Bene shares some modifications he made to my libnotify over ssh post.

Please bare with me while I re-organise the categories on this site.

In an attempt to make the categories more logical and useful, I have began a full reorganisation of the structure, and categories that posts appear in. You can find the full list of the Categories under “Browse Posts/by Category”. As part of the re-org I have split the previous Browse Posts page into three seperate pages, the primary “Browse Posts” page will now show the most recent posts from all categories, however this can be filtered by digging deeper into the ‘by xxx’ pages under “Browse Posts”.

If you have any comments or suggestions on how I can improve the navigation and browseability of the information on this site, please do not hesitate to either contact me or comment here.

In other site news, I have now upgraded WordPress to version 2.0.4, which fixes around 50 (small) bugs in WordPress, and enhanced it’s security even further. I urge all WordPress users to make this very simple upgrade (especially if its done from an existing 2.0x install).

The majority of my time is currently spent answering a few questions from prospective clients, I figured I should cover a few of these questions here.

Which Blogging Software should I use?

I may be a little biased with this one, the obvious answer to me is WordPress. Why? Because WordPress is flexible, easy to use for non-technical people, easy to extend for the slightly more technical, and completely customisable for the fully technical.

Can WordPress do …

Yes. Yes it can. Whatever it is. It may not be able to do it now, but with the right amount of time WordPress can be setup to do almost anything you like. An example of this is a job I am currently working on which has extended WordPress to include a full CMS with specific options dedicated to storing and sorting Printer Information.

Why should I blog?

You should blog for multiple reasons. The most common reason I recommend businesses start blogging is to drive traffic to their website and to keep in touch with a client base for regular product and market information.

Driving traffic to your site depends on your content. A blog is the simplest way to regularly publish and provide up to date info to your customers.

What is SEO?

SEO is simply Search Engine Optimization. In more detail it is customising your website to achieve better results in a search engine. The most effective way of increasing your search engine ranking is a simple on. Providing content people want.

If people link to your content, your rank on google will increase. More people will link to your content if you provide good content. More people will link to your content if you provide fresh, updated content.

Why do I need a good search engine result?

Rarely will users go past the first page of results returned by a search engine. You should aim to be in that first page on a search for relevant search terms.

Why do I need a Consultant?

Do you re-wire your house, do your plumbing, mow your lawn, fix your car and television? No you generally find someone who is experienced in doing these, or can save you money by really knowing what they are doing.

Why should I pick you?

Sure Joe Bloggs has a cheaper price. But does he have 10 years experience in IT, with a focus on Web Technologies? Is he also a competent programmer, with the ability to provide custom code for a specific job? Does he also have graphics and HTML experience to provide layout tweaks. Does he understand XHTML and CSS standards, and strive to meet those standards?

I can answer yes to all of these questions and more.

I also provide my time voluntarilly to the WordPress community, answering questions in the support forums and providing plugins to WordPress released under the GNU Public License, making them free to use, distribute and modify.

What tools do you recommend to help other Website Developers?

This is a particular tough question. My background is in UNIX administration, and all my web and development work is performed using Firefox and Vi¹.

However I have come to rely on a few tools in particular, and found some others very usefull on occasion. All of these tools are browser based (and therefore cross-platform) and more importantly freely available. Please contact me if any are broken, shouldn’t be here or you have suggestions.

Standards Compliance

• HTML/XHTML Validator
  http://validator.w3.org/check
• CSS Validator
  http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator

Site Layout

• Browsershots - Auto Screenshots from multiple browsers
  http://browsershots.org

Search Engine Optimization

• SERP Checker and other Free SEO Tools from SEO Company
  http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/serp-checker.php

Spelling, Links etc.

• Site Check Spell Checker
  http://www.siteowner.com/sitecheck.cfm
• Link Validity Checker
  http://www.siteowner.com/system/linkcheck.asp

My previous posting was a post to ‘Ask JaredQuinn’ to assist a user of the WP Support forums with their enquiry about setting the default post date in Word Press posts.

While this is still not technically a “plugin” because it requires modification to WordPress core files (there are no current hooks for these, yet) the closest I can get to a plugin has been released as in now available here.

This plugin allows you to specify any value that the strtotime() PHP function accepts, this includes strings such as:

• now
• next thursday
• in 1 week

These can be inserted into the Post form as the default timestamp and used to set the default without needing the user to click the ‘Edit Timestamp’ box.

See the link above for full details.

Plugin Details

Comments can be made on the download page.

The latest bugfix upgrade from WordPress is out which fixes some of the minor (because there wasn’t any major) niggles some people had with the Christmas release of 2.0, so the dev team brings us all WordPress 2.0.1.

This site has been upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1, and if anyone is experiencing issues with 2.0, especially memory issues (which I have noticed had started appearing in the last few days) I encourage you to upgrade. If you need commercial/professional assistance upgrading feel free to contact me.

The “production” version of my website has now been upgraded to WordPress 2.0 after sufficient testing in my development area. The development environment (http://jaredquinn.info/dev) will be updated regularly with the current development version of WordPress for my own testing/development.
Upgrades to version 2.0 for my clients will be continuing this month, if you are interested in having your WordPress install updated by someone with loads of WordPress experience follow the “Contact Me” link and send me a note.

I was expecting migration of everything to the release candidate of WordPress 2.0 to be a difficult task, but it wasn’t. So far I have yet to make any changes to anything, here’s what I did.

• Copy my theme from my current wp-content/themes directory into the new one.
• Ensure all required plugins are activated from the administration panel.
• Copy the plugins directory from wp-content/themes directory into the new one.
• Copy my “downloads”, “images” and “pic” (and/or any that you use) from the old wp-c0ntent into the new one.
• Test

I had no issues, nothing to report out of the ordinary and nothing much to do at all.

My development blog can be found at http://jaredquinn.info/dev if anyone cares to check it out, it’s only up to date as of a few posts ago.

While performing WordPress installations for several clients lately, they have asked me “what are the essentials?”, there are a few good lists of essential plugins out there and loads of information on WordPress SEO.

This article is the list of what was done with JaredQuinn.info and on Bob Mutch’s SEO Company blogs for Plugin Installations and SEO.

Plugins

• General
  • Downloads for WP
  • Adsense Deluxe
  • Google SiteMap Generator
• Wordpress Enhancements/Fixes
  • Search Pages
  • Smart Link
  • Static Front Page
  • SubList
    - Recursively list subpages
  • WP Contact Form
• Interface Enhancements
  • Tiger Design (Administration Interface)
• Statistics
  • WP Advanced Stats Recorder
  • WP Advanced Stats Viewer
• Code Highlighting
  • Code Markup
  • Code Snippet
• Anti-SPAM
  • Captcha! - SPAM prevention
• SEO
  • Head META Description
  • Keywords
• Execute PHP Code
  • PHP Exec
  • Exec PHP

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimising a WordPress blog is a relatively easy task thanks to the excellent construction and ease of customisation of WordPress.

Permalinks

The single most important thing to do with WordPress for SEO is Permalinks. In the WordPress administration panel ensure you set your permalink structure, it can be found under Options. Pick a structure to use and stick to it, changing it will cause you problems with any inbound links.

The permalink setting I use for JaredQuinn.info is:

[code]
/%category%/%year%.%monthnum%.%day%/%postname%/
[/code]

Titles

Next, some modifications to your theme are necessary. Most search engines display the meta title tag in the search results, it is important to have something meaningful in there.

To produce the titles on this site I use:

[code]
<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> :: Blog Archive <?php } ? <?php wp_title(); ?></title>
[/code]

There is no use setting a neat title in your theme and then using useless titles in your posts and pages; put some thought into each and every one.

Keywords

Using keywords is useful for SEO; to do this use the Keywords plugin mentioned in the previous section. It adds a keywords() function to WordPress. In each of your posts/pages you can add a Custom Field named Keywords. Set this to the comma seperated list of Keywords to use.

[code]
<meta name=”keywords” content=”jared,quinn,it,consulting,consultant,design….,<?php echo keywords(); ?> />
[/code]

Description

The Meta Head Description plugin extends the wp_head(); function to include a description tag. Description META tags are used by search engines such as Google as the text displayed in the results instead of whatever the crawler happen to find.

Make sure your theme calls wp_head(); in header.php.

Standards Compliance

Crawlers and other robots will understand your page better if it is standards compliant. I prefer all my pages to strictly adhere to XHTML 1.1; however this is not always entirely possible. You can use the Validator at validator.w3.org to validate your code. I personally prefer pages with NO errors and NO warnings. If you are going to the effort to ensure compliance it’s worth making sure you have a valid DOCType , Content-type and Character set.

While on the subject of WordPress themes, the theme you pick is important. JaredQuinn.info uses a fully XHTML 1.1 compliant theme, which is loaded content first followed by navigation. This means that crawlers and spiders see the important parts of the page first!

Content… Content… Content!!

Getting higher rankings on Google and other search engines is all about links. The best way to get links is having content that is worth linking to. If you don’t have content worth linking to, it’s pretty pointless getting a #1 ranking, not to mention annoying to the rest of the world.

Google Sitemaps

Google sitemaps are a useful way of providing the full structure of your site to Google in a single easy to use format, which is even easier to accomplish using the WordPress Google Sitemap Generator plugin.

References

The first time I considered SEO for a WordPress blog, I found the following pages invaluable:

• Fintan Darragh’s Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips
• WordPress Codex - SEO

The decision was an easy one… I’ve been gearing myself up as a WordPress consultant and have spent most of my time lately working with it. So the new jaredquinn.info is now a full Wordpress site.

So you’re blogging now, I hear? Well no. There is much more you can do with something like WordPress then just Blog. Sure i’ll blog but that will be for Site News, and for information about my software and other relevant bits of the site. I’m also thinking I might generally blog about technical issues I come across and solutions I find (similiar to the articles i’m always intending to write.)

I’ve worked with WordPress for quite some time through several versions, and huge leaps forward. I converted a very old blog of mine from Moveable Type to it a while back, and when I did that I spent alot of time hunting around for the right software to use. WordPress still to me is the right software to use for so many applications. And besides even a PHP programmer gets sick of using his own cobbled together excuse for a CMS to update his own site when it can be done in such a nice user interface (I have WordPress Tiger Style Admin installed for a fresh admin UI).

Enjoy the new jaredquinn.info.