Well, I finally made my 100th post. It didn’t come quite as soon as I would have hoped, but it’s here nonetheless.
Hopefully the posting will be picking up here soon. I’d like to make it a more regular habit. We’ll see if that happens.
For those of you who use WordPress and want to learn how to change your titles, read on. This is definitely a techie post.
I was reading Search Engine Journal today and there was an old post that discussed reccommended WordPress Search Engine Optimization Plugins.
One of the suggestions was to put the title of your post first in the HTML <title> of your page, and then to have your Blog name displayed. I believe be default WordPress shows the title of the blog first (i.e. define: Jared Barden) and then the title of the individual post.
No problem, I thought. I logged in to my account, clicked the Presentation tab, selected the Theme Editor for my current theme, and went to the header.php file, which is where most of your header information for your post (the HTML wp_title() function, and a couple of forum posts later, I found at that this is the default behavior of the wp_title() function. To change this behavior, simple pass an empty string ( ” ) to the function, like so - wp_title('');.
Moral of the story - if you’re trying to do something when it comes to blogging or coding, do a Google search first. Chances are someone out there has experienced the same problem you have, and hopefully they have been nice enough to document how they conquered said problem.
So, as I was trolling my RSS feeds the other day, I came across this really cool site.
The site in question is Wordpress Theme Generator. The site lets you automatically create themes (in case you hadn’t already guessed) for your WordPress-powered site. The best thing is that it does all the heavy lifting for you - creating the CSS files and assorted PHP files that are required for a WordPress theme. Save your theme, and it creates a ZIP file that just needs to be opened, and then the theme can be uploaded to the site.
I don’t know if I’ve stated this on this blog before or not, but I don’t consider myself a graphically talented person, so this site was a huge help to me.
I’d love to know what everyone thinks of the changes.
Tonight I upgraded to Wordpress 2.1. The upgrade went smoothly, except for one tiny little part.
I thought I had backed up everything I needed for the transition. When I upgrade my WordPress installation, I follow a pretty simple process, although I wouldn’t recommend it. Always follow the upgrade instructions at the WordPress site.
My upgrade goes something like this.
1.) Delete the old files, except the ones that need to be backed up (any themes, plugins, configuration files, etc., as listed in the official upgrade instructions.
2.) Upload the newly downloaded files along with the old files I had backed up.
Tonight I forget to back up all of my theme files. These files control the look of the blog. To my horror, after my successful upgrade, I saw the default theme on the blog. I started to go into panic mode.
Then along comes Google. I used the Google cache of my blog to find the missing pieces of HTML I needed. I would have been completely lost without this information. It would have taken a few days to get everything the way I wanted it. After getting the missing HTML, I downloaded the old theme I was using (Almost Spring by Rebecca Wei, and with the HTML I found in the cached page, patched the theme back to the way it used to be.
After about 30 minutes or so, the blog was back up and looking the way it was supposed to.
So when you upgrade, be careful, and follow ALL of the instructions. Don’t get bit like I did.
Several blogs that I read have posted their 2006 statistics over the last couple of weeks. Although mine pale in comparison, I thought I’d share them anyway.
Thanks to the good folks over at Google Analytics, the statistics are as follows.
Total visits: 457
Page Views: 1,937
And to help prove that you never know how people might find your web site, here are some of the search terms visitors used when finding my site.
define condemnation, jared barden blog, define jared, define a person that went crazy, flag+desecration+failed, define sports, bush iran war, anti-santa scripture, define: jared
As you can see, people were searching for all sorts of stuff when they stumbled upon my site. The search engine marketer in me has to point out that blogging can be a great way to bring traffic to a site, especially for a niche site where this is not a lot of online competition. Just a thought.
The other day I read an article that talked about people blogging just for the sake of blogging, not unlike someone speaking solely because they like the sound of their own voice. I hope this is not one of those blogs. I find blogging is a good outlet for my thoughts, views, etc. My mom always encouraged me to keep a journal, so I guess I’m living out that encouragement now.
Do I wish thousands of people read my blog? It would be kind of cool, I’ll admit it. However, if I can make a difference in just one person’s life, it would be more than worth it.
Over the past year I have debated whether or not posting such personal opinions on this blog was a good thing. Was I being too preachy? What if certain people read this blog, etc. etc. I finally came to the decision that it did not matter. I am not ashamed of who I am. Am I a Christian? Yes. Do I have outspoken viewpoints that might not fit in with the norm of society? Yes. That’s who I am. I won’t change that.
I want this to be a place where people are challenged, informed, etc. I want to be able to share my faith, and hopefully make a life-changing impact on someone’s life.
I believe I’m on my way.
No, I’m not a lawyer, but some news that came across Google Reader yesterday has me concerned.
According to this, a proposed Senate bill would require, “…even bloggers, who communicate to 500 or more member of the public on policy matters, to register and report quarterly to Congress the same as the big K Street lobbyists.”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t like the sound of that one bit. Apparently this bill is seeing support from both sides of the political aisle.
One of the greatest features of America is our freedoms. One of the biggest is the Freedom of Speech. I should be able to say what I want to say, and I shouldn’t have to register with the government if I’m going to be blogging about governmental issues. That seems a little too “Big Brother” for me.
Perhaps this is all being blown out of proportion and we’ll all be proven to be paranoid, but it does sound suspicious.
Of course I don’t have 500 regular readers, so nothing to worry about here!