For the two of you out there who are looking at this blog, you might be thinking “Whoa, where did the dog with the iPhone 4 go?”
Well, it turns out that I can design the most visually spectacular web site themes in existence, but not the most SEO and Ad friendly themes. So with that in mind, tonight I have purchased Stuart Wider’s ass kicking Heat Map Theme.
Stuart, you had me at “23 Widget Positions”.
Please excuse the mess whilst I renovate. It’s business as usual though!
And if your 40 Years old, and a geek, you will love this! Otherwise, just dis-regard, you had to be there (the 80’s that is)
Two years ago I was telling everybody how I thought Twitters days were numbered, and I expected it to be swallowed up by the Facebook Juggernaut, but today it seems to me like it has justified itself, and holds steady as a platform of its own (Watch the bird fall off it’s perch tomorrow now I have said that). I am noticing more and more now sites that are feeding updates to Twitter, and I have created a Twitter account for The Webernets as a result.
My Question now, is, what is the best plugin/method to pipe your WordPress posts to Twitter?
A recent addition to WordPress 3 is the “Admin Bar”. It allows you to view your site, and at any time skip to your dashboard, add a new post, and a plethora of other handy “Shortcuts” to places you will likely want to go after viewing your site. Initially, I hated it. I looked for, and found plugins such as “Global Hide Admin Bar” to remove it, so I didn’t have to look at it ever again. Although there are still a few sites I have the admin bar disabled on, it does remain on this site. I guess the reason is that on other sites I am the admin/creator/god, and I have no need for the options it offers, so it’s a pain when I am trying to see if my DIVS are correctly aligned. On this site however, it does come in handy when I look at a post, and realise that I have written gibberish that nobody but me could possibly understand, and I need to go back and edit my posts. Yes, I am admin/creator/god on this site, but I am primarily an editor/user, hence in this capacity the bar is slightly more appealing. My feelings towards the admin bar are definitely on a site by site basis. It depends on if I am the creator, or a user of a site. For the most part, I don’t like it, and I could go on living quiet happily without it, even though it has proved useful at times on some sites.
I have written about some bad WordPress plugins, so I thought it was time I wrote about a good one, and oh boy, is this a good one. This is one of those plugins that is “Bigger than Ben Hur”. If you are building a WordPress site for someone who is a bit of a newb, or in my case an editor of a major print magazine and celebrity national television sports commentator, who has no interest in the back end, and just wants a word processor to update their site, you NEED this plugin.
The point of Adminimize is to minimize the admin, or back end of a WordPress site. This is great for multi user sites. As an admin, you can decide what site users get to see, and more importantly, what they don’t get to see in their dashboard. In my case, my client comes from a purely editorial background. He wants to write his articles, and moderate his readers, and that’s it. So with Adminimize, I have been able to remove all of the other WordPress features such as the Plugins panel, Pages panel, Appearance panel, Tools, Settings, and the menu/settings entries for the twenty something other plugins I have had to install to make the site work to his requirements. He can create new posts, reply to comments, and ad links to his blogroll, because that’s all he wants to do. What I really like about this plugin, is that when you install other plugins, it knows about them upon a refresh, and you can decide how much of their admin capabilities is available to your different user levels as well.
You can remove that pesky admin bar, screen options, or admin colour schemes, and many other of WordPress’s “features” (depending on whether you love them or hate them) not only globally, but on a user level as well. So you can have the admin bar for yourself as an admin, remove it for your editors, and enable it for authors, if that’s what you want to do.
This plugin is one of those ones that I just can’t believe is free. There is a “Donate” option on the settings page, and I believe this one is well worth leaving a few bucks for the authors – It’s a killer plug in! Just one word of warning though, on installation and activation, you will be confronted with literally hundreds of check boxes. Even though it will appear overwhelming, it’s not. Keep in mind there is 5 check boxes, one for each user lever, per option. Just remember the options are down the left hand side in column one, and the rows are for user levels that you want to allow/disallow the privileged. Give it a go, and look at it one option at a time, and before long not only will you understand its simple layout (which appears complicated because there are hundreds of choices), but you will see why I hereby officially give Adminimize “5 Paws Up”!
Adminimize is available for download at the WordPress repository HERE.
If you are reading my blog, there is a very good chance somebody, somewhere, looks to you as their own personal tech/web help desk. We all know people who need some help, and some need it a lot more than others. Most of the time we understand that not everybody knows everything, and we try to help. However, there are some days when you just want to tell them to “Google it and leave me alone!” – That is the g-rated family friendly version of what we actually think BTW.
For those days when you just want that person to evaporate before your very eyes, there is a really cool way you can point them towards the answer in a not so subtle way, that is sure to get the message across – Let Me Google That For You. The sites description says:
For all those people who find it more convenient to bother you with their question rather than google it for themselves.
Last week I was asked “How do I re-size my browser windows?” You can view my answer on Let Me Google That For You HERE.
There is also a page where you can view a Live Feed of all of Let Me Google That For You searches occurring in real time, giving you an idea of just how many of those people there really is.
All web sites need a good robots.txt in my opinion. For those reading (Ha….what a joke!) who don’t know what that is, a robots.txt file is simply a text file that tells search engines what they are allowed to tell the world about, and what you dont want them to promote. Now, you might be thinking “I want them to index every page on my site”, and that’s a fair call, but what they can also do, is promote the folders and files that exist behind the scenes of your site, that you would prefer to keep private for reasons such as privacy and security.
If you are new to the web/site design, and this is all news to you, and you have realised there are some folders on your server that contain files you don’t want the world to find through a search engine, you can easily generate a robots.txt file using the free robots.txt file generator at McAnerin HERE. Once you have told the generator the directories on your server you want to keep private, copy the code it generates, and then create a new text document on your computer, and paste it in. Call the file “robots.txt” (without the exclamation marks of course) and then upload it into the “public_html” folder of your website.
Now, for those of us who use WordPress, there are quiet a few directories that I think should be blocked. There are also others who have the opinion that your WordPress site ranks higher if you don’t use one. There’s still a lot of unanswered questions about the internet, and this is one of them. Until it is resolved, I personally will continue to use robots.txt.
So for now, below is my robots.txt file I use – If you think I have missed something, or if you think the whole robots.txt idea is junk, please comment! I’d love to hear your thought’s for and against.
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For the two of you out there who are looking at this blog, you might be thinking “Whoa, where did the dog with the iPhone 4 go?”
Please excuse the mess whilst I renovate. It’s business as usual though!
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