Category: blog

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blog

Hacking WordPress theme – external URL for post title

Sometimes something weird happens – I demand something that isn’t available. With software it’s easy (that’s how I got into computers), you dig in the code and you tweak and hack around until it does what you want.

When I just started this blog on Blogger quite a while ago, there was this feature that allowed to set up a link for your title – in case if you don’t want the title of the post to link to external resource. Why would you do it – whole another story, but it was just possible. With WordPress, even matured to version 2.3, it is still not.

I have decided to dig in and figure out how to do it with as least effort as possible. I have no idea how to build a WordPress plugin yet and I didn’t really have time to figure that out. So I decided to go hacking. Through various resources on the web I figured what needed to be hacked and how. Initial idea was to leave core files untouched and hack the theme only, so any time you upgrade your WordPress installation the feature remained untouched.

The only two places you will need to touch are functions.php and main index file of your template. This is such an easy process that almost any can do it in under 15 minutes.

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blog software

Blog Editor – Wish List Continues

One more thing to add to my Blog Editor Wishlist is To-Do list. Or ability to have some tags for offline use only. For example, if you have a large topic, like web design, there exist a huge number of nuances that you can cover. Given that you know what you are talking about.

Let’s say you are writing about how much CSS means for design and as a side thought you realize that it would be good to elaborate on inline vs. inner vs. external styles. By the time you’re done with post or article, you may already forget about it. But in our editor you right-click on a word (CSS, in our example), select a menu “Create a To-Do Note” and fill in fields where you would specify what you want yourself to do in a future.

Pretty neat, right?

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blog seo

More fun with Alexa and stats

As any blogger I can’t help but look at the stats now and then. At certain moment I realized that I don’t see Alexa in list of visiting search engines. I also realized it’s wrong. So I ventured in depths of my memory and just before hopelessly sinking there I remembered someone posting about Alexa redirect and how that helps your Alexa score.

What I did was I gave out just one redirect link (http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.dontdateguy.com) to our friends’ blog DontDateGuy.com on a not very crowded forum and watched stats afterwards. In just several hours I saw a tremendous boost in Alexa’s “curiosity”. Alexa was going over the site like there is no tomorrow, superseded by Google only (but who can beat that guy, eh?). For last 8 days (since the blog became active) Google hit it 143 times, Alexa 93, Yahoo 65 and Ask.com – 27. Comparing to this blog where Alexa also wasn’t showing up – pretty impressive to me.

So I have set up some more redirect links to two aforementioned blogs and will keep watching what will happen by the end of the month.

UPDATE: Alexa’s redirect doesn’t work now. Guess it got abused too much.