Joe and Jamie's Blog

I finally sat down and figured out how to make Joe and Jamie’s Blog look better for mobile readers. Well it turns out there are simple plugins out there that take all of two seconds to install and voila, mobile-fied.

So why did I put it towards the bottom of the list for a rainy day? Not sure, guess I thought it would take hours of work.

I decided to to add mobile capabilities because sadly I am on my BlackBerry as much as my computer, if not more. So now you all have even less of an excuse to read this blog, you can do so anywhere you get a signal.

Just go to the blog on your cell phone as you would normally, but this time it will detect you’re on a mobile browser and arrange the blog into a readable format that’s easy on the eyes and easy to navigate. Nothing fancy needs to be done. Try it out, maybe you’ll find it more convenient and stop by more often.

If you have a WordPress blog and are interested in this plugin, you can check it out here. I chose to use WordPress Mobile Edition. You can’t customize the theme too much and there isn’t many options, but it works really well with pictures and links. Another one is WordPress Mobile Pack, which you can customize the crap out of it (colors, sidebars, etc), but it didn’t display links correctly so I scrapped that one.

I updated the blog theme to the latest version today, hoping it would fix some format errors that I had to manually fix in the previous versions. Please let me know if anything doesn’t work or looks wierd on your browsers. I’ve tested for the past few hours but I could be missing something…

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.

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.

Over the past two days I have been tweaking the look of the blog. I have modified the template to show 4 posts on the main page, rather than the default 1 post and small boxes to display the older posts. I also removed the older post boxes, to me they were just ugly. I also encapsulated the posts in borders, I think it looks better than just post after post with nothing but a title header to separate them. I found a cool plugin to place related posts in each posts, hopefully driving some more page views and reading.

These are the obvious things that anyone that has been checking the site regularly (the whole 2 of you) would notice. The little things were playing around with the placement of advertisements to make sure they all looked the same on each page and weren’t put into boxes. I also moved around the widgets on the sidebar to allow me to show more recent comments and recent posts, especially since I removed the older post boxes from the blog.

Hope everyone likes it!