Posted by ljmacphee on February 28, 2008 under hack your template, wordpress, wordpress template | 
There has been much debate recently among bloggers who blog about blogging about whether to use full or partial posts on your front page. As you may have noticed many bloggers are putting the blog on page two and using more a portal type front page to the website. This allows you to show your visitors more posts. The hope is that you get more page views. Good posts that are old can resurface to the front of your website. It also makes it easier for visitors to find things of interest.
In your Wordpress blog it is very easy to switch between partial and full posts. Edit your Main Index Template and just change the line from one to the other.
For full posts use:
<?php the_content(’Read the rest of this entry . . .’); ?>
For excerpt use:
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
The Debate:
Full posts vs partial posts, on the homepage
Full posts or excerpts?
Increase your Alexa rank with post excerpts
Post excerpts on the homepage?
Read more links or full posts?
Cool Themes of this sort:
Jello wala mello
Revolution Magazine
Digs’em WordPress Theme
Here is a very simple demonstration using the Wordpress Classic Theme, you should be able to look at the changes I made to the style.css and index.php page and alter your own favorite theme to this format.
Download Magazine Style Classic WP Theme
Posted by ljmacphee on February 25, 2008 under archives, hack your template, wordpress |
I received a request for this on the ArchivesByCategory plugin page. Unfortunately there isn’t a plugin I can write that will paginate the archives one category to a page for you. But it is not too difficult to do with this plugin.
The plugin takes one category number from you and creates a link list of all the posts in that category.
You must create a separate archive page for each category. Since every template is different it is hard to give really detailed directions but I’ll try.In your theme find your archives.php page. Make a copy one for each category. archives1.php, archives2.php etc.
In archives1.php change
Template Name:ArchivestoTemplate Name: Archives 1change<h2>Archives</h2>to<h2>Category 1’s name</h2>Change<?php wp_list_categories(); ?>to<?php echo archive_of_posts(1); ?>
Now you have to do this for each archive page you want, one per category. The above example is for your first category. For your next category replace the 1s with 2s.Lastly go to your wp-admin->write->page section. Then go to the Page Template drop down menu. You will see an entry for each archive page you made. Create one new page for each template archive entry. Give the page a title ‘Archives for Category 1′ or what ever you wish to call it. Nothing else. The template will fill in the page for you.
Both the plugin and the default WP theme that have been altered are included in the file below. That way you can see what I have done. Do not upload the default theme to your WP site. Just upload the plugin.
The theme is just to make it easier for you to see what I have done.Archives example and plugin
I’ve done this on two of my blogs so far, Herself’s Houston Garden, and Herself’s House Plants. It is much cleaner and a much nicer way of sorting your archives. I hope to have all my blogs updated to this method in the next week or two.
Posted by ljmacphee on February 22, 2008 under blogging, wordpress |
Everyone has had their blog scrapped. Some of my blogs have even been totally cloned elsewhere. While you can take up a war against bots and scrapers the RSS feed still sends out your entries to anyone who wants them.
All of the major blogs about blogging claim you should run a full feed to get the most traffic. After seeing a blog of mine totally cloned I stopped doing that. There was a 10%-30% increase in blog traffic when I went to a partial feed. Now my blog traffic seems to jump every 3 months anyhow so it may have nothing to do with my rss feeds. But it certainly did not hurt to go to partial feeds.
Another tactic is to try to put a link back to another entry in your blog somewhere in the first few sentences of your articles. Then even if it gets reposed there will be a link back to your blog. A blog can’t ever have too many links.
I ran across RSS Footer Options a Wordpress plugin that will allow you to add a link or comment to every entry in your rss feed. And there is MaxPower’s Digital Fingerprint plugin for Wordpress which puts a fingerprint in your rss feed which you can then use to locate republished material.
Posted by ljmacphee on February 20, 2008 under things you should know |
iPhone web browsing makes up most of the mobile phone web browsing while making up only 2% of the smart phone market. (Google sees surge in iPhone Traffic, and Google betting big on mobile market and Apple ).
So what are people doing with those other smart phones? I use mine to view web pages daily. What is most important here is that mobile websurfing is just beginning. Is your website mobile friendly? Your time to update it may be getting shorter.
Make a mobile friendly version of your blog with Google Reader