If you change a slug in WordPress it will automatically generate a 301 redirect – helping keep your search engine juice nice and rich.
Try it with the following link – it shouldn’t work, and I’ve not done anything manually. Yet it does:
http://www.interconnectit.com/wordpress-course-7th-8th-february-2008/
Some nice tricks inside WordPress. Keep up the good work lads!
Sometimes there’s a need to produce training videos which show how you carry out a certain piece of work. Simply explaining a technique isn’t always possible in words. You need to show people how it’s done.
Alternatively you may wish to demo your lovely piece of software.
And for that, there’s a rather wonderful piece of software called CamStudio. Even better than being great, it’s also Free Open Source. Go get it…
I’m not really one to moralise.
But I’ll say that I feel a slight tingle of concern over Face By Fix – a new website where folk can upload their photos and visitors can say what cosmetic surgery they should consider!
In a way a shocking idea. In another way quite cool. If we were all well balanced individuals then we’d be able to take the discovery that our ears look funny in good humour. But allowing the public to choose what you need improving – especially when the public doesn’t necessarily have your best interests at heart… well really.
So what do you think? Good or bad?
Please Note – This version of the guide is now obsolete and been superceded by our WordPress 2.6 User Guide which can be downloaded from Spectacu.la
One of the things lacking, in the free downloads world, so far as we could see, was a simple, easy to follow WordPress guide designed for non-techie WordPress users.
There are two versions available – the latest which is for WordPress 2.6, and the previous version for WordPress 2.3 – the latest is only available from our Spectacu.la WordPress Themes Club.
To download the NEW WordPress User Guide follow this link to Spectacu.la
Download the OLD! WordPress User Guide Version 2 beta for WP 2.3
I think the document still needs work, but I would greatly appreciate any feedback, comments, or even offers of assistance. It would be quite nice to GPL this but we haven’t done so yet and I personally am 50/50 about it. What do you think?
If you want to help popularise this guide, please digg it, or add it to your favourite social bookmarking system – it would be much appreciated!
I was doing a little thinking about WordPress and its rival CMS systems. And then I thought… it’s not hard to find comparisons if you know where to look. Sadly it’s hard to find hard numbers – people hold this data dearly.
Still – I had a play with Alexa and Google and the stats were interesting to see. WordPress.com has practically exploded. If Alexa’s 2% reach is correct then that makes WordPress.com and all its blogs into one of the most potent internet nodes.
Looking for traffic to WordPress.org and its rivals (I’ve put in Joomla, Plone and Drupal) is also illuminating. I recommend a good play around with the charts. Also look at different regions if you’re working with Google.
I find these stats sites great fun. You can also see the effects of certain events. For example, searches for the word Botfly shot up and into existance last year – and these correlated with spikes in traffic to my story of my own experience of the little blighters. The reason was a TV show.
You can also get a taste for the desires of certain countries… French Kissing, it seems, generates huge interest in Pakistan. They also like English Girls.
I’m not going to rant here about all the great clients, who understand that time is expensive, who listen, pay attention, and do their own research.
But what I do think is that there’s a significant chunk of people out there, with no clue as to the Web, what it’s for, and how it works, who currently seem to be desperate to jump onto the bandwagon. They sometimes actually have some pretty sound business ideas.
Thing is, they turn up at our office with these huge plans. And a budget of £250.
There then follows an awkward silence as we have to explain that £250, like in dentistry, doesn’t really buy you a great deal of cosmetic awe. Even if the underlying software is free, you still need someone with the ability and understanding to implement it correctly. And they’re in demand. Read more
Want to know how we keep track of all those websites and bugs?
It’s quite simple – we use Mantis Bug Tracker. It’s not as powerful as some, but we’re a three man company – a more heavy solution would probably simply be going over the top with things and would carry a support load that we simply wouldn’t be happy with.
In other words, it’s a great fit for our needs and requirements today, and for the next few years.
I was reading through some project management methodology just now (yay! My life is full of joy at last!) and came across the phrase “The Wicked Problem” in this line on Wikipedia:
Steve McConnell in Code Complete (a book which criticizes the widespread use of the waterfall model) refers to design as a “wicked problem” – a problem whose requirements and limitations cannot be entirely known before completion. The implication is that it is impossible to get one phase of software development “perfected” before time is spent in “reconnaissance” working out exactly where and what the big problems are.
One thing worth thinking about in 2008, is fixing the DNS entry to your website. Most here are probably set up just fine, but here’s one of the most common problems we see:
Go to a website – eg, http://www.marketsafeuk.com and it should all work fine.
But take out the www and go to http://marketsafeuk.com and it doesn’t. You just get a time out as the DNS fails to resolve the request.
This happens on a remarkable number of sites, even those belonging to some web designers. And it’s poor because a lot of users have got used to not typing the www subdomain to many addresses. They expect the null subdomain to point to the normal website. How many customers would Amazon miss out on if going to amazon.co.uk didn’t work? Lots….
So – if your site experiences this problem go into your domain’s control panel and set up a new A record where the subdomain is left uncompleted. The ip address should be the same as your usual one. Most control panels should allow this.
Your webserver, in most cases, will be set up by default to serve a blank subdomain the same way as the www one. If not, you may need to talk to your hosts about resolving this.
