I was getting very tired of the last theme. The huge header really bugged me, along with a few other small things. I like how this theme looks and does the comments pages. I decided to remove all the junk from the sidebar as well, which I think helps make it look cleaner and neater. I chose the free theme iNove, found on Wordpress.org.
So…how do you like it?
Not sure if the average reader would notice this, but the domain name and URL has changed of the blog. Don’t worry, all the old links will still copy over to the exact posts with the new domain.
So here’s the change:
http://www.josephhannigan.com/blog2
is now
http://www.joeandjamie.com/blog
Update your links – www.joeandjamie.com
This is something that always has bugged me since day one. I don’t know what took me so long to do this, would have been much faster if I had done it when I had three posts and a small database.
Over the next week you may experience different looks of the blog. I will be testing some new themes. Quite frankly I have grown board with this one. I did put a lot of work into making it what it is though, I remember all the long nights tweaking the page code.
Since this was a bit of a daunting task (more me worrying about screwing it up more than anything), I want to share the articles I found that were very helpful.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress -This article is hands down the most important. It is narrowed down to each specific type of move you could be doing. Whether you are changing subdirectories or servers, this is the document for you.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL – This article goes deeper with the database changes to be made. I found it just as easy to backup the database, edit it in a good text editor (not notepad) to update the links, then restore it.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database
http://codex.wordpress.org/Restoring_Your_Database_From_Backup
The trickiest part was figuring out how not to lose the old links. I am sure most will drop from the search engines, but I do have a handful of direct links which I didn’t want to lose. I found documents on .htaccess redirect rules which did the trick. The following site from Apache has all the mod aliases you can use. The RedirectMatch worked best for me.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_alias.html
This is the code that I have in my old blog’s folder .htaccess file.
RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog2/(.*)$ http://www.joeandjamie.com/blog/$1
This keeps everything after www.joeandjamie.com/blog/ and puts it after www.joeandjamie.com/blog/ essentially pointing all old links to the new URLs, which is exactly what I wanted! I couldn’t be any happier.
Another important step was getting the image URLs updated. This wasn’t done during any other step because they are part of the content in the post. I very luckily stumbled across a wonderful plugin to take care of this for me.
http://www.velvetblues.com/web-development-blog/wordpress-plugin-update-urls/ – This plugin allows you to enter the old URL and the new one and presto-magico its done…I wish everything were that simple…
I learned a bunch of neat stuff tonight. Feel free to ask any questions and I’ll try my best to help.
I have made a decision to finally start using www.JoeandJamie.com as an actual site and not just a forwarder we tell everyone to visit to get to this blog. What I want to do is have a nice simple page come up with two choices, our photo gallery that I am developing, or this blog. Once I get that set and finish uploading all the pictures to the gallery and organizing them, then I can work more on what I want to do with the blog.
There is only one thing that bugs me about this blog, its the fact that the link is www.joeandjamie.com/blog. I don’t know what possessed me to keep that as the live one, it was only for testing, hence the “2″ part. I really want to make it so its www.joeandjamie.com/blog which matches the blogs title. I know all my hard SEO work will somewhat die off from losing links, but I’ll make sure the mod-rewrite in the .htaccess file works right to redirect it to the correct links. At this early stage I can afford to lose a few back-links, I don’t have too many.
Now that I got that out off my chest, I should talk about the photo gallery. I don’t want to give it away yet, I’ll post the specifics when it is complete. We have always wanted a place online to store and share photos so I decided to create a gallery for them all. I’m in the process of uploading thousands of pictures and organizing them all into albums and categories so the site is nice and navigable.
So stay tuned for more stuff to come, I should have something by the end of the week.
Well I just hit my 100th spam comment today. It’s rather sad that a very new blog such as mine would already have more spam comments than real ones. I’m glad the Akismet plugin works very well and is part of Wordpress otherwise we would all be pulling our hair out more than we do already.
I have nothing more to say, just noticed it said 100, minor milestone for the blog. Lets see how long it takes to get to 200.
Hats off to Nigeria, Russia, and all the rest of the spam nations, keep up the good work.
Since I am a fairly new blogger with a even newer blog, I am very anxious to get and excited when I see comments. I know there are a lot more than my original two readers now, so please leave a comment if you like something or find anything interesting. I love the comments I get in person, but why not leave your mark here for all eternity?? While I was surfing around my usual round of sites to check daily I came across a post over at Blog Oh Blog about why people should leave comments. Here are Jai’s 7 reasons to leave comments:
1. Do you know me?
If you regularly leave comments on a particular blog, it will make the blog owner recognize you and also your website. When you do this on multiple blogs, you will be socially recognized in the blogging community. Also, most of the blogs nowadays use Gravatars which can help in branding and getting some popularity for your own blog. I think that leaving comments on popular blogs is the best way to be known around the Internet.
2. Building Community
A community is built around people and their views. Leaving comments is a way of showing that you care and want to share your opinion with others including the owner of the blog. The comments can be a suggestion, feedback, appreciation or even criticism. They are good as long as they are not spammy or abusive. So, even if you are just stopping by, try to make that little effort of writing a comment, even if its just a line.
3. Getting What you Want
You should leave a comment because that’s the only way the blog owner can judge what the reader/customers want without getting a written e-mail or any other form of communication.
4. Link Building & Traffic
Most of the blogs allow you to leave your website link/s when writing comments (Dofollow or Nofollow) for the blog. This can help you in getting good inbound links and also some additional traffic to your site.
5. Selling yourself
If you are a service provider or have something to sell, comments can be an unobtrusive way to do this. I am not asking you to write your sales pitch in the comments but when you build a relationship with the people through commenting on their blogs, it gets easy to sell your wares to them. Cheap advertising for you
6. Go down in the Blogging history
This is for the people who do not run websites or blogs but just like to surf the Internet. Someday, when someone tries to search for your name on Google, believe me or not, if you mentioned your name in the comment author, the search results will pop out the comments that you wrote. For some people, the results can be very fascinating
7. Show off your writing style
Finally, if you have good written English skills, comments can be the platform where you can flaunt them. A lot of people will read them.
And last but not the least, when you leave a comment on a post, it is sort of a reward or a small prize for the blog owner. So, you know now what makes leaving comments so special! Go on, leave a comment and show me that you learned something
I found it very interesting, so support Jai and check out the original post here.
Tired of hearing about this yet? Regardless of your answer, here is more on it.
Paul at the Homeowner’s Blog recently posted an excellent article on a method of saving gas while driving. He backed everything he said up with equations and accurate results. I couldn’t say it better myself, so please read his post and its comments.
Click here to read Paul’s article on the best way to increase fuel economy.
I bought some more domain names this weekend. I was bored and stuck in front of a computer which never leads to anything good. I have had some idea of creating informative blog sites on basic computer and networking troubleshooting tips and guides. I started snooping around GoDaddy for some catchy names and found that they were all taken, like always. Some domain names were available for a premium price of two grand, but I don’t have that kind of cash to blow right now, especially when I don’t have time to make the site bring that much money in fast.
Here’s some of the names that I purchased that were surprisingly available for regular price:
I picked up the same domains with different TLD’s (top level domains) along the way, whatever was available.
I wanted to get a few other domains, but they were too pricey. I searched around and found Sedo.com, a huge domain name aftermarket. Sedo.com allows you to actually bid on the site with the owner, rather than just pay the price posted on GoDaddy. After a few days of haggling with owners that wanted thousands for sites with absolutely no traffic at all out there, I obtained these two sites this morning:
What is great about networkadministrator.org is that it is seven years old and had a page available, it was not just owned without a site up. This means that it should be known to search engines and possibly already bookmarked by others and have links out there. You don’t make it in this business without links. I am in the process of getting the domain transferred to me now. There are a few more I am interested in, just have to keep beating the price down, hoping the owner doesn’t close the negotiations. [UPDATE] Just bought systemadministrator.biz while I was posting this for a fair price for a four year old domain, made for a fun night.
For these sites, I think I will start out using blogs to host the content. They are easy to set up and use, as well as free. The person who created this blog here as a whole slew of blogs, some free and some really nice premium templates. I really like a few of the templates at Blog Oh! Blog. You can check out the templates here.
I am out for now, going to start uploading the main templates now!
I came across the NextGEN Workpress Plugin tonight. I was looking for something to do a nice gallery or slide show for pictures on the blog. The plugin can be found here. So far I am having an issue getting the thumbnail pagination to work, but if I leave it showing all the images in the post you can click on it and the pagination works for the full image size. It’s pretty cool. To see what it can do/looks like, go to the link above and click on FAQ.
These are some of the features:
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