Website Designers and Webmasters

I just created a simple Wordpress installation. It was only going to be short pages and a simple shopping cart, but at the last minute, they decided to add a blog. Since the area for text was so small, we decided to only have one post for every page. As it would only act as duplicate content, there is no point in using the blog home page at all.

With some help from WP Recipes, I created this code to redirect the blog home template  (home.php) to the first post:

<?php
/*
home.php (Blog Home Page):
Redirect To First Post
*/
if (have_posts()) {
while (have_posts()) {
the_post();
wp_redirect(get_permalink());
}
}
?>

It’s actually very simple. It just uses the WordPress Redirect function to redirect to the first permalink that would show up on that page.

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders

(P.S. If you haven’t heard, Adobe just released the pre-order for CS5… If I were to get one of the packages today, I’d probably get: Adobe Web Premium CS5. It looks ridiculously epic.)

This is a question I’ve been asking for a few years.

Recently, I’ve heard a lot about Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal, but it’s practically impossible to find someone who knows all three and is unbiased enough to tell you the pros and cons of each.

Through Montana Programmers, I’ve been able to find a very unbiased Polson Website Developer who has been an excellent resource for asking all sorts of random questions. Although he knows more programming languages than I have fingers and toes, he hasn’t spent years of time testing out CMS’s.

As you can tell, it’s pretty hard to find a unbiased website developer who knows a lot about many of the Content Management Systems, who could give me a good comparison of the Pro’s and Con’s of each. There are a few problems here:
Continue Reading…

I just searched the Wordpress Plugins section for “twitter” and I got 17 pages of plugins and most of them are crap… ugh.

All I want is a Twitter Plugin that will:

1. Send a tweet to my twitter when I post on my blog.
2. Adds a re-tweet link to each blog post.

How difficult can this be? After installing a few highly-rated plugins, and not being satisfied, I decided to write up what I found.  This is only 6 of the most popular twitter plugins I could find. If you know of a better one, please let me know so I can check it out. This is in order of Best to Good. I don’t have any crappy plugins on this list. They should all work, at least partially.

Twitter Tools – v1.6

Wordpress Plugin Page

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.

Well that’s a promising introduction. It’s a very simple installation, and just about everything is editable in an easily-accessible Twitter Tools Page. Put in your information, select your preferences, and you are good to go.
Continue Reading…

It has been under two months since I have started my Mordheim Blog, and we are seeing lots of good progress in the Search Engine Rankings.

For almost the entirety of the last 7 weeks, my blog has been ranked on the second page for the keyword “Mordheim” at Google. Just this last week, I’ve arrived on the first page! My blog has been sitting in the #10 rank for about 3 or 4 days now.

My blog is very content heavy on the word “Mordheim” and is included in the title of my website and in almost every post title and keywords. Many of my categories also begin with the word Mordheim. I currently have 42 posts in my Mordheim blog. That is almost .9 posts a day!

Merry Christmas,
Ashton Sanders

When I first started this blog, I did a little bit of research about blogs, and chose Blogger. Now that I’ve been using Blogger for almost a year, I’ve started another blog, about Mordheim, with Wordpress, and here are my thoughts:

Blogger

Overview

Blogger is very simple and user-friendly. There is a reason they are the most popular: it’s extremely easy to set up a blog and write posts. They also have a lot of functionality.

Wordpress

Overview

Wordpress is a little more complicated, and it seems like you can do more with the additional complication. They also have a very user-friendly interface and simple layout. Wordpress has a larger base of fans who have created many blog layouts that are free to download. Because of this, Wordpress’s Free Layouts are much nicer, stylish, better.

Blogger

Remote Blog

Unfortunately, if you want to put your website on a remote server (any other website besides “*.blogspot.com”), you lose almost all of your functionality. You don’t even get a Category Roll. The Categories listed on the right side of this blog is done manually. (The post count is also done manually).

Wordpress

Remote Blog

Fortunately, Wordpress.org supplies you with a free download of Wordpress, and easy installation instructions. In 5 minutes, you have a new, stylish and functional blog hosted on your PHP website. They have a lot of functionality, and each free blog layout has different amount of functionality. You could probably spend the rest of your life trying out different blog layouts. If you are a PHP programmer, it is very easy to sink into the code and make lots of changes to the functionality. From making the categories display alphabetically, by ID, etc.

I would definitely recommend Wordpress over Blogger for advanced users who are looking to host their blog on their website.

Blogging For Life,
-Ashton Sanders