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Great Specs and an Inbox Surprise

by Michael on September 19th, 2007 in General, WordPress

I've been busy in the office as evidenced by my lack of posts during the past month. Allow me to break this drought by sharing two recent highlights from my time in cyberspace:

Great Specs Lead to Fast Development
insidethewalk.jpg Sevier Heights Baptist Church got in touch with me last month with this request: "We have designed and laid out a website for our college ministry. Now, we need you to implement our design on a live web server." In addition, they needed the project finished in one week.

This type of project can easily become quite daunting; however, thanks to an excellent specifications document submitted by the Sevier Heights design team, it turned out to be a relatively painless task. Along with a Photoshop comp of their design, Sevier Heights also provided me with a Word document which contained all of the content and specifications for every page of their site.

In the final analysis, I built insidethewalk.org with the help of the following tools:

  • WordPress - content management system
  • WordPress plugins:
    • cforms II - provided for the quick and easy development of various contact and signup forms
    • Event Calendar - along with some custom coding and CSS to control its display, this plugin serves as a great way for the content managers to post information on upcoming events
    • FAlbum - displays photos from the Inside The Walk Flickr account
    • Image Manager - allows for easy management and editing of photos in blog posts
    • podPress - handles the Inside The Walk podcast
  • Image Cross Fader - JavaScript which smoothly transitions images on the home page
  • XSPF Web Music Player - site-wide music player

An Inbox Surprise
Around 5pm one Friday afternoon last month, I checked my email to see that I had received a Paypal payment. This was rather confusing as I hadn't sent out any invoices lately; however, upon closer examination, I remembered the payment's source. Last October, I posted a tutorial showing how to embed WordPress into a vanilla install of OS Commerce 2.2. As an accompaniment to the post, I posted a demonstration of my technique complete with two products: 1) an OSC Commerce/WordPress install plus hosting and 2) an install without hosting. The payment was for option two.

Before leaving the office for the day I sent a quick email to my new client informing him that I would get to his request on Monday morning. This was the beginning of what has been a very good business relationship brought about by a website I hadn't thought about for a while.

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WordPress Tip: Find the Current Page Slug

by Michael on August 9th, 2007 in Tips and Tricks, WordPress

While I was working on a WordPress template today, I needed to find the current page's post_slug. After investigating the function is_single in wp-includes/query.php, I discovered the following method for determining the current page ID, post title, or post name:

$post_obj = $wp_query->get_queried_object();
$post_ID = $post_obj->ID;
$post_title = $post_obj->post_title;
$post_name = $post_obj->post_name;

~ 10 comments

New Tool: SWF Downloader

by Michael on June 25th, 2007 in Flash, Tools

swf_downloader.jpgToday I needed to grab a Flash file from one of my client's websites. However, I did not have FTP access to the site, so I created an online form that lets me download Flash files quickly and easily.

For anyone else who needs such a tool, feel free to use my online SWF Downloader.

~ 3 comments

Do Meta Tags Still Matter?

by Michael on June 15th, 2007 in SEO, Tips and Tricks, WordPress, WordPress Plugins

HTML Meta Tags have been around since the early days of the World Wide Web with search engines formerly relying heavily on them for the proper listing and classification of web pages. However, as search engines have become more sophisticated and the tags themselves have become subject to abuse, their importance has wained. So, Do Meta Tags Still Matter? More specifically, does my use of meta tags affect how my web page will be listed on a search engine?

My quick answer to that question is, yes, at least as far as Google search results are concerned, your description meta tag does appear to influence the content displayed with your search results listing. To demonstrate this, I'm going to give you a couple of examples from this blog based on search terms people are using on Google to find this site:

Search for "google apps cpanel":

search_google_apps_cpanel.gif

Search for "widget subpages":

search_widget_subpages.gif

Search for "mirror cpanel server":

search_mirror_cpanel_server.gif

You will notice that the description under the link for each of these search results is "Unique insights on PHP, WordPress. and Open Source". This description corresponds to the description meta tag on each of these pages. Unfortunately, this description is ambiguous with regards to the specific content on each page.

What appears to have happened is Google has indexed these pages because they provide relevant content for the given search terms, and while indexing these pages, Google has included the description meta in the result. I am pointing this out because the key to each of these pages being listed is an accurate page title and relevant content. So, the description tag doesn't appear to have as much influence on how these pages are getting listed; however, having a better description would make these listings more useful.

To change this behavior and add more meaningful data to my search results, after publishing this post, I am going to install the Add Meta Tags WordPress Plugin by G-Loaded. This plugin will give me more control over my meta description tag. Once Google re-indexes these pages, their search listings should start displaying the new descriptions thereby giving more meaningful search results.

Update (June 20, 2007)
It is now five days since I updated the description meta tag on my blog posts, and as I suspected that description data is now showing beneath the Google search results for each of the search terms I mention above.

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Mirror a Dynamic Website on a CPanel/WHM Server

by Michael on June 11th, 2007 in Tutorials

Recently, one of my clients asked me to mirror his web server. The only problem with this request was that I host his web site on my WHM reseller account, and his budget would only cover another shared hosting package. Mirroring one shared hosting server via another shared hosting server seemed possible; however, I knew that the budget constraints meant I would be piecing together my own solution...

Now a couple of months after his request, I am happy to report that I have successfully setup a mirror of my client's CPanel/WHM server. My technique combines the right combination of service providers, public key ssh authentication, rsync, mysqldump, and DNS Failover switching.

Read the rest of this entry »

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