I went ahead and updated the theme for this blog this weekend. I have some further tweaking to do (like I want the sign up for the newsletter to be more prominent), but for the most part I am fairly happy with it. I would love to know what you think about the new theme.
So what do you think about the new wordpress theme I am using? Do you love it, hate it, does it even matter?
Michel Fortin wrote this interesting post today about a WordPress scandal I thought you might be interested in. I have to side with Michel on this one.
What do you think? Is WordPress in the wrong?
Is it possible for a blog to catch a cold?
I caught a cold last night that has been going around our house over the weekend. So I didn’t spend much time on the business (or anything else for that matter).
Sunday night I went to this blog to finish a post I started last week. To my surprise all I saw on my blog was a string of error messages that looked somethng like this:
WordPress database error: [User has exceeded the ‘max_questions’ resource (current value: 50000)]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘siteurl’ LIMIT 1
Unfortunately, my blog limits the amount of queries it does per hour. I had never run into this problem before. In fact, when we were blogging the olympics we got “WAY” more traffic than I ever get to this blog.
So what went wrong?
Well, it seems that the plug-in I recently installed to show related posts was creating too many queries to the database. This is partially because of the WordPress Template that I am using and partially because of how many posts I was showing on the main page.
Anyway, for now I have removed the plug-in.
The good news is that my blog has gotten over it’s cold! The bad news is that my fever and stuffed nose are signs that I am not quite over my cold yet…
There have been several plugins on my blogs that I have wanted to install, but just haven’t found the time to do so. However, Saturday night I went ahead and installed the plug-in highest on my list onto most of our blogs. I am SOOOOO happy I did.
One of the things that I really like on some blogs is seeing a list of related posts at the end of a post. I have been meaning to install a plug-in to do this, because I think it ads so much value to a blog. I for one, stick around on blogs longer when they have a list of related posts at the end of a post. In other words, it’s a great way to make your blog “sticky” (ie. make it so people stay on your blog longer).
So, this weekend I installed the related entries plug-in that you can get by clicking here. It was easy to install. The only problem I ran into is that I had to run the longer setup, but it worked fine (and was pretty quick).
If you have a blog, I highly recommend adding the related entries plug-in. It will give your readers a better user experience, which in the long run is bound to make your blog more successful.
What are your thoughts? Do you like the new plug-in, hate it, don’t care either way?
One of today’s post by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger prompted me to figure out how to change the code on my blog so that my titles were more Search Engine friendly.
I have never liked the way wordpress displays the title by default. I wanted my blog to display only the title of the post in the title bar when you were on the post page. So I decided to change that.
NOTE: If you don’t know what the title tag is, go back and look at this post on my other blog.
To change the default title tag in wordpress you need to edit the header.php for the theme that you are using.
The line of code you want to change will look something like this:
<title>< ?php bloginfo('name'); ?> < ?php wp_title(); ?> </title>
Replace that code above with the code you want to use. Here is the code I am using on this blog (and will be soon using on all my blogs):
< ?php if(is_home())
{ echo '<title>'; echo bloginfo('name');
echo '< /title> '; }
else
{ echo '<title>'; wp_title(' '); echo '</title>'; } ?>
The code above displays the name of my blog as the title if you are on the home page. Otherwise, it only displays the post name if you are on a post page, the name of the archive page if you are on an archive page, or the category name if you are on category page.
It’s kind of funny how long it took it me to figure this out. I made it much more complicated than it needed to be. At one point the code looked like this:
< ?php if(is_home()) { echo '<title>';echo bloginfo('name'); echo '< /title> '; } else if ( is_category() ) {echo '<title>'; wp_title(); echo '</title>';} else if ( is_archive() ) { echo '<title>'; wp_title(); echo '</title>';} else { echo '<title>'; the_title(); echo '</title>'; } ?>
While it did the job, it was overkill.
Fortunately, I found the WordPress wiki and was able to quickly find the code changes I needed to make from there.
Another option for changing the way your title displays in WordPress is to use the Optimal Title WordPress Plug-in. But I prefer making the code change above.