blogging 102

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes One of the least used and most powerful features of wordpress is the page template. The page template to make a long story short integrates non standard coding into your blog seemlessly. It is probably used most often as an archive page in free themes, but most of those free templates forget to tell their users how to use the template and therefore it goes unused. They can be used for so many other things than just an archive page though. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger makes extensive use of page templates. If you look at the beautifully designed landing page you will find a lot of information all packed neatly into one space. If this were a standard freebie theme you wouldn’t be able to see much more than this. It is my esitmation that his home page is home.php rather than the standard index.php. (for more information see the the wordpress codex on) By making use of the home.php as a landing page in your theme you can then make a blog template that will... 

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes Permalinks for those of you who don’t know are just what they sound like, permanent links to everything in your blog. The WordPress default, which I have temporarily reverted too, looks something like this http://domain.com/?p=123. Prettier examples look like http://domain.com/2008/04/18/sample-post/ or http://domain.com/category/sample-post/ There are however problems when making this switch on occasion as I am finding out again. Just because your post time works doesn’t mean everything else is working fine and dandy, so be very careful how to change things and test everything. If anyone has plugin suggestions or comments to restore my pretty permalinks now would be the time to feel superior and hand over that knowledge to BlogBoy. In light of that there will be a thorough post on permalink plugins once I get everything figured out on my own. WordPress Permalink Documentation convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes Here is your daily round up of everything you should have read today, but didn’t because you were jerking all morning, napped this afternoon, farted around with your new theme project this evening, watched idol, blogged about idol, wondered where all this traffic came from on The Other Blog, fooled around some more with your theme and then wondered what you were going to post today over in Blog Boy. i suppose I could have twitted all that today. Mani at The Daily SEO Blog brought us Tags and Categories – SEO and Usability Darren blogged on branding your blog with your name in The Choice of Associating Your Name with Your Blog Last but not least Sara gives us a very appropriate post on tax day in Free Tax Sites: A Lesson for Bloggers about Advertising Balance convey_source = "English"; Read More →