Archive for the 'Blogging' Category

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.

I’ve come across a few articles on how to optimize WordPress performance (all of the following links come from the first linked story in the list below):

• Wordpress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much Faster Than Yours
• Optimize WP Loading Times
• Optimizing Wordpress Performance
• Optimizing Wordpress for High Volume Traffic
• High Performance Wordpress
• Diggproof & Speed up Your Wordpress Blog

WordPress is by far my favorite content management system, but I opted to use Movable Type over at Born Geek, mainly because it uses static HTML pages (which load faster). Considering the content in the above guides, I may eventually switch from Movable Type to WordPress.

Matt Mullenweg has an interesting post on security in WordPress. He points out that, as a product becomes more popular, its security issues garner more attention:

When a product is popular, not only does it have more eyes from security professionals on it, but any problems garner a level of attention which is not quite warranted by the frequency of the general event, like Angelina Jolie having a baby. There are certainly things intrinsic to coding that can make software more or less secure, but all things being equal the software with the most eyes on it, which usually means Open Source, will be the most robust in the long term.

I just realized that this past Monday, Year of the Code Monkey turned 2 years old! Here’s a look back at my first post, The Bandwagon. Not surprisingly, it isn’t that interesting. Hopefully you’ll agree that things have gotten slightly better since then. At least the post from this time last year (Fun With Linux Development) is a little more enlightening.

On an entirely unrelated note, I made three small changes here at the site:

1. Each individual post page now has navigation links to the previous and next post, making it easier to move around.
2. The poorly named “Tips and Tricks” category has been renamed to “How To.” Stay tuned for new posts in this category.
3. I have removed a very small amount of padding around the post footer, something you probably won’t notice.

Let me know if I broke something.