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WordCamp Birmingham Notes

Note: I had intended to post this Monday night, but work has been crazy-busy this week and Jim’s having a bit of a site snafu, so spare time has been pretty much nonexistent. LOL!

We had a wonderful time at WordCamp Birmingham this past weekend. A big thanks to Andre Natta and the B’ham team for all of their hard work. I’m most definitely looking forward to next year’s. The date is already set (September 26-27, 2009), so be sure to mark your calendar! Matt Mullenweg is slated to be a keynote speaker, so it should be awesome!!

The Future of WordPress

The first speaker we saw Saturday morning was Dougal Campbell with “The Future of WordPress.” He briefly covered WordPress’ version history and various milestones over the last few years. Thinking back, I think I started off with either version 1.0 or 1.1. I remember the upgrade to 1.2 being pretty hard, but that was nothing like having to re-do my theme for 1.5, LOL!

Ahh, those were the days … :lol:

He then moved on to the upcoming and much anticipated version 2.7. It’s due sometime next month. According to Dougal, there will be:

He also went over some possible features for future versions of WordPress:

Some features that he thinks are likely for version 2.8 (taken from the Trac Tickets) include:

We can look forward to seeing more CMS features, more social networking features, better widget management. Perhaps even OpenID (that would be sweet).

Documentation was brought up and he stated that there has been a big push (internally) to get the functions (I’m assuming he means the Codex?) better documented, updated, etc.

SEO For WordPress

The next speaker was Donna Fontenot, who had some really good insight on SEO for beginners. You can view her slides here. It is also available on her website in HTML format.

She started with a very simple recommendation as a first step for blogging: think first, write later. This can apply to so many aspects, and I admit it’s one that I don’t practice enough. You should actually USE the phrases you want to rank well for in blog posts. For best results, use them in prominent places:

Another stickler subject: Blog Visibility. In covering the WordPress Settings, she states that you should always make sure to have the privacy option set so that your blog is visible to everyone, including search engines.

Moving on to Permalink structure, the optimal setting is /%category%/%postname%/. For most blogs it’s ok to be different though. Dates, which are useless for SEO, are useful for users and are most generally preferred. It’s best to make sure that %postname% in there somewhere.

She talked a bit about URL canonicalization. Blog owners must make a choice: www or no www. Whichever you choose, you must consistently use it everywhere:

Donna then moved on to categories. This is another thing I am doing wrong, LOL! She says it’s best to keep them as top-level important concepts, as opposed to tagging. Me, I tag and categorize all willy-nilly. Guess I’ll have to work on that. :mrgreen:

One of the plugins she highly recommended was All-In-One SEO Pack. I’ve heard about this plugin from several different people and from what I understand, it takes all the guesswork out of SEO for your blog. Donna says that the default settings work well.

Another plugin mentioned is: Excerpt Editor. This one gives extra control over excerpts, autogenerates excerpts (but allows overriding), prevents duplicate content between excerpts and full post, replaces the_content() with the_excerpt(), and more…

She spent a bit of time on two other post elements:

Other topics covered were:

Donna’s presentation not only had a lot of good information, she also made recommendations as to customizations to themes and various plugins that could help improve the “SEO-ness” of your site. I highly recommend checking out her site. You’ll find a LOT of useful information there that she covered at WordCamp, and a lot more!

Merging your work life with your blog life

The next speaker was David Griner. His presentation was pretty comical, poking fun at himself (he’s not even a WordPress user *gasp* hehe) and his profession. While this wasn’t really one of the topics that first piqued my interest, it did have a lot of useful information for anyone whose ever wondered what it could take to make blogging a full-time job.

It’s not something I could do, but I admire anyone who does it!

Topics included:

You can see these and more in his slides here.

Break!

At this point, we broke for lunch. Jim and I didn’t go back for the late afternoon sessions. I was nursing a migraine and football would be on soon. (Hey, I’m a ‘Bama fan first and WP geek second! )

I went back Sunday for a couple of the sessions: Brett Bumeter’s “Windows Live Writer — Blogging with any Blogging Software Has Never Been Easier” and Mitch Canter’s “Making WordPress Dance.”

Brett’s presentation covered the Windows Live Writer application. It’s not really my cuppa, but would be a great interface for anyone intimidated by the web UI for most popular blogging software/services.

Mitch’s presentation covered several topics I had previously researched and I was impressed with the amount of helpful information he covered. He also had a great list of plugins that he recommended. I would like to see more of him next year, if he attends. You can find his slides here.

The Media

From watching the WordCamp Bham twitters, I can see that a photo pool is available on Flickr, as well as a handful of the presentation slides gathered on SlideShare. I also see that WordCamp Birmingham also made the local news. You deserve it guys, great work!

Good stuff. Can’t wait until next year.

(Updated to include slides links, thanks Don @ authorize.net!)

MOVED and UPDATED!! WordPress Plugin: Blank Target Replacement

Just an FYI for anyone using this plugin…

I have moved my Blank Target Replacement plugin to WordPress.org for better version tracking and visibility — and not to mention auto-updates for those using it. (not that I don’t want my users to come back to my site often, but even *I* have to admit that WP auto plugin update thingy is NICE!)

Version Change

If you are using this plugin, please download and install the latest version (1.0) via the link below at your convenience. All previous versions are also available there (for those of you who aren’t using WP 2.5x).

Proceed with caution; and as always, feedback and bug reports are ALWAYS welcome here!

Download

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/blank-target-replacement/

Updated WordPress Plugin: Blank Target Replacement 0.3

My Blank Target Replacement plugin has been updated again to play nicer with WP 2.5x.

Requires

WordPress version 2.5+ (older versions may not be supported, use at your own risk)

Instructions

Download

Click here to download the latest version.

Caveats / Issues

I did this pretty much on the fly. If you have any Blogroll links that have other rel attributes assigned (i.e. me, neighbor, met, etc. – any of the options under Link Relationship/XFN), you may experience problems getting the link(s) to open in a new window. Best thing is to clear out any existing XFN attributes for each link.

Same thing goes for links in posts that use lightbox or another setting for the rel attribute. It may or may not work.

I have not found a graceful work-around for these yet.

Disclaimer

Use at your own risk. No warranty expressed or implied is provided. There is no guarantee that this will work for your version of WordPress, I wrote this out of need for myself and am sharing in the hopes someone else finds it useful.

Copyright / Permission

This plugin is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Have fun!

Revisiting: Blogroll OPML Export

A comment left on my plugin announcement post has pointed me in a new direction. It turns out that this function indeed DOES exist in WordPress, but it is highly under-documented barely mentioned in the WordPress Codex. I think initially my searches were too narrow, which is why I never ran across any of the following information.

Gonahkar’s comment gave me something new to search on, and I was able to find it mentioned in the WordPress Codex under WordPress Files:

A note at the top of the page states that the file descriptions are for WordPress Version 2.x. I was unable to find this file mentioned anywhere else in the documentation. However, under WordPress Features I stumbled across a reference to the export function:

Very cute, guys … c’mon, where is the rest of the documentation on this? From this point, I clicked through to the section on the Links Manager. The page starts with the following:

However, the export feature is not mentioned again on the page, nor any others pertinent to WordPress’ current release. The only other mention that I was able to find was this:

These are from the WordPress 1.2 changelog, which tells me that this ability has most likely been in WordPress a while. It’s highly possible it’s been forgotten, or maybe it’s been left out for a good reason. I can’t but speculate as to its reason … but at least now I know it does exist.

I may revise my plugin in the next few days to include this information and will most likely alter its purpose/function.

Updated WordPress Plugin: Blank Target Replacement 0.2

I’ve updated my Blank Target Replacement plugin by adding a feature: any links contained in posts and pages will automatically have rel="external" added.

Requires

WordPress version 2.2 or higher — may work with previous versions, I hadn’t tested!

Instructions

Download

Click here to download the latest version. The earlier version (minus content links auto mod) is still available here.

Caveats / Issues

I did this pretty much on the fly. If you have any Blogroll links that have other rel attributes assigned (i.e. me, neighbor, met, etc. – any of the options under Link Relationship/XFN), you may experience problems getting the link(s) to open in a new window. Best thing is to clear out any existing XFN attributes for each link.

Same thing goes for links in posts that use lightbox or another setting for the rel attribute. It may or may not work.

I have not found a graceful work-around for these yet.

Disclaimer

Use at your own risk. No warranty expressed or implied is provided. There is no guarantee that this will work for your version of WordPress, I wrote this out of need for myself and am sharing in the hopes someone else finds it useful.

Copyright / Permission

This plugin is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Have fun!

New WordPress Plugin: Blank Target Replacement

Ok, I haven’t tested this one a whole lot, so if you find any bugs, please use the comment box below!

Basically, I wrote this as an alternative to using the outdated target="_blank" in a link’s attributes. Using a tiny bit of javascript and the rel=”external” attribute, it’s a (hopefully) more XHTML compliant option.

This plugin allows you to mark any (or all) of your Blogroll links as ‘external’ and implements a small bit of javascript to open links in new windows. With this plugin enabled, you can also add the rel=”external” tag to any links in your post (or anywhere else in your blog) to have them open in new windows (or tabs depending on the user’s browser settings).

Requires

WordPress version 2.2 or higher — may work with previous versions, I hadn’t tested!

Instructions

Download

Click here to download the zip file.

Caveats / Issues

I did this pretty much on the fly. If you have any Blogroll links that have other rel attributes assigned (i.e. me, neighbor, met, etc. – any of the options under Link Relationship/XFN), you may experience problems getting the link(s) to open in a new window. Best thing is to clear out any existing XFN attributes for each link.

Same thing goes for links in posts that use lightshow or another setting for the rel attribute. It may or may not work.

I have not found a graceful work-around for these yet.

Disclaimer

Use at your own risk. No warranty expressed or implied is provided. There is no guarantee that this will work for your version of WordPress, I wrote this out of need for myself and am sharing in the hopes someone else finds it useful.

Copyright / Permission

This plugin is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Have fun!

Resistance is futile, you will be widgetized

I have been messing with various parts of my theme over the last couple of days. Sadly, I have not yet widgetized this theme (shocking, I know) because I had so much custom code in it. I have been looking for a replacement to the Twitter swf and nothing I’ve run across so far has fit my liking (yet), but I did see a WP widget that looked promising.

Key word being ‘widget’ … OK, so I’m stubborn.

I know I could hack up the plugin code to make it work for a non-widgetized theme, but honestly, if I’m going to find new toys to play with, I need to clean up the playground — so to speak. Get on the ball, re-arrange my theme’s innards, banish those last handful of code gremlins back to the outer banks of Hades, and “get with the widgets.” *nyerk*

So, over the next few days, don’t be too surprised if I break something …

New WordPress Plugin: Blogroll OPML Export

Update: Please see this recent post regarding this WordPress function.

A few weeks back I was in need of exporting the blogroll out of one WordPress install for importing into another. I was dismayed to find that WordPress does not have this ability built-in. It seems you can import almost anything, but export nothing. ??:

So I searched for a plugin to do this — a few hours later, the closest I came was a plugin for exporting your blogroll for importing into del.icio.us. I have modified the plugin and added OPML formatting necessary for importing into WordPress via Blogroll > Import Links.

Note: I modeled the OPML formatting after that used by Blogrolling.com so it will work there as well. It may work for other services, it may not … I don’t know because I haven’t tried. Would love to hear from anyone who’s been able to use it in another capacity and/or another service!

Requires

WordPress version 2.2 or higher — may work with previous versions, I hadn’t tested!

Instructions

Download

Click here to download the zip file.

Caveats / Issues

Problems that I ran into when importing the OPML format, all ampersands must be in a valid XHTML format (using &). Also, be sure to remove any odd characters (such as the curly apostrophes, quotes, and other characters commonly used in MS Word). If you experience an error while importing, check your OPML file first for invalid characters or bad formatting.

Also, this plugin exports from ALL link categories. I have not yet looked into a way to export from only selected ones. (and may not do so, depends on my time)

Disclaimer

Use at your own risk. No warranty expressed or implied is provided. There is no guarantee that this will work for your version of WordPress, I wrote this out of need for myself and am sharing in the hopes someone else finds it useful.

Copyright / Permission

This plugin is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Have fun!