ThinkPress WordPress Enlightenment

Congratulations go out to Josh Penrod of Amish Robot for entering our little giveaway and winning the Skype headset and 30 minutes of talk time. We’re looking forward to that “thank you” call Josh.

For all of you who didn’t enter, let this be a lesson to you. Josh only took a few moments to register and post a comment for a chance to win. Now he;s got a sweet Skype headset for his efforts. We expect to see a better turnout for free warez next time.

For those of you who entered this time and didn’t win, keep leaving comments. Next time you could be the winner.

If you are a prolific writer you may have this problem: You are looking at your archive, index or search page results and notice that not all your posts are showing their respective post dates.  What’s the deal with that?

The deal is that the WordPress Loop will not print out the same day more than once.  So if you have more than one post for a single day, only the first post of that day will have the post date printed out.  This is a function of the “the_date()” Template Tag.

But there is a very easy solution, fellow bloggers (unless you are such a voracious poster that you post several posts at the exact same time).  Go into you template folder and open up the index.php, archive.php and search.php pages (and any other pages that list out posts).  Within The Loop simply swap out “the_date()” for “the_time().” Assuming your posts don’t have the same post time, each post time will be unique and therefore print out.

Now, use the PHP date formating to configure your prefered date display format and use that for the argument in “the_time().”  For example, let’s say you like the date on your posts to read like so: June 18 , 2009, 6:30 pm. Then you would replace your the_date() with the_time(”F j, Y, g:i a”). And if you don’t want the time shown at all, no problem. Using the_time(”F j, Y”) would produce just June 18 , 2009.

Here’s another little tidbit I picked up from WordCamp.  This is comes to you from Matt Cutts.  (For credentials, Matt has a Ph.D., has been with Google since 2009 and is currently head of Google’s Webspam team.  So, I trust this tip.)  Granted, this is not a huge thing, but still every little bit helps.  So, here’s how to squeeze every little bit of SEO goodness out of your blog posts.

When you write a new post in WordPress, WordPress usually take the title of the post and uses that as part of the Permalink for the page’s URL.  (I’m assuming you have set up your URLs to contain the post title in there somewhere.  If you haven’t you are probably not into search engine optimization…and this post may not interest you.)  When checking the content of your post page, Google (and other search engines) will look at the URL of the page, items in headers tags (like <h1>, <h2>, <h3>…), links, alt tags…so on and so forth.

One thing that search engines do not do however is look at your page and say, “Wow, this page mentions ‘WordPress’ 88 times.  This page must REALLY be about WordPress and therefore we will rank this one so high for the keyword ‘WordPress.’”  Instead, Google will see “WordPress” mentioned a few times and think, “WordPress.  Got it.  What else?”

So, rather than flood your post with tons of the same keyword – spice it up*.  Specifically for this tip, there’s no reason for the title of your post and the Permalink to be exatly the same.  So, use those two things to add some variation.  Notice what I’ve done here with this post.  The title is “Increase SEO Keywords in your Posts,” wheras the URL is “more-keyword-in-blog-url.”  (I admit my URL looks like a caveman wrote it.  I’m not saying this is a great example; I’m just saying notice what I did. Hopefully you can do it better than I can.)  So in addition to keywords “Keywords” and “Post,” by changing the Permalink, I’ve also told Google and other search engines to also consider “Keyword” (singular), “Blog” and “URL.”

Happy blogging, buddies.

*When you spruce up the keywords in your posts, don’t just run to the thesaurus and toss in a bunch of synonyms.  Yes, you want variation.  But remember, after the search engines look at it, humans have to read it too – so keep it natural.

At our recent trip to WordCamp San Francisco, we talked with lots of vendors, potential partners and Matt Mullenweg himself.

One of the interesting vendors we talked with was MySpace. It turns out that they’ve got  new WordPress plugin and (like all other social networks) an API for connecting their platform with other platforms. We have one client in particular (Taro Gold – WordPress & MySpace) that uses MySpace as a means to get their books and music some publicity.

Currently the MySpace plugin allows “bloggers and commenters the ability to log in using their MySpace credentials rather than having to set up and remember yet another username and password.” This feature seems kind of trivial, but after talking with the representative, he revealed that they’re working on adding some other features that seem like they might be worth it, such as the ability to cross post between WordPress and MySpace.

While I’m personally not a huge fan of MySpace due to it’s lack of design standards, but I do see the benefit of using it for traffic generation. This is a huge step forward, and for that I commend them.

So what does this have to do with a Skype Headset, and why are we giving it away? Skype has also aparently partnered with MySpace  so that now you can use Skype to make phone calls with your MySpace IM account. MySpace is trying to promote the partnership, so they were giving away Free Skype headsets with 30 minutes of talk time. We picked it up, and while we use skype daily, we thought it would be in the good spirit of WordPress to give back to our community.

So, leave a comment on this post telling us what you’d do with 30 minutes of Skype talk time. We’ll choose a random comment on Friday, June 19th and announce the winner the following Monday.

WordPress 2.8 is now available for download!  WordPress 2.8 is nicknamed “Baker” after jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. What you should notice from the begining is that this version of WordPress handles and works faster than previous versions. The nice folks at Automattic attribute this to how they have “changed the way WordPress does style and scripting.”

One of the more prominent upgrades is the Theme browser.  Similar to how they updated the plug-in search and install in a previous version, you can now browse through the entire theme directory.  (These only include themes in the WordPress directory.) They allow you to search by theme attributes such as color, columns, width and features to narrow down your results.  Then you can install your selected theme with one click.  Again, Automattic just making things even easier.

Developers will really appreciate another new feature – syntax highlighting! If you are like me, you tend to make code adjustments in text editors rather than the WordPress admin mainly because syntax highlighting makes coding so much easier. Now you can code right in WordPress easily thanks to the CodePress editor. Furthermore, they have adding in contextual documentation as well as a function look-up that seems super handy.

Another treat for developers is the way they have redesigned the widget interface.  (This is a bit frustrating if you have already taken the time to become proficient at making widgets, but…) This upgrade will allow you to do things like “edit widgets on the fly, have multiple copies of the same widget, drag and drop widgets between sidebars, and save inactive widgets so you don’t lose all their settings.” We (developers) now have access to “a much cleaner and robust API” to help us create our widgets.

Sidebar are now easier to manage as well.  You can manage all your sidebars at the same time rather than having to update each sidebar separately.  Also, if you customize a widget, if you take the widget out of active duty, WordPress will remember the settings you selected for later use.

One nit-picky thing though.  They’ve changed the color scheme in the admin if you are using the Blue Admin Color Scheme.  What was once beautiful and soothing has now become stark and jarring.

For a list of all upgrades and improvments, click here.

Download WordPress 2.8 now (or click the upgrade link in your WordPress admin).