My wife departed on Philippine Airlines flight number 102 last night at approximately 10 pm. She's now at the Los Angeles domestic terminal for United Airlines, waiting on her flight to Phoenix.

Read the rest of this entry »

Time may change me,
But I can’t trace time.
…Changes

Over the last 24 hours, I've made some changes. I've made changes both because of something I discovered and because Google changed AdSense for search.

Read the rest of this entry »

John P. at One Mans Blog recently published 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog. You see these kinds of lists all over the place, but I think I should listen to this guy. He's the Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President for Layered Technologies, founder of HTMLHelp.com and former Vice President of Sales for SAVVIS Communications. If he knows enough to present information at WordCamp Dallas, and WordPress people actually listen to him, he must make a whole lot of sense.

I'm not going to repeat what he's written and I'm only going to list the subtopics I need to change and have control over. Here I go:

1. Use English Naming Conventions for Images

   This was something I wasn't paying much attention to until I read this. I named all my images myself, but I never made them descriptive on purpose. After seeing all the searches for "frog clipart" and "money clipart" (images I have on this blog) appearing in my logs, I'm convinced this is the way to go.

2. Use TITLE Elements on Hypertext Links

   Again, I failed to do it on purpose. If you saw titles when you hovered over a link, it was by chance and not intentional. From now on, it'll be intentional. However, with over 1200 pages on this blog, there's no way I'm going to go back and change all the links. Sure, I'll change them when I'm editing a page, but that's about it.

3. Pick the Right Theme

   I hacked the heck out of the theme I'm using for this blog. The original theme code is almost completely gone. What am I saying? Except for some stray strings, it IS all gone. I rewrote and compressed the CSS and I rewrote most of the theme code. I say most because I didn't need to rewrite the functions.

   I won't do it again, though, because someone has already done it for me with other themes. I'm talking about the themes available over at Court's Internet Marketing School. I've started two blogs using two of the themes he'd already gone through and I went through them again, looking for errors or missing functions.

4. Do You Have a Print Stylesheet?

   No. No, I don't. I'll have to investigate this and see what I can do.

5. WP Admin Bar Reloaded Speeds Up Blogging

   I'll get the plugin when it supports WordPress 2.5. Until then, I'll have to do it the hard way.

6. MyBlogLog Makes It Personal

   Maybe, but I was getting spammed by people on it, so I killed my account. Perhaps I'll set a new one up later on.

7. Show Recent and Top Commentators

   I show the top commenters on a separate page, not in the sidebar. I'm thinking of moving it back to the sidebar, but with it "nofollowed" on every page but the index page. I haven't implemented recent commenters yet, but I plan to do it soon.

8. Optimize and Resize Every Image

   I don't use many images, so I should be safe, and I almost always resize them. I'll have to check out the software he recommends.

9. Always Include At Least One Image

   I don't do it on every post and I have no intention of doing it on every post. I'm not a big image fan. Do YOU think I should?

10. Homepage Excerpts Increase Pageviews

    I don't agree with this at all. If you want to read the whole article on the home page, so be it. I get plenty of page views because of my content (7-9 per person average). Why make it any harder for you to read them? You're not clicking my ads, the searchers are. What do YOU think about it?

I reread and checked everything John P. suggested. I already do most of what he wrote, but I completely skipped the "VLogging, PodCasting and Multimedia" section. Because of my limited options here in the Philippines and because I can't keep a connection stable enough to view video from the 900-pound gorilla called "YouTube" without waiting for an hour, trying to get deeper into video authoring is foolhardy at this point.

I just spent the last 24 hours upgrading WordPress on 3 blogs. Things broke. Some people were blamed, others were shot.

I could have saved myself a whole lot of headaches if I'd disabled the cache on each of them while changing the widgets. Mine kept disappearing on me. If you haven't upgraded yet, do yourself a favor and do that first.

Okay, I finally knuckled under and decided to add tags to my theme. Prior to WordPress version 2.3, you had to use a plugin in order for your theme to support tagging. Now, however, it's a native function and it's pretty easy to use. If you look down at the bottom of this post, you'll see "Categories:" followed by "Tags:". It's going to take some time to go through a thousand other posts to add tags.

You may wonder why I'd even bother to start using tags this late in the game. It's the related articles thing. I was maintaining a separate database to keep track of related articles, using keywords. Kind of like tagging (duh). Once I thought about it, I decided to stop circumventing the plugin that shows related posts and just add tagging. It'll be a whole lot easier.

I already had both an archive.php and a category.php file for my theme (that I previously copied from index.php and modified). I just added a tag.php file to the list. As soon as I make a couple of minor changes, I'll be all set.

Just in case you want to play with tags, and the theme you're using doesn't support them, take a look at this WordPress Codex page to make sure you're doing it right: Template Tags/the_tags

I've written about problems with the Global Translator plugin before. I managed to get it to work with the last version of WordPress. I didn't realize until a few minutes ago that it doesn't work with my upgrade to version 2.3.

As of right now, it's off my blog for good and it won't be making a reappearance later on down the road. I didn't link to it this time for a reason. I don't want anyone else pulling their hair out over a plugin that isn't worth the trouble for all the trouble it causes.

In fact, I'm never going to put a translation option on this blog again. What a waste of time!

I don't know what all the hullabaloo was about, but I just finished upgrading this blog, Untwisted Vortex, and my other blog. Both are now running the latest stable version (2.3) of WordPress. I think there was like 5 minutes where the blogs were inaccessible.

I took the opportunity to also upgrade all of my plugins. I only had to manually edit one. Piece of cake — the instructions were on the website for the plugin, in the comments.

Now, about this tagging thing. I haven't used it up till now and I don't plan to do so anytime soon. It's supposed to be good for SEO purposes but I don't buy it. Other than that, this was a ho-hum upgrade in my opinion, almost not worth doing at all.

I mentioned in my article, "It Got Stumbled Again!", that I had excluded certain articles from my "Popular Posts" widget in the left sidebar because they didn't present the image that I wanted to present for my blog.

After careful consideration, I've removed the exclusions. If they're in the top 100, regardless of the subject matter, they'll be in the list. I shouldn't be concerned what kind of impression they may leave my readers with. This is, after all, a personal blog. Right, wrong, or indifferent, my thoughts are my thoughts and I shouldn't hide them. I didn't hide them the first time I published them so why should I hide them now?

I think it's amazing that this has gone unnoticed by my regular readers. I know of at least three of you who have commented since I made the change. Something as big as this should stand out like a sore thumb to anyone who's been here more than once or twice.

There have actually been several changes over the past couple of days and I'm not going to tell you what they are, so there. Guess what? I'm not going to mention the other changes when they happen this week either. Unlike some bloggers I've seen, I don't make it a habit of making constant changes. Unless something goes horribly wrong, or if I make mistakes, I won't be doing anything else after the end of this week that'll be noticeable to the human eye.

Comments? Anyone?

I've been working on optimizing my CSS. Before I get into that, a brief history is in order:

Back in May, I made some adjustments to my theme. The first was the Google AdSense ad placements. They're still displayed that way except now I use the Shylock AdSense plugin to display the ads. The second was to increase the font size of the main content from 10 pixels to 11. I noticed that the "Tigarator" options of my theme reset themselves several times since then and that's what prompted me to dump the "Tiga" functions from my theme and start editing the CSS by hand.

After that, I made some more adjustments to my theme. The most significant was making the sidebars load after the middle content area. Then, after I said goodbye to my JavaScript widgets, my blog loaded pretty fast. I tested the speed back then with a meta tag analyzer and it loaded in under 1 second. I tested it today and it still loads in under 1 second (without the widgets).

I boycotted JavaScript widgets the first time I felt the need for speed but have since put a few back. I put them where they wouldn't affect the displaying of the contents, in the footer. I do have one in the bottom of the right sidebar, but it's the last thing to load before the footer.

Last night, I somehow found myself at Daily Blog Tips and read the post about 6 ways to speed up your site. Tip #3 about using Clean CSS caught my eye as well as a comment by Chris from Reflective Reality V2.0 on how to make WordPress quicker by adding a single line to my .htaccess file. I did the .htaccess thing. I wonder if my blog is any snappier now.

I started using the Clean CSS website this morning to see what changes were suggested to my CSS. I made a lot of the changes but stopped because I didn't understand the changes it suggested for the shorthand properties, so I "Googled" for more information and came across an old post at 456 Berea Street that did a very good job at explaining efficient CSS with shorthand properties. Armed with that information, I now feel confident enough to complete my CSS optimization project, which I hope to finish today or tomorrow.