As much as I adore the current theme I’m using, there’s one huge problem with it…

I didn’t create it!

The blog still feels like rented space to me and not the ‘home’ I’m ultimately seeking. So, let’s do something about that, shall we?

In my very first post here I discussed our options when selecting themes. The last option I mentioned was the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) route. We’re going to explore this more in the coming weeks as I start this series of posts on the topic.

Before I go any further I should point out that I am not an expert theme coder. I expect to make mistakes, blunders, and bone head moves (all in public, no less!) which I ultimately hope to be called to answer for via comments from my readers. I simply mean to come at this as an ‘intermediate’ because let’s face it, newbies and experts aside, a lot of us fall into this category of skill level.

Who knows. Maybe we’ll all learn something in the process.

Preparations:

I’ve setup two sub-domains to aid in the development of the new theme. The first sub-domain will house a default WordPress setup with a theme switcher plugin installed. This way, I’ll be able to post about my progress and provide a link to a working version of the theme on a post by post basis. That’s to say if someone a year down the road is reading the post, the link provided will demo where the work stood on that particular day. A visual timeline of sorts.

The second sub-domain will house the theme images. Most browsers can only load 2-4 images simultaneously from any single domain. By keeping theme images on a sub-domain and content images on the main domain, I can increase the load speed of the site dramatically by allowing an additional 2-4 images to be loaded at the same time. (A preliminary step in page optimization)

Today’s Link simply takes you to the default WordPress theme. Nothing special there.

In my next post we’ll be stripping that puppy down to basic code. From there we’ll start building our new theme based on what’s left. Ripping apart and rebuilding a default theme is a great learning technique, not only for WordPress, but other CMS’s as well.

Themes Coding, Optimization, Themes View Comments

One of the first things suggested to me in regard to blogging was to have my picture taken and start plastering that along side my name as my avatar. Branding… bla bla bla.

As good as this idea was I have an aversion to having my picture taken. I hate it! I’m much like my father in this way. In fact, the last time I had my picture taken (that I know of) was for my 20 year old driver’s license. We all know how ‘good’ those pictures can be.

My fake smile comes off as ‘creepy’ every time, in my opinion. So instead of creeping out the entire blogosphere, I’ve decided to go the mascot route.

Allow me to introduce you to Kaffy – The Kaffeinated Kitty. Kaffy’s been with me for a number of years now and we’ve been through thick and thin together. He’s appeared with such slogans as ‘Coffee Addict’, ‘More Coffee’ and ‘Juan Valdez is my buddy’ and currently sits beside several thousand forum posts across the web. He’s associated with my forum nickname of StarLab.

If you see Kaffy now, the first thing you should think is: ‘OMG! It’s Larry!’ The second thing you should think is: ‘I Need Coffee!’

My buddy Kaffy – Saving the Internet from my creepy smile. lol

Odds N Ends Asides, Social Media View Comments

I’m guessing the more experienced among us can go grab a smoke and coffee while I, once again, talk about starting up.

Too much information (TMI) and not enough time can be a harsh cocktail. If you’re like me then you have a real life job to work at too. So how do you manage your time effectively when dealing with all the information that flows on a daily basis?

On a previous venture into blogging I made the mistake of trying to follow everything. I’d obtained an exported OPML for my RSS reader containing hundreds of feeds and signed up to all the hot social sites. It was too much and I found myself turned away rather than inspired to continue. 

This time around I’m taking it slower. Instead of someone else’s OPML file I’m building my own RSS subscriptions in the areas that interest me alone. Much less clutter. I can follow a couple dozen blogs better than a couple hundred. Same thing with social sites. I’m following/friending fewer people this time also.

Don’t get me wrong. I doubt things will remain this light as I continue on. I may end up at those several hundred feeds and many friends at some point anyway, but at least it will be a silent progression rather than a cacophony hitting me all at once. Perhaps the future will allow more time to handle the load.

I guess the point here is ease yourself in. There’s nothing worse than sitting there at 4:30am with an unfinished post and having to work at 8am. Why did you stay up all night sidetracked from what you set out to do?

Stay focused. Less can actually mean more in the long run. (You are in this for the long run, right? )

Blog Startup Blog Startup, Social Media View Comments

I’m still not seeing what the attraction is but the damned place attracts millions of people from all over the globe. There is no question that this is THE hot spot on the Internet.

None of what Facebook offers is new to me in any way. I’ve been chatting, playing online games, and communicating with people online since 1985. It’s little wonder why I find it boring.

However, since starting this blog I’ve been thinking about Facebook in the capacity of a promotional tool. Certainly sounded like a good idea.

However, after reading Nick Bradbury’s post The Great Un-Friending of 2009 I realized the flaw in my thinking.

Anyway…because I never used Facebook, I just blindly friended anyone and everyone.  Which now, of course, makes it such a noisy place that I can’t possibly spend any time there.

This is exactly the place I found myself now. Since your reach only goes as far as your friend list, you need to add massive amounts of people as friends in order to benefit yourself in any possible way.

I’d added quite a few new people in the last couple weeks in hope of expanding my reach. The result was a noise level unlike anything I’d seen before! Emails, alerts, requests, this, that, and the other. There literally was no peace until I followed Nick’s lead. I un-friended many of the newly added ones earlier tonight. Back to my original short list of close friends.

Ahhh… some peace at last! (No offense to anyone dropped)

Will I be using Facebook for Blog Promotion? If I think something I’ve written here will interest any of my close friends then I may share it there. Otherwise, I doubt Facebook will play any significant part in my promotion.

Am I giving up too soon? Is there a way to use Facebook effectively and noise-free? If so, please comment because I’m not seeing it.

Blog Promotion Blog Promotion, Social Media View Comments

There must be a lack of image ad sponsors out there when it comes to Google Adsense. I’ve tried running these on two blogs in the past and never once found them relevant to any of my content.

I’m guessing because there are fewer image ad sponsors, diversity suffers. If your content doesn’t match any of the available image ads then you’re just given anything. In my case, I got nothing but online gaming ads with the occasion web host ad or something equally irrelevant.

The default at Google for Adsense is ‘text and image ads’ when setting up your ad block. I had switched to ‘image ads only’ for a few months and found clicks had dropped from their normal rate of ‘rarely’ to ‘never’ for the duration. About a month ago I switched them to ‘text ads only’ and have started to see those pennies rolling in again. (I should be able to retire in the year 2875! )

If you want people to click on ads they must be related to the topic the reader is visiting for. If your blog is about electronics or other popular topics of image ads then you’ll likely do alright with with them. Otherwise, I find ‘text ads only’ is the way to go.

I’m thinking Adsense and similar programs should be thought of as stepping stones anyway. Once your blog reaches a Google Page Rank (PR) of 4 or better there are much better ways to utilize your ad space. I can only hope to achieve such ranking so I can blog about those choices at some point.

Advertising Adsense, Google View Comments

To this point I’ve touched on the subject of Forum Profiles and Signatures as a great way to build backlinks to your new blog. (Over 200 for here now!)

Since I moderate on several Forums I thought it might be a good idea to post about proper Forum behaviour. If you go into a Forum with links a-blazin’ chances are you’re going to find yourself infracted, or worse, banned from the Forum altogether.

Each Forum will have their own set of rules but here are a few things that might help keep you out of hot water:

• Finding the Rules: Most welcome emails from joining a new forum will usually contain a link to the Rules. Look for it, read and understand them. Sticky posts in the topic listing is another place to look. There’s nothing worse than spending months building up post counts just to find yourself banned for a simple link drop.
• The Signature itself: Some Forums simply do not allow links in Signatures. Others will have restrictions or posting requirements before you’re allowed to have live links appearing. Be sure to check any rules before doing this.
• Posting: Your Signature links will do nothing unless you get involved in the Forum Community. Adding replies to threads, or creating your own threads can see mention of your site appear in Google within several minutes of posting. (Depending on the popularity of the Forum) Don’t throw your link into every post. Your signature will take care of that.
• Be polite: Just because the person you’re talking to can’t punch you in the face doesn’t mean you can be rude. Remember, these people are a community. They don’t take kindly to someone new mouthing off to their friends.
• Don’t tick off the Moderators: More of a personal request than a useful tip.

I’ve been involved in Forums to one degree or another for many years. Not only are they a great place to meet people with similar interests, but they also contain a community of knowledgeable people who can help with even the most perplexing problem.

Don’t overlook this valuable resource!

Blog Promotion Blog Promotion, Blog Startup, Web Forums View Comments

That’s right! Take a freakin’ walk! You’re done, finished, ka-put, ceased, closed, come to an end, concluded, discharged, dispatched, disposed of, ended, finalized, in the past, lapsed, realized, resolved, settled, sewn up, terminated, through, tied up, worked out, wound up, wrapped up, and just plain history!

Do you get the feeling I’m glad to see it go? Yeah, it hasn’t been one of my best years by a long shot.

So, as I look forward to 2009 I can only share my optimism by saying:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

May 2009 make you happy, healthy and prosperous.

Odds N Ends Asides View Comments

I’ve been surfing around to other blogs quite a bit recently and I’m shocked at how much sidebar pollution is out there. Specifically – advertising.

I’m all for making a few bucks and I’m hoping the few spots I’ve allocated to ads will at least cover my hosting at the end of the year. The last thing I want to do is distract people from the content. Or worse yet, send them screaming for the hills just because it takes forever for the site to load.

If you’ve taken the pains to optimize your theme, then why are you going to turn around and slow things down by overpopulating your sidebar? In some cases I’ve been able to finish reading a post before the page had even finished loading. (Thankfully, content was rendered first.)

The first thing I learned in web design was the fact you have approximately 15-20 seconds to grab a user’s attention. After that you can consider them gone. In these days of high speed access, most designers and site owners have pretty much forgotten about this. We still have a certain portion of the Internet population that still uses Dial-up.

Slow loading sidebar? Here’s a few things to look for:

• Flash Video Ads. These things take a fair amount of resources and bandwidth. I have the luxury (?!) of running an older computer. These ads, especially when more than one appears on a page, bog down my system to the point where I have to wait for the ad to finish playing before I can do anything else. The quickest solution to this is to simply close the window or tab. Not something a blogger wants. Not all flash video ads demand such resources but a good portion do. (Especially those Telus ads which dominated Adsense prior to Christmas)
• Plugins and Widgets. Some people are just wild about adding all the latest greatest sidebar widgets and plugins. Truth be told, many of these make a huge amount of http and database requests. Some plugins are just coded poorly which doesn’t help matters either. If you think your sidebar is slowing things down, deactivate all plugins and corresponding widgets then start them up again one at a time. Eventually you’ll find the culprit.
• Community Avatar Widgets. Yay! It’s great to see who’s been visiting, but each one of those tiny little avatars require an http request to load. If you run several of these community widgets (each displaying last 100 visitors) then you slow down the load time considerably. Next to flash ads, I found these to be once of the highest load times on many sidebars.
• External Content. If a plugin or widget needs to pull it’s information from a 3rd party site, this can slow things down if the target site is either busy or experiencing technical difficulties. Ensure that the site provides it’s content on a timely basis, otherwise lose it.

I’m yet to finalize exactly what will appear in my sidebar, but rest assured. I’ll be watching the above points very closely.

Plugins Optimization, Plugins, WordPress View Comments

It’s officially been 10 days since uploading Wordpress to my server. I thought I would take a quick moment to review the actions and results so far.

Actions:

1. Selected a Theme and hacked it into place.
2. Added relevant content.
3. Added essential Plugins (Firestats, Discus, Google XML Sitemaps, etc)
4. Added my URL to forum signatures and profiles.
5. Almost swallowed an Earwig.
6. Set myself up in various social networks. (Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc)

Results:

1. A Theme that is easy to read and more importantly, easy on the eyes.
2. Getting hits from Search Engines for several posts I’ve made to this point.
3. Plugins just make life easier and in some cases neater.
4. I’m now seeing backlinks due to Forum Signatures. Like I said previously, it takes some time but I’m expecting to see anywhere from 500-1000 backlinks in the coming months just from previous Forum Posts. (Even more if I remain active in these forums)
5. Puke!
6. A blog is useless without connecting to other people. By adding and updating Social Media accounts, I’ve seen several visits from these services.

Some Stats:

• Over 150 Unique visitors
• Over 250 Page views
• 14 RSS subscribers. (As of today… this number fluctuates daily)
• 6 hits from Search Engines for content added to this point.
• Over 100 backlinks. This will likely grow daily for the next while as more Forum Posts are added to the list.
• Over 48 (double sized!) cups of coffee have been consumed.
• Approximately 300 cigarettes have been smoked.
• A dozen meals skipped.

I guess the next step is to get out there and start reading and commenting on other blogs. I’ll be yapping about this method in another post later. Doing this will also prompt more ideas for better posting. To this point I’ve just been posting about what I’ve been doing here and other things off the top of my head from experiences gone by.

It’s time to bring myself up to current speed in the topics I plan to cover here.

Blog Promotion Blog Promotion, Blog Startup View Comments

So, you’ve been out there for hours (or even days) looking for that perfect theme. Suddenly, pay dirt! You hit one that suits your needs beautifully.

You download it, activate it, then head off to the widget screen to set up the sidebar. But Oh no! The theme doesn’t support widgets!

At this point you have two choices:

1. Continue looking for another theme which does support sidebar widgets.
2. Get brave and start hacking in your own widget support.

Since the first option is boring, we’ll talk about the second. Widgetizing a hard coded theme is drop dead simple and only takes 3 simple steps!

(Disclaimer: Don’t yell at me! Backup your theme first. Have a quick restore option handy)

Step 1

Locate "sidebar.php" in your theme directory. (Note: Code will vary!!) Load it up and you will see something like this: (search for: <div id="sidebar">)

<div id="sidebar">
<ul>    
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=<h2>Main Menu</h2>' ); ?>
    <li><h2><?php _e('Categories'); ?></h2>
    <ul>
<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name'); ?>
    </ul>
    </li>
    <li><h2><?php _e('Archives'); ?></h2>
    <ul>
<?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?>
    </ul>
    </li>
        <<<<Snip!>>>> <-- To keep this brief  
</ul></div>

There’ll be more code but here I snipped it for the sake of brevity. Basically you want to remove any hard code that makes up the sidebar (wp_list_pages, wp_list_cats, etc) and replace it with support for widgets.

Step 2

In the example given here, we replace all that with this:

<div id="sidebar">
<ul>
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')
        || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul></div>

Save and upload this to your server.

Step 3

Find and load "functions.php" (If it doesn’t exist, create it) Make sure the file contains this line:

<?php if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )register_sidebars(2);?>

Save and upload this to your server.

Now you can activate and use widgets. You may need to adjust some CSS, depending on how the theme was coded, but you should be done.

You can also run a combination of both hard coded and widgeted sidebars:

<div id="sidebar">
<ul><li><h2>Main Menu</h2>
    <ul>
    <li><a href="http://www.example.com/about/"  
    title="About example">About example</a></li>
    <li><a href=http://www.example.com/ 
    title="Back to the Home Page">Home</a></li>
    </ul>
    </li>    
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar')
        || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
    <li><h2>W3C Valid</h2>
    <ul>
    <li><a href="http://validator.w3.org/check/referer" title="<?php _e('This page validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional'); ?>"><?php _e('Valid <abbr title="eXtensible HyperText Markup Language">XHTML</abbr>'); ?></a></li>
    <li><a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://www.example.com"><?php _e('Valid  <abbr title="Valid Css!">CSS</abbr>'); ?></a></li>
    </ul>
    </li>
</ul></div>

I’ve been through many theme hunts. It wasn’t long before I realized this method as essential knowledge. It broadened my theme-hunting options greatly.

Hope someone finds this useful.

Themes Themes, WordPress View Comments