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In: Wordpress
With: 5 Comments

I just implemented a new theme on my WordPress website. I’ve been wanting a new design for well over a year but couldn’t find what I wanted: a simple design with lots of subtle transparency, rounded corners, and a simple color pallet. Then I found the Aeros theme (created by Joe at TheBuckMaker.com blog) and it provided a great starting point — but some modifications were required. I started off by prepping my site content for the new theme. Using the P2Pconverter extension, I converted many of the old and outdated pages into posts to unclutter the top page navigation bar. Unfortunately, WordPress does notRead More →

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In: Wordpress
With: 3 Comments

I happened upon the site WebSiteOptimization.com and started testing the performance of my site. I was astounded by how long it would take to load the front page of my site over a 14.4 kbps modem connection. True, not many people use a modem connection anymore, but still, 130 seconds is a long time to wait! Now this the time required to load every last image, not the the time required before the page starts to render and become readable, but still there is room for improvement. So I started playing around with performance settings and quickly made some substantial gains. First of all, IRead More →

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In: Wordpress
With: 0 Comments

My long-time friend Bryan recently described me as “a person who will spend a lot of money on some new electronic gadget and then take it apart before he even uses it.” He’s right; I can’t help myself. I want to make everything “better.” This has extended into the use WordPress Plugins on my site. I’m always looking to add something new and my plugin count has increased to nearly 40. But the list has grown large and I’ve started to debate the usefulness of several of them. I then receive an e-mail from a native Dutch speaker by the name of Ilse, who reverse-translatedRead More →

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In: Wordpress
With: 0 Comments

I finally got around to updating my website to version 2.2.1. The feature I was most looking forward to built-in tagging. I was a previous user of Ultimate Tag Warrior, but I had to stop using it because it broke the WordPress search feature (posts with no tags were not included in search results.) To my surprise, I couldn’t find the tag feature or the Ultimate Tag Warrior importer. After a great deal of Google searching, I found that tagging was removed at the last minute from WordPress 2.2.x and will be delayed until 2.3. Additionally, I found that Christine Davis release a new (actuallyRead More →

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In: Wordpress
With: 1 Comment

I think Ultimate Tag Warrior is one of the most useful WordPress plugins available for Serach Engine Optimization. For those who are familiar, it allows authors to add descriptive tags (keywords), helping search engines categorize the content and ultimately increasing site traffic. This feature is so useful that there are a bunch of people who believe it should be incorporated into the core of WordPress. Unfortunately, to be so popular, I find it surprising that the two latest versions are causing serious problems with the WordPress search feature. Versions 3.1415926 and 3.14159265 have incorrect table joins in the search function. So, if a post (orRead More →

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In: Wordpress
With: 3 Comments

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0 and I’m not all that impressed with the results.  The WYSIWYG editor (that I was so excited to see included) does not work well. In fact, I couldn’t even get it to apply formatting at all in Firefox 1.5. I would highlight the text, click the bold button, and it would flash bold for a brief period before reverting back to non-bold. No idea why. Also, no way to format pictures (float right, for example) or browse images on the server before inserting them. I switched back to ChenPress, which is much more functional. Also, the file-uploader is notRead More →

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In: Wordpress
With: 0 Comments

I have several WordPress plug-ins installed and working. Unfortunately, WordPress does not yet have a decent site to list, rank, vote on, and download plugins. Here are a few that I’m using: Archivist – displays older posts on the front page that would otherwise be lost in the archives Subscribe Me – adds news reader subscription links to the sidebar on the right WP-TinyMCE – WYSIWYG editor that works for both main posts and comments ChenPress – Another WYSIWYG editor. This one based on FCK editor. Does not work with comments as far as I can tell. I’m comparing it to WP-TinyMCE to figure outRead More →

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In: Web
With: 8 Comments

I’ve converted my blog from blogger.com format to WordPress. My initial thoughts are that WordPress is much more customizable and powerful. If you have have your own webhost and know how to ftp files to your server, floowing the installation instructions at wordpress.org will result in a much better blogging experience, especially if you like to tinker!Read More →