Category Archives: WordPress

New Blog Direction

As I stated earlier, I have recently changed jobs. I have also decided to close down Siolon as was known as a web design firm/blog. I have have been fortunate to learn so much about web content management from WordPress, but it’s becoming more and more difficult to keep two professional tracks running.

It was easy when I was working during the day as a designer to come home at night and do more design work. However, now I come home and study knowledge management, SharePoint, and enterprise content management. It’s a very different way of thinking, and I need to really focus in on that right now.

If you do want to stay subscribed, I will still topic about topics such as usability, UI design, and information architecture amongst other related topics. I’m still doing all those things just in a different capacity, with a specific product, and aimed for the enterprise.

Thanks for all the support!

Post Information Plugin Updated

I recently updated my Post Information Plugin to version 1.2. The changes include:

Converted to jQuery from script.aculo.us (uses jQuery bundled with WordPress)
Added extensive styling including the famous Fam Fam Silk Icons
Reorganized code
Added support for tags
Added graceful degradation for users without JS

Please visit the plugin home page to get all the information.

Better SEO Titles in WordPress 2.5

A bane of WordPress development for a long time were the awful titles generated for blog posts. When I speak of this I’m talking about the order of the blog title and the post title are put together. An example of this can be found below.

Bad Title

And this example is better than other’s I’ve seen. On some sites where the blog/post title is long then the post title is truncated! This is unacceptable when search engines give so much weight to the content of your post titles.

For a long time I circumvented this behavior by using the Optimal Title plugin. It worked fine, but it was yet another plugin for something that should’ve been inside the core. So I opened ticket #4407 to integrate the plugin architecture into the core. I created a patch, and it became changeset 6,538! In short, I added a parameter into wp_title() that sets the location of the separator. By default, it goes to the left, but you can move it to the right by specifying it. If you don’t specify anything it defaults to the legacy behavior of going to the left.

This is the code you can now use to generate sexy SEO titles:

<?php wp_title('&raquo;',true,'right'); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>

This will print: Post/Page Title » Blog Name. By ensuring that you specify meaningful titles for your postings then you can ensure that your findability will increase. The official documentation on this function has also been updated to include this change.

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