Archive for the 'Blogging' Category

I have added support for category-specific RSS feeds (actually, they were there all along; I’ve just ‘turned them on’). Each category listed in the site sidebar now has a corresponding feed icon. Simply click the icon and you’re set to subscribe to that category’s feed. I’m not entirely happy using the RSS icon here, and I may switch to using a purely text link (removing the category post count in the process).

I have now migrated this website to WordPress 2.5. Better yet, my installs are now managed with Subversion, which will make future updates as easy as issuing a single command from my web-server command line. This all comes thanks to a handy article in the WordPress Codex that gives step-by-step instructions.

This new install was done in a virgin folder (for subversion’s sake), and I had to copy existing files over to the new location. If you spot any breakage, please let me know and I’ll fix it.

The latest release of WordPress is now available. I’ve installed it in a sandbox, and I have to admit that I really like the new look of the admin area, courtesy of the folks at Happy Cog (Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Liz Danzico specifically). Thankfully, my theme still works in the new version, as does Spam Karma and Official Comments.

I want to spend a little more time with the sandbox, but I’ll probably migrate this site to 2.5 in the next few days.

I’m in the process of tweaking the theme at this site. Specifically, I’ve made a number of changes to the comments portion of each page; it seemed a little too cluttered to me. I have also removed the post navigation portion on each individual post page. Does anyone use that? If so, I’ll put it back.

Matt Cutts has posted three security tips for WordPress users. Here’s a quick overview:

1. Protect your wp-admin directory with an .htaccess file
2. Protect your wp-content/plugins folder with either a blank index.html or an .htaccess file
3. Keep your WordPress install up to date by keeping tabs on the WordPress development blog

I was already doing item 1, though I don’t currently handle IP white-listing (that’s an appealing idea). Item 2 was something I didn’t even know to do. When I checked to see if my plugins were listed, they did indeed show up. I have since corrected this issue. Item 3 is a no-brainer.

Matt also suggests removing the WordPress meta tag from your theme’s header.php file (which I have also done). This particular “bonus” tip doesn’t add a whole lot, but it at leasts cuts down on your broadcasting what version of WordPress you have installed.

I’ve tweaked this site to use an improved means of search engine indexing. WordPress ships with a less than perfect SEO setup. As such, many incoming search queries were hitting pages that no longer included the requested terms: stuff like archive pages, category pages, etc. This duplicate content problem was easily solved by using the following snippet of code in my header.php file:

if(is_home() || is_single() || is_page())
    echo "\\t<meta name=\\"robots\\" content=\\"index,follow\\" />\\n";
else
    echo "\\t<meta name=\\"robots\\" content=\\"noindex,follow\\" />\\n";

I now ask search engines to only index those pages that are either a single post, page, or the home page itself (my photo album also gets indexed, but that’s handled by the photo album software itself). Nothing else gets indexed, but all page links are followed, so that the target pages can be indexed as necessary. This should lead to improved search engine hits, leading people directly to the content they were looking for. Win-win for the user and for me.

It appears that WordPress 2.3 has been feature frozen, and has now entered the bug hunting and fixing phase. The listing of what’s new seems pretty bare bones, but I guess that is to be expected on a shorter release schedule. One of the big new features coming is tagging, something I’ve neither been impressed with nor interested in. Does anyone here make use of that on any other website? I don’t see too much difference between tags and categories, so why include them? What I really wish they’d get around to adding is an automated updating feature; migrating to a new version is really painful.