Chasing the Walrus - A Blog Development
 

The first thing to decide when starting a blog is what is it's purpose. Chasing the Walrus is going to be an entertainment / comedy / satire type of blog which will touch on a multitude of topics...hence the chasing part of the title. If any of you remember The Walrus Blog, it will be very much like that other than I probably wont be posting much porn. But it will be adult in nature and I will use some celebrity sponsors for monetization.

The first thing to do is to download the latest release of Word Press and all of the plug-ins I intend to use. Today's post will be listing and explaining why I use certain plug-ins.

I'll list the plug-ins I use on every blog first and then the ones I've selected for this specific application.

Plug-ins

If I'm looking for new plug-ins for something I want to do on a blog, the WordPress Plugin Database is always my first stop.

Spam Prevention - Askimet. I use the standard Askimet plug-in that is bundled with Word Press. It seems to do an excellent job of keeping spam comments from appearing in my blogs but I will admit that it does flag legitimate track-backs as spam.

Google Sitemap Generator - While I won't comment on the long term advantages or lack there of to using Google sitemaps or not, I will say that I do believe that if your starting a new blog using it does seem to get your site indexed a bit quicker.

Ultimate Tag Warrior - This is my "must" have plug-in. It does a great job of tagging your posts without creating a traffic leak to technorati or delicious but thats just for starts. You can create a tag cloud either as a page or as part of your sidebar. I will interlink common themed posts and it will add your tags into the post meta as keywords.

I'll post more on tags and tagging a little later as that will take some writing to explain.

Feedburner plug-in - Redirects your RSS feed to your feedburner feed. The advantage to this is that the feedburner feed is readable as HTML. So that if your feed does get mixed into the SERP's (and that does happen now and then) it is readable. You can also watch as the popularity of your blog grows as they do offer feed stats.

Social Bookmarks - adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic linkss at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them to a number of social bookmarking sites. This link wasn't working for me tonight but I do have a recent copy of the plug-in.

Subscribe Me - Displays the tiles with subscribe buttons to the major readers.

Feeds, feed readers and how to market your feeds is a post all it's own which I will get into at a latter date.

WP-Contact - a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post.

Now for some plug-ins I've selected specifically for this blog:

vPIP - This is a great plug-in for embedding video's into your posts and while I won't be doing a video with every post...or even a picture...I can envision wanting to embed one now and then.

Site Map Generator - This is one of a number of plug-ins that I previously haven't used but I want to take a look at.

atiChaos Aggregator - Another new plug-in. While I will not be aggregating any feeds into my posts on this blog, one of the things that caught my attention with this plug-in was it's ability to aggregate feeds both in the sidebar and on pages. Something I've done more manually on a number of other blogs.

Page Category Organizer - If you've tried to organize your pages in wordpress you know what a pain in the ass it is. This plugin claims to let you add your pages into categories, thus making it possible to organize your pages in a logical order. I haven't tried this yet but I do like to create a lot of pages and if this works pretty well will be integrating it into XXX Blog Maniac.

Next week I'll post in here on how I optimize my template and configure WP

Walrus - Can I just throw in another useful online utility for you to look at. http://www.toprankblog.com/tools/rss-buttons/ The drop down menu one is handy if you are short on space.

nice post walrus

Nice Walrus :)
Greenie and I are going to start this on Monday. I am starting from a clean slate.

Thats why I've always stayed away from the list your favorite plug-in threads is that there are so many really good ones out that do different things for different people that someone setting up a blog really needs to look through them to see what is going to work for them and their theme.

I'm sure that eventually someone will wonder why I left out some of the meta tag plug-ins like Wordpress Meta Tag Generator which is a good plug-in.

Like I've said in other posts, I prefer to do a few small hacks, when I can, to limit the number of plug-ins I use. Which I'll get into more detail When I talk about optimizing your theme.

I also didn't add the Do Follow plugin for removing the nofollow on comments for the same reason.

I hope it is okay to post on this, I don't want to hi-jack Walrus's great thread.

One thing on the social bookmarking plug-ins, I spent a good amount of time checking them out and found only a hand full allow or show adult type content, I eliminated many from my plug-in, sociable.

There is also a solution to comment span, Math Comment Spam Protection, which works quite well.

It's my post and I don't consider it hijacking at all. One of the points I definitely want to make is that there is a wide range of plug-ins and while I may prefer one doesn't mean the others are any less useful.

So having everyone add to the discussion can only be a good thing.

Since you've done the research....care to share which of the social tagging sites don't allow their users to tag adult.

With the social bookmarks plug-in I use it's a snap to enable or disable which of these places to display.

Of course I would be willing to share. From what I saw, searching social bookmarking sites to try and find adult content, I was left with the following that do:

Blinkbits
del.icio.us
furl
netvouz
reddit
simpy
yahoo
stumbleupon

I don't remember how many I went through, but seems it was alot and these being the bigger ones anyways. There is one slightly possibility on the ones that do not show adult content in search, it's possible with those services, users can still share adult bookmarks?

Sociable is probably similar to yours. I love widgets, drag and drop is nice..:) Maybe thats also something you could post about, widgets? Sure make is easy to change around a blog with no coding. Think many people could find them useful.

nice post guys ... thanks for the info!

So I tried both Sociable and Social Bookmarks and they both want to put fairly big icons in a vertical line down the page.

It would be nice if I could just have a single line with words for links instead.

And I find myself wondering... who the hell actually uses these social things? LOL I very rarely bookmark anything anymore.

Thats odd for sociable, mine shows little icons and in horizontal rows. Maybe a setting?

I'm using 'Share This' on a couple of my blogs. It gets added to the foot of each post. As well as the social bookmarking it enables a user to email the URL of the post to a 'friend'

Templates and Themes
 

Probably one of the most time consuming part of setting up a blog is deciding on a theme and editing a template. I literally go bug eyed doing it but a great place to start looking for your theme is the WordPress Theme Viewer. Probably somewhere near 1000 themes all with preview.

You can also search for WP themes and come up with some really nice ones that aren't listed in the theme viewer.

Once you select a theme, before you do anything else, check that it is html compliant. Many aren't. Also, check that it is optimized so that your post information comes up first before any of the sidebar information does. Many 3 column themes suffer from this problem. If you find issues with the theme, you'll have to decide if you can correct the problems or whether you should search out a different theme.

Since 90% of the themes available are variations of previously published themes, you can usually find other themes that might not be as close to what you are looking for but similar enough that you can make them into what you want.

While the template files will vary greatly depending on the specific theme, here is a list of some of the most common and what their uses are:
404.php - Customizable 404 message for posts that may have been deleted from your blog.

archive.php - File used for both archives and category recall and recalls the complete list of posts. If you want to have different templates for your category this would be the file that you copy to do that. In order to limit duplicate content worries I like to replace in this file with . You can either define the excerpt in the post editors optional excerpt field or it will use the first 55 words of the post.

archives.php - Usually a part of the sidebar, this returns a list of the archives in question (month, day, year, category, etc.) as opposed to the posts as above.

attachment.php - I haven't ever used attachments to my posts but if I did, this is where I would edit to change the look of the attachment.

comments.php -
comments-popup.php -
I'm not sure about the dynamics with these two files. I know comments.php is called from single.php and comments-popup.php is called from index

footer.php - Adds the information to the bottom of the page and closes out your template. Be sure to edit in all of your copyright information.

functions.php - Used by some templates in the admin area to allow manipulation of basics in the header file.

header.php - Yep, your header information area. I'm going to say most WP templates do not have meta keywords or descriptions in the header. I'll discuss in a future post how I deal with adding them (not that it's the best, it's just mine) but you can also use plug-ins like Wordpress Meta Tag Generator to add these.

index.php - All of your main page blog post information is here.

page.php - This is the default template for a page display. You can assign a different template on a page by page basis if you ever find the need. Since I like to use sponsor feeds on pages (as opposed to blog posts), I'll copy and edit this since some sponsors haven't learned that some affiliates like to use fixed width, 3 column themes which can't display pictures larger than 350 px wide without blowing up the theme.

search.php - Self explanatory, this is the template that is used to display search results

searchform.php - This template formats your search bar

sidebar.php - Your sidebar. On some themes you may have a sideone.php and a sidetwo.php.

single.php - Single post display

style.css - Your style sheet

and from Ultimate Tag Warrior

tag.php - If you use this you can have a separate template for when someone clicks on one of your tags. Otherwise it seems to use the main index template. I use this much like the archive template as described above so that my tag archives only display excerpts and not full posts

tags.php - Used as a page to make a tag cloud page

searchtags.php - Used in tags.php to add a search function for your tag cloud.

I'll most likely get into more detail on some of these as I begin to setup my template but for now I think I've covered the basics on most of the templates in a basic theme.

Very well explained, Walrus. A few bits of info there I didn't know. I can now get more out of my blogs while I'm waiting for this series of tutorials to finish :)

Wow Walrus, that is great. It's funny, I never really gave all the various pages much thought. This will help me do a bit more customising.
Thanks.

good job Walrus |thumb
I just wanted to make a post in this thread so that I'm emailed when you come up with more :D

Has anyone been able to connect to the atiChaos Aggregator site? It's been down for me ever since this thread started. Maybe Walrus' post made it too popular!
Anyway, if anyone has downloaded it, can they email it to me, please, so I can have a look?
steve [at] oast [dot] com

Thanks

I had it downloaded and sitting on my desktop....then someone other than myself decided to install some software to help me out and it deleted everything on the desktop.

That was very helpful. |shocking|
Deleted as in "Shift-Delete and permanently gone", or in the recycle bin?
Or maybe System Restore; if you didn't really want the software to be installed at that time.
Hopefully someone else has managed to get it. It is not one I had heard of. I've been using FeedWordPress, but it is starting to generate more and more dupes and errors

Exactly my point. :)

Nice idea doing this, Walrus. |thumb

Isn't that what "Subscribe to this Thread" under "Thread Tools" is for?

Well I'll be go to hell, didn't know you could do that |huh

wow nice thread Walrus

Another excellent addition to the tutorial Walrus. You are making the tip and trick too easy :)

Wow, long live the Walrus, I came here to learn :)

One more useful tool for bloger - free and easy top referrers script

Here's the url to the theme generator:
http://www.yvoschaap.com/wpthemegen/

Setting Up Your Theme - Part One
 

For Chasing the Walrus I wanted a very simple, basic theme but I wanted it to be unique and attractive. I chose the moony theme and with a little editing came up with this: Chasing the Walrus.

Note: you don't absolutely need to do any of the things below. Right or wrong, this is simply how I optimize my themes. You can either use what you like or throw it all out a quackery.

Now it's time to start editing the templates. The thing to remember from scratch is that some plug-ins require certain things get added into the script in order to make them work but you can't add them until after you enable the plug-in or your theme wont work. A sort of catch-22.

So I pre-edit the templates a little and then re-edit them as I get to specifics of certain plug-ins.

One of what I feel is a shortcoming of WordPress it that they really don't handle meta-tags well. Specificly, the title, description and keyword tags.

The Title Tag
When I'm on the index page, I want the blog title to appear but when I'm on a category, I want something like this "category name | blog title" and on a page this "page title | blog title". I can blame this on grandmascrotum since she first pointed it out but the damn >> WP likes to add bugs me as well. Especially since it gets added to the front side of the page title and category name. The little hack I found works wonders for taking this out.

You can find the details of the hack if your interested in this thread

I then edit the header.php template file like this:
The Description Tag
There are four basic page displays with WordPress

1. The Index Page
2. The Single Post Page
3. The Category Page
4. basic WP Pages

and if your like me...the tags page

I have yet to find a single solution to having unique descriptions (or keywords for that matter) for all of these pages. WordPress Meta Tag Generator does a pretty good job with this for everything but category pages. With them it uses the same defaults it would use for the index page.

The thing that the plug-in does do that I haven't figured out how to do using template tags is set custom descriptions for WP pages.

For this theme, I'll use a combination of the two....WP template tags and Meta Tag Generator for descriptions. I'll use the Meta Tag Generator for WP pages and template tags for all the rest.

This is how I form my meta-description tag for my header file:
Notice for a single post, I'm using an excerpt from the post. I don't know if this is a WP2.1.x change or if I'm using excerpt in the header but you must add the excerpt in the optional excerpt field for this to work.

Category uses the category description field you can define when you create the category.

Everything else uses the blog description you set as your tagline.

Since I want different descriptions for pages but I don't want duplicate meta tags, I edit out the following line usually found right before
That is the what the meta tag generator will use to add it's meta tags. So obviously, I need a separate header and page templates for this.

I copy my header template and rename it headpage.php. Delete both the meta description and keyword lines and add back in right before

Also, edit the page template file and change to Once I enable Ultimate Tag Warrior, I'll be back to edit this some more.

Keywords
Since I rely heavily on Ultimate Tag Warrior, I wait to set this up until I enable the plug-in as well.

Other pre-install edits:
Let me add that I like to show the full posts on the index and single pages and excerpts on all the rest. To do this I edit category.php, archive.php. Simply find on these pages and replace it with Next post, we'll setup the WP options and start enabling plug-ins and adopting the templates for the individual options.

Looking forward to it! |headbang|

Oh, BTW, the atiChaos Aggregator page is back up again if anyone else is interested :)

Walrus, thanks for posting this, I've just realised something awful.

I've been using Wordpress Meta Tag Generator from the very start and have dutifully written out unique descriptions for each post I've made.

But I've just checked the source code and guess what? The fucking plugin doesn't actually add my unique descriptions to my posts. It's just been adding the main blog description. So I've got about 300 pages on my site with exactly the same meta tag. No wonder Google hates me.

So I went to the original plugin page to see if I'd missed an instruction, but it's incredibly vague. Here's what it says:

"Using Meta Tag Generator

to generate meta tags on a per post or per page basis, use the key/value sets as:

* description – small description of the post or page
* keywords – keywords for post or page (also stacked with the default keywords assigned earlier)."

That's no use whatsoever.

Is there some kind of extra code that needs to go in the header for this plugin to work? Has anyone experienced any clashes with other plugins?

Someone has had the same problem but Wil's reply is "It's not my fault."

There's a possiblity that this plugin used to work with an older version but it's not happening now.

I also just had a go at adding your bit of description code into my header, but it excerpted the tags rather than the first paragraph and screwed up the layout.

What do I need to do to make the excerpt hack work properly? What's the "optional excerpt field"?

Walrus, you're a wonderful human being for helping me to discover this monumental stuff up. I'm just banging my head against the wall that I didn't discover it earlier. And now I don't know how to fix it.

Edit: I should add - when I go into "manage posts" the descriptions and keywords I added are there. They're in the database, but for some reason WP isn't pulling them out and putting them on the page with the rest of the content.

I've used this plug-in on 2.0.x WP blogs successfully so I'm going to have to believe that it is not 2.1.x compliant since, having read your post, I tested it on the new blog and it doesn't seem to work.

Guess I'll have to do some testing over the next week and see if I can find a meta tag generator that works with 2.1.x and pages.

When your on your write post page...or when you edit your posts, below where you edit in your posts you have a small section for adding files, below that is optional excerpts, trackbacks, and custom fields (where you added your information for meta tag generator) Not sure but I'll try to attach a screen shot

Cool, if you check it out, let me know what you think. I'd love to find an easier way to add feeds to my sidebar and pages than what I'm doing now.

OK, here's a possible reason. The plugin is working on my other blog at Quirkysex.com and I didn't upgrade that one to 2.1.2. It's still 2.0.3. So perhaps the newest version of WP doesn't support this meta tag plugin.

There are some extra plugins I'm using on Ms Naughty: Sociable and Chicklet creator. I deactivated both and it made no difference. So it would appear to be the upgrade that's done it. :( I'm now going to do a bit of searching on the WP help site to see if I can find more info.

Edit: Well, there ya go. It's not listed here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/P...lity/2.1#L_-_O

I've found four other plugins that should add meta tags, but I don't know what it means for all my previous posts and their painstakingly-added descriptions. They might be useless now.

Damn you got this in while i was editing my previous post to explain the excerpt stuff.

Bing! All is solved!
This plugin works and it makes use of all my previously-entered descriptions and keywords.
http://www.g-loaded.eu/2006/01/05/ad...dpress-plugin/

Edit: Also found the optional excerpt thing, right in front of me. I'm used to just ignoring it. LOL

The next challenge is getting the plugin to list my description and keywords underneath the title, not under all that other stuff. Although I guess the important thing is that they're there.

Well, I just learned a valuable lesson. Check for new plug-ins when you create your blogs. grandmascrotum's plug-in pretty much makes my whole post above unnecessary.

Glad you found something that worked with all the work you'd done.

While trying to help out, I found headspace2, which is probably what I'll use on my new blog. It also does everything I just wrote about.

Too bad none of these work with UTW tag pages.

LOL Walrus I think we've helped each other. I'm so glad you did your original post, it alerted me to a problem I didn't know I had.

My lesson learnt: check to make sure your plugins still work after an upgrade.

Not Found

The requested URL /feedburner/feedburnerplugin12.zip was not found on this server

|banghead|

Just worked for me...you must have picked a bad time.

what about direct link?
http://flagrantdisregard.com/feedbur...erplugin12.zip

still can't download this :(