Torn Elements

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

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

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

Before I get started here I thought I would just give a quick ‘hat tip’ to mg12 for creating such a great free theme. I’ve only worked on 4 blogs to this point but I’ve been through many themes. This one is an absolute pleasure to work with! Thanks!

However, there were just a few more things I wanted to do.

My installation of Disqus broke the comment links on the single post page. (single.php)

Neither of these links went anywhere as they were making calls to the internal WordPress comment system. Since we’re using Disqus we’ll have to code things a tad differently.

In single.php

<span class="date"><?php the_modified_time(__(‘F jS, Y’, ‘inove’)); ?></span>
            <div class="act">
                <?php if ($comments || comments_open()) : ?>
                    <span class="comments"><a href="#comments"><?php _e(‘Goto comments’, ‘inove’); ?></a></span>
                    <span class="addcomment"><a href="#respond"><?php _e(‘Leave a comment’, ‘inove’); ?></a></span>

Since Disqus does the job for both of these links we can simply remove the line making the #comment reference.

<span class="date"><?php the_time(__(‘F jS, Y’, ‘inove’)); echo ‘. Posted By <a title="author" href="’; the_author_url(); echo ‘">’; the_author(); echo ‘</a>’; ?></span>
            <div class="act">
                <?php if ($comments || comments_open()) : ?>
                    <span class="addcomment"><a href="#disqus_thread"><?php _e(‘Leave a comment’, ‘inove’); ?></a></span>

While here, I added author info to the single post display just like we did previously for the front page. Also we changed #respond to #disqus_thread in our link reference.

While working in single.php I thought I would add code to display an Adsense block just after the post but before the comments. I’ve been told this is a prime ad spot so I thought I would take advantage of it.

Unlike the sidebar ads which were inserted using Text Widgets this had to be hard coded into the theme page. (single.php)

<p class="under">
                <?php if ($options['categories']) : ?><span class="categories"><?php the_category(‘, ‘); ?></span><?php endif; ?>
                <?php if ($options['tags']) : ?><span class="tags"><?php the_tags(”, ‘, ‘, ”); ?></span><?php endif; ?>
            </p>
            <p align="center"><script type="text/javascript"><!–
google_ad_client = "pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx";
/* 468×60, created 12/26/08 */
google_ad_slot = "xxxxxxxxxx";
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
//–>
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script></p>

Finding the code which displays categories and tags, I inserted my adsense code between that and the call to the comments function. Tucked in nicely.

Now that I’m making millions (ha!) I turned to my final task.

I’ve always found that having a comment link at the end of the post is preferable to me than at the top. This theme only features a comment link at the top of the post. We don’t want to move it, we just want to add another at the end of the post.

In index.php

<?php if ($options['tags']) : ?><span class="tags"><?php the_tags(”, ‘, ‘, ”); ?></span><?php endif; ?>
                    <span class="comments"><?php comments_popup_link(__(‘No comments’, ‘inove’), __(’1 comment’, ‘inove’), __(‘% comments’, ‘inove’)); ?></span>

We simply duplicate the code used at the top of the post and insert it after the category and tag code at the bottom.

Now that the user has read the post, there’s a handy link right there to make a comment.

I was honestly expecting this Theme Hacking series to go on a bit more. But, thanks to such great work by the theme author, I think I just might be done hacking.

I bet some of you are wondering about why I’m posting about such simple tasks. Two words: relevant content baby! While I’ve been screwing around getting things setup I’ve been seeing hits for search terms such as: ShareThis, ‘startup wordpress blog’ and most recently, ‘disqus startup’ All of these are due to the content I’ve added up to this point.

A head start, so to speak.

Themes Blog Startup, Themes, WordPress

At this point, sharing my posts is starting to become more of a focus. (Not that I’m writing anything Earth shattering here! ) To this end I have installed a couple more plugins to help with this.

GOOGLE XML SITEMAPS

The first place you want to share your posts is with Google and other Search Engines. This superb plugin regenerates XML sitemaps after posts are published and notifies Search Engines of the changes automatically.

No muss, no fuss. Activate it, review the settings then simply forget about it.

I wasn’t sure if I still needed to go into WebMaster Tools at Google and initially submit the sitemap manually or not, but I did just that anyway. I figured it couldn’t hurt.

WebSite: http://www.arnebrachhold.de … sitemaps-generator/

SHARETHIS

One thing you want on your blog is an very simple way for people to share your posts with others. The ShareThis plugin pulls this off beautifully with many options.

Instead of blathering on about it, check out the ShareThis icon at the bottom of this post and give it a try.

WebSite: http://sharethis.com/

WP-PAGENAVI

This has nothing to do with sharing but does add pagination for navigating through post pages. I like it as it tidies the pages up a bit.

WebSite: http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/ (You’ll have to scroll down)

As you can see I don’t get into a lot of technical detail when describing plugins. At this point those topics have been blogged to death already. I doubt I could add anything new.

I’m just suggesting what I like here.

Plugins Blog Startup, Plugins, WordPress

I’m not sure why I’ve avoided this plugin for so long. I’ve been aware of it for about a year now but never tried it other than to make comments on other blogs. I guess the idea of storing my comment data elsewhere made me a little nervous. I think I’m over that now.

So, balancing myself on the edge of the diving board, I took the plunge and installed it.

The install was drop-dead simple. Create an account with them, upload a few files, activate the plugin and make the desired settings. Done! The only thing missing now are people to make comments. They’ll come soon enough. We’re only on day three here.

So far it looks to be an awesome Comment System. Just from surfing around a bit it looks like support is also top notch.

Come the new year people will be able to comment on blogs with Disqus using their FaceBook Profiles. Also Comments post to the Facebook news feed. I’m too much of a FaceBook dummy to know how this will benefit a blog, but we’ll see.

What more can you ask for?

Well, I do have one issue with Disqus. It breaks XHTML validation. There are several solutions out there but most are for earlier versions and simply didn’t work for me. I did see mention of promises to look into this problem by support staff. So, even though it breaks my efforts to keep everything validated, I’m still willing to use it. That should say a lot about how I feel about Disqus.

This is definitely a plug in you should look into right from the get-go.

Visit their site: http://disqus.com

Plugins Blog Startup, Plugins

As you can see by the screenshot (and site itself) I’ve found a theme! And after only 2 days of searching! I actually found this theme early in my hunt but I wasn’t about to deny myself 48 hours of agonizing searching anyway.

Why I chose this theme…

• Clean look. (Who wants a dirty blog?)
• Supports Widgets.
• Valid CSS and XHTML. (A must!)
• Table-less design. (Also a must!)
• Right Sidebar.

The Right Sidebar was a primary criteria in my search. Likely no real advantage to it but I like the idea of rendering content before anything else. I suspect Search Engines prefer it too.

But with all themes there are some things I wanted changed. So, with my trusty code editor on standby I started hacking.

First up was the XHTML validation. The theme dictated XHTML1.1. Unfortunately, this presents a problem for me. I use Windows Live Writer to compose my posts and I always use images. For some reason WLW will break strict XHTML (and in this case XHTML1.1) validation. It has something to do with image parameters but I won’t go into that in any detail here.

Changing this was simple.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

The above line appears at the top of index.php. A simple change to XHTML Transitional will solve my problem.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

Now I can use WLW to my heart’s content without fear of breaking validation.

Next on my to-do list was to include author information to the post header info.

Previously this theme only included date and comment links. It may just be my sick need to see my name in lights, but I’m thinking ‘recognition’ is a big key in blogging. Be it a picture or a name you want something to stick in peoples minds. The more people see it, them more likely they’ll remember it later.

By changing this line…

<span class="date"><?php the_time(__(‘F jS, Y’, ‘inove’)) ?></span>

 

… to …

<span class="date"><?php the_time(__(‘F jS, Y’, ‘inove’)); echo ‘. Posted By <a title="author" href="’; the_author_url(); echo ‘">’; the_author(); echo ‘</a>’; ?></span>

I was able to easily insert the author info.

With my name in lights I pushed on. Time to insert my FeedBurner Chicklet.

The RSS feed link was hard coded into the theme so back to our trusty editor. I needed a new CSS style for this. I created the following element in style.css:

#burner {
float:right; /* make the box look full */
padding: 5px; /* so chicklet image would line up with RSS image
}

Then in sidebar.php i added this line…

<div id="burner"><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TornElements"><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/TornElements?bg=E1E1E1&amp;fg=000000&amp;anim=1" height="26" width="88" style="border:0" alt="" /></a></div>

… just after the RSS code but within the same display element. Tucked in nicely.

Pretty basic stuff here. I hope I’m not boring too many people. Hopefully it’ll help out some of the newer people entering into blogging.

Themes Blog Startup, Themes, WordPress

Although I’m nowhere near finished with my setup of this blog, I’ve taken some early steps toward getting some backlinks coming in. Certainly nothing major, but the coming weeks will see some good results from doing this.

Forum profiles and signatures are great ways to get the word out. My longevity on the web provides me with an abundance of Forum Accounts and Posts. Busy forums are best, but even dead forums will return a certain amount of link juice. So be sure to hit those long forgotten forum accounts if you decide to go this route.

Forum Profiles are not only viewed by people but Search Engine Spiders as well. A perfect place to stuff your blog URL. I’ve seen several of my Forum Profiles appear in Google within an hour of my joining a forum. Google LOVES forums. Make no mistake!

Forum Signatures is where it’s at! Attaching your blog link to your signature instantly adds the URL to any previous posts you’ve made. I have somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5,000 posts lurking out there. A good portion of these (but not all) will start showing up as backlinks to my blog. It may take a bit of time for them to start showing so it’s best to do this activity ASAP.

I launched a blog about a year ago and achieved a Page Rank of 3 within the first 7 weeks mainly due to Forum Signature links. So yeah, it’s a very effective way to achieve ranking. And people DO click on signature links.

I also added the link to places like FaceBook, LinkedIn and other social networks.

I’ll be discussing other methods of promotion as we go along. For now, we’ll fly with this.

Blog Promotion Blog Promotion, Blog Startup

I’ve been using this Stats Plugin for over a year now on another blog. I love it! It’s the very first Plugin I installed here.

There’s nothing like real time when it comes to stats and FireStats delivers. Why wait for your web server to process the logs? See how busy your blog is NOW.

FireStats has just entered RC4 of their new 1.6 version. Here are a few features this version delivers:

• Performance improvements
• Hits table pagination (Finally!!)
• RSS Subscription tracking (Available to donators only)
• Some other technical stuff… bla bla bla…

I recommend using their other plugin: FireStats Installer. No muss, no fuss. And no waiting for over an hour to FTP this massive archive. You’re literally done in seconds using this. It will also allow you to upgrade to newer versions in the future.

Check it out: http://firestats.cc/

Plugins Blog Startup, Plugins, WordPress

One of the more difficult chores of setting up a new blog is selecting a Theme which is right for you. As you can see by the screen shot here, I haven’t quite made it that far yet.

Many of us are anxious to get posting. Who wants to spend endless hours hunting for Themes? Not me!

Unfortunately, we must make the time. If only there was a ‘Theme Blender’ that would allow you to mix certain aspects from several different Themes together.

When it comes to Themes, you have four choices:

• Free – There are some great free themes out there. Unfortunately they’re lost in a sea of crap themes that will make your eyes bleed after a couple hours of searching.
  Quite often the free themes feature excessive links in the footers. I don’t mind linking to the authors homepage but I don’t need my blog acting as a site map to their entire web site. Fly one link and leave it at that! Otherwise, I’m not interested. NEXT!!
• Paid Theme – If you have the cash this is the way to go. There is some nice work out there and most themes are reasonably priced.
  In some cases authors will allow you to remove footer links in Paid Themes.
• Hire A Professional Coder/Designer – Expensive but you’ll get exactly what you want.
• DIY (Do-It-Yourself) – Likely the most ambitious of the 4 options. It’s cheap and you’ll get exactly what you want. If you’re not satisfied, you’ll know exactly who to blame.

So, in the next few days I’ll be putting on my protective eye-gear and sifting through pages upon pages of GawdAweful Free Themes. I’ll hack something into place. Eventually I’ll go the DIY route.

Since we’re just getting started here I thought I would spend the next few days talking about things I’m doing to get this place up and running.

Boring stuff, but I’ll try to ad some life to it.

Themes Blog Startup, Themes, WordPress