From the category archives:

WordPress

Speed Test Your Blog

by Ken on November 21, 2009

in Blogging, WordPress

Speed Test Your BlogWith the latest word from Google, that they MIGHT consider to include loading speed into their algorithm, I decided to have a look what I could do to improve the performance of my WordPress blog.

It turned out that there is a lot you can do, without involving your host’s tech department, to speed up your blog, considerably.

However, before you start fine tuning your blog, you must first know how it performs right now, in its current state. It might just happen that you’re so fortunate that your blog loads at the speed of lightning, but how would you know, if you not test it first?

[click to continue…]

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Empty Canvas & Swift – Two Fresh Themes

by Ken on August 23, 2009

in WordPress

I stumbled upon two really sleek, fresh and free WordPress themes today, Empty Canvas and Swift, as I was browsing the Weblog Tools Collection.

Empty Canvas WP ThemeLet’s start with Empty Canvas, which I think shows that less is more. The clean layout, which offers plenty of ‘breathing room’ between the elements, brings the content into focus, which is exactly what a good theme should focus on.

The only thing that bothers me is that the font color is a tad too bright; I personally feel that reading text, with low contrast, to be quite tiresome for my eyes. However, that is an easy fix, if you would like to change it, though, and nothing that would prevent me from using this theme.

Something that is interesting to read, but rarely seen, is how a theme designer thought, as a theme was created. However, the creator of Empty Canvas, Adrian Diaconescu, has done just that and put together a comprehensive background story of his theme. You can click here to read the whole story behind Empty Canvas and download it.

SWIFT WP ThemeThe other theme that really caught my eye was, SWIFT, a sleek, fast loading theme with a clean typography, and some SEO tweaks.

SWIFT comes with a vast amount of features, neatly bundled together on its option page, which gives you the ability to make your blog, a bit more personal and unique.

For example, you have 8 different color schemes to choose from and a nifty color picker, to help you out.

Other features are ad management from the option page, popular posts highlighted on the home page, sidebar and footer with four widgetised sections and much more.

One thing that makes SWIFT interesting is that it seems to be under active development. The latest version, 2.0.2, where released today (August 23), plus the creator has posted some of the upcoming features for the theme, as well.

You can read more about the features that SWIFT has to offer and download it through this link.

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Full Size Images in WordPress Galleries

by Ken on January 10, 2009

in WordPress

When including a gallery in your WordPress post, the thumbnail is linked to a medium size version, which is then linked to the full size image, kind of frustrating, isn’t?

Well, I think it is, and I have often wondered why WordPress behaves like this, so today I did some research on the matter and found out that it isn’t WordPress fault that you get this awkward set up, of your WordPress gallery.

WordPress does exactly what it’s told to do. When there isn’t a corresponding page template present, WordPress select the next in line and presents the content on that one. If you would like your thumbnails linking to the full size picture, without going through the medium size first, you must add the correct page template to your theme.

However, that was something easy and I managed to do it in just a couple of minutes. Nevertheless, remember to do a backup of all important files, before you start to experiment with your WordPress files, then if anything goes south, it’s easy for you to restore your blog.

First open your single.php file and, save it as image.php.

Then find the loop code, which is the code that’s displaying your content on your page and looks something like this, in your theme,

<?php the_content(); ?>

Now, replace that line with the following code,

<?php if (wp_attachment_is_image($post->id)) {
$att_image = wp_get_attachment_image_src( $post->id, "full-size");
?>
<p class="attachment">
<img src="<?php echo $att_image[0];?>" width="<?php echo $att_image[1];?>" height="<?php echo $att_image[2];?>"  class="attachment-full-size" alt="<?php $post->post_excerpt; ?>" />
</p>
<?php } ?>

Then upload your new image.php to your themes folder. Now, when you insert a gallery inside your post, the thumbnail will be lined to a page, showing the full size of the image. I found out that if image.php isn’t present, WordPress is told to use single.php instead, which causes the affect of medium size images, instead of the full.

Also, I would like to send some credit to the WordPress codex and their forum for helping me understand how this worked.

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How To Spot SEO Friendly WP Themes

by Ken on December 29, 2008

in SEO, WordPress

Lately, I have been browsing around for a new fresh theme for Chew The Web, I have encountered several creators of premium WordPress Themes, that claims that their themes are SEO friendly. Which sounds reasonable, since they actually charge, a fee for their themes and you shouldn’t ask for less either, especially since WordPress is pretty SEO friendly straight out of the box.

Now, I understand that SEO has a broad spectrum and that it means different things, depending on who you ask. However, If nothing else, you should at least require that a premium  theme manage to keep the duplicate content issue, to a minimum.

The duplicate content issue, means that the same content appears at several different URL’s. This might cause your site to be devalued or even penalized, in the search engines. Google is pretty good to spot this and usually, when Google finds duplicate content, they choose the version that they think, represent the content best. This could however, be at a location that you doesn’t want to be ranked high in, like the printer-friendly version of your article, instead of the one with your ads or affiliate links. Not quite what you wanted, right?!

OK, how can you determine if you and the designer have the same references, when it comes to SEO? If the designer offers a live demo of the theme, examine it carefully, and click around to see how the content is presented. One thing that would tell if the designer knows something about SEO, is to click on the different archives, tags and categories links.

Now, you wouldn’t want the posts to be shown in full here, preferable only the title with a link to the single post page, should be visible. The next best thing is just to show a short snippet, also called an excerpt, of your posts.

Surprisingly, some of the premium theme designers, seems to have missed the duplicated content issue and doesn’t have a clue of what I’m talking about, when I contact them about it. Some don’t even reply at all, which is a good sign that you might want to look for another designer.

Now, if you already have bought a theme or have a free one, which displays your posts in full on your archives, tags and categories pages, you should know that this is easy to fix. Here is how it’s done:

First, click on the Appearance title in the left sidebar in your Dashboard and then on the Editor link, see image below.

Now you will see a text editor and your theme files to the right, see image below.

Theme files

Click on the Archives (archive.php) link. This will bring up the file that is responsible for how your archives, tags and categories pages are displayed. Now look for the following line,

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

This is the start of the ‘loop’ which will fetch all relevant posts, from your WordPress database. Somewhere beneath that line, you’ll find,

<?php the_content(‘Read more…’); ?>

This is the line of code that tells WordPress to display the full post, which isn’t something we want on this type of page. Your code could look a bit different from the one showed above, however the tag the_content will surely be there.

Now, edit your code and replace the tag the_content with the tag the_excerpt
Your code should now look similar to the one below,

<?php the_excerpt(); ?>

Save your file. Done!

By using the tag the_excerpt(), you have told WordPress to just show a short summary of your post, which is just what we want. Just a note, in some themes you must also edit the files tag.php and category.php in the same way as above.

If you would like to read more about how WordPress works and the tags that is available visit, http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags, for a full list and detailed explanation of what they can do for your blog.

Back to topic now, if you hire a WordPress designer or buys a premium theme, you shouldn’t be forced to mixture with the code, the designer should have done that for you, period! Luckily, you now know how to see if a designer know anything about SEO, before you decide to approach him or her, to create your premium theme.

Also, I will post some sites that provides real SEO friendly premium themes, in a couple of days.

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Drenched: A Stylish WP Theme

by Ken on November 16, 2008

in WordPress

I have found a really good looking WordPress theme, provided by WP Theme Designer, called Drenched. The best part with this theme is that it’s free to use, if you leave the link back to the WP Theme Designer, intact.

Drenched has a very stylish design, with a color scheme of black gray and white. One of the coolest features with the theme is that you can have an image, assigned to your post, through WP’s custom fields. That adds some life to your blog, I think.

It’s also Adsense ready, so all you need to do is to switch the Adsense code to your own. However, there is only one Adsense spot. I would have wanted to have at least one more, at the bottom of the theme. Of course, that is something that you could easily implant yourself.

Drenched displays your features news or post, at the top of every page, with it’s image. That is the one thing that I didn’t like with the theme. It would have been nice if the featured news only showed up on the main and category pages, and not in the single post. Sure it looks nice, but after a while it gets rather tiresome to see the feature news, over and over again. However, that is also something that can be done with some tweaking of your own.

The theme also comes with a page number navigation, through the plugin wp-page-numbers plugin, which you must download and install. That is not a big deal and instructions is provided inside the read me file, that comes with the theme.

Moreover the theme is SEO optimized, uses gravatar on the comments and has a featured video section in the sidebar.

Overall I think Drenched is classy WP theme, that will work right out of the box, without any hassles. Also, as always WP Theme Designer gives you support through the themes post page, if you would need that.

You can read more about the theme, see it live and download it from WP Theme Designer,
http://www.wpthemedesigner.com/2008/11/08/drenched-theme/

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