Xavisys» General http://xavisys.com WordPress Plugins and Custom WordPress Development Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:45:51 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 WordPress Dream Theme http://xavisys.com/wordpress-dream-theme/ http://xavisys.com/wordpress-dream-theme/#comments Tue, 26 Jul 2011 01:48:16 +0000 Aaron D. Campbell http://xavisys.com/?p=961 James Pearson has always been an inspiration to me. Recently we had a chance to talk about chasing dreams and how the pursuit of dreams has had such a drastic impact on history. As we discussed dreams I spoke of big picture dreams. The life changing stuff. It was inspiring, but that’s for another post. This post is actually about my smaller dreams that I realized later.

I want a WordPress theme that is built and maintained like WordPress. I want it to be licensed under the GPL, completely free, maintained by a group of lead developers, worked on by a larger group of contributors, lightweight, fast, flexible, and extremely extensible. I’m not talking about a new default theme. Twentyten and Twentyeleven are awesome for new users to be able to start a great looking site quickly and easily. Instead I want something that is more like WordPress in that it’s basic and powerful, but mostly extensible. I call it Essence.

My dream in a nutshell:

  • The development would be guided by a small group of trusted developers
  • Anyone would be welcome to contribute code based on a meritocracy much like WordPress.org (and probably closely tied to it)
  • It would use the same 80/20 and “decisions over options” approach to development
  • More advanced functionality would come from plugins that the theme is designed to work with. For example, I’d love to see the theme fully support Joost’s WordPress SEO plugin, giving it the hooks it needs to be as effective as possible.
  • I’d like to see it support BuddyPress, forums (like BBPress), even E-Commerce (like Shopp)
  • People that work in a niche (like publishing) would be able to make plugins that make developing a theme for their niche easier.
  • It needs to be well coded, secure, and fast
  • The most important thing is that someone should be able to easily create a child theme that inherits all this amazing functionality. It should not only make it easier to make a theme, it should make it easier to make a powerful theme that supports nearly everything WordPress supports.

There are some great theme frameworks out there (like Genesis), but as far as I know none of them are community ran and completely free like I envision.

I’ve started on the theme and submitted it to the themes repository. I call it Essence because I want it to be “the most significant element, quality, or aspect of” other themes. However, I need help. It can’t be community developed without the community. If you’re interested in helping out, contact me.

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]]> http://xavisys.com/wordpress-dream-theme/feed/ 7 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in Simple Terms http://xavisys.com/search-engine-optimization-seo-in-simple-terms/ http://xavisys.com/search-engine-optimization-seo-in-simple-terms/#comments Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:03:46 +0000 Aaron D. Campbell http://xavisys.com/?p=913 First let me say that search engine optimization is a very complex subject. There are people who really know what they are doing and plenty of people that don’t. This writeup will not get you to the point where you really understand it all, and I highly recommend that you budget for a professional, but this will be a good start for people that are just starting and need to know what they can do.

Search Engine Optimization, in simple terms, breaks down into two sections; onsite and offsite. Onsite is well within your control and is the first thing you should focus on. Offsite is harder to control and is something you will focus more on later.

Onsite

First, make a list of key phrases that you want to rank well for in search engines. Usually these should be two to five words long. It is not realistic for you to think that your site will rank for a term like “jewelery” (you’d be competing against Jared, Tiffany, Kay, etc), but you may rank very well for something like “vintage typewriter jewelry”. Make sure to be reasonable about what you can and cannot compete for.

I recommend using a something like Google’s Adwords Keyword Tool to research your terms. Obviously more traffic is good, but remember to check who you are competing against and always ask yourself “will my perfect client really search for this term?”. Also try to keep an open mind. Take a look at other terms that Google things are related to the one you put in. Remember that you are likely far more knowledgeable about your products/services than your clients, which means they will likely be using different terminology when searching.

You need to also try to understand what I call key phrase clusters. For example, when I checked out “Vintage Typewriter Jewelry” I found that it is searched for 140 times per month. That’s not a lot. However, I also saw that “Typewriter Key Jewelry” is searched 880 times per month (seven times as often). I also saw that “Vintage Typewriter Key Jewelry” is searched 91 times per month and immediately I saw a key phrase cluster. Basically, there are three phrases that are all basically the same, and if we are careful we can target them all at once. How? Well, we use the all inclusive “Vintage Typewriter Key Jewelry” phrase. Take a look:

  • “Vintage Typewriter Key Jewelry” = “Vintage Typewriter Key Jewelry” which is searched 91 times per month
  • “Vintage Typewriter Key Jewelry” = “Typewriter Key Jewelry” which is searched 880 times per month
  • “Vintage Typewriter Key Jewelry” = “Vintage Typewriter Jewelry” which is searched 140 times per month

By using the one phrase regularly on a site you can actually target all three. Search engines can easily understand that someone searching for “Vintage Typewriter Jewelry” may be interested in “Vintage Typewriter Key Jewelry”.

This takes time. Quite a bit of time. It takes time to build a list of key phrases (or key phrase clusters). There’s really no way around that. The thing is…it will pay off.

So, once you have your list, when/where do you use these? The answer in short is…everywhere. You don’t want to “keyword stuff” which basically means to put them where they don’t make sense, but you do want to use them regularly. When you write articles, when you write product descriptions, even when you write something on other sites and link back to yours. These are supposedly phrases that describe something you are an authority on, so be authoritative!

Offsite

Offsite is something you have less control over. The basics are that you want other sites to link to you. These are called “inbound links” and are a metric that search engines use directly to rate your authority on any given phrase. Often getting a link can be as easy as asking. Sometimes a site would link to you if they just knew about you. Asking is simple and effective, but remember that buying inbound links will get you penalized in search engines (I cannot be more clear than this: Do not buy links to your site).

The simplest way I can explain it is this: An inbound link is worth more to you if the site it’s coming from has content related to yours. It’s worth even more if the page it’s on contains one or more of your target key phrases, and more still if the link itself contains one of your key phrases. For example, this is ok: “I saw some great vintage typewriter key jewelry today, click here to see it.” This is WAY better: “I saw some great vintage typewriter key jewelry today!”

You can help to curate incoming links by doing a few things:

  • First and foremost you get incoming links by creating good content. If someone sees a good article on your site, they will link to it. I cannot stress enough that this is the absolute best thing you can do. If you take nothing else from this entire article, please just remember that quality content is the key.
  • Approach sites whose users would be interested in your content and ask for a link. Make sure to be specific when you ask. It’s ok to say that you’d like the link text to be _____. The worst they can do is say no.
  • Become active on other sites and link back to your own site. I don’t mean spam, I mean really be active.
  • Other sites are looking for content too, so consider doing a guest post for another site that links to yours.

This is by no means a definitive or exhaustive guide, but hopefully it’s enough to not only get you started, but carry you through for a while.

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]]> http://xavisys.com/search-engine-optimization-seo-in-simple-terms/feed/ 26 Keeping Pace in a World That’s Speeding Up http://xavisys.com/keeping-pace-world-speeding/ http://xavisys.com/keeping-pace-world-speeding/#comments Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:13:58 +0000 Aaron D. Campbell http://xavisys.com/?p=492 I’m currently attending the Mequoda Summit. Xavisys has been doing a lot of work with Mequoda building WordPress sites for publishers. Mequoda has developed some really amazing best practices for publishers online, and I’ll get to those in a future post, but I wanted to share a video that they showed.

We all know that the world around us feels like it’s moving extremely fast. If you’re in charge of marketing for a company of any size, you’ll know exactly what I mean. As soon as you think you’ve figure out your strategy you’ll find that so much has changed that you need to start all over. The video is called “Did you know 3.0″ and was created by Karl Fisch and modified by Scott McLeod. It contains some extremely interesting statistics on technology and just how fast things are moving. It’s not just you, things really are moving fast. The question is: What are you doing to keep ahead of the curve?

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]]> http://xavisys.com/keeping-pace-world-speeding/feed/ 1 Client Craziness http://xavisys.com/client-craziness/ http://xavisys.com/client-craziness/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 18:44:00 +0000 Aaron D. Campbell http://xavisys.com/?p=386 The client is always right aren’t they? Of course they are, just ask them! (Yes, that was sarcasm at it’s finest) The reality of the situation is that we’re all in business to make money. There are some clients that make that impossible. I don’t want those clients and you shouldn’t want them either. I’m a firm believer that the absolute best vendor client relationships are mutually beneficial. The vendor can make a decent profit, and the client can benefit from the product or service. Try to make that happen. Be flexible, be friendly, be helpful, but don’t be a door mat. Just remember, this is what “those clients” are really acting like:

As a final thought, remember to never be that kind of client…in any situation. Keep that in mind whenever you’re negotiating for something.

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]]> http://xavisys.com/client-craziness/feed/ 0 Cell phone safe redirecting with mod_rewrite http://xavisys.com/cell-phone-safe-redirecting-with-mod_rewrite/ http://xavisys.com/cell-phone-safe-redirecting-with-mod_rewrite/#comments Thu, 26 Jul 2007 23:45:18 +0000 Aaron D. Campbell http://xavisys.com/cell-phone-safe-redirecting-with-mod_rewrite/ This is an update to Redirecting all ServerAliases to a preferred domain with mod_rewrite. In that article I solved a problem that I was having where I needed to redirect all ServerAlias options to just one domain, preserving the ssl preference. However, we have a lot of users on cell phones. Some of the simple cell phones (like the Motorolla Razr) do NOT like addresses that are missing the www. A simple url like http://mysite.com?u=user&p=password would not work, because it didn’t store the session cookie properly. Adding a www causes the cookies to work, but our ssl certificate is for mysite.com and having the www in that case causes warnings, and I still wanted to redirect our .net and .org TLDs. I ended up deciding that having the www would be ok as long as the user was NOT trying to use SSL. Here is how I did it:

<ifmodule>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT}%{HTTP_HOST}  !^(443|80(www\.)?)?mysite\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}                ^(www\.)?
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT}s%1           ^80s(www\.)?|443((s)(www\.))?$
RewriteRule ^(.*)                       http%3://%1mysite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</ifmodule>

Again, this is in the .htaccess file. In the end, a user using SSL is always sent to https://mysite.com. Standard connections are redirected to .com, but their www selection is preserved.

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]]> http://xavisys.com/cell-phone-safe-redirecting-with-mod_rewrite/feed/ 1 My Kubuntu Experience http://xavisys.com/my-kubuntu-experience/ http://xavisys.com/my-kubuntu-experience/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2007 18:10:05 +0000 Aaron D. Campbell http://xavisys.com/my-kubuntu-experience/ Well, I got sick of windows again. I switched back to windows quite a while ago when I was doing a lot of QuickBooks work (which didn’t work right with wine…even Crossover). However, in my experience Windows tends to degrade in performance and reliability over time. You end up having to reinstall, or you feel like you’re balancing plates on top of a pool cue. Recently it seemed like every windows update caused me a day of work to get my system working again. I took note of everything I use used on a regular basis, and was surprised to find that there was a linux version for pretty much everything. However, I’ll readily admit that as a web application programmer, the programs I use regularly are probably NOT the same as the average user. Here is what I found (this is NOT a free solution…I try to use what is best for me, not what is free. I use this machine to make my living):
(Many of these actually STARTED on linux and added Windows support later, but for our purpose here, I’m simply going to point out that they have linux support.)

Now for the list of apps that do NOT have linux versions, and what I plan to do about it:

  • Dreamweaver: I really haven’t used this since I got the Aptana plugin for Eclipse. I used it only for CSS auto-completion (something Zend Studio does poorly), but now Eclipse does it fine. so, the short story is…I don’t plan on doing anything about this one.
  • Fireworks: I’m not great at graphics, and fireworks is easy. If I can get used to Gimp, I’m sure it will do everything I need (I outsource most graphic design). Until then, I have Fireworks install on an XP Virtual Machine through VMWare Workstation.
  • Photoshop: Again, I think Gimp will do everything I need eventually. Until then I have Photoshop installed in my Virtual Machine.
  • Internet Explorer: Again, I’ll probably also use my Virtual Machine. I also have CodeWeavers’ Crossover Office, which should work with Internet Explorer 6 (but not 7). I may use this too (the main reason is that I used to use a small script that would open a page in all my browsers…I can’t do that in a VM).

Now for the actual experience. First I had to choose a distribution. There were a TON, but the two I had a hard time choosing between was Fedora and Kubuntu (I prefer the KDE desktop). I ultimately decided on Kubuntu simply because I hadn’t used it before. I may set Fedora up on another system here, but for now I’m quite happy with Kubuntu. Since I was using a VERY new system, and Kubuntu Feisty (7.04) was due to be released approximately a month from when I was setting this all up, I decided to use the beta. It worked pretty well. It installed without a hitch, and I began installing all my applications. The first problem I had was when I went to set up my dual monitors. My 8800GTS card needed the absolute latest nVidia drivers (9755), but there was a bug. Once I figured that out, it worked great. However, they then split the nvidia-glx package into 2 packages (nvidia-glx, and nvidia-glx-new). I had to re-do my fix then. However, I think most of this is my own fault for choosing a beta release. Once it was all set up, I had both monitors set up at their proper resolution (1680×1050), and even Beryl functioned. I had some problems with Beryl crashing KDE, but I asked on IRC and was told to switch my rendering path to copy due to a problem in the nVidia drivers. Now it works fine. The next problem I ran into was setting up my printer. Konica Minolta offers linux drivers as source, or as an RPM. I had problems when I tried to build from source, but Alien was able to convert the rpm to a deb, and it worked great.

My experience of actually moving my data was simple. I moved my profiles for Firefox, Thunderbird, and Filezilla from my Windows system. With Firefox I then removed a couple windows only addons that I had. Firefox still gave me some problems until I found that ColorZilla does not play well with the linux version. I removed that addon, and it works great.

I still have a few small issues that I need to address, but I don’t think there will be any major problems. The most “major” of these is that my keyboard and mouse are Bluetooth, and they use a USB Bluetooth adapter. When I restart my system I have to unplug that adapter, and plug it back in to get my keyboard and mouse working. Again, I’m still on a beta version.

Now that I’ve gone over the problems, here are some of the unexpected beauties of Kubuntu. First, I looked at Beryl as a “pretty” thing, but useless. However, I’ve found it to be extremely useful. I can keep things more organized on separate desktops. You can already do that with KDE, but add in the windows picker (which I have set up to trigger on mouse in either top corner), and the ability to make the “cube” transparent so I can quickly find what I’m looking for, and it has actually increased my productivity. Then there is digiKam. I have a nice digital camera (Canon Rebel XTi), and it came with some nice software. The main thing I liked about the software was it’s ability to pull large amounts of photos from the camera, put them into a directory of my choosing, but sort them into sub directories by date they were taken. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I plugged in my camera, but it offered to launch digiKam. When I let it, digiKam set walked me through setting things up, and a few minutes later it was copying all my photos into sub directories based on date. It was smoother than the expensive software that came with the camera, it has proven to be more flexible, and just as reliable. I was completely amazed.

To sum it up, I think Kubuntu Feisty really has something good going. I’m impressed with it’s package management, software availability, hardware compatibility, and ease of use.

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