Wordpress Workshop

Get old versions of wordpress

admin — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 02:16:11 +0000

For those of you who are not aware, you can get old versions of wordpress from the wordpress release archive. I am one of the few who is not happy with the current release, it breaks some important plugins that are no longer supported so I deleted the newer version (2.3) and restored my old database.

I learned a valuable lesson, never upgrade until you have fully tested new versions of wordpress. Setup a test server on a sub domain or home computer.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin

admin — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:50:30 +0000

What a time saver Keith Dsouza’s Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin is! When I used to update my handful of blogs it required several minutes and I would often forget to turn plugins off and screw other things up during the tedious install. This plugin won 3rd prize in a recent Wordpress plugin competiton and I highly suggest those who have little free time and others not technically inclined to use this plugin to keep yourselves current. I just upgraded this blog in a few seconds. Excellent! [More…]

Redirect All Wordpress Plugin

admin — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 18:12:33 +0000

Ever delete posts and you do not remember the URLs so you have no way of adding a line to .htaccess to 301 the links to your main domain?

Ever have a screwed up 404.php page that just doesn’t work?

Dax made a cool plugin that I will name Redirect All because he believes that 404’s are a waste of time and uses lots of sware words to describe things.

Add that to the choosing your preferred domain plugins and you are livin’ large.

Thanks Dax!

Two plugins for preferred domain mastery

admin — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 17:13:23 +0000

Here are two plugins that help you set a preferred domain in wordpress. It is important to do so for ranking in search engines because they see www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com as being different URLs which can cause something know as canonicalization. In short, search engines do not like troublesome paths.

Matt Cutts from Google:

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

* www.example.com
* example.com/
* www.example.com/index.html
* example.com/home.asp

Here are the two Wordpress plugins for preferred domain mastery:

No www - This simple plugin by Photo Matt himself allows you to choose the short URL for you domain so it will look like yourdomain.com minus the “www” in the beginning.
Enforce www - Another easy to activate plugin by Mark Jaquith that allows you to choose the URL for your domain with the “www” so it will look like www.yourdomain.com

And do not forget this last step:

Google:

The preferred domain feature enables you to tell us if you’d like URLs from your site crawled and indexed using the www version of the domain (http://www.example.com) or the non-www version of the domain (http://example.com).

If you do not have an account with Google Webmaster Tools get one and choose your preferred domain.

DO NOT overlook these details, they can have HUGE benefits for building your relationship with search engines that will eventually bring your blog what is known as organic traffic.

Nofollow Case by Case

admin — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 14:33:14 +0000

Here is an interesting plugin for Wordpress called nofollow case by case which allows you to choose comments to give link credit to case by case. This is also a good way to reward your visitors and avoid low quality or spammy comments getting credit at the same time.

So there is no reason anymore to use rel=”nofollow” by default!

Keep in mind that good links will be honored by Google. Why shouldn`t you build your network and help your friends?

Download: Nofollow Case by Case

Translate Widget 2.0

admin — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 17:19:10 +0000

Trevor notified me that his outstanding old translate widget is now version 2.0 so you can just plop it in your sidebar using your widget console in Wordpress.

It was smart to name it a “translate widget” because widgets are hot!

Download: Translate Widget Version 2.0

Thanks again Trevor!

Wpdesigner Wordpress Themes

admin — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 19:31:56 +0000

Small Potato @ Wpdesigner.com is offering free wordpress themes. His plan is to make 1 a day for 30 days and judging from the high quality of these templates, he will make many people happy.

Check them out, thanks Small Potato for being so humble about your outstanding talent.

WordPress Ultimate Gamer’s Pack

admin — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:43:33 +0000

Ever wonder what your blog looks like to people trying to access it from Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS-Lite or Sony PSP?
David Harper offers a cool plugin that renders a blog to be viewed from the above gaming devices.

Download the WordPress Ultimate Gamer’s Pack here.

Apple iPhone version coming soon, thanks David!

Ford is using Wordpress

admin — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 03:26:35 +0000

Photo Matt notes that Ford is using Wordpress.

Other than the need to update permalinks it looks pretty nice.

I wonder how much the site builder charged for that 1 hr. project?

Wonder if he is going to break Matt off a chunk.

Wordpress T-shirts

admin — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 06:23:53 +0000

Get your Wordpress T-shirts here - there appears to be a short supply so grab one now. Note: Clever marketers often get one to react by saying that things are in “short supply”, worked on me, I just bought a cool, black and white Wordpress T-shirt! It’s mine all mine!