Web Cash

Google Analytics is a great tool for gathering data about your website. You can track and analyze all kinds of data about your visitors, their navigation paths, and the effectiveness of your content.

To use Google Analytics, you need to place some javascript on your website. A commonly asked question in forums is, “How do I add Google Analytics to my Wordpress template?”
(more…)

I recently started working on a new website - the one I mentioned in the article on creating individual 301 redirects for Wordpress.

I got the site up and running, updated some content, and then submitted my sitemap information to the Google Webmaster Tools. As usual, the next step is to wait and see how long it takes Google to start regularly indexing the site.
(more…)

While working on a new site (Rolling Horde), I decided to include a small image gallery. I randomly display four images from a flickr album in the sidebar.

The pictures are presented in the mark-up that flickr creates, and I used the styling that came with the template I was working from. It creates a simple two by two square of photos, with a slight gap in between them.

Although I like the way they are presented, I’m not sure I like the mark-up that flickr creates. What would be the simplest, semantic way to mark-up and style images in a small album like this?
(more…)

I recently decided to move part of an old blog to an independent site.

In order to maintain the meager search engine and referral traffic that the old pages had, I planned on using 301 Redirects. I figured that I would re-create each of the old articles (~10 total articles) on the new site and set up an individual 301 Redirect to send users and search engine spiders to the new location.

The problem, however, was that the standard .htaccess rewrite that Wordpress uses was conflicting with the 301 Redirects. For some reason, they just weren’t working - so I turned to a PHP-based solution.
(more…)

I’ve been playing around with developing Wordpress sites for a while now. I love how quick and easy it is to launch a site and update content.

One of the greatest features is the thousands of plug-ins available for Wordpress. You can find a plug-in for just about anything you want to do - or if you have some PHP know-how, you can develop your own.

Here are five basic Wordpress plug-ins that I’d recommend using for any project you start.
(more…)

The other day, I was looking into using Picasa to create an image album and embed it as a slideshow on a website.

Uploading the images and creating the album was easy. However, I noticed that the code Google creates to embed the slideshow (a flash file) is not standards compliant - it uses the <embed> tag.

How can we convert this code to a standards compliant version?
(more…)

Last month, I wrote on article on creating an RSS feed for your site. Some people have reported problems with the process - but these all come from malformed XML, not the PHP code supplied in the article.

There are a few things you need to keep in mind while writing an XML document, or else the RSS reader will not be able to understand it. It’s better to think of writing XML as writing code than text, because there are some strict syntax rules you need to adhere to.
(more…)

Since Digg broke the scene years ago, website operators have looked to social bookmarking sites for help. They can be a great source of traffic, and they can also be a good source of backlinks for search engine optimization.

For now, let’s stick with the traffic component. Can a social bookmarking site direct significant traffic to your site, and is it worth your trouble to use them?
(more…)

There are tons of free Wordpress templates available, but at some point you’ll probably want to modify one or make your own. Even if you know HTML pretty well, this can be a daunting task at first.

Wordpress templates have a decent amount of simple PHP mixed in, and you need to utilize a special file structure for the template to operate correctly. Before you dive into making a Wordpress template, let’s look at the basic structure of a Wordpress template compared to a normal website template.
(more…)

One reason I’ve heard people say that they prefer a full-blown CMS to Wordpress is that Wordpress doesn’t allow time delayed posting. I was about to figure out a way to mod Wordpress to make this possible - until I realized that there is some decent built-in functionality for time delaying.

You can easily delay the release of your posts into the main indexes (front page, archives, “Recent Posts” list, etc). With a little bit of code, you can also restrict people from viewing the page before its appointed “Published” date.
(more…)