Justin Bahn's Blog

I am currently not using any form of version control, although I would really like to get in the habit of using one. From what I have read there are really 2 good options, SVN (http://subversion.tigris.org/) and CVS (http://www.nongnu.org/cvs/).

You can also subscribe or get spaces on the internet that supply loads of tools in addition to version control. These places are ideal multiple people to collaborate over the internet and still have access to the same files and communicate efficiently. Assembla (http://www.assembla.com/) is one I have used in the past and it works pretty well. The one drawback is it used to be free, not sure it still is for private spaces.

I have been following the art of Dani Jones for a long time and have become quite impressed with the methods Dani uses to share artwork on the internet. Dani uses the a personal website to showcase art, a Blog to keep people updated on events and post tutorials for new artists that are up and coming, and even does a live show most weekdays. There is also the usual Facebook, Twitter, mySpace, Deviant Art, YouTube etc, linked from the Contact page. I highly recommend checking out some of Dani’s art, you won’t be disappointed.

http://danidraws.com/

So I only had a slight hitch in my backup. I had to locate where Wordpress defines the base bits of all the URLs that stem from the home page. Turns out this is all located in the mySQL database which is easy enough to change.

So first thing was first I transfered a copy of all the files on my ftp to the new location. I then did a mySQL backup and moved that to a new database for the backup. Lastly I used 3 mySQL statements to rewrite the base values for the URLs. I followed a guide at this link here on specifics (http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/10/01/how-to-move-wordpress-blog-to-new-domain-or-location/).

So I’ve started modifying a template for my Wordpress site.

Pretty straight forward, Wordpress breaks down where elements have their html generated into individual files. For example, the header of your pages is generated in header.php.

Styling is controlled in a CSS file called style.css and depending on your base theme, the id tags are pretty easy to figure out. This is even easier if you use FireBug as that will tell you what each element’s id tags and hierarchy are exactly.

So far I have just had time to change some font styles for the header and body and start work on a banner image. The banner image will be inserted this week.

Theme I am using is the ArcLite Theme by http://digitalnature.ro/

You can see the base theme at my site here http://eavab.com

So for my site here are the following actions being taken to make it SEO friendly:

• Search friendly links are in place for the content
• Page Titles are Search friendly so far and will be designed to be for future pages
• Site is registered with my Google Webmaster Tools Account

In the future, when I am writing/modifying my themes, I will be making a pass to ensure that all my headers and tag code are appropriate since I will be accessing a lot of that code anyways for styling.

Time to play the content catchup game on my site tonight. Once content has been uploaded, I will generate and post an XML sitemap for the site. The one issue with this is that it will become outdated every so often due to dynamic content in the blog portion. But, I might be able to find a Wordpress plugin to keep it up to date.

So a couple weeks ago, I got hit up to take a free introduction Webinar that this dude was doing. It gave an overview of a course he is doing and he gave out 10 tools and did a quick overview on how to use them.

So I figured I would share these tools with you guys. A few of them you probably have used in the past:

1. Google Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)
2. Google Website Content Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)
3. Google Wonder Wheel (http://www.google.com/)
1. To get to this one, do a search and then hit “show options” on the toolbar.
2. Third Group, Second Option
4. KeywordSpy (http://www.keywordspy.com/)
5. SEOBook’s FireFox Rank Checker (http://tools.seobook.com/)
6. XML Sitemap Generator (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/)
7. Google Web Master Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools)
8. Keyword Density (http://www.keyworddensity.com/)
9. Yahoo Site Explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/)
10. Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/)

Also just a heads-up. I was doing some SEO stuff for the company I work for and noticed Bing has released the first of their webmaster tools. Worth checking out, nothing to fancy but they have the basics for the Bing search engine.

4 (when it works for your site), 1, 2, 7, 10 and 6 I use often.

So here we go, lets make this a legit presentation by showing a chart.

So according to that chart, we have 4 major sections and here they are in outline form:

1. Blog
2. Wiki
   1. Tutorials

1. i.      This will include any and all tutorials I have created over the years and in the future. I will be able to organize a wiki page to show links to each tutorial and then the tutorials themselves.
2. i.      Here I will be able to create a list of new technologies, a synopsis about them, useful resources I have found for them, and any experiences I have with them. This will be useful for obscure things that I don’t use all the time like RDFa or cryptographic things like SHA encoding etc.
3. i.      Going to use a Flickr module/plugin to showcase the artwork I have done over the years.
4. i.      Link list to demo sites and past web work.

1. 1. Technology

1. Portfolio
   1. Art

1. 1. Web Work

1. About Me
   1. Resume
   2. Background
   3. Contact

The Blog, which will be powered by the standard blog features of WordPress. This will incorporate a few different RSS and link log widgets that WordPress has available.

The Wiki, which will most likely be DotWiki or another external php module that I will integrate into the site. DotWiki is a new module I have heard on the grapevine, and if it doesn’t work then the whole standard mediawiki thing will probably be the direction I go. Integration will include one user login, so the tables/php code will need to be adjusted to work for that.

The Portfolio, this will be a Flickr style image gallery widget and a link list of some sort linking to demo sites/launched sites of web work I have done. There are a few of these advertised on the WordPress site and I will be testing out various ones till I get one that I like. Mainly I will be looking for easy ability to upload and a thumbnail/expansion feature that will let me show a preview of an image and then expand it to full quality/size. This will also be useful for the blogging functions of the site.

About Me, this will be just standard Wordpress pages.

Finally, there will be a custom Wordpress theme and themes for external modules I use to tie them all together. The goal will be to make it seem like even external modules are still on the same site as to not confuse users coming to my site.

All in all I think this will be a healthy amount of content for my site to begin with. I am sure as I am building it more things I will want to do will come up.

Time to find my hard hat and get to work….Up first, design layout ideas.

Wordpress has been installed and configured. Next on the agenda is to start building the site out. Stay tuned as construction happens through early December.