Archive for June, 2007

Out sick: Preparing for a regular posting schedule.

For the last three days I’ve been holed up in my room trying to get rid of one of the worst cases of stomach flu I’ve ever had. I can’t remember the last time that it’s felt like I’ve been wrung out and then ran over a few times. When my wife asked, “What in the world have you come down with?”, the only answer I could muster was, “Death.”

Well, now that Death has seemed to loosen it’s grip on me and I’m beginning to feel better, I was feeling sorry for my countless readers out there who are missing my posts. This got me thinking of a post I read the other day on optiniche creatively titled “Make Time for Blogging with a Schedule”. While I won’t go over everything that Teli wrote in his post, I will say that it got me thinking that I need some backup posts for this blog in emergency situations so that I can have posts coming out on a regular basis. My current schedule is three times per week, Mon, Wed, Fri and will increase to 5 days and then seven. By that time I should have enough posts to be able to just repost old ones in a pinch, but until that time building up an inventory of posts to get me through another week like I just had would be good.

So my tip for today is: “Be prepared. Have backup posts.”

if you liked this post :)

Category: General | 13,534 views | Posted: June 14th 2007 10:08 pm

Related Posts

More SEO/WordPress Ads Project Strategy Changes

I just want to make sure I document my changes to the site so that everyone can benefit from them. Here is a list of changes I’ve made to WordPress since my last Ads post:

  • I’ve pruned old posts. Sorry, no more posts about guitar playing or art. Those are just going to have to wait for another blog. DEVTRENCH is all about Web Development, and this change should help to bring focus the blog.
  • I’ve forced the ‘www’ to be in front of my url. Google and other search engines like this, and I think it looks better. I’ll show you how to do this in another post.
  • I’ve added the Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure plugin. This plugin solves duplicate content issues that WordPress creates by having so may different links to the same content (links from categories, archives, posts, etc). Google frowns on duplicate content, so if you have a WordPress blog, this plugin is a must.
  • I’ve removed the rich text editor from the WP backend. This is kind of a behind the scenes change, but I think it is an important one. I was frustrated with how the rich text editor (which I believe is an old, modified version of TinyMCE) messed up my formatting. Line breaks kept getting messed up and it would bold entire posts by sticking in single <strong /> tags. Annoying! So, since HTML is my second language, I turned it off.
if you liked this post :)

Category: Announcements | 870 views | Posted: June 8th 2007 12:00 pm

Related Posts

DEVTRENCH is live!!

Well, it’s official, jamesehly.com has been moved to devtrench.com and rebranded as DEVTRENCH (well at least in name). You’ll see a redesign of the header soon to incorporate the new DEVTRENCH logo along with some other graphical/layout changes that will suit the new site better. The site is now poised to grow into a web development hub for developers and designers that need great working solutions to their problems.

Switching the site turned out to be quite a process. I was working late yesterday switching the domain on my server from jamesehly.com to devtrench.com when cpanel reported an apache config error :( I wasn’t too worried though because I have a great host who has fast customer service and awesome tech support. They fixed me up and got devtrench.com live. Then it was just a matter of redirecting jamesehly.com and devtrench.net to devtrech.com (I did this from the registrar I use: goDaddy). I also had to change the WordPress options for site url and blog address via phpMyAdmin, and then dump the WordPress cache to get the site working again. So, like I said, it was a process. It probably could have gone smoother if I’d planned better, but that apache error really threw me for a loop. That’s how it goes when you work in the trenches though, you have to always be ready for that next problem to solve.

The only problem I’m really worried about (and I was worried about it before going into this), is that I’ll start to get adsense ads about trenching and trenchers :) I’ll combat that when and if it happens.

Some other upcoming things I’m planning on:

  • I’ll be adding a top commentators plugin.
  • The entire design of the site will change to better suit the new brand.
  • I’ll be changing the feed to use feedburner, so I can track my RSS reads better.
  • I’m sure I’ll be adding more plugins that I find, and sometime I’ll write a post about all the plugins I use.
  • I’ll be adding different kinds of ads down the road.
if you liked this post :)

Category: Announcements | 544 views | Posted: June 8th 2007 08:36 am

Related Posts

« Prev - Next »