Web Cash

So it’s summer, and in my spare time I’ve cooked up another idea for a new project: Digital Photography How To.

I like writing tutorials/educational stuff (which is the way this site began), and this falls into that niche. Photography is an increasingly important hobby of mine, and this new site will give me a chance to organize my thoughts about photography and also help out others.

As an exercise for myself, I’m also maintaining a Picture of the Day section of the site. The goal is to look through Flickr for one nifty photo each day, post it on the site, and then explain what I do/don’t like about it. You get better by looking at the work of others…

Another ulterior motive is that I want to help promote my other project: Olinda Gibbons Photography. Ideally, Digital Photography How To can be used to generate some ad revenue, but I’d be happy if I can also use it to channel some link juice and traffic back to that site. Ultimately, the photography itself will be much more lucrative for Olinda and me than the writing about it…

I recently completed (in a manner of speaking) a new project: olinda-gibbons.com. It’s a portfolio/proof ordering site for an up and coming photographer.

Although it’s kind of a work in progress, it’s up, live, and fully functional. I wrote a little bit about how I designed the site elsewhere, and I plan on writing up some more information in the future. That info will likely appear in a new blog portion of olinda-gibbons.com.

In the meantime, one highlight to check out is the portraits portfolio page. It was made possible by a combination of the galleria jquery plugin and the NextGen gallery plugin for WordPress.

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?”
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
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