How to start a blog (WordPress basics)

/*--- holy mAcar00ns!! --- */

Quick and dirty notes for:

BUILDING ONLINE COMMUNITIES WITH DRUPAL, PHPBB, AND WORDPRESS, 2006 Douglass et al.
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Chapter 15 - Starting to Blog and Building Your Community
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- what is trackback uri??
- allow pings?
- shoudl use excerpt for SEO reasons - used in feeds, etc.
- post slug - part of permanent URI -- used for SEO
- custom fields - use depends on plugin

Categories
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- can have parents
- slugs

Post Slugs:
Post Slug
This is where WordPress will "clean up" your post title to create a link, if you are using Permalinks. The commas, quotes, apostrophes, and other non-HTML favorable characters are changed and a dash is put between each word. If your title is "My Site - Here's Lookin' at You, Kid", it will be cleaned up to be "my-site-heres-lookin-at-you-kid" as the title. You can manually change this, maybe shortening it to "my-site-lookin-at-you-kid".


There are three significant differences between pingbacks and trackbacks, though.

1. Pingbacks and trackbacks use drastically different communication technologies (XML-RPC and HTTP POST, respectively).
2. Pingbacks support auto-discovery where the software automatically finds out the links in a post, and automatically tries to pingback those URLs, while trackbacks must be done manually by entering the trackback URL that the trackback should be sent to.
3. Pingbacks do not send any content.

Category slugs:
Category Slug
The Category slug must be unique. The Category Slug is used in the URL. For example, setting a Category Name of "Recipes" and a Category Slug of "food" would show all "Recipes" posts with a URL like example.com/blog/food/.


During the many Save and Continue Editing page reloads, your post title is not permanently set in stone. You can change it at any time during the editing process. However, once you hit Publish the title is cleaned up and turned into a post slug, if you are using permalinks.


take look at RSS Link List Plug-in for wordperss

SEO
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when search engine crawls category pages, it will get excerpt of your posts rather than full content. if you provided the excerpts, then you're in good shape for keyword density

Go for SEO-friendly permalinks -- i would take out the dates, etc. and move the keywords closer to the front of hte URL. the thing is that if you change your permalink structure apparently it changes your old posts too and then you'll have broken links so you have to install a plugin that will handle that with a 301 redirect

apprently howeer the 301 redirect does not transfer your PR. but maybe it saves the existence of the old page with its old PR. i suppose that's how it works.


http://scott.yang.id.au/code/permalink-redirect/

(personally I recommend /%category%/%postname%/)

redirect_canonical

apparently this is now in core. but how do you use it?
http://www.htaccesselite.com/canonical-url-improvements-wordpress-vt296.html

http://trac.mu.wordpress.org/changeset/1218?new_path=trunk%2Fwp-includes%2Fcanonical.php

the thing is that i don't see any redirects though. i tried changing permalink on a wpmu localhsot intallation, and i get a 404 if i change the url.


add_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');

how do you use it???

http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/wp-includes/canonical.php

Fixing URL redirects

Edit wp-includes/canonical.php

Insert this after the 4th row ("function redirect_canonical(...) {"):

$do_redirect = false;

This will set do_redirect always be false, whatever the caller tries to do.

This should take care of most problems, but not all.

http://blinkenshell.org/wiki/Howto/Webpage/Wordpress

Fixing the trailing slash problem

Save the plugin found here to your WordPress plugin directory, like this:

cd ~/public_html/blog/wp-includes/plugins

wget http://flipjarg.blinkenshell.org/share/slashFix.txt

mv slashFix.txt slashFix.php

Open slashFix.php and change line 22 to use your Blinkenshell login name:

$user = "YOUR_USERNAME";

Now just go to your WordPress panel and activate the plugin.


yeah using category/postslug is a good way to do it becuase you get the category in there which is an importnat keyword (unless it's 'uncategorized')

wonder if being on localhost has anything do with redirect_canonical not working

the good thing is that if whatever you do doesn't work you can easily reverse it without consequences.

Labels: blog, blogger, blogging, wordpress

all your bases ar--