We had a wonderful time at WordCamp Birmingham this past weekend. A big thanks to Andre Natta and the B’ham team for all of their hard work. I’m most definitely looking forward to next year’s. The date is already set (September 26-27, 2009), so be sure to mark your calendar! Matt Mullenweg is slated to be a keynote speaker, so it should be awesome!!

The Future of WordPress

The first speaker we saw Saturday morning was Dougal Campbell with “The Future of WordPress.” He briefly covered WordPress’ version history and various milestones over the last few years. Thinking back, I think I started off with either version 1.0 or 1.1. I remember the upgrade to 1.2 being pretty hard, but that was nothing like having to re-do my theme for 1.5, LOL!

Ahh, those were the days … :lol:

He then moved on to the upcoming and much anticipated version 2.7. It’s due sometime next month. According to Dougal, there will be:

• more backend UI re-design;
• upgraded API, so you can upgrade themes, browse and install plugins and themes, etc.;
• comment improvements (many of these are covered in great detail on Otto’s blog) such as:
  • threaded comments
  • paged comments
  • auto-close comments
  • replying to comments from the Admin menu (a HUGE plus!!!)
• sticky posts;
• “Quick Edit” inline editing via Ajax for posts;
• HTTP-only cookies, a security feature;
• a new HTTP request API for plugin developers, replacing the current request API (Snoopy, I think?);
• and many others …

He also went over some possible features for future versions of WordPress:

• APP Importer: for Movable Type, Type Pad, Blogger, …
• A new “default” theme, possibly based on Sandbox or something similar to it. This will be replacing the current Kubrick theme.

Some features that he thinks are likely for version 2.8 (taken from the Trac Tickets) include:

• better page managment: select page order, hide pages
• expanded template functions: users, comments, attachments

We can look forward to seeing more CMS features, more social networking features, better widget management. Perhaps even OpenID (that would be sweet).

Documentation was brought up and he stated that there has been a big push (internally) to get the functions (I’m assuming he means the Codex?) better documented, updated, etc.

SEO For WordPress

The next speaker was Donna Fontenot, who had some really good insight on SEO for beginners. You can view her slides here. It is also available on her website in HTML format.

She started with a very simple recommendation as a first step for blogging: think first, write later. This can apply to so many aspects, and I admit it’s one that I don’t practice enough. You should actually USE the phrases you want to rank well for in blog posts. For best results, use them in prominent places:

• Document Title
• Body Headings
• In posts

Another stickler subject: Blog Visibility. In covering the WordPress Settings, she states that you should always make sure to have the privacy option set so that your blog is visible to everyone, including search engines.

Moving on to Permalink structure, the optimal setting is /%category%/%postname%/. For most blogs it’s ok to be different though. Dates, which are useless for SEO, are useful for users and are most generally preferred. It’s best to make sure that %postname% in there somewhere.

She talked a bit about URL canonicalization. Blog owners must make a choice: www or no www. Whichever you choose, you must consistently use it everywhere:

• Linking to your site
• correspondence
• email and IM signatures

Donna then moved on to categories. This is another thing I am doing wrong, LOL! She says it’s best to keep them as top-level important concepts, as opposed to tagging. Me, I tag and categorize all willy-nilly. Guess I’ll have to work on that. :mrgreen:

One of the plugins she highly recommended was All-In-One SEO Pack. I’ve heard about this plugin from several different people and from what I understand, it takes all the guesswork out of SEO for your blog. Donna says that the default settings work well.

Another plugin mentioned is: Excerpt Editor. This one gives extra control over excerpts, autogenerates excerpts (but allows overriding), prevents duplicate content between excerpts and full post, replaces the_content() with the_excerpt(), and more…

She spent a bit of time on two other post elements:

• Post titles:
  • use H1 or H2
  • Ok to use other tags, but H1 or H2 are best (use whatever suits your theme)
• Post slugs:
  • these should contain only most important words
  • and you should strip out “stop” words like ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’, etc. These dilute the value of other keywords in the slug (permalink)

Other topics covered were:

• Post Image Optimization
• Interlinking
• Encouraging Sharing/Linking
• Participating and Reciprocation

Donna’s presentation not only had a lot of good information, she also made recommendations as to customizations to themes and various plugins that could help improve the “SEO-ness” of your site. I highly recommend checking out her site. You’ll find a LOT of useful information there that she covered at WordCamp, and a lot more!

Merging your work life with your blog life

The next speaker was David Griner. His presentation was pretty comical, poking fun at himself (he’s not even a WordPress user *gasp* hehe) and his profession. While this wasn’t really one of the topics that first piqued my interest, it did have a lot of useful information for anyone whose ever wondered what it could take to make blogging a full-time job.

It’s not something I could do, but I admire anyone who does it!

Topics included:

• Pros of Freelancing
  • schedule your own time
  • stockpile blog posts in advance
  • decent extra pay
  • very minor level of celebrity
  • opportunities for guest editing/posting
  • work in your underwear
• Cons
  • most people suck at time management
  • you’ll starve
  • no benefits or security
  • can mess with your taxes
  • easy to lose steam
  • neighbors get tired of seeing you in your underwear
• Finding the right blog
  • you’re probably already reading it
  • who owns it?
  • how many writers?
  • Whats the output?
• Getting the gig
  • get to know the writers or editors
  • comment often under the same name
  • write response posts on your blog
  • if you like the site, help drive traffic there
• Asking for the job
  • no harm asking about openings
  • always write at least three sample posts that they could run that day
  • make sure your e-mail is colon-rupturing in its awesomeness
  • get across your enthusiasm for the blog
  • talk about how it has evolved
  • say why they need you
  • what is the blog missing?

You can see these and more in his slides here.

Break!

At this point, we broke for lunch. Jim and I didn’t go back for the late afternoon sessions. I was nursing a migraine and football would be on soon. (Hey, I’m a ‘Bama fan first and WP geek second! )

I went back Sunday for a couple of the sessions: Brett Bumeter‘s “Windows Live Writer — Blogging with any Blogging Software Has Never Been Easier” and Mitch Canter‘s “Making WordPress Dance.”

Brett’s presentation covered the Windows Live Writer application. It’s not really my cuppa, but would be a great interface for anyone intimidated by the web UI for most popular blogging software/services.

Mitch’s presentation covered several topics I had previously researched and I was impressed with the amount of helpful information he covered. He also had a great list of plugins that he recommended. I would like to see more of him next year, if he attends. You can find his slides here.

The Media

From watching the WordCamp Bham twitters, I can see that a photo pool is available on Flickr, as well as a handful of the presentation slides gathered on SlideShare. I also see that WordCamp Birmingham also made the local news. You deserve it guys, great work!

Good stuff. Can’t wait until next year.

(Updated to include slides links, thanks Don @ authorize.net!)

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

I have moved my Blank Target Replacement plugin to WordPress.org for better version tracking and visibility — and not to mention auto-updates for those using it. (not that I don’t want my users to come back to my site often, but even *I* have to admit that WP auto plugin update thingy is NICE!)

Version Change

If you are using this plugin, please download and install the latest version (1.0) via the link below at your convenience. All previous versions are also available there (for those of you who aren’t using WP 2.5x).

Proceed with caution; and as always, feedback and bug reports are ALWAYS welcome here!

Download

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blank-target-replacement/

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

Please download the latest version of this plugin.

My Blank Target Replacement plugin has been updated again to play nicer with WP 2.5x.

Requires

WordPress version 2.5+ (older versions may not be supported, use at your own risk)

Instructions

1. Upload the blank-target-replace folder to WordPress plugins directory and activate on the Plugins page in WP-Admin
2. Go to Manage > External Links
3. Choose the links you want to open in a new window, or tick the top checkbox in the gray bar to check all links as external. Click the “Mark Links External” button at the very bottom of the page.
4. That’s it! Links in your blog entries will automatically have rel="external" added.

Download

Click here to download the latest version.

Caveats / Issues

I did this pretty much on the fly. If you have any Blogroll links that have other rel attributes assigned (i.e. me, neighbor, met, etc. – any of the options under Link Relationship/XFN), you may experience problems getting the link(s) to open in a new window. Best thing is to clear out any existing XFN attributes for each link.

Same thing goes for links in posts that use lightbox or another setting for the rel attribute. It may or may not work.

I have not found a graceful work-around for these yet.

Disclaimer

Use at your own risk. No warranty expressed or implied is provided. There is no guarantee that this will work for your version of WordPress, I wrote this out of need for myself and am sharing in the hopes someone else finds it useful.

Copyright / Permission

This plugin is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Have fun!

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

Gonahkar‘s comment gave me something new to search on, and I was able to find it mentioned in the WordPress Codex under WordPress Files:

wp-links-opml.php

Produces OPML output of Links that were added to the blog via the WordPress admin menu.

A note at the top of the page states that the file descriptions are for WordPress Version 2.x. I was unable to find this file mentioned anywhere else in the documentation. However, under WordPress Features I stumbled across a reference to the export function:

Exporting

Did we say you can also export an OPML file with your list o’ links?

Very cute, guys … c’mon, where is the rest of the documentation on this? From this point, I clicked through to the section on the Links Manager. The page starts with the following:

WordPress allows you to store a set of external links, also known as your blogroll. These links can be put into categories, imported, exported, added, deleted, and edited.

However, the export feature is not mentioned again on the page, nor any others pertinent to WordPress’ current release. The only other mention that I was able to find was this:

Features

* Plugin architecture
* Custom fields
* Sub-categories
* Thumbnail creation
* OPML import and export

These are from the WordPress 1.2 changelog, which tells me that this ability has most likely been in WordPress a while. It’s highly possible it’s been forgotten, or maybe it’s been left out for a good reason. I can’t but speculate as to its reason … but at least now I know it does exist.

I may revise my plugin in the next few days to include this information and will most likely alter its purpose/function.

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

Please download the latest version of this plugin.

I’ve updated my Blank Target Replacement plugin by adding a feature: any links contained in posts and pages will automatically have rel="external" added.

Requires

WordPress version 2.2 or higher — may work with previous versions, I hadn’t tested!

Instructions

1. Upload the blank-target-replace folder to WordPress plugins directory and activate on the Plugins page in WP-Admin
2. Go to Blogroll > External Links
3. Choose the links you want to open in a new window, or tick the top checkbox in the gray bar to check all links as external. Click the “Mark Links External” button at the very bottom of the page.
4. That’s it! Links in your blog entries will automatically have rel=”external” added.

Download

Click here to download the latest version. The earlier version (minus content links auto mod) is still available here.

Caveats / Issues

I did this pretty much on the fly. If you have any Blogroll links that have other rel attributes assigned (i.e. me, neighbor, met, etc. – any of the options under Link Relationship/XFN), you may experience problems getting the link(s) to open in a new window. Best thing is to clear out any existing XFN attributes for each link.

Same thing goes for links in posts that use lightbox or another setting for the rel attribute. It may or may not work.

I have not found a graceful work-around for these yet.

Disclaimer

Use at your own risk. No warranty expressed or implied is provided. There is no guarantee that this will work for your version of WordPress, I wrote this out of need for myself and am sharing in the hopes someone else finds it useful.

Copyright / Permission

This plugin is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Have fun!

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

Please download the latest version of this plugin.

Ok, I haven’t tested this one a whole lot, so if you find any bugs, please use the comment box below!

Basically, I wrote this as an alternative to using the outdated target="_blank" in a link’s attributes. Using a tiny bit of javascript and the rel=”external” attribute, it’s a (hopefully) more XHTML compliant option.

This plugin allows you to mark any (or all) of your Blogroll links as ‘external’ and implements a small bit of javascript to open links in new windows. With this plugin enabled, you can also add the rel=”external” tag to any links in your post (or anywhere else in your blog) to have them open in new windows (or tabs depending on the user’s browser settings).

Requires

WordPress version 2.2 or higher — may work with previous versions, I hadn’t tested!

Instructions

1. Upload the blank-target-replace folder to WordPress plugins directory and activate on the Plugins page in WP-Admin
2. Go to Blogroll > External Links
3. Choose the links you want to open in a new window, or tick the top checkbox in the gray bar to check all links as external. Click the “Mark Links External” button at the very bottom of the page.
4. That’s it! To do the same for links in your blog entries, simply add rel=”external” to the ‘href’ statement for each link.

Download

Click here to download the zip file.

Caveats / Issues

I did this pretty much on the fly. If you have any Blogroll links that have other rel attributes assigned (i.e. me, neighbor, met, etc. – any of the options under Link Relationship/XFN), you may experience problems getting the link(s) to open in a new window. Best thing is to clear out any existing XFN attributes for each link.

Same thing goes for links in posts that use lightshow or another setting for the rel attribute. It may or may not work.

I have not found a graceful work-around for these yet.

Disclaimer

Use at your own risk. No warranty expressed or implied is provided. There is no guarantee that this will work for your version of WordPress, I wrote this out of need for myself and am sharing in the hopes someone else finds it useful.

Copyright / Permission

This plugin is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Have fun!

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

Key word being ‘widget’ … OK, so I’m stubborn.

I know I could hack up the plugin code to make it work for a non-widgetized theme, but honestly, if I’m going to find new toys to play with, I need to clean up the playground — so to speak. Get on the ball, re-arrange my theme’s innards, banish those last handful of code gremlins back to the outer banks of Hades, and “get with the widgets.” *nyerk*

So, over the next few days, don’t be too surprised if I break something …

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved

A few weeks back I was in need of exporting the blogroll out of one WordPress install for importing into another. I was dismayed to find that WordPress does not have this ability built-in. It seems you can import almost anything, but export nothing. ??:

So I searched for a plugin to do this — a few hours later, the closest I came was a plugin for exporting your blogroll for importing into del.icio.us. I have modified the plugin and added OPML formatting necessary for importing into WordPress via Blogroll > Import Links.

Note: I modeled the OPML formatting after that used by Blogrolling.com so it will work there as well. It may work for other services, it may not … I don’t know because I haven’t tried. Would love to hear from anyone who’s been able to use it in another capacity and/or another service!

Requires

WordPress version 2.2 or higher — may work with previous versions, I hadn’t tested!

Instructions

1. Download the zip file and unzip.
2. Upload the blogroll-opml-export.php file to WordPress plugins directory and activate on the Plugins page in WP-Admin
3. Go to Options > Export Blogroll
4. Copy the exported links from the textarea box into a blank text file and save as FILENAME_OF_YOUR_CHOICE.opml
5. Import as needed. For importing into WordPress, go to Blogroll > Import Links

Download

Click here to download the zip file.

Caveats / Issues

Problems that I ran into when importing the OPML format, all ampersands must be in a valid XHTML format (using &). Also, be sure to remove any odd characters (such as the curly apostrophes, quotes, and other characters commonly used in MS Word). If you experience an error while importing, check your OPML file first for invalid characters or bad formatting.

Also, this plugin exports from ALL link categories. I have not yet looked into a way to export from only selected ones. (and may not do so, depends on my time)

Disclaimer

Use at your own risk. No warranty expressed or implied is provided. There is no guarantee that this will work for your version of WordPress, I wrote this out of need for myself and am sharing in the hopes someone else finds it useful.

Copyright / Permission

This plugin is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Have fun!

This is a post from Nicki Faulk’s Birthplace of the Process of Illogical Logic

Copyright © Nicki Faulk · All Rights Reserved