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On setting up a new WordPress blog

September 4th, 2007 Jason Posted in geek, php, site, wordpress |

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.