…The key point to success with any type of web site, be it a blog or business portfolio, is content. That means you should post, post and post a lot more. This helps out for the following reasons:

1. Google likes to look through content. Your writings quickly become Google’s friend.
2. Google likes frequently updated content. If it sees that you post more, it will index your site more.

One other thing you need is links from “good neighbors”. This means that you shouldn’t just add your link to a free-for-all page; rather the sites that link to you should have good content and be on good terms with Google.

I would also suggest setting up permalinks now. They will help your site’s rank in Google’s index, and in general you shouldn’t change the addresses of your pages once they are set. If you need help, I am pretty proficient in the workings of WordPress, and surely I can provide help.

Blogging isn’t rocket science, but in order to make your way up the ranks (I have gotten that far yet), you need to put in lots of effort. The effort will pay out with lots of traffic, as you will see in due time.

…

About the part on rocket science, the effort really does pay out. Once you start blogging, you will read other’s blogs, and you will discover many new things (like how I discovered my WordPress static home page technique). Those new things will help you gain traffic, which is many people’s goal in their blogging career.

Think of trackbacks as comments that are posted by your blogging tool, rather than your own self-determination. To use a rather crude comparison, they are similar to video responses on YouTube. Someone makes a video. You think that you can add to that video. you make a video, and it shows up under the existing video.

Same concept with trackbacks. You find a blog post on someone’s blog that you think is interesting. You write about it on your blog, and leave a trackback in the process. The whole nine yards:

1. You read a blog post, and you like it.
2. You write a post on your blog about it. This could possibly be an “Aside” post.
3. While posting, you paste the address of the post you are commenting on in a special field on your post editing screen. With WordPress-powered blogs, the trackback address of posts will be the post address, followed by “trackback/” (ex. http://www.mysite.com/blog/2007/01/02/my-first-post/trackback/).
4. Upon the publishing of your post from your blog, their blog is notified by your blog, and a link to your new blog post is made on their blog.

To make this all fair, you should remember to include a link to their post in your post if your post is not specifically about their post, in which case you may not remember to leave a link. That way, the network between you and them is built, and you two have formed a “micro-relationship” of sorts.

You should also leave comments on blogs regularly, but that’s another topic. Following these tips will help you build your blogging future, giving your blog increased exposure. But remember the main rule for any Web site: Content is king.

Interstate 80 (I-80 from now on) is a marvelous highway. It goes all the way from the George Washington Bridge (in New York / New Jersey) to California, and covers significant territory in between. I-80 also is one of the most common routes to the Pocono Mountains from New York. Fortunately, this super-highway was practically empty on Thursday morning, like it usually is at that time of day.

This trip was a bit different to me, because after I got dressed and picked up my gear for the day, I was able to hit the slopes right away (which is exactly what I did). I don’t know whether this particular set of steps was efficient or not, but either way it would have taken some time to get all ready:

1. Fill out rental form, pick up boots, and try them on.
2. Go down to changing room, change, come back up.
3. Get the rest of the gear.
4. Find a locker, take out and put away various things.
5. Hit the slopes!

I started off on Camelback’s Coolmoor beginner trail with a few warm-up runs, and then went over to The Birches and The Meadows. This was the majority of my excitement for the day, which included a few runs with my friends.

I learned a bit more about controlling speed, which is essential on any trail other than the bunny slopes. I figured out an inefficient but effective way to get absolute control over how fast I’m going. With this technique, one ski is at an angle, with the other ski pointing straight down the hill and positioned slightly behind the angled ski. With the application of pressure on the tilted ski, you directly control your speed, but if you want to go faster, the straight ski allows it to happen.

This trick helped me make it down trails in one piece, but it came with an at-first unexpected side effect. It takes a lot of effort to keep the downhill ski in position, most of which I concentrated on my right knee, and I ended up with a bit of aching in that leg as well as the knee for the rest of the day. Stupidly, I didn’t take a lesson this trip (anytime I saw a ski school instructor, they were working with someone, and when I managed to find any other employee, it was for something else), so I didn’t officially learn anything new. I still feel a bit depressed about this mistake.

By the time lunch rolled around, I was really out of it. I ate somewhat slowly, constantly sighing at my level of “wiped out-ness”. Skiing, with or without made up techniques, is really a tiring sport, using muscle groups one never knew existed. Add the adrenaline rushes (after just avoiding falls) to the mix, and you’ve got one exhausted skier.

I didn’t do a whole lot after lunch. I sat around in the lodge, talking with my principal, and staring at the nice scenery outside the windows. I did manage to make two or three more runs later on, but they were kind of bad. My knee was about to crumble (not literally), and I felt like I could fall asleep while watching the trees go by on The Meadows.

For dinner, my class set up for a barbecue in the farthest parking lot. We had hot dogs and burgers, with pickles and soda on the side. I did enjoy this, even with the finger-freezing winds present at the time. We ate the food basically straight of the grill, decreasing the total time it spent in cold air, and helping to make sure we were able to get back home on the van with the rest of the school (I think my principal would have left without us if I didn’t have the key to the van, which I had used earlier to get something).

After this trip, I really thanked myself for buying my Smith Universal Helmet Helper, which currently is a bit difficult to find. If it wasn’t for the five dollar piece of plastic that extends a goggle strap, my eyes would have been stressed out too.

Lessons for next trip: Do more, and stick with the group. For the former part of that statement, I mean that I want to try even more trails, and take a good lesson, and for the latter, I am saying that I should stay with my friends most of the time. But for any trip, the main goal is simple: Have fun!

It’s very tempting to all of a sudden change your permalink structure, or suddenly switch to them. Unless you have absolutely no choice in the matter, either take ‘em or leave ‘em at the beginning. One change in the middle will disturb the SEO status’s equilibrium (that a new one), with potentially lethal effects on the site’s ranking. Jonathan agrees with me.

I haven’t documented this, but it may be something that you would want to keep in mind. Some things are better off “like old times,” and left undisturbed. Perhaps I will report on this again in the future and see if my theory has proven itself.

I’ve tried several methods for keeping myself organized and on track. I began with Devin’s weekly scheduler, in hopes of being able to remember to do everything that I plot out on it. After that failed, I set up my own spreadsheet, with three periods for each day (morning, school, and evening; on Saturday, school is replaced with daytime). This was extremely poor, receiving just one or two entries. I knew that I was seriously failing to keep myself heading straight.

Then came David Seah. His Printable CEO™ series looked like a viable solution. I browsed around his site for a while, looking at his forms and other articles (I have to say, he’s a beautiful writer). Last week, I took a deep look at his Task Progress Tracker Form. It’s mainly built for designers and other freelancers who work on individual projects, but I found that by filling in the project name box with “my Life / School”, I can use it for my own purposes.

A day later, I put it to the test. After getting hold of my most recent report card, my dad told me that I am going to be putting in at least an hour of effort toward my studies every night (yeah right). I happened to have some social studies homework due the next day, so I sat down with the textbook, papers and the form Approximately every fifteen minutes (as prescribed by the form), I filled in another bubble indicating that amount of time was spent on the particular task.

I’m still slacking off a bit now, but I feel like things are rolling now. I think this plan will need a week or two to settle in, at which point I will report back. Maybe i should try some of the other PCEO forms.

Rule numero uno: Make lots of good content. People (and search engines) look for pages that have something useful to say and that say it well. If possible, use spell checking (or copy and paste the text into another app and spell-check it there) before publishing you articles. Google Hacks says that with the advent of spell checking from search engines, spelling is as important to your content as water is to you (I like that metaphor).

Another trick I’ve discovered is to write in a timely fashion. Timing is a key factor in getting traffic. If you write about skiing and snowboarding, late fall and winter is probably the best time. Similarly, the optimal timeframe for content on roller coasters or surfing is late spring and summer. For example, if I would have written about the Math A Regents exam in August, I don’t think I would have as many hits (also, people were using “January 2007″ in their search phrases, which brought them to the archive page of that timeframe, but this is a side effect). If you want to write about a particular topic, take a few moments and think about whether it’s relevant at that time. If the answer is yes, pour out your thoughts, otherwise, write it down and save it for later (just don’t forget about it).

Finally, I suggest using SEF-friendly URLs or pretty permalinks (or whatever they are called in your respective CMS), or paying attention to your URLs if you hand code your site. Although I don’t seem to notice any effect from using this tip, I am guessing that it helps a little bit. At the very least, it makes your URLs look nice to your visitors.

With WordPress, there have been so many attempts to make the best static front page. Most variations have included plugins that change the default behavior of the home page to display a pre-selected WordPress page. However, the Turbocharged blog showcases a new technique that uses a theme’s home.php template, and even allows you to add pure PHP code to it. Rudd-O’s solution is to place this code into the home.php file:

<?php $homepage = get_settings('siteurl')."/home/";
global $wp;
$wp_received_argument = false;
foreach ($wp->query_vars as $k=>$v) if ($v) $wp_received_argument = true;
if ($wp_received_argument) require(TEMPLATEPATH . "/index.php");
else { wp_redirect($homepage);
exit(); } ?>

Simple and quick, this will redirect to a static WP page with a slug of ‘home’. However, this technique doesn’t really provide much flexibility as to what you can do with your homepage, as you are simply limited to the tools provided by WordPress’s editor and any installed plugins.

What the code you see above does is check for any parameters passed in the URL that tell WordPress what to display in the resulting page. If parameters exist, the normal index.php template will be used. If not, the visitor will be redirected to your static page.

What I have done is extend this code so that instead of redirecting to a WP static page, the user will see the output of code run in the home.php file. I replaced the redirection code with a custom made layout, which includes a slimmed-down WP Loop, the code that displays post listing pages. This is my version (I’m going to omit the large portions of irrelevant code):

<?php get_header();
//$homepage = get_settings('siteurl')."/home/"; - from original code
global $wp; $wp_received_argument = false;
foreach ($wp->query_vars as $k=>$v) if ($v) $wp_received_argument = true;
if ($wp_received_argument) require(TEMPLATEPATH . "/index.php");
else { //wp_redirect($homepage); - from original code
//exit(); - from original code get_header();
?> <div id="content">
<?php include_once(TEMPLATEPATH.'/intro.php');?>
<!-- Primary content: Stuff that goes in the primary content column (by default, the left column) -->
<div id="primarycontainer">
<div id="primarycontent">
<div id="contentarea">
<!-- Primary content area start -->
<table summary="Layout for Educated home page" width="100%">
<tr>
...
<td style="width: 50%; vertical-align: top">
<h4 style="border-bottom-color: #070000; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid">Latest Updates</h4>
<ul>
<?php //begin the loop if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<li>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">
<?php the_title(); ?>
</a><br />
<span class="date">
<?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?>
</span>
</li>
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
<p>
<?php _e('Sorry, no posts.'); ?>
</p>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<!-- primarycontent end -->
</div>
<!-- primarycontainer end -->
</div>
<!--content end -->
<?php get_sidebar();
get_footer(); }?>

Please do not copy this directly. I omitted various portions of important code that you may need for the code to work on your site. Please see the companion article for a sample version you can download and play with and instructions.

What this does is imitate the index.php template: it shows the user the header, sidebar and footer. But what it does differently is it shows my layout instead of posts. Using this you can create a portal-looking home page, similar to that of Devlounge and one other site that I don’t remember off hand.

I’ve discovered the home.php is incredibly useful. While hand-coding may be slightly difficult, the results are almost always pleasing. One of the static home page plugins I’ve used before didn’t make the cut, and not using it was not worth it (sorry Semiologic).

One little secret: I got the inspiration for the edit in the shower last night. Amazing what relaxation techniques can bring (either that or I’m just a good brainstormer).

I’d like to publicly thank Turbocharged for acknowledging my accomplishment on his blog. But I’d also like to thank him, since it was his code that gave me the inspiration.

As I once said: I’m not a coder, but I know how to make ends meet. That includes hacking (not cracking) other people’s code.

See also:

• OEIC » Wordpress as a CMS

Start by following the four essential steps in the official upgrade guide, which involves backing up everything and deactivating all of your plugins. When you are done with that, continue here.

1. Extract the update archive to your disk.
2. Upload the files in the wordpress folder of the update archive (all of the .php files), but not any folders contained within the root wordpress folder.
3. Delete the wp-admin folder from your site using SmartFTP, the cPanel File Manager, or whatever file management mechanism you use.
4. In Windows Explorer or the SmartFTP file browser (that’s where part of the SmartFTP mention comes in, since it redefines convenience), right click on the wp-admin folder on your disk, select Send To, and then click Compressed (zipped) Folder. This will give you a new .zip file containing the contents of the wp-admin folder that you would normally upload yourself.
5. Upload the wp-admin.zip file to your WordPress root directory on your Web server.
6. In the cPanel File Manager, navigate to the wp-admin.zip file, and in the right pane, click Extract File Contents. This should extract the directory, saving you hours of time that you would normally spend uploading the update file-by-file.
7. Close the resulting popup window, and delete the wp-admin.zip file on the Web server.
8. Repeat steps 3 through 7 for the wp-includes directory.
9. Upload the wp-content directory on your disk to the site using SmrtFTP, which will overwrite the older versions of the Askimet, DB Backup, and Hello Dolly plugins. It will also give you the update default Kubrick and Classic themes. You don’t need to zip it up this time because the total size of these files is pretty small.
10. Re-enable your plugins, and test everything. If you see something scrambled up, clear your browser’s cache, and refresh that page.
11. Done!

Now if the rest of life were as simple as that, the world would be much more peaceful. But for now, at least WordPress upgrades won’t give you migraines (in most cases).