246 scheduled posts

I don’t know about you, but I kind of like to just push a button and make magical things happen. With my clients in mind I created a system that auto populates WordPress with content aggregated from RSS, CSV or any HTTP accessible sources. The goal of this is to provide an easier solution for my clients who wish to move to WordPress from ANY content platform, even from an old flat HTML website.

Fingers tired from copy-pasting?

There is always a better AND easier way!

bEtsy plugin for WordPress - Display your items for sale on Etsy

I installed the bEtsy plugin for WordPress on Hopelessly Entangled String Puppet, my personal craft blog. bEtsy (I found it here, it is not in the Official WordPress Plugin directory) is designed to display items for sale in your Etsy store. On the right you can see how it looks.

High Points

- None

Low Points

- Does not display pictures.
- Does not have a title.
- Is not widgetized. That means you will have to go into your template code and add the code yourself.

Verdict: Do not install

I offer you two simpler solutions:

1. Configure your RSS

If your template supports widgets and you do not want to fiddle with code, go into Presentation > Widgets (Screen shot.) Scroll down to the bottom of the page and drag the RSS1 box to the sidebar. You can click on the icon to the right of RSS1 in your widget list to configure it. Enter the URL of your Etsy RSS.

To get your RSS URL go to your Etsy store and find the icon shown above. The RSS this shop icon is at the bottom of the right-side column. Right click on it and Copy the URL or Link.

Simply paste it into your widget configuration, add a title and click on the [X]. DO NOT FORGET to click on Save Changes button.

Here is the results on as it appeared on this blog. Basically the same as the bEtsy plugin I am reviewing.

2. Add an Etsy Mini-Store

If you are comfortable editing your theme to include new code, you can create an Etsy mini. This option is available at the end of the left hand-side column in Your Etsy administration interface. Using this official badge maker from Etsy will accomplish much more beautiful gallery and it can be customized to show your items horizontally or vertically. You can even paste this code inside your blog posts as I have done below.

Conclusion

At this time, there are no solutions that are BOTH easy and pretty to display Etsy items for sale on your blog.

Upgrading: The One-Page Website That Blocks Google

Yesterday I started re-programming a site with a huge amount of immensely rich business content related to a very specific trade. I am part owner of this trade magazine (paper format) and the reason why I was interested in investing is the excellent quality of the writing. The Editor-in-Chief wants to start publishing exclusive Web content on a monthly basis that will not be available in the printed version of the magazine. There are many other functionalities that we want to add in the future as well.

The website is under-used, because of a host of issues.

The original programmer thought it would be cool to make this a one-page website. Moreover, all the links are served in POST method. This method of programming was somehow thought to be elegant a few years back. What this means is that all content is encapsulated in the home.php page therefore only that page can be indexed by Google. Some agents are blocked by the redirect in the index.php page. The front page content changes on a weekly basis, browsers who find useful info in Google click-through to a news page that has changed and can’t find the info they were looking for. The website benefits from frequent visits by hundreds of readers, but based on the paper magazine readership (over 5,000 copies in corporate offices), it should be so much more.

I have detailed statistics from Google Analytics for the past few months so that I can show you the results a few months down the road based on a very specific series of changes and improvements.

Is your website underused? It may not be your fault. Certain small details can affect your ranking and undermine the effort you put into your content.

The Fix: Upgrading to WordPress from Textpattern

I have a friend who wants to upgrade to WordPress and the work is currently under way. She has a personal journal, but would like to reach a wider readership. With over 200 posts, I expect her readership to grow 4-5 folds. I have read many accounts of readership going up 3-4 folds when upgrading to WordPress.

Textpattern is a rather primitive system and upgrading to WordPress from it is not easy. I wanted to tackle the problem of upgrading the URL when the old blog is configured to show only the title after the domain name.

I have begun using the following method to publish my blogs: category/date/title. The category is an extra bit of SEO crunchiness, as long as your categories are well defined. Together we decided to go for it and upgrade her URL structure.

So my friend has 200300+ posts indexed by title only. I need a way to patch her blog so that 404 errors return the actual content the person meant to find. This will also be useful for all those people who link to her entries from their personal journal.

In a business context changing your URLs without managing the traffic coming from the already indexed pages is suicide!

I will be testing redirection, a WordPress plugin that is supposed to do this. Please point me in the direction of any other plugin that does one or both of the following:

1) Automatic redirect
Capture the old URL and search the database for a match. If found, redirect the browser to the correct page immediately. If not, send the browser to the front page.

2) Intermediate page
Capture the old URL and display a list of posts that match the query.

Always, capture every 404 error with origin for further study and action.

Option #2 is what the redirection plugin promises to do. It may not be interesting for a blog with a constant topic such as tennis, gardening or cooking. If there are a lot of posts with vague personal titles compromised of only one word, the resulting list might be huge!

Time Capsule: My First SEO Article Ever

UPDATED: As I was curious to find out if someone else had ever claimed to have written the frist SEO article ever, I noticed that Google picked up this article within an hour of me writing it. This blog was installed, configured and launched officially on March 17, 2008 and has only been 30% SEO optimized (according to my ever expanding WordPress optimization checklist).

In 1995, I wrote an article about Search Engine Optimization and it was picked up by a few local media outlets. I have lost the article itself, but found this review of it recently (dated December 1, 1995). It must be the first SEO article ever and I assure you the info it contained is no longer à-propos. You see, SEO has become a sport and I never played professionally.

I don’t consider myself a SEO-type person. I just make WordPress themes Google-friendly and program sites that are not too complicated so search engines don’t choke on them. I program all my widgets server-side so the resulting pages can be indexed by Google and I have never used black-hat techniques or link farms to accomplish my goals. In the past 10 years, I have benefited from affiliate revenue generated by over 350,000 web pages, all of them about a specific product, most often jewelry or clothing. Then I got bored with Web Gardening and progressively took down all my websites to get back to helping other people succeed on the Web.

Today, my main goal in being #1 for Friendly Webmaster is that people never remember how to spell my first name!

When I published the blog-like <hypermedia> 13 years ago I was just so proud that the title had animation!

Ze article is in French btw, as are most of the projects I worked on between 1994-1997 when I lived in Quebec City.

Blogs 101: Blogs in Plain English by Common Craft

Excellent and engaging video made by Commoncraft. You can also see many other including the one about zombies.

Tinkering with WordPress 2.5 RC1

I installed WordPress 2.5 RC1 over lunch and tinkered with it a bit. I am looking forward to seeing what other developers think about it. I have not come across any problems posting, widgetizing or editing it yet. I have a list of full sized screen shots below.

The only thing I have found that will likely drive me nuts is the fact that the delete link is right next to the SAVE/POST button.

The installation process has not changed. The login screen remains the same.

The Dashboard has been published before, but I re-capped it for my own use.

I noticed much change in the Post/Write page with some new tools for media (sound, video, etc.) and an extended tool bar with full screen mode and advanced Word-style buttons like pre-defined formats, special characters, full alignment (justify), undo, erase formatting, paste from Word and paste as plain text (Thank you WordPress!) and even more.

Posts/Write is the most used interface and I am looking forward to giving it a spin but I have not yet decided which blog I will update yet. I have 5 blogs and, as a Webmaster, maintain about 15 for others so I try to run a few instances of each stable release on my own blogs. But for now Wordpress 2.5 RC1 is in the Sandbox.

Another interface that has changed quite a big is the widgets page. I don’t have much to say about other than it looks good.

The Media Lab #20: Siftables

I stopped by the MIT Media Lab today and spied LabCAST #20: Siftables. I have been following the projects at Media Lab for about 10 years and my favorite project used to be Electronic Paper and Kismet The Robot.

Photo: MIT Media Lab LabCAST #20: Siftables

Siftables are a series of small screens that can interact with each other as they are moved on a table or in the air. They do not appear to have a touch-sensitive screen. While these look like engaging gadgets, isn’t this something that can be easily done with software on a Microsoft Surface?

But watching this video I felt the same as I had when I first saw Saturday Night Live’s fake commercial for a cross between an Apple Newton and 3M PostIt Notes in 1993.

The Fix: Youtube Videos Broke My Blog!

You may have noticed that when you embed a Youtube video in your blog it looks just fine until you edit that post again. This is a problem present in most Wordpress themes, or at least the ones I like the best.

That is because Wordpress parses your edited code and does two things that disrupt the display of the rest of the page.

First of all, it will insert a line break after your parameters (</param>). This is simply because the engine recognizes that a closing tag is a decent place to put a line break. I agree for the most part.

Second of all, it takes </object> at the end of the embed code and puts it just after the <object> definition rendering the rest of the parameters useless. This will usually happen the second time you edit the post. Why? Because there are line breaks in your parameters!

By the way, if you notice your code starts with & lt ;/object, it is because you pasted your embed code while in Visual mode. Simply delete the code block and re-paste it while in Code mode.

What can you do?

Don’t ever edit that post again! Just kidding, here’s what you should do while editing those typos.

Make sure there are no line breaks by putting your cursor at the end of the line and pressing [Delete]. If you delete a character, simply type it back. When you are done you will notice that the end of each line happens to be a space within the <param> like the code shown below.

And don’t forget to take the </object> and put it back at the end!

Now share that sleepee kitteh with the world!