@thesoapbox A) I got your new follower notification email (so I know who you are :) ), and B) Jacob's not even in camp this year. 12 mins ago
Jai Nischal Verma from Blog Oh Blog is holding a contest, with the prize being a free, custom-designed WordPress theme. All you have to do to enter the contest is write a blog post describing the contest and linking to it.
Previously, I briefly illustrated how using a home.php file can allow you to build a custom layout to your WordPress blog’s home page. However, I didn’t really document it well enough for the casual WP user to implement by himself. For the unknowing of my readers, here is a guide to using my (really Rudd-O’s) discovery on your site.
If you already understand the concepts behind this, skip to the download link.
Let’s take a look at Rudd-O’s code again. Try to figure out what it’s doing:
1: <?php $homepage = get_settings('siteurl')."/home/";
2: global $wp;
3: $wp_received_argument = false;
4: foreach ($wp->query_vars as $k=>$v) if ($v) $wp_received_argument = true;
5: if ($wp_received_argument) require(TEMPLATEPATH . "/index.php");
6: else { wp_redirect($homepage);
7: exit(); } ?>
Line 1 gets the address of the blog and adds what we would use to access a static page with a slug of ‘home’.
Line 2 brings in the $wp object, which allows us to figure out if there are any parameters in the URL that we need to work with.
Line 3 sets a simple boolean value of ‘false’ to a variable that we will use to determine if we have recieved any parameters.
Line 4 looks at the $wp object and asks it if there are any parameters. If it finds any, then we set $wp_received_argument to ‘true’, and we will use that in the next line.
Line 5 is where the magic happens. If we have parameters, like the page number variable, then we will load the regular index.php template which will show you the normal blog page. Otherwise, we will continue to line 6 and 7.
Line 6 will run if we don’t have any parameters, which means that we want to show our special home page. We will send a redirect to the browser telling it to go to our static page. Then we quit running this page, since there is nothing more to do anyway.
This is a relatively simple concept. Rudd-O mentioned in his original article that one should add a link to /[wp-root]/page/1 somewhere, like in the header along with the page links for example. What that will do is give WordPress the parameters we need to have the blog listing shown. If you need help adding this link, leave a comment below.
Here’s the fun part. My hacks to Rudd-O’s code will replace the redirection of the original code. All HTML and PHP content is placed within home.php. Now that we are including our content in a straight-out PHP file, and not going back to the database to retrieve a page (via the WP Loop), you can even add a real mini-loop to your front page! You can do whatever layout you want with home.php now. (See my home page, which has the mini-loop, a list of categories, and my Flickr photostream, for an example).
Now that we understand what Rudd-O’s code accomplishes, it’s up to you to use your imagination. Until recently, my email that came upon request included some basic instructions, which read something like this:
Attached is a well-commented version of home.php. Use it to set up your custom layout, but don’t upload it yet.
In order for this to look and function properly on your site, you will need to adapt it to your theme. You will have to make the portion of home.php before my table-based layout look like the code in index.php from the top of the file to just before the loop, and from just past the loop until the end of the template. Remember to close the else statement with a right curly bracket.
Also, you will need to add the /page/1 (or ?paged=1 if you aren’t using pretty permalinks) link to the page list in header.php, which should include code to dynamically change the highlighting of the Home and Blog links.
For those basically familiar with PHP, HTML and some of the simpler CSS concepts, adapting the sample home.php file I am providing should be somewhat easy. If you don’t have such keen skills, you can review the W3Schools’ tutorials on HTML and PHP for a bit of help. (Sorry folks, these days I can’t handle doing the editing for everyone, although I wish I could.)
If you are convinced that you want a home page with a custom layout for your WordPress blog, I have provided an older version of my layout, plus all of the associated logic basedon Rudd-O’s code. As noted above, you will have and want to do lots of tweaking with it to make it look good, so grab the download below, and hack away.
According to some friendly message present within a part of the Askimet interface, comments that you mark as spam will be submitted to the free service to help make it better. Most people don’t realize, however, that when they click the Recheck Queue for Spam link in the Moderate Comments screen, they are most likely just having Askimet filter the spam comments over again. Help Askimet out buy clicking Mark all as spam, and submit those spam comments to the folks at Automattic to make the service smarter.
Throughout the blogging world there is a growing practice to get rid of the rel=”nofollow” addition that WordPress adds to links in comments. I agree that it’s a great way to give commenters an incentive to write comments (they get their share of PageRank value). However, there is a specific reason I don’t “follow” the crowd: comment spammers.
Askimet (the hosted comment spam filtering service from Automattic, the creators of WordPress) is very good, but it’s not perfect. Almost every day last week there have been some of the newer forms of spam comments slipping through Askimet, and along with them came undesirable links. As long as I keep comment moderation turned off (allowing a good majority of legit comments to get through safely), the nofollow code will prevent the spammers’ sites from getting my precious PageRank.
Note: I only nofollow links in comments and trackbacks. If you are linked to from one of my posts, like the link to Chris’s blog below, then you are in safe territory.
Related link: Thursday Thoughts » Solo Technology
David Peralty has given me enough. His BloggingPro blog is nothing but a waste of his time (counter-intuitive to this post, but relevant), my time, his Web host’s resources, and my computer’s resources. The writings on his blog are worth next to nothing, which makes me wonder why I even read them. It’s almost as if his blog were an RSS reader with a bit of AI built in.
Every day I choke through my already long and distracting list of blog posts in my feed reader, only to see more of his constant quoting and lack of original content. Davey seems to be keeping to the list of The Nine Essential Posts that Every Blogger Should Know, but not actually writing anything of his own for us to quote.
While it is true that the blogosphere is all about networking, Mr. Peralty has gone too far. He also violated my blogging (only) about blogging rule, which I personally think he should take a look at. While he’s reading, he might actually have a sudden brainstorm, but he’ll probably just quote half of my post instead.
Ryan decided to start his own blog recently, probably in response to my new blogging obsession. So I ended up giving him the low-down on blogging. Here’s what I told him:
…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:
- Google likes to look through content. Your writings quickly become Google’s friend.
- 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.
Trackbacks are one of those blogging features that some beginners just don’t get (I was there – trackbacks have only made sense to me recently). The truth is that they are very simple to understand.
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:
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.
Recently, I’ve been observing a new form of spam on my blog. It is coming in the form of vague registrations, with email addresses including Russian domains and strange user IDs. For now, it’s not too bad, so I won’t take serious action. If things do heat up, I’ll look into ways to effectively block spammers from clogging up my users table.
Favorite Tweets