Jerry D. Russell dot Com

If you’re a long time WordPress user like myself, you may have gotten used to using the  <!– more –> tag to display teaser material in your RSS feeds.  If so, the decision to remove support for this feature in the 2.5 release of WordPress may have had you a bit put off. Since WordPress 2.5, you either had to go with full feeds, (Not good in cases where traffic to your blog = money) or you had to fill in the description field for each and every post.  (Honestly, if I wanted to use Joomla! I would have been doing so already!)

Enter the Better Feed plugin from Ozh.  Not only does this bad boy return you to the stock behavior of earlier WordPress versions, but it allows you to add just about anything you ever thought of to the footer of your RSS feed. How about Post word counts, custom (Read More) text, number of comments, a nice little reminder that you’re running a contest?  You name it, this plugin will do it.

I’ve used several plugins over the past few years that added advertising to my RSS feeds, but none of those solutions was very elegant.  Better Feed makes this process simple.  Each time a new round of advertisements that I feel my readers would be interested in comes through my inbox, I simply append the best of them using the plugin interface, hit save and forget about it until next week.  No more worrying about whether I’ve fubar-ed the code for one of five rotating ad choices or mucking with a management script designed to handle far more than I will ever need on a C-list blog. (I’m working at hitting th A-List, but hey, it takes time!)

There is a bit of a learning curve to Better Feed, but It’s nothing that should send you into a fit.  The tags are pretty straightforward and the editor will be familiar to anyone who has ever edited their comments before.  Getting things to look just the way you’d like may take a bit of time, but you’ll get there, don’t worry.

In the end, I’m listing this as one of my “Must have” WordPress plugins.  I just don’t know what I’d do without it at this point!

Jerry WordPress, WordPress plugins WordPress, WordPress plugins

If you’re like me and occasionally need to post code snippets in your wordpress powered blog posts, then you absolutely adore the highlight source pro plugin by Christian Knoflach.  Gone are the days of hard to read and uncopyable code snippets.  Highlight Source pro not only displays your code as a preformatted text via the <pre> tag, but it also uses the Geshi color coding system to give your readers properly highlighted code, with no additional effort from you!  Just start a block using a <pre> tag in html view and give it the proper language attribute.  As an example, for a block of php code, you would enter the following:

     echo("This is a sample of a block of php code.");
     echo("any code will work here, from php to BASIC to bash.");
     echo("it will even make sure that the block scrolls without breaking your page template on really long lines like this one.");
     echo("though you may have to type all of the code with the WYSIWYG editor disabled.");
?>

It’s as simple as that (and yes, I’m using the plugin to show you how the plugin works!

The only drawback is that if you’re using the visual editor, you may have to go back and add your code at the end, then save the post from the code editor. This is only a minor annoyance, however, and I think that the pluses definitely outweigh the negatives.

If you’ve got code to share with your eaders, I think this little gem is more than worth the time and effort to use.

Jerry Uncategorized, WordPress, WordPress plugins WordPress, WordPress plugins

If you are a blogger that accepts paid posts or paid reviews, you have either experienced or will experienced Google’s policy of wiping your PageRank to zero. I have seen several methods posted on other blogs for counteracting this issue. The most notable of these methods has been to cave completely to Google and ad rel=”nofollow” to all sponsored links. While this method will work, it isn’t a real help to those of us who depend on paid posts or paid reviews for a revenue while we’re waiting for numbers large enough to drive affiliate sales.

The next most effective method was spelled out by Andy Beard, and included using a robots.txt file to limit the posts that Google indexes. While this method works perfectly well, there are issues involved, especially for people who aren’t all that familiar with updating this file or are uncomfortable doing so. It also has the inherent issue of having to update two files for each and every post that contains a paid advertising link, something that can seriously add to a bloggers workload, which is something I avoid at all costs.

I wanted a method I could use on a post-by-post basis to keep Google happy and to keep advertisers happy, and I think I’ve managed to do so in just a few easy steps In WordPress. I’m not sure how to do this on other platforms, but I’m sure there’s something available for your specific blogging tool of choice if you dig around enough.

1. Verify your blog with Google by using the Verification tool at Google Webmaster Tools. This step is crucial if your blog has already been penalized.
2. Download and install a plugin that allows you to modify meta tags on a per-post basis. I used the MetaTagz plugin by Brandon Buttars, but there are others available, take your pick here just as long as the plugin allows you to modify the robots meta tag.
3. In each and every post you have with a sponsored link, or a link that looks like it might be a sponsored link, modify your robots meta tag to look like this:

   <meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow" />

   This tells the Google spiders to avoid indexing the page or follow any link on that page. Other spiders may or may not honor this tag, but Google is the only spider we’re worried about in this instance.

   Be sure to modify the robots tag on each new paid post!

If you haven’t already had rank lowered or removed by Google you should be all right at this point. If you have had rank penalized or removed, run over and file a reinclusion request. In my case it took about a week to see results, but my main site is now back up to a happy PR4. The nice thing about that ws that the blog only had a PR3 when they hit it!

As I said, I only know how to do this for a Wordpress powered blog. If anyone out there knows how to pull this off using another platform, let me know and I’ll add the instructions here, or just give me a link and I’ll do the legwork.

Peace!

Jerry Blogging, WordPress, WordPress plugins Blogging, Google, pr, WordPress

One of the largest shortcomings of the WYSIWYG editor bundled with WordPress is that like may so called “smart” editors, it likes to change your code for you. Visual editors are notorious for this, and have been for years. It seems that the designers of these editors just “know” that what you were trying to do can be done in a different way, and of course, since their way is better, they code it into their editor.

In the case of the TinyMCE editor bundled with WordPress, the designers were pretty sure that you wouldn’t ever want to use a < div > (or layer) tag. In fact, they felt so strongly about it that they coded the default editor behavior to change any entered into a < p >, or paragraph tag. While this might not be an issue in most simple editing cases, it can be a major headache if what you are trying to do requires the use of any of the tags that the visual editor automatically alters.

This problem is seen time and again on the WordPress Codex help forums. For the more hard core in the WordPress camps, the mantra is simply “never, ever use the visual editor”. For them, entering code into the textbox in its raw state is good enough. While this method works, it is not one I’m fond of. Perhaps if it were still 1997 I would agree, but tools like dreamweaver have spoiled me and I don’t really want to go back to editing my code in plain text. (something I will admit to being a complete nerd about when I started in the industry.)

I ran into this problem the other day on another one of my blogs. The only way to align an image in the theme I’m using there is to wrap that image in a < div > tag with a class of captionright, captionleft or captioncenter. Using the editors built in align function simply doesn’t do anything in a heavy CSS design. The stylesheet rules cancel out the code used by the editor for aligning images. (Which isn’t very good code to start with.)

Enter Trustworthy XHTML, a plugin from Leo Jackson. it’s a bit of a challenge to get configured, as you have to set both global options and then options for yourself as a user, but once that’s done, et viola! Enter code to your heart’s content and WordPress graciously leaves it as you entered it in the code editor. While I’ve only juststarted using Leo’s plugin, I can tell you that I already know I don’t want to live without it.

Trustworthy XHTML gives five options for how WordPress will deal with the code you entered, from the Default, which leaves Wordpress alone to do its thing, to Anything goes, a textbox that will allow you to enter absolutely anything. (I don’t recommend the last option unless you really, really know what you’re about.)

There are other plugins out there, and I’ll be getting to those over the course of the next week or so, but for now Leo has a new fan in me, and his plugin is running happily on my food and cooking blog, keeping my images where I want them.

Jerry WordPress, WordPress plugins Blogging, WordPress, WordPress plugins

One of the projects I’m working on is a community-based blog system. Because of what I’m trying to accomplish, I have a need to add extra fields to my user’s profile information. Without giving anything away, I need a profile picture, some information on what organization my members belong to, state, and a few other pieces of information from each user to realize the vision I had when I started piecing this project together.

While it is completely possible to go in and hack the core files of WordPress MU to give me the functionality I need, I’d be giving up the ability to upgrade easily on the next release cycle, and for me, that’s just not an option. If at all possible I don’t want to mess with the core files at all.

Cimy Extra User Fields provides all of this functionality and a lot more. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come out of the box as a WordPress MU capable plugin. After looking around a bit, I found that it could be adapted, and I’ve done so, though not to the level I’d like… Just yet.

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Jerry WordPress MU, WordPress plugins