Further thoughts on WordPress, and blogging

September 18th, 2007 Jason

One of these days I’ll settle back into some sort of “theme” for why I’ve even kept up this aspect of the site. As I’m not doing a bunch of theater myself at the moment, it would make sense to at least be writing up the shows I’m seeing on a regular basis…there are rather a lot of them.

But, of course what has prompted the switch to WordPress and the idea of doing a regular blog again at all is all the search engine research and work I’m doing online these days, so it would make sense to yammer on about that now and then as well.

My next bit of wordpress fun – and work research – may be to write my own plugin. One of the online properties at work is now running their own blog, also on wordpress. They are also taking a n RSS feed of info from their ‘parent’ site, thereby promoting one through the other. Works great. Except that we’ve done a lot of work to give the search engines a clear path into SEO-friendly pages, and the RSS feeds are not actually delivering the right URLs…so they’re pimping out the wrong pages. And it will probably be easier for me to whip out a bit of code that will do a custom rewrite of the RSS output on the wordpress side than it will be to get the parent site to change the outbound RSS feed.

Maybe.

Posted in geek, theatre, wordpress | No Comments »

Claiming Technorati

September 18th, 2007 Jason

And just so I have an excuse to not delete this post later, I’ll just link over to my Technorati Profile while I’m at it.

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On setting up a new WordPress blog

September 4th, 2007 Jason

I was impressed that wordpress pretty much installed in two steps. Template management has been a piece of cake (browse, download, activate), as has installing plugins.

Because sometimes it’s interesting to know, I’ve got the following plugins installed:

All-In-One-SEO pack
Because I’m working in SEO right now, I’m paying attention to this kind of stuff, and it’s best to have it set up properly right off the bat. One thing I never bothered to resolve on the old blog setup was setting individual page titles for each post. Wouldn’t have been that hard to do, though the way I’d set up the original Dreamweaver template system did throw in some challenges. But I’m moved away from that template now, and this plugin will help keep this part straight.

Did You Pass Math?
A comment-spam protection plugin. A simple math question must be answered before a comment can be posted, which should prevent spambots from commenting. Of course, you need to register to comment anyway, so I’m guessing I’m safe.

NoFollow Case-by-Case
More SEO stuff. The default on wordpress is to render all links in comments with the “nofollow” attribute; this deactivates that default and gives that control to me.

Then I’m doing other customizations on my own.

I wanted to keep the basic look and functionality of my home page, presenting just the latest post in a separate box. The best way I could come up with in two minutes of thinking about it was to display from the wordpress RSS feed. Piece of cake. The snippet takes the RSS feed from the wordpress blog, and processes it using the MagpieRSS library, which I’ve used before but was pointed to again by this post. Magpie parses the RSS into a standard PHP array. so it can be manipulated and styled in whatever way you like. To avoid exactly duplicating the content, I’m trimming the posts using some basic substring manipulation I found in the PHP documentation. (It’s possible that the RSS is supposed to do this trimming, but I’m not sure that it does, so I figured I’d just have some fun with it anyway.)

What remains to do is actually muck about with the template and styling of the wordpress sections of the site now, so I can make it better match the existing areas that I don’t want to throw away. This isn’t likely to be a public post until after that’s a little more settled, so by the time you read this it’ll probably all be fixed, and for all I know the subject of another post.

Posted in geek, php, site, wordpress | No Comments »

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