useless if you’re getting the targeted traffic from the terms you optimize for.

When you download a browser or when you get a new computer with Internet Exploder pre-installed on a Windows PC (or Safari on a Mac), the lil green bar that represents Page Rank, is it there? Or do you have to download the Google search bar?

I love seeing highly ranked pages based on PR that have garbage content. If you see any, please drop a comment in here.

I think I should integrate the ping.fm posts to my blog. I’ll be working on that shortly so I can at least throw something in here from time to time. Ideally, if posting to a social network I can add it here as an aside.

And yes, I wrote this on the WordPress app on my iPhone.

• New admin UI and WordPress 2.5.1
  You might want to hold back on upgrading if you feel like it’s a pain. If you need help with WordPress upgrades, get in touch and I am always glad to help.
• Guide to the WordPress loop
  Great guide, I’ve skimmed it. I know that sucker inside out but if you need to theme or add functionality to your WordPress then learn this.
• New bbPress (v 0.9)
  With the update of WordPress, bbPress has undergone an upgrade. It’s just as yummy as the WordPress upgrade and you should check it out if you use it already.
• Fix for Simple Trackback Validation by Donncha
  Just before I had LASIK I had fixed this issue in WordPress 2.5 RC1 after noticing the same errors in my logs. Donncha Ocaoimh has released a better fix than mine and I’ve replaced my sloppy code that did the job with his.

I wanted to test some new caching I’ve been working on that augments GZips compression. Well, perhaps “augments” isn’t a great choice of words, maybe “enhances”.

Did I mention WordPress 2.5 has been released already? ;)

Check out the announcement about the WordPress 2.5 release here and here is the official announcement on WordPress.org.

It saves me time from showcasing and documenting the new version. Have a hop along to the WordPress development blog and have a peek.

• Ad Server development – running locally, serving file from localhost, developing plugins and skins.
• WordPress development – again, running locally and being served from localhost, making/changing/hacking plugins and themes.
• We site development – you guessed it, it’s running locally using PHP and screwing with/tweaking Apacge.

I’m about to tell you the secret – I’m using MAMP. It’s a little like a LAMP except it’s a Mac which in itself is part of the UNIX operating system family with a hybrid kernel type. So Mac + Apache + MySQL + PHP = MAMP. It’s pretty awesome. It has configurable ports, PHP version 4 or 5 availability, Zend Optimizer availability and two choices of PHP accelerator (XCache or eAccellerator).

I don’t usually drop shameless links (except for that time when I thought it would be cool to monetize this site with stupi text links and sponsored posts, bad idea I know).

If you tinker with Macs have a peek at MAMP.

So far I have been following the testers mailing list (which you’re free to join) and watching for the bugs and what not. There have been a issues with the old K2 theme I used previously, hence the step up to the new theme and the auto downloading of plugins was a little flaky but now they work.

I’d love to hear from anyone else out there who has installed the latest WordPress.

Note. You should (in theory) never publicize your WordPress version because there are a lot of people out there dorking Google for URLs to break your blog and spam or hack it.

The best thing you can so is always keep up to date with the most recent WordPress version.  It keeps you hacker proof (most of the time) and will keep you up to date with the recent advancements with arguably the best blogging platform in the world (insert evil laugh here).

edit: someone removed the original video embedded… bastards

Anyway, Iron Man never died, he was buried in there with all the other Black Sabbath songs that I didn’\t listen to for ever until I recently picked up Guitar Hero2 & 3. My play list for Last.fm is to the right and it shows you the drivel I listen to, most notably is the overload of older great guitar songs all heavily influenced by Guitar Hero. If that’s what it took then so be it, that music ROCKS and also kicks a lot of ass.

update [table_name] set [field_name] = replace([field_name],’[string_to_find]‘,’[string_to_replace]‘);

OMG, I am glad I listened in the database classes all those years ago :) I’m upgrading an older WordPress blog to the latest version and that lil query saved my life!

Here’s my question:

What is the best way to optimize an old WordPress blog that is running on the latest WordPress version, keeping all active function data and removing all the inactive function data from old plugins?

Essentially, a fresh new install of WordPress but with all the old data minus the crap.

• smallest – Use 8 point font-size when displaying the tag with lowest count value
• largest – Use 22 point font-size when displaying the tag with highest count value
• unit – Describes ‘pt’ (point) as the font-size unit for the smallest and largest values
• number – Display at most 45 tags
• format – Displays the tags in flat (separated by whitespace) style
• orderby – Order the tags by name
• order – Sort the tags in ASCENDING fashion
• exclude – Exclude no tags
• include – Include all tags

My only problem with this is that if you use the sidebar widget you can’t pass any parameters. Doh, previously I coded it into a php exec sidebar before the final release of 2.3 but now I used the widget, why not.

The long and short of it is that the widget inclusion needs to have a menu allowing you to enter some parameters. that’s kinda the point of this post, how are you all liking version 2.3?

Da da da da daaaaa, I’m lovin’ it. McLovin it even.

More about the wp_tag_cloud function here from the official WordPress website.

Another solution is to use Category Converter by Timothy Haroutunian. I’m probably one of the biggest advocates of this plugin because I think I posted about it a long time back when I discovered it and even helped Timothy bug fix it. Anyway, I can move categories fairly easily using this plugin, however, if I want to tag them then I think it’s not for me…

Let’s think, two database tables and one query, no, wait, in my head I know how to do this via two queries… I am glad the Nintendo DS Brain Age is helping me out with my thought process these days because life is complex and I have gotten my brain down to that of a 36 year old. That’s +6 on my current age. Anyway, that’s my rant for today over.

Check out the box in the bottom right. Yes, dummie, the one that says testing tags tag cloudage. I’ll most likely change that header for the cloud (in fact I just have) but at least I have a working tag cloud under the latest WordPress version using WordPress native tagging – booya. Stoked. Props to WordPress on the latest version.

Edit: I ran Leeroy Jenkins into this one and forgot to upgrade the plugins. Kids, don’t forget to upgrade your plugins. Oh well, at least I have chicken…

Nothing really much to add to this post, I am just testing the alleged tag support. So far I add the tags using the new functionality and it doesn’t display and if I use the added UTW plugin tag functionality it adds it, see above (right under the post title).

It’s a required update and not just a bug fix release. I will update tomorrow.

I updated it and it literally was the over written files and no DB to upgrade, easiest WP upgrade EVER!