SEO for Non-dicks – Matt Legend Gemmell

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By going for search engine abuse instead of actual optimisation, you’re dooming yourself to eternally be finding new ways to deceive people and reduce the effectiveness of the very technologies you’re relying on. That seems sleazy, depressing, ignoble, tiring and unsustainable. It’s also why any job title including “SEO” is seen as slimy at best, and often not a real job at all.

 

-Matt Legend Gemmell

SEO for Non-dicks – Matt Legend Gemmell.

Why I changed my Twitter handle, OR the Great Renaming

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Firstly, I’m an avid video game player. I love Starcraft (and Starcraft 2), Half-Life and for quite a while I was a dedicated World of Warcraft player. My first character’s name was Tyrun (pronounced Tear (like tears from crying) – Un) which now that I think about it I really liked probably because it’s very close to my real name: Aaron. You know how it goes, you adopt a handle or pseudonym and you start to use that for all your online accounts where you don’t really have any reason to use your real name.

I believe the time to use an online handle has passed as I would like to increase my visibility and allow people to find (the real) me.

And thus I have thrown caution to the wind and have started to brand everything with my name and my name alone: Aaron Holbrook.

I attempted to create a new twitter handle @Aaron_Holbrook, but man starting anew on twitter is just something I don’t really care to do, especially because all the people I care about are already on my @Tyrun stream. So I transitioned @Tyrun to @AaronJHolbrook and shutdown @Aaron_Holbrook. Which is great and which may also be a bit confusing to some people that have grown to be familiar with @Tyrun.

I’m also really glad that Twitter now allows you to change your handle and display name, as it wasn’t always that way and could potentially be confusing to many people.

So yea – there you go, confusion cleared up I hope. Any questions or suggestions feel free to leave me a comment.

Cheers!

WordCamp Chicago 2011

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So I just got back home from the first day of Chicago’s WordCamp 2011 held at the lovely Depaul University in downtown Chicago. Man, what a great experience – I just love the inspiration and the idea sharing that goes on at these conferences.

Some highlights of the day were:

  • Dave Tufts’ KickPress WordPress API
  • TJ Stein’s great talk on developing fast & scalable servers
  • Jason McCreary’s talk about developing WordPress on multiple environments (hooray for finally perfecting my workflow! More on this later!)
  • And finally Brian Richards motivational Developing for Success in which he reveals he’s released his development framework Startbox for free!

Also, at the after party I had the opportunity to meet the fantastic Ryan Imel from WP Candy, which was awesome.

All in all a great day – and I’m looking forward to more of the same tomorrow.

Cheers!

Press This 404 issue

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Just recently I was attempting to use the Press This bookmarklet that they’ve had for ages and it kept giving me a 404 error (I was using this in Google Chrome on Mac 10.6).

Apparently there’s a pretty easy fix – just change a bit of the javascript code in the bookmarklet and you’re good to go.

Where it has this:

u='+e(l.href)+'

Change it to this:

u='+e(l.href.replace(/\//g,'\\/'))+'

Thanks to those who figured it out before me in the forums: WordPress › Support » Press This 404 issue.

Adding a redirect link from a post (or page)

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I just had a client request that for his home page posts that were being displayed, have them link instead to a permanent page. The type of content that they were linking to was longer term and the posts that were being displayed were created just as excerpts.

Not a problem! Let’s just set up a custom field value, call it ‘redirect’ and go to work.

So we’ll be editing the page-home.php file and first testing to see if the custom field value exists.

Using our get_custom_field_value function we’ll do a quick if then statement:

<?php if(get_custom_field_value('redirect')) { ?>
<a href="<?php echo get_custom_field_value('redirect'); ?>">
<?php } else { ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
<?php } 
the_title(); ?></a></h3>

So that will change the title link if there’s a redirect value. We can easily add this to the thumbnail so if there’s a featured image it’ll go to the right page.

<?php if(get_custom_field_value('redirect')) { ?>
<a href="<?php echo get_custom_field_value('redirect'); ?>">
<?php } else { ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">
<?php } ?>
<?php the_post_thumbnail( 'thumbnail', array('class' => 'thumbnail rounded-img')); ?></a>

All in all, fairly quick and easy. Sure there’s plugins out there, but using a custom field is a little less taxing and just as easy.

Plugin: Gravatar Sign Up Link

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Just put together a simple little plugin that adds a Gravatar link to your comment area.

You’ll be able to download it on the WordPress’s plugin directory shortly – I just have to figure out SVN. Git + SVN doesn’t sound like it will be very much fun :(