So on a nice lazy morning I decided to look into converting my permalink structure to one that I preferred. Permalinks are how WordPress describes permanent links to a post. When I first started this blog a couple of years ago (seriously, that long??) I decided on going with a fairly standard /yyyy/mm/dd/post-name type of structure for my posts. However, I am now a little opposed to this since it reveals more information than I would like. I tend to think that my writing transcends time since I am not usually writing about current events so I want to remove a visitor’s perception that my post is not worth reading just because it is old.

After searching online, I came upon Scott Yang’s Permalink Redirect plugin. The instructions seemed easy enough so I:

1. Downloaded it
2. Unzipped, installed, and activated it
3. Accessed the new Settings->Permalink Redirect page. Under “Old Permalink Structure” clicked the link after “Current permalink structure”
4. Accessed Settings->Permalinks. Changed to a /post-id/post-name structure. (I used tags that I found here.)

All of my old links are now redirecting correctly! And that, my friends and enemies, is sweet! Especially since it took less time than it has taken me to write this post. I’m loving WordPress all over again for its abilities, both built-in and extensible.

And now I present to you: Soi-disant

I’ve only changed my theme once to (Not So) Fresh as I posted in New Look. That was 8 months ago and since then quite a bit has changed.

Why I wanted to make my own theme

1. Have a unique look to my blog

   I’ve come across other blogs that had the same theme, and that wasn’t too exciting for me. I want and like to be my own. So even though the last one did look nice, it was unfortunate because other people thought that it looked nice as well.

2. Learn much, much more web design

   CSS in particular, HTML and PHP to a lesser degree since I already knew a fair amount before doing the theme. Part of who I am wants to understand how things work and why. So learning new things can be very exciting to me. Not to mention the fact that it’s very pertinent to my profession of computer programming. (Although I must admit that I believe that I lack the creativity necessary to actually ever become a web designer. I know the nuts and bolts but lack the vision. )

3. Create a fluid display

   I wanted one that would show up well on the very popular 1024×768 and 1280×1024 screen resolutions in addition to any other screen resolutions. I’m sorry to say that it’s very likely that anything below 1024×768 won’t look all that great. A fluid display means that the text and page elements will expand according to how much space is available. My previous theme was fixed width so it didn’t look too great to me on higher resolution displays.

4. Speed things up

   The last theme used a fair amount of images to create all of the nice effects. And that’s nice for people on fast connections (which at this point is a very fair amount of people). However there still are people on slower connections, and I want my blog to be accessible to them as well, too.

Soi-disant

I got the name of this theme (Soi-disant) by looking up a word of the day online. Lame, huh? I thought it was cool because it means calling oneself thus, self-styled, or so-called. Seemed interesting to me so there it is.

So I did it all for this theme: header logo, PHP code, HTML, CSS. It was a learning experience, that is for sure.

WordPress theme designer: check

The plugins that I have added and am now using on this blog are:

1. Brian’s Threaded Comments which allows for comments to be in threads rather than just as a single list. This is nice because it can get confusing in the way that I used to just use an “@ user” type of response. The only drawback is that I’ll probably have to limit the number of levels that nesting will occur because it will make the comments unreadable as they get more and more narrow.

   This code looks stupid and ugly on my current theme, but I’m going to change it very soon so I’m still going to post it. Most people don’t care about this, but I figured that I’d put it out there if anyone did find it useful and didn’t know too much PHP.

   So is here is the change so that there will be no “Reply to this comment” link if the comments for a post are already closed:

   <div class='reply'><?php global $user_ID; global $post; if ( get_option("comment_registration") && !$user_ID )
echo '<a href="'.get_option('siteurl') .
'/wp-login.php?redirect_to=' . get_permalink() .
'">Log in to Reply';
elseif ('open' == $post->comment_status) {?>
<a href='#' onclick='moveAddCommentBelow("div-comment-<?php echo $c->comment_ID ?>", < ?php echo
$c->comment_ID ?>, true); return false;'>Reply to this comment</a>
< ?php } ?>
</div>

   I also added code from my original comments.php in my theme file so that if a user is logged in, it will not ask them for their information (name, e-mail, etc). Although I don’t think that there are too many people with accounts on my blog (go for it, it’s not so bad) I figured that it was at least a solution that I enjoyed more for my own sake. However the code change was too much for this so I’m not going to post it in this entry.
   Other than that it’s pretty super! I like the look, and I hope that others will appreciate it. And most of all I hope that it fosters more discussion!

2. Comment Timeout lets me fight another problem on my blog. And that problem is spam comments. Hateful, despicable spam comments. They take at least a little bit of time to go through sometimes when people’s comments get caught in moderation. So I’ve decided that since it rather makes sense to close the comments on old posts, I will. It’s not as if people particularly post comments on my old posts anyways.

   Additionally it has the ability to keep the comments active if the post is deemed “active.” The plugin is fairly full-featured with some customizable options such as the timeout period, etc. Not a bad plugin if I do say so myself. It was a better option for me than the very basic Close Old Posts plugin written by Matt Mullenweg and listed on the wordress.org site.

Let me know what you think of the new plugins! Does it make you want to leave more comments?

So after participating a bit at One Man’s Blog (who is also having a great contest for becoming a “member” of his site right now where he gives away something to the winner of a random drawing), and enjoying it very much I decided that I would do something similar to what he does.

Instead of removing the nofollow on each and every commentator’s link, he instead creates a refreshed list of the top 10 commentators and provides them with a link back that way. I think that after seeing how I can sometimes be getting the single comments just to get a link, I think that this is a more prudent decision to minimize single-line “spammy” comments.

So therefore I am going to go for installing the Show Top Commentators plugin.

The way to get onto the list is as follows:

1. Use the same information (name, e-mail, website) when leaving comments. It might be easiest to simply register (which I have opened up) on my website. You’ll be able to log in and not have to enter your information each time you leave a comment.
2. Leave comments! It’s fun anyways, I think to get to give feedback to the author (and be assured that authors do enjoy feedback, especially this author).
3. The plugin will gather its data from the last 60 days, so be active else you fall and cease being the king of the mountain. Hm I always enjoyed that game (king of the mountain, not falling).

Oh an don’t worry, it will start immediately and retroactively use the comments that you’ve left. So we actually don’t start off with a clean slate, but I wouldn’t think that would be fair anyways to those that have graced me with their participation.

I’m going to remove myself from any sort of communities for adding dofollow. I don’t really get too much traffic from them, and the traffic that I do get is usually people just leaving a single comment to get the link back to their site. I like the idea of adding dofollow, I just don’t like how it’s worked out for me thus far.

Comments might not make the world go ’round, but they sure are more pleasant than the alternative.

favorite posts in the sidebar!

Courtesy of the plugin that I used for my sitemap (as described in A Sitemap For You And Them), there are now the top (for now 10) posts listed in the sidebar. “Popularity” is a rather arbitrary thing to decide, so my popular posts are based on a calculation using the number of views and responses. Sometimes this means that the most viewed is popular and sometimes this means that the most commented is the most popular. Is this useful to you?

I think that it’s cool, although I’m looking for a better way to order it. It seems like it should be ordered based on the number of comments because that’s what I set the option for.

Hmm I just installed the Popularity Contest plugin to see if I could use that in order to calculate how to order the sitemap.

And now I just easily set it to calculate the priority based on the Popularity Contest plugin! It uses a priority that is calculated using view count, comments, pingbacks (links to), etc. I also just realized that the sitemap is just ordered by having the most recently changed posts at the top. I suppose that this makes some sense since it is for updating the index of the ‘bot that is crawling it. There is no sense in updating the index of a page that is unchanged.

Okay so basically, now you can browse through and check out posts based on their priority. I just recently made a Favorite Posts page, but I’m not sure if I should still keep it. Feedback, as usual, is welcome!

I doubt that many of you would want to read the wikipedia article explaining what I’m talking about so I will briefly explain. Search engines (Google among them) have an algorithm that uses the amount of links to your website as a part of how to determine the important of your website (this is called your PageRank in the end). This is, in part, what is used to determine how high you are when searches are done.

However to combat people abusing the system, they started to allow you to add an attribute relationship in the links like

<a
href=”http://www.goingthewongway.com/” rel=”nofollow”>goingthewongway<a>

This would then be disregarded in the algorithm to calculate your PageRank. The bottom line is that any links that have that attribute are worth nothing for search engines.

Why is this important?

As a blogger, being read is what’s important! Search engines allow your site to be listed as “more relevant” which could allow more people to find your site and read your content. I don’t write on this blog to understand myself. I write because I like to share my thoughts and get feedback from others. So after reading the article and thinking about it myself, I realized that it definitely encourages more feedback if commenters can get something back. The big popular sites like to do fancy giveaways, but I’m not a big popular site. However, I realized that the least that I could do would be to give anyone who commented a backlink! This helps them because it ever so minutely increases their importance in the eyes of the search engine. And it would hopefully help commenters to have another incentive to leave their thoughts.

Anyways suffice to say I installed the ever so easy to use DoFollow plugin for WordPress which removes the nofollow attribute for all user-input links (like the website that you list when you leave a comment). Happy nofollow commenting!

Sphere.com is a site whose goal is connecting people to related content. From their site:

Sphere is a startup from a handful of people passionate about connecting mainstream and conversational media content

Anyways, a little while ago I added a cool Sphere widget to the bottom of each post. Click on it (it won’t redirect you away from the page unless you click again) and you’ll see some (hopefully) related content. And then this site will be just another stone in your stepping. Anyways, hope that this is useful to you!

In any case, check out the “Statistics” page in the navbar.

And onward (not in order of preference or importance but rather just so that you can make sure that I have 13).

1. Akismet

   The ubiquitous spam comment catcher for the WordPress community. It’s so popular and well-done that it’s a default plugin. I didn’t actually activate it initially because I didn’t think that I needed it as my blog doesn’t have extensive traffic. And thus I didn’t think that I would get picked up by any spammers. Of course I turned out to be wrong. And of course I got spammed hundreds of times. And of course it happened while I was on vacation. Ah ’tis life.

2. Croissanga

   Not a normal plugin to have I would think. But this is definitely a crucial one on my blog because of the community (small as it is) that I have on xanga. I enjoyed installing it because it allowed me to learn about PHP cURL (which is basically a way for you to access remote sites through PHP!). Additionally it definitely upped my readership and got the word out there about my blog. This is better than having to tell people about it. It gets old telling people to check out my blog.

   With some fairly prompt response to my report that Croissanga wasn’t working (within the week), Ryan stepped up and pushed out a new version to handle the changes. That is just sweet.

3. Feedburner Feed Replacement

   Replacing the default RSS feed is useful because you can track more information by sending the feed through Feedburner. Very easy to set up, and there are some interesting things that you can learn through them that you wouldn’t if you hosted your RSS feed on your own site.

4. Get Recent Comments

   This is a very useful plugin, in my opinion, because it gives you the ability to bring the comments part of your blog to the front and center (the main home of your blog). I encountered this by seeing it on other people’s blogs and thinking that it was very handy. You know when I publish a new post, and now you can know when someone else adds a new comment!

5. Gregarious

   There is something that is very hot lately in the world of the Internet. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s called social bookmarking. Basically it’s a way for people to share what they find interesting with other people. This plugin allows your posts, pages, etc to have an instant connection with such sites as Digg or reddit. I have this on my blog because I think that it’s cool and I try to participate in social bookmarking. However, I hardly think that my content is the type of stuff that will get put onto these sites. But if you feel that it is, feel very free to use the links on the side of each post!

   Worked with the author a little on fixing a slight bug with the plugin, and I really appreciated Ankur’s responsiveness and work to fix it!

6. More Smilies

   A plugin that allows you to choose different smilies to use in your blog. Basic and useful if you’re into customizing things.

7. Sidebar Widgets

   This is a big deal right now in the WordPress community. Basically it allows you to have drag-and-drop functionality in your sidebar when you’re setting things up! A widget (in the web sense) is an arbitrary piece of code that conforms to some standards and can be dropped into place without any changes. This is a good way of approaching software projects (where you can just substitute in a component for another component and nothing will know about it), and it’s also a good way of approaching third party software like plugins. I am not currently using this too much, but I have every intention of doing so once I finish re-organizing the structure of the site. I might also have to write my own widget(s) if there isn’t one to do what I want. How fun! But this is seriously a plugin that you should use because it just makes customizing WordPress even easier than it was before!

8. StatCounter for WordPress

   An easy way to utilize a free service (statcounter) easily without having to muck around in the source code. This keeps the code clean while simply adding an action to the WordPress functions. This appends the necessary code on each page and thus allows you to keep track of all of your pages! Very useful for those that like to know what is going on in terms of page loads, hits, etc.

9. Subscribe To Comments

   This is an interesting plugin that I saw first-hand while looking at someone else’s blog. I was interested in it because I found it interesting to stay “in the loop” to the comments that were posted as follow-up discussion to the post that I was reading. Basically you check a box when you’re leaving a comment, and you will get an e-mail when a new comment is posted. Pretty nifty if you ask me!

10. The Ultimate Tag Warrior

    Well first of all the name is just awesome, in my opinion. Additionally, I think that the functionality is pretty amazing. Basically it allows you to tag your posts with tags that you create. Continue to tag your posts and eventually you’ll end up with a list of tags that somewhat accurately (depending on how good you are at tagging) will represent what your site is generally about. I really enjoy the tag cloud in the sidebar because it gives a visual representation to how often I tag about certain things. And from there, if any particular tag is clicked, a new page will display that shows all of the posts that have that tag. Pretty nifty, if you ask me! There are numerous other ways to display aggregate tag information, but the plugin is even useful if you just want the tags to display for each post! It kind of gives a summary of what the post is about.

11. WP-Stats

    This plugin gives a you some statistics to your blog such as number of posts, number of commentators, and the like. Even though the information isn’t exactly ground-breaking, it’s still nice to just have a plugin that will allow you to easily see it.

12. Random Redirect

    This is a really simple plugin in both idea and code. Basically it allows you to visit http://www.yoursite.com/?random and it will take you to a random post. I have yet to actually put a link somewhere to use this plugin, but I very much mean to sometime soon. If you’d like to, you can try it using a link to a random post on this site.

13. WP-Cache

    Although my site doesn’t exactly get hammered because of all of the traffic, I would still say that this is a great plugin to have. Basically it will save pages as they’re visited to a flat file. What does this do for you, you might ask. Well a flat file is much easier to serve than a dynamic page generated from PHP and MySQL. Thus your server will have less processing to do, and it will be able to serve the page more quickly! Even if your site doesn’t get a lot of traffic to actually utilize this plugin, there’s no difference if you do or do not have it. So I say that you might as well install it. Who knows, maybe you will get your site submitted to digg, and with this plugin you might be able to withstand the digg effect!

I am very grateful to the respective authors of these plugins because it’s amazing to see how a community (such as the WordPress one) can make amazing products that are so functional. I’ve enjoyed hacking around and making them do what I want them to do, but this is by no means an end to configuring my blog exactly how I want it. This is just a snapshot of my blog.