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Main

Hacking WordPress – Link In The Title (update 2)

As I have just figured out after some of the upgrades the external link in the title hack was, indeed, broken. In fact, I am somewhat puzzled, as it worked on some of my installations and didn’t work on others.

It turns out that the method of obtaining the permalink for the post is returning the canonical URI no matter what permalink system has been set up (I use custom on this blog). For example, even if you have something SEO-friendly, the code

$permĀ  = $post_id->guid;

would still return https://www.istudioweb.com/?p=427 as a link to this post. The right way of doing it now (before WP 2.7 arrives) is change the above line to:

$permĀ  = get_permalink($post_id);

That’s it. Should work.

P.S. Updated the downloadable txt file. Click here to view.

Categories
Main

Hacking WordPress theme – External URL in title still works

At least once a week I get an e-mail about the WP theme hack I posted in January. Most of the people ask how to make the hack work in WP 2.5 and 2.6.

Here’s the simple answer – if you didn’t touch your theme (I didn’t) and if you have just upgraded the WordPress installation itself – then the hack should still work. The original post with instructions is here.

The proof is this post – look at the title and take note that link in the title leads to the main blog page, not to the post itself.

If something actually did went wrong, check the following:

  1. Your theme’s functions.php file or whatever the name of the file with theme’s functions is. It should still contain the code from the original post.
  2. Your theme’s index.php file or whatever the main index template file name is. It should have the original hack as outlined in the original post.
  3. Custom field – the new URL must be in the value field, whereas the custom field name should be url1 or whatever you made it to be.

Let me know if the damn thing is acting up again.

Categories
seo

Bad Times, Bad SEO

As a bad taste SEO techniques adopter a company called Sitelynx on behalf of the The Times (UK) was spamming media sites with links. Why would a reputable publication like The Times fall for black-hat SEO techniques is another story. What is interesting is that a report on Waxy.org looks like a breakdown to bootstrapping your web site. Well, at least a part of it. Comments give an idea what was done wrong, what worked and what didn’t. Very interesting indeed.

Last week I was participating in another experiment with Freshmeat.net. A lot of pages there have PR 3 and above, so it was naturally a good idea to comment away. However, moderators appear to be quite on guard, so most of the experimental posts and accounts went down the drain couple of days after the end.