This blog post is pretty useless. It’s just here to test WordPress integration with Ping.fm. I’ve been researching this so we can do the whole social media thing at work. If you’re remotely interested in what this means then take a look at the Ping.fm Custom URL plugin and CR Post to Ping.fm plugin.

I manage several websites at work and have therefore learnt something about search engine optimisation (SEO). Our main site at work uses WordPress as the content manager, which has good SEO features by default. Last week we launched a new website and I also refreshed the other sites, in so doing I found a great article discussing how to fully SEO your WordPress site. It is a good read even if you don’t use WordPress, but for those of you that do, it recommends a suite of plugins that do all the hard work for you

• WordPress SEO – The definitive guide to high rankings for your Blog

I have quickly forked WordTwit into WordDent.

WordDent is a WordPress plugin that utilizes the Twitter API to automatically push a published post to your Identi.ca account as a dent. It allows all your Identi.ca contacts to keep up to date with your blog postings. I’m still  just testing that WordDent works correctly. I’ll find out if the nice people over at Brave New Code will agree to me releasing WordDent since I can’t fine any license details for WordTwit

I finally got around to verifying my websites with the Google, Yahoo! and MSN Live search engines. I’ve also setup sitemaps for my websites too. I’ve done this for the websites at work but couldn’t be arsed to do it for my own sites until today. To find out why you want sitemap enable your sites read the Site map page at Wikipedia.

In order to register your sitemaps with the major search engines you’ll need to setup accounts for Google Webmaster Tools, MSN Live Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer. You’ll then need to verify your site(s) with each of the search engines, they provide details about how to do this but it typically requires that you put a meta tag in your page header.

Once you’ve verified your site(s) it’s time to create a sitemap.xml. If you have a WordPress blog adding sitemap support is easy, just use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin. This re-builds sitemap.xml when you update posts, pages, comments etc. It also notifies all the relevant search engines that content has changed on your site. Very useful indeed.

If you need to create your sitemap by hand, or better yet script its creation, then read sitemaps.org for the protocol spec.

I’ve just installed WordTwit on my blog. WordTwit keeps track of when you publish new posts, and automatically informs all of your followers by pushing out a Twitter tweet. All links are automatically convered to tiny URLs to save space.

I have been meaning to setup a weblog client for a while now. I have tested a couple of weblogs clients and have settled on BloGTK.

It has a simple user interface but comprehensive features, although I did need to define a few Custom Tags before the editor supported all the formatting options I wanted.

Setting up BloGTK is very simple for Ubuntu and Debain users.

aptitude install blogtk

Once installed, the following settings will connect to a WordPress blog.e

• Server URL: http://blog.example.org/xmlrpc.php
• Account: Your Username
• Password: Your Password
• Blogging System: Moveable Type

Now I can blog directly from my desktop, I am hoping it will encourage me to post more often

My website has had a change of clothes today, ain’t it purdy? I am now using the Mandingo theme. It is available in 7 colour schemes, has a number of configurable options and is compatible with WordPress 2.3

I prefer to have a traditional home page which explains a little of what my website is about with menu navigation for visitors to read the blog or whatever. It wasn’t obvious how I could do this with WordPress, thankfully a quick Google turned up the answer in the discussion below…

• Difference between Front page and Posts page

When combined with the WordPress Navigation Tool (NAVT) I get exactly what I am after

I have finally got around to re-activating this website after many months of neglect

The first thing to do was move away from Jaws. Sadly, my Jaws installation is broken in a way that newer Jaws releases plain refuse to upgrade it. So, I did some research and decided to migrate to WordPress since it caters for all the essentials I require either in the core functionality or via plugins. Plus I can integrate with some other stuff I want to use.

My migration to WordPress was made all the easier thanks to the excellent Jaws import plugin I found on the WordPress trac. However, I decided not to use the Textile plugin to preserve the Jaws formatted text. Instead I chose to manually clean up some of the old entries so I could stick with the TinyMCE editor long term

I am happy with WordPress thus far and look forward to getting some plugins going and picking up a new theme over the coming days and weeks.

Stanley is the template I have created for Jaws 0.5.x and was the template in use here until I upgraded to Jaws 0.6.1 in February. This morning I finally started the Stanley migration to Jaws 0.6.x and have completed enough that I can now use it again for Flexion.Org

So far I have only migrated the Blog, Blocks, Static Pages, Phoo, Search and Weather templates. Even though there are still some errors things look much better. Over the coming weeks I will migrate the rest of the gadgets, simplify the CSS, further improve the cross browser compatibility and I may even redo all the administrative templates as well.

Stanely does sport one new feature since the last time I worked on it. Unfortunately it breaks CSS compliance but it is just too pretty to leave out. Only those of you equipped with a Firefox derived web browser can fully appreciate Stanely