Giving the WordPress client for Android a try on my HTC Desire.
Testing text formatting: bold, italics, underline, strikeout & link.
Blockquote text.
Photo taken from phone.
While developing Basic-SEO I’ve found the following sites very useful for reference purposes:
WordPress Plugin Repository – http://wp-plugins.org
You can’t beat learning by example, here you can browse the source code of all the plugins WordPress.org hosts.
WordPress PHP Documentation – http://phpdoc.wordpress.org/
All the comments from the WordPress source code extracted in HTML format and correctly linked, very useful for looking up functions.
WordPress Hooks Database – http://adambrown.info/p/wp_hooks
Database of all the action & filter hooks that have ever been available in any WordPress release and where it occurs in the source code.
WordPress Codex – http://codex.wordpress.org/
The official documentation for WordPress, has a very useful developer documentation section.
It’s time to unveil my first WordPress plugin: Basic-SEO. It’s a very, very simple plugin really, it applies a pre-defined set of search engine optimisations to your active theme. It has no configuration options at all at the moment it just achieves the goal I had in mind for it. I thought I’d release it as it is now in case anyone else finds it useful. I’ve already got a list of features I’d like to add to it but my next step is to get it listed on WordPress Plugins.
If you find the plugin useful or have an feedback then please let me know.
As I’ve recently changed the theme I use in WordPress I’ve lost all the basic SEO tweaks I’d made. Rather than make the tweaks again to this theme I’ve decided to convert them into a simple WordPress plugin, should allow me to get my hands dirty with the inner workings of WordPress and plugins as well as save a bit of time in the long run. I’m also planning on documenting the development of the plugin here.
While Java is my preferred language of choice I’m sure it won’t hurt to stay involved in PHP.
Well 2009 came and went quickly, the majority of it was spent buying and then moving into our first home (more on that another time). I then proceeded to spend the last 6 months thinking about what I want to use this site for and very little time doing anything about it. Yesterday I started to make a few changes, I configured WordPress as the CMS behind the whole site rather than just being used for a blog. It’s not my ideal solution but it’s a start in the right direction at the very least. I’m looking for a bliki type solution really along the same lines as Yaki that powers Tao of Mac. But until I find a Java based version that I like it’ll do for now, should allow me to focus on the content rather than the mechanism for getting the content online anyway. I’ve also dropped the “www.” from the URL for the site, it was long enough anyway!
I think I’ve got WordPress configured correctly just need to go through all the posts and fix any broken links and images due to the mod_rewrite/redirect rules I’ve put in place. Next thing on the list is to scrap the current theme and go with “Twenty Ten” until I either find a minimalistic theme I like or make my own.
I finally got round to upgrading the blog to WordPress 2.6.1 last night and it seemed to go without a hitch. It was my first upgrade of WordPress so I checked their site for upgrade instructions before I went through the process, and to my surprise the page had already been upgraded for 2.6.1. The documentation for WordPress is fantastic and proof that an open source project can do it just as well as a commercial offering.
I’ve been tweaking my theme recently to make it more search engine friendly and it seems to have worked as I’m getting a few hits direct to posts from Google searches. In case anyone is wondering I’ve just made sure the HTML meta tags always have values (using the post excerpt & tags) and that the post title comes first in the page title if applicable. I know there are some plugins I could have used to do the same job however I learnt quite a bit about WordPress themes in achieving my goal. I’m more familiar with WordPress and themes now than I was before anyway.
Does anyone have any other SEO tips they can suggest?
