I’ve been having a little bit of trouble with WordPress lately. When I go into an old post while using firefox, oftentimes, the post is cut off about halfway. The problem has come after I’ve edited an article. The post then saves without all of its text.
This last week I learned how to make rotating tabs on a website. You know what I’m talking about, those rotating slideshows that display the news. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any tutorials on the subject. But since I’m sorta’ a Java redneck, rest assured, any fix of mine is nothing more than a good lookin’ hack. But it works. And so, if you want rotating tabs on your website, do as I do and employ my quick and dirty methods.
First, put the following between your <head>…</head> tags.
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.ui-1.5b4/jquery-1.2.4b.js"></script>
<script src="jquery.ui-1.5b4/ui.core.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="jquery.ui-1.5b4/ui.tabs.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function() {
$('#rotate > ul').tabs({ fx: { opacity: 'toggle' } }).tabs('rotate', 7000);
});
</script>
Then, download and unzip this into the same directory as the webpage you’re building.
Finally, somewhere in the body of your webpage, cut and past the following:
<div id="rotate">
<ul>
<li><a href="#fragment-1"><span>Section 1</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#fragment-2"><span>Section 2</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#fragment-3"><span>Section 3</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#fragment-4"><span>Section 4</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#fragment-5"><span>Section 5</span></a></li>
</ul>
<div id="fragment-1">
</div>
<div id="fragment-2">
</div>
<div id="fragment-3">
</div>
<div id="fragment-4">
</div>
<div id="fragment-5">
</div>
</div>
Put stuff in between each fragment id and it will rotate on your webpage. There you have it, super dirty, incredibly friendly.
I spent the better part of today trying to manipulate the archive.php page on the Mimbo theme. Nowhere on the internet was I able to find how to integrate tags into your post. If you use the following code on your website, you can build a loop that utilizes the tag that is clicked on by your website’s user. This particular coding was the top of my “lead” story loop.
<?php
$single_tag_title = single_tag_title();
$tag == str_replace(" ", "-", $single_tag_title);
$tag == strtolower($tag);
?>–>
<div id="content">
<div class="feature clearfloat" id="lead">
<?php
// this is where the Lead Story module begins
query_posts('showposts=100&category_name=lead&tag=' . "$tag" . ' ' . "$tag");
?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
I’ve been reading on how to better utilize Google Analytics to improve your website’s performance. I’ll post some of the really great youtube videos that I found later. But, I have found some great articles, including Bounce Rate: Sexiest Web Metric Ever?, which explains how important a metric bounce rate is. The best definition of bouncerate I’ve ever heard is customers come, puke, and leave. Basically, it means that someone came to your site and left right away because they didn’t like what they saw. But I’m a bit skeptical of Google’s metric. On one of my websites, I have a bounce rate exceeding 60%. Two problems: 1) it suddenly increased one day for no reason, 2) The sites average page views are way way higher than they were when my bounce rate was nearly 0%. Either, Google changed the way the metric is measured, or it’s just wrong. I’m wondering if spiders are counted in the metric, or, perhaps, if average pageviews are not counted for “bouncers”. If anyone can explain why the graph below makes sense, I’d love that.
Bounce rates (yellow line) v. Visits (blue line)
I’m on a kick, I know. I am really trying to figure this SEO stuff out. I think it’s important. And as a website designer, it’s probably one of the most important service I can offer my clients. So today, I was looking for some really basic SEO stuff. I found it at one of my favorite blogger’s sites, Mr. Mike Davidson of Mike Industries (he’s the dude that created sIFR). In his article, Lessons From The Roundabout SEO Test, he tries some quick and dirty experiments that tell us a lot about how Google ranks sites.
His conclusions:
Header’s Matter: He found that H1 tags get ranked over simple mentions and even duplicate mentions of a keyword.
Despite nasty rumors, nested tables aren’t that big’a deal: While a page with an instance of a keyword is ranked above a page with an instance of a keyword and a nested table, if two keywords appear on a site with a nested table, it will be ranked highest of all. And so, as he says, “The mere appearance of many nested tables…does not have a strong enough negative effect to be considered a drag on search engine ranking.”
code validity matters (at least in some instances): Mike found an instance in which invalid code got a page blackballed from google. While it doesn’t happen all the time, it apparently does happen some of the time.
The placement of semantic elements of coding don’t matter:An H1 tag put at the end of a post where it doesn’t even matter is far more effective than an H4 tag at the top of a post where it actually serves a function.
Semantic elements of coding don’t matter that much:“Although good semantics are somewhat valuable in optimization, simple things like proper titles, descriptive filenames, and incoming links are dramatically more important.”
He goes onto say that for good Search Engine Optimization, making a “site sticky enough to attract quality incoming links is by far and away the thing to concentrate on.” Apparently, pagerank doesn’t matter much, but “link love” does.
SEO is an interesting animal. While some developers make it a priority in developing their site, others seem to think it sort of a happenstance feature of good coding and good practice. I’m sort of inclined to agree with the latter. It seems that most basic SEO is accomplished by building sites that are W3C compliant and use HTML elements correctly and efficiently. And that is why I will sign this blog post off with a great big
I love SEO-Search Engine Optimization
.
I just ran the w3c validator to crawl google’s homepage. I was surprised to find 66 errors. It makes me wonder how important this valid XHTML stuff really is. I’ve found a lot of controversy on the issue. And I’m not really sure of the answer. All I know is that Google seems not to care about it’s own HTML. Interestingly, 456 Berea Street has a HTML valid version of Google’s homepage. Apparently, the valid HTML is 1402 bytes smaller than Google’s current invalid homepage. That’s so much bandwidth. Ouch! You’d think Google would do something about that.
good articles about google and Valid HTML:
Hobo found that Google loves valid HTML
Mark Daoust found that Google loves invalid HTML.
The last couple days I’ve been reading a lot about Search Engine Optimization. Apparently it’s really important (just kidding, i know it’s important). I just began working on optimizing one of my sites. Over the next few weeks I’ll be watching traffic, and I’ll let you know whether my SEO attempts helped increase visits.
Anyhow, I spent the better part of the day just validating my sites HTML using the W3C validator. My most common mistakes: I didn’t close off my imgtags with a /, I didn’t have alttags on all of my images, and I used capitalized tags.
Frankly, I had no idea that <BR /> is invalid HTML and <br /> is valid HTML. Convention has always been something I didn’t concern myself with, but it may be more important than you think. Additionally, I had no idea that having an alt tag in an image would be as helpful as it (apparently) is. In my readings, adding tags to elements ends up skewing the content:links ratio toward more content on one’s page. This, of course, is good when it comes to getting indexed by search engines (search engines love content). Your image tags should look like the following:
Issue and Volume Management
While Wordpress has quickly become my favorite platform for building almost any webpage (so simple even my stupid brother could use it), it isn’t perfect by any means. When it comes to magazines, one of the biggest problems with Wordpress is that there is no Issue and Volume management. iJoomla has constructed a phenomenal plugin for Joomla. It allows you to organize your issues and volumes, change the layout, and much much more. The problem with iJoomla is that you have to use Joomla. Now, I love Joomla(it was my first CMS), but to be honest, it’s a terrible CMS when it comes to handing it off to an end-use who isn’t you. The backend navigation is a bit complex for most users.
If Wordpress had some sort of mechanism like iJoomla that would allow you to manage the content on the frontpage by volume and issue, that would be amazing. As it is now, a Wordpress magazine user has to be content with just allowing the content within their issue to be treated like all Wordpress; the old stuff sinks to the bottom, and the new stuff sits at the top. That means that an old issue’s material will likely exist on the frontpage right under new content. Eww! Wordpress needs a plugin that allows magazine developers to manage volumes, issues, and frontpage content.
Batch editing of Articles
One of my greatest frustrations with Wordpress has to do with its inability to allow an user to batch edit posts. One of the magazines I worked on required me to archive years worth of material. What that meant was I had to upload about 300 articles, upload a picture for each article, assign its “date of publication”, insert pullout quotes for each article, and assign a category and tags to every article. It took nearly 3 hours per issue. I would love to see a plugin for Wordpress that allows a person to edit the categories, tags, and dates of multiple articles simultaneously.
In the next few weeks, I’m going to be putting up SpiderMarket’s bare essential WordPress plugins for running a magazine site. Below is my initial list of plugins. I’d love your recommendations, if you have other ideas.
StatPress (or some other WordPress Statistic Plugin)
Google XML Sitemaps
CG-FlashyTitles (if you know of a less clunky sIFR plugin, I’d love your comment).
WP-PostRatings
Exec-PHP
