Archive for the 'WordPress' category
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
There is a raging debate right now about the sponsored themes at themes.WordPress.org.
Given the garbage currently being submitted with up to five credits including anchor text like web directory (x 3), Make Money Online and bid for links (a real single example), this is no surprise.
Matt Mullenweg has come out hard against all theme sponsorship.
Guidelines (strict ones) are what we need here, not an absolute ban.
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Sponsored Themes at Wordpress.org continued...)
By Alec
WordPress |
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
WordPress.org has an amazing feature which I hadn't noticed before. It's a New Ideas section which lists any registered user's idea. Registered users simply vote the new ideas up or down (one registered user, one vote). They can also give their feedback if so inclined.
Sometimes inviting user feedback can yield unanticipated or even unwelcome results.
The latest idea is to revamp the default blogroll install in WordPress. Right now it features links to the personal websites of Matt Mullenweg, Michel Valdrighi, Alex King and others. Needless to say, all of the above have enormous Google juice (strong backlinks) to these personal websites. Some of the above are selling text links on their websites (Alex King please stand up).
Wordpress default Blogroll
The issues is that the blogroll has stood still since WordPress 1.0 but WordPress has not. Many people have given enormous hours to the project since. Even more importantly, WordPress resources have expanded. There is a codex, there are hosted WordPress.com weblogs, there are support forums, there plugin guides. These are the links that a fresh install of WordPress needs both in the blogroll and in the dashboard.
Instead of crediting the founders on the blogroll, there should be a single link in the blogroll to a Credits page similar to the existing About page or Copyright page. That page is Google PR 9 so none of the original creators will be short of PR. Those people who have contributed substantially in the last two years could aslo be recognised there.
For the moment, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has come out tersely against this proposal, "Not so inclined". Hopefully in time, he will listen to the users as the voting is 4.7/5 in favor of changing the blogroll.
By Alec
WordPress |
Tuesday, February 20th, 2007
Finally a place for good quality outsourcing and coders.
In 5 days I received about 25 applications. Of these 25 applicants, 20 of them had a better combination of skill set and experience than any resume that I have had float across my desk in the last year....My providers are highly skilled, great communicators, detail oriented, affordable, and they WANT TO WORK! When is the last time you went to the university down the street and picked up a developer with those credentials?
I've checked the resumés myself and Adam's right.
oDesk home page
Actually oDesk is more than a place for outsourcing, but a whole system for hiring and managing coders. It's rather techcentric. It's not the sort of thing that a client would enjoy managing (one does need to know how to spec a project in technical terms and how to speak to a developer). It's something for someone like me with one foot in the commercial realm and the other on the technical side. But to be honest I would probably have John do most of the developer management (depending on the project).
The decision about whether I would manage the project directly or not, would probably depend on whether John was already involved in that area of the business. Most of the SEO work is my direct province. To put someone between myself and the end developer would likely not improve matters. Most of the WordPress refinements and CMS (apart from the WYSIWYG editor and even that I've tried to hand off - but developers just don't understand WYSIWYG editors) are John's sphere. I am about to interview amother full-time developer locally with superb qualifications (finally!) this week. But if it doesn't work out or we need still more hands on deck, oDesk here we come! I will probably hire Russian and Ukrainian developers as I speak the language fluently. I don't really want to move to Tomsk (Vienna is quite nice, thank you!) to have to work with them. Without oDesk, you'd feel pretty cutoff. But with oDesk, I can live in Vienna and work in Tomsk a few days a week. Fantastic.
Some things I really like about oDesk apart from the system itself.
- reasonable fees: oDesk takes a flat 10% fee. Small enough that nobody is really tempted to push them out of the middle. In exchange they provide a superb regulated environment.
- transparency - you can get objective tested evaluations of most of the developers and you can even check out their personal sites and contact them off oDesk if you wanted to.
- good design: unlike rentacoder.com, oDesk looks like it was meant to be used by people in attractive offices not tortured coders in industrial parks. As an ex-adman appearances are important to me.
- high rates for the providers. As a buyer that sounds like a crazy notion. But really I don't want to be hiring a developer for $2/hour. Not only would I not feel great about it. He will probably either not have the skills or do a shoddy job. oDesk gives really talented guys in Tomsk (who might like Tomsk - I've been to Irkutsk but not Tomsk) a fair shake at earning something like a Western wages. $10/hour ($9 after oDesk's cut) might not sound like much to you but it's a great wage for a programmer beyond the Urals or in Rumania. Expect to see some international programming stars rise out of oDesk.
I could even imagine that I would consider taking on an oDesker as a permanent programmer six months or year into the relationship. Who knows I might even move the guy to the West if that's what he really wanted and the commercial project justified the expense. Certainly, somebody who was doing regular work for Foliovision over six months would be more than welcome to visit home base for a couple of weeks, partly tourism and partly work.
Vienna is the new Paris! Code for us and see Vienna in style.
By Alec
WordPress |
Saturday, December 2nd, 2006
As most of you know by now we are big users of Ecto for editing our weblogs, across all platforms including WordPress and Typepad. Lack of Ecto support for WordPress is one of the main reasons I stuck with Typepad so long. Ecto just makes things so much faster and more convenient.
One very large irritation when using Ecto with WordPress is the inability to get a hold of the Pages section via XML-RPC. Developer Adriaan Tijsseling is tired of questions about why doesn't this work, pointing out quite curtly in his Ecto 3 progress notes that it's not in his power to fix:
Pages isn't in the API for editing blogs, so if you want to edit pages, you have to ask WP to allow editing pages via the API. It's nothing any blog client can implement.
There are two solutions out there. One is to modify the core WordPress files, specifically wp-includes/functions-post.php.
John prefers that we not modify any core files for the sake of future compatibility (we got burned on this on what is now a very difficult upgrade on another CMS platform).
Andrew Grant has come up with a WordPress plugin to allow all sorts of games with keywords and to improve compatibility with Windows Live Writer (whatever WLW is).
His plugin has some side benefits:
Static Wordpress pages (e.g. ‘About’) can be edited via Ecto / Windows Live Writer.
I suspect we'll go this route. Unfortunately I want to edit my pages now (and need Ecto to do so efficiently).
We'll get there.
By Alec
WordPress |
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
Time for some forums for client sites.
Second I wanted to introduce an old friend you are all probably familiar with from our support forums, bbPress. bbPress is forum software with the WordPress touch, and developed by the same folks. It has some pretty cool features, such as tagging, RSS feeds, Akismet spam protection, AJAX interaction, but the team focused the most on creating something fast and light. bbPress can power a forum with hundreds of thousands of posts with just a fraction of the load as WordPress. (If we could re-write WP from scratch, it would be a lot like bbPress.) What is probably most compelling for WordPress users, though, is that bbPress supports complete user and login integration with WP.
We'll be integrating any forum with each client's WordPress installation.
By Alec
WordPress |
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
If you need to get some images up on your website in a hurry, here's a bit of code which is extremely straightforward: Lussumo Filebrowser.
The filebrowser is a lightweight PHP application that allows you to thumbnail images and view them in a web browser. That's it. Short and sweet.
While it's too lightweight for what we are doing, some of this might show up in our future foliovision applications.
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Immediate help with images continued...)
By Alec
WordPress |
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
My acquaintance Nick Wilson of threadwatch.org fame (founding editor)
has created an interesting Firefox plugin for posting to one's weblog directly from within the browser.
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Weblog Posting in Firefox continued...)
By Alec
SEO, WordPress |
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
We are working hard on some gallery stuff of our own, but there are a couple of simple and powerful plugins over at InternetVibes.net for galleries in WordPress.
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Interesting PhotoPlugins For WordPress continued...)
By Alec
WordPress |
