Sorry, I’m running a little late on my links post today. I have to say thanks to Phil for inspiring me on what category to use for these links.

Checklist for Setting up WordPress - Phil has been building Wordpress sites like crazy for quite awhile now, and lucky for us, he’s distilled his knowledge into a checklist. Great list Phil, Thanks!

A Rule of Thumb for Categories - Here’s another Gem from Phil. On  our Drupal site, I’ve had to create categories by hand, which makes for far fewer categories then what you see in most WordPress blogs. Phil shares his rule of thumb on categories, and why it’s his rule.

WordPress: The complete post install checklist - Like they say about checklists, you can’t have just one. Well, maybe that’s chips or something, but you get my point. Might as well have a couple of check lists, it always helps to have another’s perspective.

9 Easy Ways to Secure your WordPress Blog - This time, a list about security. This list tells you how to lock it down a little more.

3 WordPress Security Tips I learnt from Matt Cutts - Well, I didn’t learn them from him, but the author of this article did, and I learned them from him. Knowledge transfer in action!

Posted in How To, Interesting, Internet, LinkLove, WordPress 2 Comments »

Well, we knew it was coming. Funny though, I thought it would be released in the morning, rather than in the evening. So get your databases backed up, and check your plug in compatibility, because WordPress 2.3 is here!

In the announcement, some of the features listed are:

- Native Tagging support

- Update Notification - This will tell you when a new version is available, and when one of your plug-ins have a update available.

- Canonical URLs - This sounds like it is really going to be great, re-directs broken or truncated URLs to the correct URL anyway. I’m curious to see this one in action.

- Pending Review feature - so multi-blog authors can put something up for review by an editor, rather than saving it as a draft.

- Better WYSIWYG functionality - I’ll have to see this one for myself. I’ve never liked the way the GUI editor works.

There are even more features that I didn’t mention. Read the announcement for yourself.

I’m not going to jump on board and upgrade tonight, but hopefully it will be this week.

Posted in Updates, WordPress 5 Comments »

This week I made some minor changes to the blog, expanding that right sidebar so that I could fit the Blog Rush Widget on it. I also re-arranged some ads and the other widgets. Visually it wasn’t much of a change.

I’m not sure what happened, but this week I joined a whole slew of web services. Jango, Last.FM, Rescue Time, and Clicky Stats.

Of course, WordPress 2.3 comes out today, so that should eat up a little of my posting time this week.

The Mumbler has been on me to start using tags, and ultimate tag warrior, but I have resisted. I guess one of the big features in WordPress 2.3 is tag support. Although it will require a theme update to support it. I seem to find that sites view my categories as tags, so I’m not terribly excited about that feature.

We’ve started having some cooler weather lately, which reminds me that Winter is coming up. Time to get my Jeeps Winterized, and get my house ready. I’ve heard that during the Summer, there is a slump in blog readers, so I’m curious to see what happens in the next couple of months when it comes to my readers.

Posted in WebServices, Updates, Web Tools, WebSites, WordPress, Themes 4 Comments »

 You may notice that at the bottom of all of my posts, I had a section titled “Also on Port 16″. Believe it or not, I was generating those by hand.

Let me tell you, that started to be a huge pain.

Last night I installed the “Related Posts” Plug-in, and it’s terrific. In the old days (read: Yesterday), I would publish a post, and then I would have to go and edit every single related post that I had, and add a link back.

Then, I would receive a flood of emails asking me about link backs, from my own posts. I always delete these, which also takes up some time.

With this plug-in, I get this handy dandy list of posts, and I don’t have to do anything.

I was worried that I wouldn’t like what the plug-in pulled, but I am really happy. The related posts are, well, related. Cool huh?

The downside is that I was up last night removing the manually entered related posts section on each and every post. If you happen to see any posts which have two “Also on Port 16″ sections, please let me know.

Who cares about related posts?

Well, I do. If you have a blog, then you should too. You see, I have two types of readers:

- Regular readers - I define them as those who subscribe to my RSS feed or actively check my site for updates.

- Accidental or Transient Readers - Those who either come to my site from search results, Digg, StumbleUpon, or referrals from other blogs.

I greatly appreciate my readers, but I prefer regular readers. So my goal is to turn the transient readers into regular readers. Then regular readers into fans, then fans into addicts, then addicts into cult memebers, and finally, cult members into …

Well, you get the idea. I want you to keep coming back. I want you to tell your friends and family, I want you to tell strangers, I want you to tattoo “Port 16 Forever” in a heart tattoo on the back of your head.

Anyway, I noticed a long time ago that if I had a blog story which sent a lot of search results my way, the new visitors would look at that page, and then be on their merry way. Never to look at my blog again. My cries of abandonment were loud and unending.

But ever since I started placing the related links, as well as the “recent posts” section on the side bar, I keep a number of those readers. Instead of looking at one page and running away, they start reading more and more, and then maybe, just maybe, they subscribe. No one has had the tattoo yet though.

If any of you have the tattoo, send me a picture and I’ll post it.

Posted in Add-Ons, Blogging, WordPress 2 Comments »

Originally I was using FeedBurner’s FeedFlare to add social bookmarking links to the bottom of my posts, but I noticed that my pages started taking much longer to load. I also noticed that the status bar read “transferring data from feedburner.com”. Hmmm… I wonder what could have caused my problem.

Looking around, I noticed that other blogs were using the AddThis button on their posts. It looked nice enough, and it seems to be all over the place, so readers should be familiar with it, and if they aren’t, its purpose is pretty obvious.

One problem though. When you click on it, the URL and title of the page you’re on is sent to addthis, not the permalink and title of the post that you’re on. This is fine if you’re in the archives, but not if you’re on the front page of your blog. If you’re on the front page, or root, of your blog, then it grabs your root URL and the Title of your blog.

I started looking around, and I found the WordPress Plugin (drop-down, Non-Drop-Down). Both of these widgets add the button to your posts automatically,and they send the Permalink of the post you’re reading, as well as that post’s title, to AddThis.

The only problem with the widget is that you don’t have a whole lot of control over where on the blog the widget appears. So I decided to poke around with the code snippet that they give you.

That is when I realized that this problem was all my fault. What happened is that when I was using the page that generates the code, I chose “On a Web Site”, which is the default, instead of “On a Blog”. It also helps if you choose your blogging platform correctly.

Step 1: Choose where you actually plan on using the code.

Step 2: Choose your Platform, it will take some of the guess work out of it.

It figures that it was my fault, this morning I spent 20 minutes troubleshooting a typo.

I hope that besides exposing my mistake, this actually helps someone else.

References:

- AddThis WordPress Widget Drop-Down version

- AddThis WordPress Widget Button

- AddThis Button Generator

Posted in AddThis, WordPress No Comments »